How To Start An Online Clothes Business

Starting your own business can be an exciting prospect, particularly if you are starting a business that focuses on something you are passionate about; if you are passionate about clothing you are in luck as there are plenty of resources available to help you start your business. Plus the fact that the clothing industry is projected to keep increasing in revenue year on year, providing increasing opportunities.

Benefits Of Selling Clothes Online Compared To Selling In A Brick And Mortar Store

• Lower Barriers To Entry: It can sometimes take significant financial investments to set up a physical store, plus it will likely take you significantly longer to set up a physical store as opposed to an online store. Setting up an online store can often take a few weeks at most for most businesses.

• Lower Overhead Costs: Online stores have lower upkeep costs as in many cases online businesses that are just starting do not need to rent out a physical location, many people starting online businesses store their stock within their homes. Because you likely won’t have a physical location you will not need to spend money on rent, utilities and insurance for an additional location; meaning that your profit margins will likely be higher as you will be spending less on overhead costs.

• Convenience To Customers: Customers can shop whenever they want as they are not restricted to your store's opening hours. Customers who don’t live in your geographic area can also buy your products, these out-of-town customers may not have discovered your business if you sold your products exclusively in a brick-and-mortar store. 

Choose A Clothing Niche

Businesses that have their unique selling points are more likely to be successful as they provide products or services that are scarcely found elsewhere. Finding a niche to aim your business towards is a good way to find a unique selling point that will hopefully help you carry your business to success; when considering your options when coming up with a niche you should be aware of the following considerations:

• Be Unique: Creating products that are unique to your business can be a good way to generate customer interest when done right. When you launch a new product you should consider initially creating a limited supply of such products to ensure that it is a hit with your customers. Once you are assured that your customers are buying the product in enough quantities you can then produce or buy in a higher amount of those products to satisfy customer demand. 

• Choose A Niche You Are Passionate About: You should consider which clothes you enjoy wearing or what you like to see other people wearing. This can mean that you are already invested in your niche and already have a knowledge of products within that category that are already on the market. You can look at existing, similar clothing and think of how your business can improve upon the clothes that are already on the open market. For example, you may decide your business is going to focus on heavyweight hoodies if that is your thing.

• Make Sure Your Niche Has Earning Potential: When you come up with a new business idea it is always important to ensure that you can turn a profit with the idea. You can do this by researching your running costs, how much you will buy your products or materials for and what your selling price should be. You can then determine a rough estimate of how much profit you will earn from each sale. 

Determine Your Business Plan

Creating a solid business plan is important for every type of business, this is where you put down into writing your goals for your business and how you expect to achieve them. You should decide which kind of online clothing business you should be, here are some options you can consider:

• Print On Demand: This type of online clothing business prints clothing based on each customer's specifications, customers can get custom images and designs printed on clothing such as company logos, favourite photos or even something the customer themselves has designed themselves. 

• Customer Cut And Saw: This type of online clothing business designs and makes the clothing themselves from scratch, this requires a more in-depth knowledge of tailoring than most other clothing business models. 

• Private Label Clothing: Being a private label clothing company allows you to contact clothing manufacturers and order clothes that have your company designs and logos on them to be sent to your company so that you can then sell this stock to your customers. 

• Drop Shipping: This is where you buy stock from manufacturers and sell it on yourself using your online store, this can be the easiest way to set up an online store however the profit margin often isn’t as good as other methods as you are essentially the middleman.