Personalised.clothing - 5 Tips For Starting A Clothing Brand In 2020

There are loads of fantastic reasons to start a clothing brand, especially in 2020. The clothing brand market is massive. It’s worth £32 billion to the UK economy and the worldwide revenue is expected to rise to $712.9 billion in the next few years. I’m sure we all wouldn’t mind a slice of that! And the bar has never been lower for you to get that slice.

I started my brand in October 2015 and recently managed to successfully sell the brand. I now run a completely free website full of resources to help people start a clothing brand and I also have a full video course explaining exactly how to start and grow a successful brand.

The first bit is always the hardest and that’s why I’m going to quickly summarise my top 5 tips for anyone looking to start a clothing brand.

Know Exactly Who Your Audience Is

This one is something that’s often overlooked by new clothing brands starting out (I fell into this category too). You need to really define exactly who your target audience is and write this down somewhere. A lot of small brands don’t have too much money to start off. Having a really narrow niche will allow you to own a larger percentage of that market. I soon learnt that if you try to sell to everyone, you’ll end up selling to no one. A great way to do this is to build up a few customer personas for your ideal customers, then make sure you target all of your marketing towards these people.

Use Pre-Orders and Mockups

Some people starting a clothing business have a lot of money to launch it and get it off the ground. However, most people aren’t this fortunate. A question I get asked all the time is, “How do I start a clothing brand with no money?”. The main answer I give is the way I did it. That’s by using pre-orders and mockups. A pre-order is where the customer pays for the item with the promise from you it will be delivered by a certain date. This allows you to collect the orders and the money first and then go to a printing company like Yazzoo and get your products made, without you ever having to invest any of your own money. 

Customers will rarely buy a product that they can’t see, and this is where mockups come into play. This is a picture of what your product (t-shirt, sweater, cap etc.)would look like once it’s produced. A simple google search should pull up lots of paid for and free mockup templates which you can normally edit in software like Photoshop. This allows you to add your designs and logos to a wide range of clothing and you can show this picture to potential customers.

Start Small and Then Grow

This is something I wish I realised to start with. When starting a clothing brand or any new venture you should feel excited (if you’re not, I’d suggest that new venture might not be for you). This excitement does sometimes take over when starting a business and you aim to start an empire before you’ve sold 1 product. I started my clothing brand with 15 or so items. This may seem low compared to that tens of thousands that large retailers stock, however, if I were to do it again, I’d start with 2 or 3. I’ve actually seen a lot of successful clothing brands start with just 1 t-shirt with a very basic design. There are multiple benefits to this. The main two I found are that it reduces your initial cost and it allows you to work out what sells much faster.

Build Genuine Connections With Your Customers and Followers

I fell into the trap of trying to act bigger than I was when I first started. This can benefit your brand in some cases, but from my own experience, I found this not to be very effective. You’ll interact with customers and potential customers a lot, that might be on Facebook, Instagram or through emails. My tip would be to build genuine connections with these people. It’s such an effective one and there are loads of easy ways to do this 

• Show them the face behind the business (people buy from people)
• Thank them whenever they place an order
• Sign emails off with your name rather than the business name
• Engage with their content on social media

One study showed that you're 60-70% likely to sell to an existing customer, compared with the 5-20% likelihood of selling to someone new.

Value your customers and potential customers and build genuine connections with them.

Set Goals

I’m a firm believer that setting some regular goals can really help you when starting a clothing brand. Even if you’re not quite sure exactly how you will achieve them, once you set the goal you’ll normally work this out. I call this, “jumping out of the plane and finding the parachute on the way”. A few examples of easy measurable goals you could set for your clothing brand are:

• number of followers on a specific social media account
• Average number of likes on your Instagram pictures
• Number of new email signups
• Total number of sales per month
• Total value of sales per month
• To write a blog post a week for your brand for the next 6 months

These are just a few to get you started. They can all be mainly split up into 2 categories. The first is things to achieve, like a certain number of sales. The second is things to do, like write a certain number of blog posts. They both normally link into each other but it’s great to have both.

These were my 5 tips on how to start and grow a successful clothing brand. The hardest bit is always the start and you won’t always get everything right. If you want to check out more articles about how to start a clothing brand, head over to my website. Alternatively you can enrol in my online video course titled “How To Start and Grow a Successful Clothing Brand Business”.

Author Bio:

Toby Cannon



Toby Cannon founded an online clothing brand in 2015. He successfully grew it for four years until selling it in 2019 so that it could be scaled further. Along the way, he gained thousands of social media followers, collaborated with MTV stars and attended events around the country. He's now the founder of The Clothing Startup and runs an online video course, helping new and growing clothing brands to become established quickly and grow fast. All of the content on his website has come from his own experiences over the years along with input from other very successful clothing brand owners.