So you want to start a fashion brand? Here’s how (with Elizabeth Stiles)

Like, how do you create your own version of one of these brands? How do you take off in the same way that some of these ones have online? So starting at the very beginning, imagining that someone, for example, has maybe a name for the brand or a logo or a concept, where would you go from there? Like, what's the next thing you would do?

You've got to think about, this is so boring, and you hear it in every single marketing book, but who is it that you're selling that product to?

Mm-hmm.

And knowing your customer really well, and I don't mean girl in her 20s, mum in her 30s.

Going and really understanding who that ideal person is.

And I sometimes do find those questionnaires of finding your ideal customer avatar a little bit ambiguous.

So an easy way to do it is pick an influencer, your dream person who you couldn't imagine buying from you or wearing your thing.

You would scream if that they wore your product.

That's your ideal customer, and then you kind of maybe work backwards from there because then you've got a tangible person that you're working with.

And every time you're making a design decision, a naming deci- you know, naming something, a fabric composition, a label, you're always just coming back to that one person thinking, "Would this one person buy that thing?" And it keeps you very focused because otherwise you can get really overwhelmed and distracted because there is so many things to think about alongside your manufacturing and also your marketing, and they're two very, very different concepts, but you need to run both in equal measure.

Because if you have a really good product but nobody knows about it and you haven't done the marketing, then you're not gonna make any money.

But if you have really good marketing and not a very good product, then your business isn't gonna last.

So you need to make sure that you're focusing on both in equal measure, but not necessarily at the same time.

You might sort of flip between the two.

And then starting off to think about factories, finding a factory.

Do you want to do it by made to order, or do you want everything pre-made, ready to send out? There's no right or wrong.

It's just two different types of business models.

Thinking about how much quantity you want to buy, what your budget is.

I've worked with one girl, she got given 18,000 pounds for her 18th birthday.

Oh.

Wow.

[laughs] Lucky her.

And she hired me because she wanted to use that 18K to start her fashion brand.

And she'd been to speak to different manufacturers, and they told her they have really low quantities, but their really low quantities were 300 units.

Yeah.