If you have ever harboured any dream to start a clothing brand online there has never been a better time than now to do so. A combination of a number of factors is creating a tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs in this line of business.
Over the past years, more and more consumers have been shifting from conventional brick and mortar shopping traditions to buying things online, the rapid advancement has leveled the play field in the clothing retail sector, and the wholesale supply for clothing has become significantly accessible (in terms of pricing and wholesale models) over the past years as well.
Starting a Clothing Brand on Shopify
Ecommerce platforms like Shopify have robust features and functions that you need to set up a professionally laid out and visually appealing online store in minutes.
This guide will show you how to start a clothing brand on Shopify.
Defining Your Clothing Brand
Identifying your target audience and niche
While the online clothing sector is a lucrative sector, you need to understand that this is also a highly competitive sector. When you are starting a clothing brand online, your first step is to gain a comprehensive understanding of your market so that you can map out what, and how, the target segment of the market looks like.
To identify your audience and niche you need to thoroughly survey the competition landscape in the current market.
Try to answer these questions as your guideline:
- Who are the major players?
- What product lines do they specialize in?
- What are their pricing strategies?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of your prospective competitions?
The point of asking the questions above and attempting to answer them using market research data is to identify a gap in the market you can plug with a unique, relevant and profitable product offering.
Due diligence in your market research will enable you to answer questions about the demographics, age(s), gender, and income level brackets of the market that you are targeting.
The more refined and granular your market focus, the better the success prospects of your online clothing boutique.
To refine your market focus further deal with questions such as what your brand will be targeting: Will you be targeting youths or young adults with a passion for sportswear, streetwear or professional men or women with penchant for sophisticated and formal apparel, or you want to run an online bridal boutique?
Understanding the nuanced preferences of your audience is what will give your brand direction.
Developing a unique brand identity and story
To set your brand apart, make it relatable with the aim of growing it to a household name, you need to appreciate that running a clothing brand online is more than just dealing with fabrics and apparels. A successful online clothing is a fusion of unique identity and story.
You need to clearly outline the personality, mission as well as values of your brand. Deal with questions such as:
- What sets your brand apart?
- What sentiments, emotions and experiences does your brand aim to evoke?
- What’s the typical customer profile that matches your target market?
Spend quality time creating a quality, professional logo that matches your colors and captures the essence of your brand. You can head over to micro task service platforms such as Fiverr to get a professional logo done for as little as $5.
Creating an Online Clothing Store on Shopify
Shopify provides an intuitive user interface for the vendors (to set up their online stores at the backend), and also enables setting up user-friendly online front stores. The Shopify platform makes it easy to create an online store even if one has no technical coding and design expertise.
Before you register with Shopify to create your online store, you need to register your own domain name first. You will need to connect this domain to your Shopify store.
This will enable you to use the domain you want while your professional looking online clothing store will be driven by Shopify in the back ground.
With Bluehost you can register a domain for as low as $9.95 per month.
Registering for a Shopify account
The first thing you need to do to create an online store on Shopify is to head to the Shopify website here.
There are two ways to sign up with Shopify.
- The 14 day Free Trial
- Premium package
For the first option, you can click on the Start Free Trial button to the top right of Shopify’s home page as illustrated below:
If you are decided on taking up a premium package then you can click on the Pricing menu item as illustrated below:
You will then be taken to a page that displays the different premium packages as illustrated below.
Shopify Pricing
Basic Plan
The basic plan is the most popular, it goes for $25 per month. The plan will give you basic reports, up to 1000 inventory locations, and 2 staff accounts. This you get over and above the standard features that come with every Shopify built online store.
Shopify Plan
If your business model is slightly bigger and you need to create more staff accounts, you can then consider the Shopify plan that goes for $65 per month. This plan will enable you to add up to 5 staff accounts
Advanced Plan
The advanced plan is where you get all the capabilities and features of Shopify as an ecommerce platform. In addition; this plan will give you 15 staff accounts, a custom report builder and several high end features tailored for growing and scaling an online store.
This plan goes for $399 per month.
Please Note
Setting Up Your Shopify Store
Shopify’s intuitive ecommerce platform makes creating an online store a breeze.
Shopify has dozens of high-end, professionally designed templates to choose from. From these you can pick a template tailored for a clothing store.
Also ensure you pick a theme that aligns with your branding and aesthetics. Once you have settled for a particular theme, you can then upload your brand logo and tweak the color scheme to match your branding, customize product displays and layouts as you wish.
You can then proceed to configure important settings such as payment gateways. Select a good set of payment options to cater to the diverse preferences and locations of your customers. Shopify will give you over 100 payment gateway options to choose from.
Shopify also enables you to customize and optimize the meta tags and descriptions of your product pages. This enables granular control for the Search Engine Optimisation of your online clothing store. This ensures that your online store pages are findable, indexable, rankable and therefore can receive organic traffic from search engines like Google.
Sourcing and Designing Your Clothing Products
The important part of the workflow to start your store on Shopify is to source clothing products for your customers.
Researching and selecting clothing suppliers or manufacturers
Do your due diligence in conducting a thorough research to identify suppliers to provide quality clothing that matches your niche. Different clothing wholesalers and manufacturers focus on different clothing product lines: find the ones that supply the specific kinds of clothing that you are looking for.
These could be t-shirts, dresses, accessories for plus size clothing, etc. In your research, consider aspects such as the quality of the garments, production capacities and delivery lead times. Also consider if your shortlisted suppliers adhere to ethical sourcing practices.
Once this step is completed, you then need to reach out to your potential suppliers to inquire and build relations.
Determining product types and variations
Now that you are in touch with your prospective suppliers, inquire about specific products and request details about product types and variations. You need to get the complete spectrum of sizes, colours and variations for each product pack that you are considering.
In doing this you also need to decide on the range of colors, patterns, designs, fabric types, etc – qualities that align with your branding and your customer preferences. Offering a good range of options will enable you to cater to the diverse preferences and thereby enlarge and widen your customer base.
Designing or customizing clothing items with branding and unique designs
One great way of defining your brand’s identity is by providing unique branding and unique designs. To achieve this you need to work closely with graphic designers and fashion illustrators to create amazing designs. You could also go the DIY route and leverage platforms like Canva to create visually appealing patterns, logos and prints that represent your brand.
Ensure a seamless integration of your branding into your apparels. This will streamline your branding and entrench a coherent and consistent branding across your catalogue.
Ensuring quality control and product consistency
You need to implement quality control measures to safeguard the quality of the apparels that you are selling to your customers.
To achieve this you need to be specific about fabric types and quality (define your benchmarks for these), work with clear standards for stitching, printing and overall craftsmanship that goes into the production of clothing.
Maintain good relations with your suppliers to maintain a level of consistency and quality.
Product Showcasing and Visuals
One other important aspect of starting a clothing brand on Shopify is product photography and visual branding.
For your online store to be successful on Shopify you need to invest in quality product photography and visual branding. High quality product visuals help you to entrench a cohesive visual branding and an immersive shopping experience for your customers.
Your product images must be high resolutions and should accurately represent the colors of your merchandise. For quality photography you can invest in a professional photographer or master the art yourself.
Your product images must feature different product angles and details. High resolution images will enable your customers to zoom in and see the granular details of your products.
Also add your personality to product visuals. Aim to develop a consistent style that aligns with your branding that you seek to maintain. Pay attention to composition, make use of props and play around with color schemes to create visually appealing and on-brand product photos.
Creating engaging product descriptions and specifications
Your high end product details must go with engaging product descriptions and specifications. Your product descriptions must highlight product features, sizing, colors, fabric and gender details as well as care instructions.
When crafting product descriptions use a persuasive and compelling voice that evokes the desired call to action from the customers. You can also incorporate storytelling into your brand and product descriptions to captivate your customers.
Inventory Management and Fulfillment
Inventory management is an important aspect of running an online clothing brand on Shopify. Running an online retail business like a clothing store requires that you stay on top of your game to match demand from the market with supply.
You also need to be in a position to anticipate demand volumes in advance and also identify product lines that are not performing well so that you can implement mechanisms to accelerate sales for these or perhaps replace them in the medium to long term.
The benefit of leveraging ecommerce platforms like Shopify is that you get robust inventory management tools, features and functions off the shelf. The combination of inventory tracking and sales tracking tools enables you to keep tabs on your clothing to ensure that:
- You manage stock levels
- Ensure that your products are readily available for your customers
- Avoid stock outs
Choosing a fulfilment method (in-house or third-party)
When it comes to fulfilment, you need to make a choice as to whether you will handle this aspect of your business in house or you will outsource it. Each option has its pros and cons. Handling this service inhouse gives you more control over the entire process: from customized packaging, personalised packaging to ensuring that quality standards are met.
This may be quite demanding though and may take time away from the much needed focus on growing the business through marketing and mechanisms to ensure customer satisfaction.
Outsourcing the service to reliable order fulfilment and shipping service will come at a cost. It will also take away the privilege of personalising and customizing packages according to your standards and preferences.
However, the outsourcing option will help to take the headache of sustaining efficient shipping and logistics out of your workflow.
This will help to 1) Streamline the order fulfilment process 2) Help you to focus on the most important aspects of your business such as marketing and customer satisfaction.
In all you do, effective and efficient customer support must be at the centre of your business. You also must be intentional about customising user experience on your Shopify store.
To keep a high quality customer service you also need to make sure to respond promptly to emails, inquiries, feedback, reviews and social media questions/comments. Also make sure you offer personalized and prompt customer support.
Implementing a robust returns and exchange policy
A successful clothing brand has a robust and transparent returns and exchange policy and workflows. Make sure that the policy is easily accessible across the shopping user experience and across the website.
Also, complement your policy with an efficient, hassle-free and straight forward workflow for your customers.
At the centre of your customer service must be the objective to create positive shopping experiences and memories.
Scaling Your Online Clothing Brand
Growth is an inevitable characteristic of every living organism. If you get all the items of the puzzle right, you will be on roll with your brand new clothing brand on Shopify in no time.
As the sales start coming in, in the ever upward trajectory, and your business process is getting more and more refined, your business is ready for scaling.
How to Scale A Clothing Brand on Shopify
To scale your clothing retail on Shopify you must leverage sales data, inventory data as well as look into the income statement of your business.
Analyzing all this data holistically will enable you to determine if you need to start targeting new and additional market segments, introducing new product lines, or if you need to expand the geographic reach of your business.
You need a data informed strategic growth approach in order to scale your business.
Strategic Partnerships and Collaborations
Since you are running an online clothing outlet, consider implementing concepts such as co-creating limited edition collections, hosting joint promotions and market campaign collaborations that align with the vision and objectives of your brand.
Other frontiers of growth could be expanding distribution channels, implementing effective marketing and advertising campaigns, building an in-house team and outsourcing certain tasks and workflows.
Final Thoughts
We have outlined the critical component that goes into starting a clothing brand on Shopify. Starting an online store on Shopify is not only easy and exciting, the great part is that Shopify is a robust eCommerce platform which has all the powerful features and tools that you need to transform your dream into reality.
Overview of What We Covered
Shopify has intuitive features to create a high end and visually appealing online store. The platform has dozens of highly customisable templates. The platform also has an expansive app ecosystem such that you can easily use this to extend the features and functionalities of your online store.
Following the critical steps we have shared in this guide can get you on the path towards success. Remember success doesn’t come overnight, however the combination of passion, dedication, diligence and what Shopify offers for starting a clothing store online at an affordable cost, building a successful online clothing store is not only a great dream but a reality.
With a 14 day free trial, you can sign up to test waters with Shopify before you dive deep into the world of ecommerce.
All the best in your endeavours.
