Ask HN: Advice for starting a fashion brand? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Advice for starting a fashion brand?

13 pointstuxxy10 comments

My partner is a talented designer and wants to start their own fashion brand and I'm curious to see if any of y'all have advice relevant to this. Perhaps funding or marketing tips, book recommendations, etc?

Thanks!

Someone asked, "What makes the brand unique?" Here's my partner's answer:

> I create futuristic, gender neutral clothing for people who are looking for something other than the tired trends that get rehashed over and over again. It will be versatile enough to wear casually on the street or in a board room meeting. My target customer is the investment shopper who wants to create their own signature look and a reliable wardrobe without feeling pressured to buy more and more clothing each season.

View on HN

Tips from my personal experience. I've been into bridal fashion for 8 years now, have 3 street shops and work with a handful of international brands.

- creating cool things without market appeal won't take you anywhere. so you need to test designs/products/ideas with your target audiences and see how they react. I found a good way of doing this by posting photos in Facebook and promoting them. Audience response varies from 10 to 1,000 likes, and we use that not only to decide which wedding gowns are catching more attention, but their attributes (style, color, luxury etc.)

- don't mind about producing/making products yourself in the beginning. once you know what the markets at your reach are interested on, you can start buying and selling products from vendors. by doing this you can save energy ($) for more marketing/selling per se. as you get more into your customer's brains and know what they want, you should be able to see gaps in your vendor's collections. this is when you can start designing and producing your own products to close that gap.

- find a good (and real) digital influencer. this was key to the first two years of my business. I found an influencer who was specialized into budget weddings. She helped me put my business on the map, which is not easy in the very beginning.

- don't lose any night of sleep because of the competition. they are missing as much as you are in many things and there is room for everybody in the market. the main reason you are not selling is YOU, not THEM. this is key for stress management.

Good luck!

Tips from my experience

* Whatever you do, try to talk to customers (not friends) as early as possible, and try to keep them in the loop when taking critical decisions. Frequent feedback can keep you on the right direction and also not lose morale. (Nothing like a long release cycle to invite self doubt and other self destructing emotions.) - Try to find the venues (online or offline) where people who can be potential customers hang out and interact.

Apart from other recommendations below: (Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant )[https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Expanded-Uncontes...]

Do your competitor research. Which is the closest brand offering what you're offering. What kind of brand voice do they use when communicating with their customers? What are they doing right? Are there any gaps in their designs that your brand can fill?

Talk to customers: - Look up fashion subreddits to see what people are wearing, what they like and what they don't. - Reach out to Instagrammers that fit your customer profile. If they have a large number of followers, see if they'd be interested in trying out a sample of your designs. - Get an advertiser account on FB/IG and use their hyper targeting ability (geo, age range, favorite brands, etc) to get an idea of the size of your market

Test out different platforms that you'll use to sell. Shopify, Etsy, Squarespace etc all offer ways to sell online, but the prices, levels of service and reliability are going to vary.

Try to forecast your production volume accurately, so you don't accidentally take orders for items you no longer have inventory for.

Just an idea. How about creating a social media "Brand" presence? Show off the fashion with it being unavailable. Get feedback, gauge who your audience is and put it in peoples minds. You can see how viable it is and gather feedback before committing to anything too big. Maybe offer social media models samples in exchange for advertising?

The only think I know about this is that I believe Nasty Gal got caught out by not doing their clothes on a size curve: https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-make-a-size-curve-for-clothi...

I think this lacks the "leverage" that excites a lot of the people on HN and which people (around here) believe make a business worth doing.

>"Startups offer anyone a way to be in a situation with measurement and leverage. They allow measurement because they're small, and they offer leverage because they make money by inventing new technology.

What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod, rather than the fish. That's the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That's leverage.

If you look at history, it seems that most people who got rich by creating wealth did it by developing new technology. You just can't fry eggs or cut hair fast enough. What made the Florentines rich in 1200 was the discovery of new techniques for making the high-tech product of the time, fine woven cloth. What made the Dutch rich in 1600 was the discovery of shipbuilding and navigation techniques that enabled them to dominate the seas of the Far East."

>"If you want to understand startups, understand growth. Growth drives everything in this world. Growth is why startups usually work on technology — because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is the best source of rapid change. Growth is why it's a rational choice economically for so many founders to try starting a startup: growth makes the successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high even though the risk is too."

I recommend reading these:

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

and especially zero to one: http://zerotoonebook.com/

First chapter is free online.

Could you add what will be unique and innovative about the brand to the question? It will help with answering.

Done!

What will be gender neutral about it? How will you account for the different body shapes of men and women?

From my partner:

> Most garments don't have a lot of difference when it comes to body types. They don't need to be constructed that differently (although they are when you go to the mall). I also use very forgiving fabrics to account for people who have more curves in their body. In general, my clothing has a more androgynous fit. I also use fit models of various body types to ensure flattering fits for varying body shapes. If required, a garment can be constructed while taking into account breasts/hips and still maintain a gender neutral aesthetic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com