How to Increase Your Profits in Fashion

While fashion can be your passion, you also need to consider it your livelihood—and to live, you need to see profits from your clothing line. What happens if those profits aren’t as high as you hoped? There are ways to increase those profits without breaking the bank!

Table of Contents

To increase your profits in fashion:

1. Do your research not only about your industry, but about other successful businesses and their practices.

2. Create and continue to edit your business plan.

3. Create a detailed budget and focus your funding on several things that you do well.

4. Don’t purchase too much inventory—find ways around overstocking.

5. Use social media and your website as free marketing and keep up on a social media posting schedule that fits your brand.

There are many ways to increase your profits within your clothing line business—and not all of them will cost you any investment. If you’re looking for ways to make more money, focus on those steps that can both increase your profits without breaking the bank. Read on to find out more.

Do your research not only about your industry, but about other successful businesses and their practices.

Before you even start your business, you should know what you’re getting into. That being said, that research will always be helpful as you grow, so continue to familiarize yourself with the clothing industry as you work on your clothing line.

What do you need to know? There are so many variables and niches within the clothing industry that you may not be aware of—start researching the options, aesthetics, niches, demographics, etc. that you may be able to tap into. There are plenty of groups of people that are not being properly served by a clothing company—find out how you can become that company while still catering to the broadest demographic possible.

You should also look into the most successful businesses and their practices. Nike, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, and Adidas may all seem like unattainable levels of success, but you can learn from what they do. Look into their marketing campaigns, who they sell to, where they sell, etc. to see if you can find trends. Even without a lot of capital, your small business can learn from those businesses and use what they’ve already discovered.

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Create and continue to edit your business plan.

Whether you haven’t even opened your doors or you’re a year down the line, if you do not have a business plan, make sure you have one. A business plan simply outlines your entire business structure, goals, budget, etc. so you can make better business decisions when each problem hits.

So how does this help you increase your profits? It doesn’t, but it helps decrease your stress levels and increase your time and speed in decision making in the future. If you’ve already considered what you might face and any problems that may arise, you literally already have a roadmap to success in your business plan. All you have to do is implement it, and you’re well on your way. This frees you up to make other decisions, choices, etc. that could help you increase your profits—something that you may not have been able to do beforehand.

Create a detailed budget and focus your funding on several things that you do well.

In that business plan, you should be creating a budget. Whether it’s an annual budget or a month-by-month budget, you need to determine what you’re spending your money on. Whether you’re looking at increasing your inventory or increasing your marketing costs, decide on three to five things that you find the most important—then find ways to decrease your spending in the other categories. Rank them in order of importance, and then focus on those few things. You’ll find you’re not spending as much in the categories you don’t need to be spending, which means you’re creating a leaner budget—which can give you room to put money into other more necessary line items, which can therefore increase your profits.

Don’t purchase too much inventory—find ways around overstocking.

There are ways around overstocking your business, and it can save you money in the long run—opening you up for more funding in other parts of your business. Consider creating demand for your items before an actual drop date—you can get names on a waiting list with sizing so you know exactly how much to order. If you have less stock, you don’t necessarily have to sell less—you just know what people want and what they’re looking for, saving you money in the long run.

Use social media and your website as free marketing and keep up on a social media posting schedule that fits your brand.

Customers hear about you through marketing. Even word of mouth advertising can be considered marketing—but those people need to know about your first. There are so many ways to market your clothing line, but there are also many ways to do so that are free. Focusing your energies online using social media posts are a great way to get marketing without breaking the bank.

So how do you create a schedule that fits your brand and brings in your target audience? You need to ask yourself some questions and bring in that research you did on the industry before. Before you start marketing, ask yourself the following:

What are my goals for my business?
What do I stand for?
What feeling do I want to evoke when people wear my clothing?
What do I believe in?
What is my demographic, and how do they find posts online?

Asking yourself these questions can help you develop a marketing campaign that isn’t just effective, but memorable.

Next Steps

So you’ve saved money by tightening your budget and making smarter business decisions. How do you use that extra money that you’ve saved to really increase your profits?

It all comes down to marketing.

Free marketing works on social media, but once you’ve freed up enough funding to start marketing more in earnest, you can open yourself up to more paid advertising. The following are some ideas to develop as you look to take your business to the next step:

Create a business tagline. So many clothing lines focus on this, and they create something memorable. Get stuck in your customers’ minds with a tagline. Who can’t forget Nike’s “Just Do It?”
Tell your story. Using social media and your ads, tell your potential customers who you are. They don’t want a faceless business anymore—they want to know who makes decisions and who runs the behind the scenes. Show how you create your items, tell your history how you got to this point. If you humanize your business, you make it seem like people are buying from you, not a corporation.
Run a sale. You never know how many people could flock to you simply because you have a sale. And when you create good product, you can find yourself bringing in new returning customers. While you may think your profits could take a hit from running a promotion, you might be surprised—sales encourage people to purchase more.
Partner. While you don’t want to partner with a competitor, you can find other businesses with the same mindset and goals and work off each other. You can also consider getting an influencer sponsorship—with the social media age, people want to hear testimonials from the influencers they like and trust. Become one of their favored products, have them wear your clothing in their YouTube videos, and you may find your profits increasing.

There are so many ways to increase your profits in your fashion line that it can be overwhelming. The important thing to remember is that you’re doing it because you love it, and you want to be successful—profits will come if you focus on the reasons why you started your line in the first place. If you merely focus on the profits, you may find yourself losing the love of your business that you started with. Focus on making your business the best it can be and the profits will follow.

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