How to start a fashion label: Marketing 101
Your guide on how to build a sustainable and profitable fashion business if you’re not a nepo baby.
Welcome to another episode of the “Things I wish I knew before launching a clothing label” where I talk more in depth on how to start a successful international fashion business. Today I’ll be covering a part of the broad scope of marketing. On my homepage, I’ll also add another section dedicated to successful marketing strategies I implemented which you could explore as an independent fashion designer.
Now this is the part I enjoy working on the most. Most of the things I write about here are specifically tailored for an ecommerce fashion label.
Email Marketing
While many mentors would say with confidence that the first thing you need to start with is opening a page on a relevant social media network, from my experience this is not the thing that you should go for first. During the testing period and while working on attracting the right target customer in order to stay on budget, my advise is to first launch a landing page. Before you commit to opening an online store, you’ll need to test your concept. The landing page will help you do this for very little money before you commit fully to opening an online store.
Shopify has a build in feature called Shopify Email which makes it possible for you to collect emails and send automated welcome emails to those who subscribe. The way we use this is to tell our story through it. Our welcome email is filled with details on how the label started and what it means to different people. When you subscribe on our website, apart from receiving 10% on everything, you’ll get to read our story and through it our brand values. For me it was very important to humanize the whole aspect of it, so our customers see that a real human stands behind the whole operation and not just a souless corporation.
While we use Shopify Email for automation emails, to send email campaigns we use Mailchimp mostly because the whole process on designing the email I feel it’s better, more intuitive and overall you have a bigger creative freedom, as well as a better analytics section.
Public Relations Agency
If your aim is to create a brand like Toteme or Khaite, I got one word for you:
Hiring a PR agency should be on top of your priority list and this should be done paralel to running your email marketing. If there’s one thing you absolutely don’t save money on is this. The best PR agencies charge around 3.000$ - 5.000$ per month and can open many doors for you, as they have access and connections to the relevant figures in the fashion industry like editors, influencers and celebrities. They have the ability to turn your label into the hottest and coolest new kid on the block in a matter of months. That’s if you hire a good one. Don’t fall for the crappy ones, you know the ones that reach out to you via email and promise wonders for little money. When things seem too good to be true, run and don’t look back.
Some of the best fashion PR agencies out there are Purple PR , IHPR, The Only Agency, Karla Otto, Lucky Chalm, DH PR and TwentyTwenty Communications. I have a list of around 50 others with relevant contacts and divided by regions, so if you’re searching for one, let me know and I’ll send it over.
Press
If you’re like me however, starting with a 0$ budget sadly you’ll need to take the longer road, which means the DIY approach. Doing it yourself is very challenging, but if there’s one advice I could share is to start working on storytelling. The more unique your brand story is, the bigger your chances are to win the hearts of editors who receive hundreds of pitches every single day. Getting featured into a fashion publication such as Vogue is nearly impossible these days and it only gets more and more difficult. Publications entire premise is to make money, so if you’re not spending money on advertising with them your label has a 0.01% of being included in their shopping lists. Therefore a good storytelling is your window, however tiny it might be to actually get featured. It’s precisely the mastery of storytelling which helped Bastet Noir getting featured in Vogue, Refinery29, WhoWhatWear, Marie Claire, Elle NL, The Brides and The Knot. Fascinating I know and to this day I still can’t believe me and my team pulled it off from a location that’s not exactly known for its fashion and no prior connections to the industry. I’ve also complied a list of relevant fashion editors with their contact details divided by publications they work for, so feel free to reach out if you want it.
Another avenue to explore could be Haro (Help A Reporter Out) , which started as a forum where journalist from all backgrounds would seek help with writting their articles. It’s not very fashion focused, but from time to time you can come by a post which might help you. We’ve used it for a while and only stopped doing it this year, but I would encourage you to try it out anyway and explore.
Social Media
When it comes to social media, many advisors I’ve encountered over the years would say to start with one and focus only on one. While I believe that focus is inevitable part later down the line, I tend to disagree with this. When you’re starting something, you need to give yourself the permission to experiment and test what works and what doesn’t. In order to do that you need to try out several options and only once you’re sure where to focus your energy only then you can stick to one. Of course, there comes a toll of doing too much if you’re doing it alone. What helped me was setting goals for each platform specifically and developing templates to follow to better optimize the time spent on each platform.
Before my lovely head of content Elena came into the picture, I was doing this all by myself. Back at the day, that’s almost 11 years now, obviously Facebook was all the rage, before Instagram took over. I started with a page on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Needless to say Facebook was left out after everyone jumped ship to Instagram.
There are different strategies to use which I’ll write about more in depth in a separate article. In the everchanging landscape of social media what I know for sure is this: the best social media channels for fashion labels are currently Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat and I would add to this list Substack as well. While I’m still exploring Substack, it seems to me like the engagement on some of the fashion publications here is nothing like what I’ve seen before even in the heydays of Instagram.
Few tips:
Instagram is only for showcasing the visual side of the label and should be used as a storefront rather than content marketing. With such low engagement rates, this social network seems like it’s lost its luster.
Pinterest while used primarly for moodboards, can also be a beneficial platform to promote your label and reach potential customers. White background product shots and lifestyle images tend to perform better than studio product photos.
TikTok is a great platform when used for education and not selling. So gear your content towards creating value rather than pushing a product. Our content there is educating our audience on how to spot a quality product vs. a fast fashion one.
SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization is a digital marketing strategy aimed at improving a website's visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) to attract more organic (non-paid) traffic. It involves various techniques and practices to optimize website content, structure, and performance to align with search engine algorithms and user intent.
My knowledge of this is limited and if I’m being honest to this day my opinion around this strategy varies from month to month. Especially this year, when it became pretty evident to me that middle to high income consumers don’t really use Google search anymore. It’s more thrifty customers who do, those who are trying to find deals online, so if you’re targeting this type of customer, than I suggest you invest into someone with the knowledge of SEO to help you out. It’s a skill on its own and it’s highly unlikely that you’d be able to do it alone. If you don’t you’re more likely to find success with influencers than SEO. At least that rings true for a more high end fashion customers.
There are of course some things you can do on your own to make the best of it. Identifying the keywords you want to rank for and using them to create engaging item descriptions, alt texts on photos, simple things like naming photo files and link building are few things you don’t need to outsource. On the other hand, optimizing site speed and fixing crawling errors are better left to the capable hands of a professional.
Since marketing is a very broad subject, I’ll split this article in two and talk about the rest like content marketing, affiliate marketing and SMS marketing in the second part that’s coming next Sunday.
I hope this was usefull for all of you young aspiring fashion designers out there. Another part of this series is coming out next Sunday. Until then, because sharing is caring, if you know someone who is an independent fashion designer and will find this helpful please share it with them. I know I would have been grateful if I could find this stuff when I was beginning. It would have saved me a lot of time and money.
I know time these days is a precious currency, so thank you for reading.
Hasta la vista lovelies from my Salad Brain.