The bridal industry is one of those evergreen lines of business. This sector has an enduring and an enchanting allure, it is highly sentimental and carries high emotional significance. Weddings occupy a special place in people’s hearts.
The shift in consumer preferences over the years, coupled with the rapid evolution in technology, have driven a major shift ecommerce, offering brides and grooms the convenience of crafting important memories through seamless online shopping experiences.
Starting an Online Bridal Boutique
Brides and grooms to-be want to browse as many options as possible, ideally without spending a lot of time and money travelling around to shop around. This is where online shopping thrives.
eCommerce makes it possible for consumers in this niche to search and browse wedding clothing, accessories and attires from the comforts of their homes.
If you’ve been considering starting a business that maps your passion for bridal fashion toa boundless potential e-commerce inclined business venture, then starting an online bridal boutique might be the perfect endeavour for you.
This guide is meant for entrepreneurs that are considering launching their online bridal boutiques. The guide covers all the essentials required to start this lucrative business.
About This Guide
Let’s dispense with a few important questions before we dive into the meat and bones of the guide.
How Much Money Do I Need to Open a Bridal Shop?
Starting an online bridal boutique is significantly cheaper and more affordable than what you would need to open a brick and mortar bridal shop.
If you were opening a physical bridal shop, you would need to consider the following cost centers:
- Rent and utilities
- Inventory
- Website development
- Marking and advertising
- Staffing
- Store Décor and Visual Merchandising
- Equipment and Technology
- Legal and Administrative Costs
ProfitableVenture.com indicates that one would need roughly, a minimum of $250 000 to start a medium scale and standard physical bridal shop in the US for example. The figure includes salaries for the staff for the first 3 months.
How Much Do Bridal Shop Owners Make?
There is no hard and uniform figure of what online bridal boutique owners earn or how much profit they make from their ventures. However, online bridal boutique owners can earn between the range of $50 000 – $100 000 annually, and even more when their stores become successful.
Data cited from the CareerBliss website where two online stores were profiled indicates that the two stores have an average annual income in the range of $70 000 to $92 000, and $46 000 and $56 000 respectively.
What is important to note is that income ranges vary from store to store, and also that when you are starting out you may run at a loss, until your business hits the break-even point and then starts registering low profits until you reach ideal profit margins.
1. Starting an Online Bridal Boutique
The journey of starting an online bridal boutique kicks off by the process of ideation and niche identification. This involves conducting market research to map out how the current landscape looks and looking for gaps that you can plug in the market. In doing this exercise you need to ask yourself questions such as:
- What are the trends in the bridal market?
- What are the general and nuanced customer preferences in the market?
- What are the establishing and emerging shopping behaviours in this market?
Asking the questions above will enable you to carve out a niche with which you can establish and distinguish your brand in the market. The niche must resonate with your vision, business goals, interest and also align with the needs of your prospective market segment.
2. Laying the Foundation: Creating a Business Plan
Many online venture entrepreneurs neglect the important part and step of building a business plan for such a business model as an online bridal boutique.
A business plan is essential for putting your ideas and business intentions into perspective with a view to turn these into reality.
An online bridal boutique business will enable you to test the viability and feasibility of your business concept and business model. The key aspects of your online bridal boutique business plan are financial projections, cost, revenue and profit breakdowns, marketing strategy, etc.
A business plan will be crucial for you to attain funding for your business. Even if you are not going the funding route, a business plan is crucial for helping you to put your ideas into hard mathematical data and plan the launch of your business in a more realistic way.
A comprehensive Online Bridal Boutique Should Cover the Following 8 components:
1. Executive Summary
A summary or overview of your bridal shop business concept, its mission, vision, and goals.
2.Market Analysis
An in-depth analysis of the bridal fashion market in general, your target market (segment), and competition overview.
3. Product and Service Description
Details about the bridal products and services you intend to offer. (tentative catalogue)
4. Sales & Marketing Strategy
Detail how you plan to attract customers.
5.Financial Projections
Financial forecasts, start-up cost estimations, revenue and profit projections, and break-even analysis.
6. Operational Plan
Details on your day to day workflows and operations of your bridal shop, including staffing and inventory management.
7. SWOT Analysis
A strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis of your bridal shop business concept.
8. Legal and Regulatory Compliance
Information on legal requirements and permits. What are these and how do you plan to meet the requirements?
Remember that a well-crafted business plan will work as a roadmap for your bridal shop’s business growth and success. If you are interested in a comprehensive template for a bridal shop business plan in PDF format please click here to download a copy.
There are basically two approaches you may consider for your online bridal boutique. You can choose to go the drop shipping route or the bonafide retail route where you handle the logistics and shipping inhouse.
The drop shipping route takes away the hassles of logistics and shipping out of your business model and workflows. You would then outsource this to a reputable shipping and logistics service provider.
The benefits of this is that this is cost friendly and saves the headache of managing deliveries such that you entrust this aspect of your business to a service provider that specialises in this.
If you choose to handle shipping and logistics in house then you should factor in the cost of shipment and deliveries in your business model. To do this you would need to consider the average distance, weight and size of a typical order package to make your costing projections.
While handling logistics and shipments in house comes with its hassles and cons, the advantage with this approach is that you will have full control over the entire process. This will give you leeway to personalise your deliveries and strike a sentimental chord with your customers.
You need to consider all sorts of permits, licenses and legal issues that pertain to shipping such merchandise. If part of your market is outside the borders of your country of location then you need to consult with the customs bodies of your country to ensure that you comply and obtain all the necessary permits.
4. Creating an Ecommerce Website for an Online Bridal Shop
When it comes to selling bridal products online, there are two ways of setting up your digital store. One way is to build a stand-alone online shopping website.
The other option (recommended) is to leverage a powerful ecommerce platform like Shopify and get all the robust tools, features and functionalities that you need to run, start and scale an online bridal boutique at a fraction of cost (paid monthly).
Setting up your on stand-alone ecommerce website may seem cheaper upfront but when you consider the full picture of what you need to put together the features and functions that you need to assemble a secure, user friendly and high end ecommerce website, it becomes more elegant, from a business model and operations point of view, to leverage an ecommerce platform that is already built to give you all the eCommerce features you need off the shelf.
Shopify is a leading ecommerce platform suited for an online bridal boutique. The platform offers dozens of high end and professionally designed themes which are highly customisable. The platform has cutting edge addons for social commerce, enabling you to sell your products on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram etc.
Payment Gateways
Shopify also has incredible Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) features. With Shopify you can define the meta tags and meta descriptions of your product pages.
This way you have control over making your product pages more visible, indexable and rankable by search engines, thereby positioning your online store for organic traffic from Google and other search engines.
5. Unveiling Bridal Treasures: Sourcing Products and Inventory Management
Having set up your visually appealing online bridal boutique, now comes the important aspect of sourcing products and managing your inventory. You need to do your research and identify suppliers and manufactures that provide the specific products that you are running with. These could be ethereal wedding gowns, tailored suits for grooms, or any other exquisite accessories.
You also need to do your diligence in identifying suppliers who have a track record of supplying high quality products. Pay attention to online reviews, brand mentions and comments related to your shortlisted suppliers across social media, brand review platforms such as Trustpilot.com and Go2.com as part of your due diligence.
Also get in touch with the top suppliers from your short list and start engaging them so that you can start soliciting more information and asking them questions. The key is to start building relations to establish if what they offer aligns with what you are looking for.
As you get traction into the market consider collaborations with designers and wholesalers to ensure you sustain a well curated catalogue that satisfies the diverse needs of your customers.
To source a diverse range of products for your bridal shop catalogue consider collaborating with bridal designers, attending bridal trade shows, working with bridal wholesalers and sampling various designs and styling concepts.
In curating products, ensure that you emphasize diversity and inclusivity in your catalogue. You can ensure this by offering sizing options and products that cater to various body size and cultural wedding traditions.
6. Bridal Enchantment: Branding and Marketing Strategies
Your business will not go anywhere without a marketing strategy. While an online bridal boutique is a low entry barrier business model, (meaning it requests low capital to start), the world of bridal fashion is highly competitive.
For this reason you need to be strategic and intentional about branding and marketing from the get go. You need to craft and execute a coherent omni-channel marketing strategy across all the target platforms.
Consider social media marketing, content marketing, getting into influencer collaborations as well as email marketing.
Make sure you do A/B testing before you put all your proverbial eggs in one basket, test and see which channel and approach yields better results and then invest more in that one.
User-Generated Content
Leverage User generated content (UGC) in your social media marketing thrusts. You can do this by encouraging brides to share photos of themselves in your apparels on social media. This works in a great way to provide social proofing that your prospective customers need at a psychological level to make decisions about your brand more so if they are first time customers.
7. Manage Stock Levels Efficiently
Ecommerce platforms like Shopify will enable you to keep tabs on your stock levels and ensure that you have a sufficient supply of your products. Shopify has robust inventory tracking and inventory management features.
The platform also enables you to set alerts and notifications to avoid stockouts by setting reorder points and regularly replenishing popular and fast moving items in your inventory.
8. Streamlining Bridal Gown Sizes and Styles
Take note that bridal gowns are tailored in a wide range of sizes and styles. You need to organise your catalogue with fine grained filters such that your customers are able to browse and search for these based on style, size, silhouette, neckline, etc.
To take things a notch up, consider offering virtual fittings and personalisation. For this you can leverage appropriate technology to make virtual fittings and consultations possible. This will enhance the shopping experience of your customers, making it more memorable and convenient.
Final Thoughts
Running a successful online bridal shop takes being intentional about creating sought after destinations for enchanting bridal products and treasures. Keep in mind that your target market comprises people preparing for an important and sentimental day in their lives.
Make their lives easy by curating quality products and in wide variety for their penchants as your business grows, keep tabs on sales and revenue data, as well as traffic and inventory data.
Identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business so that you can make adjustments where needs be. Also, identify your popular and fast moving products and make sure that you also identify the slow moving ones with the intention to boost their sales or replace them.
You can scale your business by expanding your catalogue, creating new markets and/ or ramping up your sales volumes. eCommerce platforms such Shopify come with all the robust tools and features that you need to scale your inventory and the overall aspects of your online bridal boutique.
Now is the time to put these ideas into action and get started on your exciting journey.
All the best!
