How to start a fashion label: Product development and Designing
Your guide on how to build a sustainable and profitable fashion business if you’re not a nepo baby.
Welcome to another epizode of the “Things I wish I knew before launching a clothing label”. This time I’ll be covering product development and designing.
As a fashion designer, you’re always tempted to start with sketching. After all, this is where you shine the most. It comes naturally to you and it’s easier than planning and organizing. Honestly, I can relate to this. As someone who leans more towards the creative side of things, I used to be the type of person with a scattered brain and sometimes I still am, especially at times when I find myself overwhelmed. My first instict then is always to “Do first, think later”. What I’ve learnt though, the hard way, is that a strategy is one of the things that keeps the focus at bay. So, why am I telling you all this? Although it sounds so common sense, I wish somebody told me prior to me starting the business. It would have probably cut in half the time it took me to make my fashion label successful and profitable.
As a fashion designer, who is not self taught like me, you’ll probably have a way better sense of your aesthetic and style direction, which will make it easier for you to start attracting customers sooner than I did. So I won’t go here into details as how to get your branding on the right track. If however you need this, feel free to go over my last article on branding.
Collection Vs. Product Development
So if not sketching, then what come first?
What you design will be heavily influenced by whether you’d want to go into product development or collection development. Let’s see what these mean?
Fashion design is essentially one big umbrella housing 3 different foundation pillars. When blended all together, the end result is what fashion people call a line or a collection.
Segment refers to the type of customer you want to design for. This ranges from basics to workwear to bridesmaids and everything in between. So for me this was bridesmaid dresses up until 2 years ago.
Once you figure out the segment, you’ll need to pick the style of your ideal customer. This can be anything from Boho to cowgirl to classic and is heavily influenced by the character and aesthetic of your target customer. The style will direct you towards the type of silhouettes you’ll later design. As uneducated self taught designer, style was a bit difficult for me to figure out. All I knew was that I wanted the dresses to be classy, timeless and yet have a bit of edge and subtle sex appeal.
Which leads us to category. This is determined based on your customers preferences and what they are most likely to wear and it features everything from underwear, dresses, pants, skirts, blazers all the way down to outerwear. In the beggining, for me it was dresses.
Once you figure all that out, you need to decide between developing an entire collection or focus on developing a product. So what’s the difference between the two? Well, while collection encompasses a range of categories, product development refers to working with only one and perfecting it until you’re ready to start with others. When we rebranded Bastet Noir, we decided to focus on workwear, which meant that instead of focusing on one product, we needed to work within multiple different categories at the same time which in addition to dresses included blazers, pants and outerwear.
While the decision is all up to you, here are my 2 cents. If you’re a young fashion designer who is just starting out, my recommendation is to go with product development first. Picking a category and sticking to it at least for the first 2 years will allow you to not only improve your design, but experiment with different fabrics until you figure out what works best and what you’re customers are loving so you can go ahead and double on that.
Designing
Now for the fun part. I’m sure you know this better than I do, assuming you’ve already finished school for fashion design, so here I’ll just explain my process.
Working with deadstock fabrics, the pieces I’m designing are heavily inspired by the type of material we find while roaming our suppliers facilities. So my design process begins only after fabrics are purchased.
I used to start with a piece of blank paper and just draw whatever comes to mind while looking at the fabrics. Then I switched my inspiration from fabrics to women I find inspiring and designed for them, which I wouldn’t recommend honestly, since every woman had different style and the whole cohesiveness was lost. Last year though, I started with a different approach. I dug deep into who our target customer was and designed only for her. Needless to say, the end result turned out to be so much better that what I did previously.
I’m doing everything by hand on my Remarkable, but I have tried several different fashion designer software and I’ll list them here:
Clo3D - This is considered the Holly Grail of fashion design softwares out there, as while designing the piece, the software also prepares the sewing patterns
FashionDraw App - This is something I found online which seems cool, but haven’t tried it yet
Browswear - They have an application especially for indie designers
Ilustrator & InDesign - Brought to you by the good ol’ pal Photoshop
I hope this is usefull for all of you young fashion entrepreneurs 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 time these days is a precious currency, so thank your reading.
Hasta la vista lovelies from my Salad Brain.