How To Improve Your Fashion Sales

Now that you’ve started your fashion line, it’s time for you to consider next steps. Those next steps often include improving your sales. How can you improve your fashion clothing business startup to be the next big thing? Follow these steps to improve your fashion sales.

To improve your fashion sales:

Research more about the industry, including the history of the industry and other successful businesses.
Make changes within your business plan to redistribute your budget into your marketing or budget lines.
Increase your advertising, but do so intelligently by targeting your chosen demographic.
Create a demand for your products.
Run some sort of sale to encourage new customers to shop with you.
Partner with an influencer or another business—but not a competitor.
Make your business memorable.

Following these steps can not only help you improve your sales, but improve your business altogether. Read on to find out how you can both save money on your investment and still make more profit from your clothing line.

Table of Contents

Research more about the industry, including the history of the industry and other successful businesses

While you should have done your research about the clothing industry before you set foot into your own business, there’s always more to learn about your fashion business—and it can help with your sales.

Knowing the history of your business is an important way that will help improve your sales—but it won’t be a direct line to profit. Why is it important to know? Because as you’ve probably discovered, there are so many niches and details that are part of the clothing industry you may be unaware of, and knowing as much as you can about the industry and the process can give you a leg up against your competition.

What should you know? Start researching the history first. Learn about what trends have been profitable and what haven’t so you can avoid those pitfalls. Learn about the most successful brands in the businesses like Louis Vuitton, Adidas, Nike—all of their histories have important lessons to learn, and you may be able to avoid the costly mistakes they have. Consider their advertising campaigns and where they sell, along with the demographic in which they choose to sell. Look at their trends throughout the years and see where you can emulate or avoid what they’ve done. Don’t think because you’re a smaller clothing line that you can’t use what they already know—in fact, it’s a great way to avoid mistakes—and mistakes can cost you profit.

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Make changes within your business plan to redistribute your budget into your marketing or budget lines

Just because you’ve been following your business plan doesn’t mean it’s optimized for profit. If you don’t have a business plan, consider making one—it is integral to your success as a business owner as it outlines all the decisions you must make at the start of your process and throughout your business growth.

How does having and continually editing your business plan help you with your sales? This is one of those indirect ways to help your sales. Editing and keeping your business plan will help reduce stress and increase the amount of time you can spend on other parts of your business, along with providing a road map towards success and your goals. In addition, when you edit your business plan, you can find that you don’t need certain parts of it or are doing things that are wasting some of your budget—and when you adjust your budget to shift your existing capital or profits, you can purchase more inventory or even additional advertising. What can that do? Help increase your profits.

Regardless of whether your budget is annual or monthly, you can start considering what you’re putting your money into—one way to help reduce the cost of items in your budget is by ranking what you’re spending the most money on. If there are items at the bottom of the list, consider cutting them if possible and shifting that funding to advertising or inventory.

Increase your advertising, but do so intelligently by targeting your chosen demographic

By shifting around existing money in your budget, you’ll have more money to invest in advertising. But you shouldn’t just throw money into any advertising opportunity you see—advertising can be a complicated process, and wasting your money shouldn’t be how you use that extra funding.

What do you spend your money on to make money? It’s not just an old adage. You do have to spend some money to make money, especially in the clothing business, and when you advertise, do so intelligently. Consider your target audience as you make your decisions. What kind of advertising do they see the most? What social media pages do they use? Do they subscribe to magazines or newspapers, or do they search for your business online? How do they find your business? Consider all of these questions before you start advertising so your money is not wasted—the more people who know about your product, the better, as they’ll become more interested in your product and more likely to purchase.

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Create a demand for your products

While you should always have enough inventory on hand to sell in your business, it’s important to predict just how much your customers are willing to purchase—and make sure you publicize your limited amount. If a customer wants your item and knows that you only have a certain amount, they’re going to be willing to pay higher or full price rather than wait for you to mark it down.

This is also a great way to avoid overstocking. Buying too much inventory will just lead to you having to cut your profits through too many sales or creating clearance, so estimate your inventory properly.

Run some sort of sale to encourage new customers to shop with you

While this is in direct competition with the last point, it is also a way to improve your fashion sales. Run a sale with some of your leftover inventory—if you’ve kept your profit margin at 50 percent, you can still make profit on what you have. By advertising this properly, you can also bring in people that may not have shopped in your business previously. Bring them in with the promise of a blowout sale, and hook them with your customer service and other products. They may come back and pay full price for items they spotted and didn’t buy during the sale, or they could become loyal customers.

Partner with an influencer or another business—but not a competitor

Collaborations are something that makes the business world buzz—and you can become a part of that buzz by creating your own. Work with another business, preferably someone local and not in the clothing industry, in a collaboration—and it’s even better if that business is popular. If not a business, look into working with a social media influencer. That can be a relatively inexpensive way to reach a bunch of people in your demographic at the same time, while also getting the support of someone who may continue to use and tout your products. People like the personal touch, and hearing it directly from another individual that they follow will help increase your sales and profits.

Make your business memorable

One of the best forms of advertising is simply word-of-mouth, especially in this social media age. People talk, and others listen, no matter if it’s coming from a trusted relative or an influencer. How do you hop on that information train? You need to make your business memorable.

There are ways that you can do that from the start, and that’s through your branding. Make sure you create brand that people can remember—think about all the most famous brands that you know. What makes them stand out? What makes others fall away? Think about what makes your business unique and latch onto it.

One way to do that is to create a tagline. How often do you see Nike’s “Just do it”? It’s something that will stick in your customer’s heads and will make your business linger, which means they will be more likely to know your brand and purchase from it.

Another way to market your business to make it even more memorable is to tell your story through advertising. In our day and age, people want to know about the people rather than the brand. It isn’t just about what the business is, but who is behind it. Use your social media to tell the story of who you are and why you started your business. Who makes the decisions? Who are the people on your staff? The more you humanize what you do, the better—show your customers who you truly are and what you do, along with the quality of your products, and your sales will improve.

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