Learn how to do market research for your fashion and clothing business
Market research is a critical component when you’re launching a product, trying to improve your existing product, or when you’re just looking to be a step ahead of your competitors. It will provide you with all the information you need to make a better business decision.
Can you answer these questions?
1. I know exactly WHO my ideal client is, WHAT their needs are and HOW to serve them best.
2. I am clear on what I sell to my clients, including any products or services that I offer.
3. I have conducted thorough market research to validate my business idea.
If you can’t answer ALL these questions, then I highly recommend watching this video. It doesn’t matter what stage of business you’re in whether you are a startup or established business you should always be performing market research.
In order to remain in business and stay relevant, you should not only anticipate change, but you need to be able to predict change too. That’s how good your market research needs to be!
The importance of market research cannot be underestimated. Market research provides you with important information that will help you identify and analyze the market needs, your customers, and your competitors so you can flourish for years to come.
In this video you will learn how to identify who your ideal client is, what their needs are and how to serve them best. You will gain clarity on what products or services to offer and you will learn how to conduct thorough market research to validate your business idea.
Learn the best strategies and tips on how to get more done, grow your business and achieve your dreams of running a successful clothing business.
In this goal setting and time management video, you will learn how to work in 12-week sprints. This method lets you focus on one major goal in your business per quarter. I will give you access to a system I created called the “Entrepreneur Success Calendar” to organize your personal and work life. It gives you a framework to work with so you know exactly what to do at the start of the week so you are better able to balance work with family life (if you happen to be a “momboss” like me).
Today I’m going to share my story how I launched my 6-figure clothing business with 2 yards of polar fleece, that costed $25 .
Beginning a career in fashion starts with getting the right education
My journey into clothing design started very early during my high school years. From my very first sewing class, I knew this was the career path I will choose to pursue. Upon finishing high school, I took the first step and enrolled in the Fashion Design and Technology program at Kwantlen University in Richmond, B.C. I then went on to further my educational studies and to enhance my skills by attending the Fashion Design program and Ryerson University in Toronto, ON. I graduated with a Bachelor of Applied Arts Degree in Fashion Design.
I came up with the name “Punch Brand” in Ryerson when I was designing my year-end graduation collection. Over the years I had experimented in different lines for Punch Brand but it never really turned into a “real” business until 2005 when I attended my first comic convention. That’s when I came up with the idea for “crazyheads” hats.
Inspiration is all around us. You just have to look.
I was really inspired by all the creative and elaborate costumes. The fans attending these conventions like to dress up as their favorite comic book, video game or cartoon character. I was immediately drawn to the community and set out to figure out a way I could contribute to this distinct and colorful world.
I bought a meter of fabric and experimented with sewing a few kitty🐱 and bunny🐰 fleece hats. I signed up for the next comic convention, had no clue if anyone would buy my hats and SOLD OUT!!! I was surprised, jumping up and down for joy, and that’s when crazyheads was born!
Work in the industry to get real world experience
Prior to Punch Brand I worked in the apparel industry for 15 years and held various positions such as fabric coordinator at Club Monaco, technical designer for Dollhouse, product developer for Hudson’s Bay Company and product manager for Reebok. Although it was an amazing experience, I never really saw myself working for someone else. It was very suffocating and also there was a lot of job uncertainty. I was becoming more and more passionate about creating my own product line. A sudden layoff gave me the perfect opportunity to pursue Punch Brand full time.
I’ve experienced so much growth since I sewed my first crazyheads hat (starting with only $25 worth of material and my own sewing machine). Here are some of the best highlights:
⭐ My business had allowed me to travel the world, exhibiting at over 100 comic/ anime related conventions and fashion trade shows.
⭐ I built my wholesale account base from scratch to over 80 active accounts and secured distribution agreements with national pop-culture distribution companies in US and Canada.
⭐ In 2011, I got a call out of the blue from Google Marketing. The Android team wanted custom Android hoodies and beanies made for their developers. I was then introduced to the Google campus merchandise buyer where we collaborated on several official Android apparel and accessories for the Google online and retail store.
⭐ My Android clothing was featured in the Google holiday videos for 2 years in a row.
⭐ I have been featured on the front page Business section of the Vancouver Sun, the National Post and The Globe & Mail newspaper.
⭐ In April 2014, I had the pleasure of pitching in front of the Dragons on CBC Dragon’s Den.
⭐ In November 2015, I successfully funded my first Kickstarter campaign.
⭐ In January 2016, I gave birth to my son Chase. I decided to wind down Punch Brand at the end of 2016 as I wanted to prioritize being a stay at home mom for 2 years. Making the decision to wind down my business was hard.
Punch Brand was my first baby and I ran it for 10 amazing years!
Hello everyone and welcome to Chase Your Dreams podcast. I’m so happy that you can join me here today. This episode is about knowing who your ideal client is.
This is SO important and I cannot emphasize this enough, to anyone who is starting a business. Not just a clothing business, but any business. I would say it all starts with knowing who your customer is and who it is that you want to serve. Because it gives you the clarity of the product that you want to produce once you know who it is that you are creating the product for. Then you’ll have a lot more clarity around it, around the product that you design for them and also around the messaging when it comes to marketing that product. Who is it that you are addressing it to? Who is it that you are selling to?
Top 5 Questions When Starting a Business
Just as a general overview here, I would say the top five questions when starting a business. Here are five questions that every entrepreneur should be asking.
First, what’s the reason for your business? Why does it exist?
Number two, who is your customer? And this is what I’m gonna go over with you today.
Number three, what do you offer them? What is the problem that you are solving?
Number four, investigate your market, do market research and validate. Is there a need for your product, and what currently exists in the marketplace?
Number five, what’s your business model? How are you gonna market your product, what are your channels of distribution?
These are probably five important questions that you should be asking when you are starting a business.
Today, I’m gonna talk about your ideal customer.
How I’d like to structure this podcast is going over the clothing brand owners checklist. This is a checklist of things to look for when you’re starting a business.
It’s a checklist that I put together for emerging designers, new business owners when they are starting a fashion company, clothing business or clothing brand.
These are the types of things that I wish someone had told me when I first started my clothing business. So just a little bit about myself and who I am. I am an apparel business consultant, and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience- a decade working for big brands like Reebok and Club Monaco and 10 years of running my own clothing design company called Punch Brand.
I have both experiences, I was able to apply my work experience into my business although when I starting out, I didn’t have the business knowledge. I just had to figure a lot of it out on my own, but luckily I had the industry, and work experience behind me, that was able to pretty much help me to sustain my business and be able to run it for 10 years. So now, really what my purpose here is to help designers build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. This is really what the podcast is about.
Know Exactly Who is Your Ideal Client
Let’s get started, if you happen to have this checklist in front of you, you can look at it. We’re gonna talk about number one and number two today: number one on the checklist says, “I know exactly who my ideal client, is, what their needs are and how to serve them best”.
I emphasize the word exactly who my ideal client is.
When you are trying to define your ideal client, some of the questions that you should ask are: Are they male or female? What do they look like?
So if you can be as specific as you can in terms of what their hair, eye color is, their height, weight, how old are they, are they single, married, divorced if they have any children. How many and how old… What type of education do they have and what do they do to earn a living?
These can be demographic questions, and I think it helps you get very clear and specific on who this client is. I like to even give the person a name and if there’s a person that you can even think of that’s real, you can find and you actually can find a picture of this person print it out and have in front of you. You can look at them and to you, it’s a real person, right? If her name is Sarah, for example, then you know who this person is.
These are some of the questions that you can start asking while you put these things together. If you wanna get more in depth into it, get more specific, you can ask questions like, what type of books do they read? What are their favorite blogs to read? Podcasts? Where do they like to hang out online? Are they on any social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. What people do they like to follow online?
Who or what inspires them? What did they like to do in their free time, and are they happy with where they are in their life? As you start asking more and more of these questions, it just becomes much more clear to you who this person is. So that you are able to better cater to them, to design the right product for this person.
Then I would take it one step further. Once you’ve identified this person if you can try to find people out there and actual people that fit this description and reach out to them as many as you can. I would say, at least 10-15 of them reach out and talk to them in real life, have a conversation with them.
Have a call with them and if you can, in person, if not on the phone or video conferencing, but really you want to get to know this person and when you ask them questions, really listen and pay attention to what they’re saying because this is gonna give you a lot of insight into the way they think, the way they purchase things.
What are their purchasing habits? How often do they shop? Where do they shop? What brands do they like? What are their favorite brands where they shop? What boutiques do they like to shop at? So, if you know that these are the places they like to shop then those are the places that you may eventually want to be able to get your line into.
So this is all part of the market research.
Be Clear on What You Sell to Your Clients
Number two on the checklist says, “I am clear on what I sell, what I sell to my clients, including any products or services that I offer. I have conducted thorough market research to validate my business idea”. These are all the things I just talked about. Trying to understand where these people shop, how often they purchase, what brands do they like? What are some of the things that they find is lacking in the market that they wish existed? If there’s an ideal product out there, what would it be?
Once you’ve gathered this information, you can then start building on and planning your line and designing according to this ideal client. Because when you know that an actual person exists and is out there looking for your stuff, then there’s a better likelihood of selling your product once it’s ready for launch, and once you’re ready to get it out into the market. By doing your customer research ahead of time, knowing who your client is, understanding the problems that they have and how you’re gonna solve it; then solving those problems… you’re gonna end up way more ahead than somebody who just doesn’t do this research and just starts going and starts designing things and producing things and spends a lot of time and money making stuff. And in the end, it doesn’t end up selling.
This is my advice to you, and this is why I chose this topic for my first episode is so that you do not waste time and money, which, as a small business owner those are your most valuable resources- time, and money. You don’t want to waste them. So if you put the time upfront in the beginning to do the proper research to validate your ideas and to do the market research, by talking to your ideal clients; that’s gonna put you ahead. You don’t wanna end up investing in $20- 30,000, in product and finding out that it doesn’t sell. Don’t do that! I beg you. I know people who have done that.
So yeah, this is my best advice to you for anyone who is starting out and so I really hope that you find this advice to be helpful and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. My email is hello@glynistao.com and of course, don’t forget to go download the checklist after this episode.
This is a presentation recorded at Apparel Camp in Vancouver on October 5, 2019.
Do you have a website that gets little to no organic traffic? If you have a brand new website or even a website that’s getting little to no traffic, you can still generate a lot of traffic from Google and rank organically. In this session, Apparel Business Consultant and SEO Specialist, Glynis Tao will present the fundamentals of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), what factors does Google look for when ranking your website, and most importantly understanding what the user wants. She will show you that it is possible to rank at the top of Google even with a new website.
Topics Covered: What is SEO? How does Google actually work? Google Ranking Factors How much money will SEO make for you? A step-by-step guide to SEO for clothing brand owners
