How to Start A Sports Wear Business
Do you have plans of starting your own sports wear business? Perhaps you’ve got brilliant design ideas or a dope new apparel concept. Or have you been searching for unique styles of sports wear and now you’ve decided to create yours? Then this is indeed the right time to start your own sports wear business.
But how would you make this dream of yours come true?
Fortunately, in this article we have outlined steps you need to take that’ll bring you a step closer to your goal. Therefore all the details have been taken care of.
But before we go into those steps, we’ve listed the two methods of making sales and bringing your sports wear to the consumers.
Firstly, you can sell sports wear bought on a bulk basis through home shopping parties, the internet or by opening a physical store sale.
The second way is starting a company that designs and produces sports wear to be distributed to clothing and recreational stores on a wholesale basis or directly to customers over the internet or through sales kiosks found in busy malls.
Any method you choose has its advantages and disadvantages. Though, the first strategy is requirements less capital to set up and can be run on a part-time basis until the business expands from through the profits made and needs to be operated full-time.
Note; the start-up cost for this business is within the range of $10,000 – $50,000.
How to start a sports wear business
Here is a rundown of the key steps in starting your own company.
Start Up Phase
Step 1: Idea & Customer’s Need
Everything begins with an idea. You may not easily find the clothes you’re searching for, or you have a clear vision of fashion that you want to show the world. You’re better off when you can relate your idea to the customer’s needs. If you really believe in your ideas, then you’re expected to go forward and make it work. The most important thing is identifying your target customers.
Step 2: Market Scan
You certainly have a brilliant idea. The question is: is this unique? Carry out a comprehensive business can. Browse the internet, visit some shops and read related magazines. You need to discover your target niche and ensure your brand stands out in the competition. As long as a brand has your idea, you’ll always remain number two.
Step 3: Business plan
Having a business plan is always helpful, especially when you have plans of bringing other people on board. They could be business partners or investors.
However, the business plan is there for you. It causes you to ask yourself some difficult questions and view your business plan from various perspectives.
The business plan is a dynamic document that develops and evolves with time; typically things don’t happen exactly the way you planned it in your head.
Step 4: Branding.
Invest a lot of time and thinking into the branding of your company. There are a lot of brands available in the market today; thus, you have to make yours stand out.
Establish brand recognition and loyalty that will make your consumers attached to your brand. Your brand must correlate with your actual products.
Step 5: Money
Nothing to is ever free, and neither is developing a sports wear brand. You’ve probably calculated the initial expenditure in your business strategy, and you have an idea of how much it would cost you to start it up. How are you going to fund it? Can your relatives or friends support you? There are special start-up loans and also investors to ask for help. Selling to an investor earlier includes giving away more of the company -and perhaps that’s a perfect way getting things started and making your dream come true?
Step 6: Entrepreneurship
Managing your businesses isn’t a task of 9 to 5. It isn’t the amount of time you spend in the office that counts. What counts is if you’re making sales. You’re your boss, and you need to make things work. You have to live and breathe your brand, working 24/7. Everyone has cool ideas. The distinguishing factor is that the entrepreneur is bringing those ideas to life. It’s going to require hard work, and then you can execute your plans. Are you cut out for this or not? Is this what you desire?
Step 7: Team
As stated in step 6, establishing your brand will take a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Are capable of doing it all on your own? Even if you can, is it the most effective way of doing this? Please ensure you’re working with creative and inspired people who will support you l wherever you fall short. If you’re great at designing v, find a great business partner, and if you’re a business kind of person, find a good designer. No man can do it alone, and you’re not meant to either.
Product Development Phase
Step 8: Define the collection here
Having left the start-up stage beyond you, it’s time to start creating the goods, the process of producing your clothing. The first step here is to define the collection. Concentrate on your brand name, your goal and the goods you want to make. Ensure that the collection is clear and that it has cohesion.
Step 9: Design
You have structured and defined your collection and the designer can start sketching. Get back to the inspiration and the brand image, and the customer you want to have. The styles should fit in with the vision and identity of your brand. The designer needs to make great tech packs so you can carry on with your product development. Read more about designing in the article: How to design without knowing how to draw
Step 10: Sourcing
Sourcing means finding factories, materials, and accessories. Materials are a science by itself. If you know your price points, performance requirement, and quality level, it will help you narrow down your search for the right materials. Accessories can be cords, zippers, pullers etc that you want to include in your garments. Then you need to find a factory that suits your needs, can produce your styles, and believe in your concept.
Step 11: Pricing
In the start-up phase you had a first look at the costs and the prices for your styles and production. Now when the collection is defined, you have sourced materials and found factories, and hence production costs, you need to check your pricing again. Does it add up? Will it be profitable? Review all the posts in your budget and see how you can recalibrate it. In the end you want to live and work, doing what you love. You don’t want it to be an expensive hoppy that you pour money into.
Step 12: Pattern & Prototype
This is a very crucial part. Even though you have great designs on paper, you need to transform them into garments that look and feel the way you want. Based on the tech packs you need to find a good pattern maker, which isn’t easy. The pattern is made in your wanted sample size and will later be graded to fit several sizes. With the pattern you will start making your prototypes. In between every prototype you will measure, fit, and adjust the pattern to improve your garment. Typically you will need 2–3 prototypes per style before you have a sample ready to show/sell.
Step 13: Production
Once you have arrived at your final prototype (sales man sample), you can start planning the bulk production. Discuss this with your factory as early as you can. They need to plan in your production in their schedule. They of course need to know how big your production will be, the number or styles and sizes per style. We suggest you write an agreement with the manufacturer stating delivery times and quality requirements.
Step 14: Shipping
You have the bulk production ready and need to get your fantastic garments to your customers. Depending on your sales strategy you can have one or more customers. There can be shops, end-users, and wholesalers. Take a look at your logistics, negotiate with transportation partners, and plan how you will repackage the goods to suit your designated customer.
Marketing and Sales
Step 15: Marketing
Let the world know the story of your brand. Marketing is your goods, your meetings, your communications, and everything you do with your company. Be transparent about everything you do, make your customers know why you do it, and what your brand is all about. You intend to get your message out. Tell the public about your goods and what makes them unique from your rivals.
Step16: Sales
It doesn’t matter if you have the best products in the world with the best story, if no-one buys them. In the end it all comes down to sales. You want your garments to sell, so you can reinvest and develop your collection and keep doing what you love. If you work with retailers, the traditional way is to show at trade fair and to take your collection in garment bags and visit the shops. This way you end up having multiple mini presentations and demonstrations of your awesome collection. Not all buyers are open to new things, so don’t get discouraged when it gets tough. Believe in your brand and keep going.
Step 17: Order
The manufacturer usually has minimum quantity requirements for producing your garment. This should at least be your selling target. Sell! Sell! Sell! And collect your orders to meet those minimums. At the same time, keep track of your minimum requirements for materials. How much fabrics are on each roll that you buy? You don’t want to buy too much fabric that in the end turns into left over. A good recommendation is to only produce the garments you have orders on. Don’t stock up, unless you have an online business, and therefore need your own stock.
Step 18: Customer Service
Take care of your customers. You make your garments so that your customers can have them for their intended need. Don’t disappoint them, put yourself in their shoes and just see how you can help them. How will you handle complaints, returns, and delays? Talk to your customers, put your ego aside, and use the information to make even better products in the future.
How to increase the revenue for your sports wear business
The clothing industry is huge—and growing. Globally, the textile and garment industry is worth over three billion dollars, and experiences annual growth of around four percent. Similarly, market segments like menswear and women’s wear continue to grow, experiencing 14 percent and 12 percent annual growth, respectively.
Clearly, what we wear is deeply important to us. As Mark Twain memorably quipped, “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.”
So, if you’re starting or running a new clothing business, you want to stand out in a market that, while experiencing huge growth, can be hard to break into. We have compiled a list of six strategies for growing your clothing business and bringing in more money, drawing on case studies from successful clothing companies who have pulled away from the pack and experienced huge success.
- Enhance your e-commerce with a great website
A solid, efficient website is key when it comes to earning more money in your sports wear business. Huge retail food chains with brick-and-mortar stores are shutting down their stores at a fast pace, and the increasing trend of online shopping shows that having a strong, user-friendly website where your customers can place their orders is essential.
Nevertheless, the continuous trend for online shopping isn’t the only thing that makes this a successful strategy for increasing revenue.
Sophia Amoruso, the owner of the apparel company Nastygal and author of # GirlBoss established an e-commerce store on eBay. Later, in 2008, she established their e-commerce site, with revenues of $28 million by 2011 and $100 million by 2012.
Though Nastygal has built retail stores, the popularity of the brand as a primarily online retailer is a testimony to the fact that a good web strategy will help you earn more revenue with time.
Sophia attributes her growth in part to her dedication to developing her clothing company as an e-commerce brand and her concentration on building a website that connects with her clients.
She discovered that real-life models resonated more with her clients than mannequins and, tracked different metrics relevant to her headings, dictionaries, and images to discern what her clients were gravitating towards.
Deciding what the website should look like should be a very individual process, possibly requiring comprehensive market research.
- Start a marketing campaign you’re interested in
As we stated previously, a large number of major mall stores are closing their doors.
Nevertheless, America’s Eagle has recently experienced growth, with its Aerie brand seeing a 32 per cent rise, notwithstanding what Fortune termed the “grim retail environment” several mall stores are currently experiencing.
Why has the brand Aerie, which has been around since 2006, seen so much growth recently?
It’s all depends on credibility and a truly outstanding social media campaign.
The brand developed Aerie Real, which emphasizes its dedication to unretouched models in its advertising campaigns and promotional materials, underlined by comments such as “the real you is perfect.”
Not only did the American Eagle brand experience progress as a whole, however, but the outcome of the new advertisement was also rapid: Aerie’s revenues rose by 9% shortly after the campaign was launched.
What does that mean for the clothing company? Choose a message that tells your customers about you, and promote it in social media and advertisement and marketing. Incorporate that into the branding and the structuring of your company, and make the best of the increased revenue and brand awareness that will occur.
- Go beyond “straight sizing.”
If your clothing store only offers “straight-sized” clothes (” which means clothing in U.S. size 0 or 00 to size 12), you may want to try expanding your collection.
The demand for women’s plus-sized garments has been neglected for years, even as the plus size clothing market alone in the U.S. is estimated at $17.5 billion.
Therefore, does the addition of plus size and the creation of plus-sized clothing lines bring more revenue to clothing businesses?
Navabi ‘s online plus-sized clothing store has tripled its sales per year since its launch in 2009, and Modcloth ‘s famous e-commerce platform has experienced “enormous business growth” since it started selling more-sized clothes.
- Get acquainted with your customers.
Market analysis and the acquisition of knowledge regarding your client base (and also the creation of a user persona) are always vital.
How well do you know what’s causing your customers to purchase your clothes?
As a brilliant case study, take a look at Zara’s famous “fast fashion” strategy. Instead of creating their clothing line based on the runway and seasonal patterns, they take a bottom-up approach, preferring comprehensive market analysis (like assigning workers to shopping malls to discover trends).
This helps Zara to adjust, to get a better view of what their target audience is currently interested in, and this establishes them as the lead in the fast-fashion market. By keeping a finger on the pulse of a customer, they get a greater understanding of what the client is seeking, which helps makeproduction and distribution faster.
- Authentic communication through social media
Cameron Parker sold his first pairs of leggings in 2009 for 10 dollars. The brand, Black Milk Clothes, was unheard of. But is now black milk clothing is a multi-million dollar business.
That’s fascinating, isn’t it? Black Milk Clothing has managed to grow with a zero dollar advertising and marketing budget.
The notion of using social media ads as a way of developing a clothing business is not new, and Black Milk is not alone in this. As mentioned earlier, brands like Nastygal were exceptionally great at playing social media games.
Although this may not be a revolutionary tactic, it means that the days when social media involvement was just a fun add-on are certainly behind us. If you plan on earning more money in your sports wear business, a good social media presence is not just suggested, it’s essential.
According to Cameron, nevertheless, social media ads should not only be about the sale. “It should also include posting customer pictures, selfies, sharing funny stories about the company he says. ”To rethink our breakdown, the three main reasons for our social media success were credibility, creativity, and usability.”
- Create the cult status
Your loyal customers are the best supporters, and once you can establish genuine brand loyalty and cult status, they will be your strongest growth drivers.
Let’s look again at Black Milk Clothing; which began out as an unheard-of, offbeat leggings company has grown to one of the most powerful figures in this (rather niche) market.
How did they do that? By constructing, in the words of the owner Cameron Parker, a “tribe” of loyal customers, leveraging imaginative storytelling and promoting credible social media marketing that establishes a bond with their consumer base. These strategies propelled the company, originally obscure, to “cult status,” a level of success that Cameron Parker credits mostly to their connecting with consumers and avoiding conventional marketing techniques.
By building massive customer loyalty, Black Milk Clothing’s fans have become “brand advocates.” Dedicated brand advocates are useful; reports show that they are 70% more likely to be considered as a credible source of Information by prospective consumers rather than conventional ads.
Conclusion
Starting your own sports wear business can be a very daunting task, especially if you are new t the business. Nevertheless, one of the best approaches to starting any business you have no knowledge about is first learning about the business.
Getting understands the scheme and modality behind succeeding in the sports wear business is very vital to your business success. Hence, we deem it right to this guide is a certain way of getting acquainted with the sports wear industry.