Alright alright alright, let’s talk about something I have mentioned in the past INSIDE THE FASHION INDUSTRY blog posts, and you all have been asking about it: planning a cost-effective collection. Now, after revisiting your marketing plan, noting your bestseller pieces, doing trend research, and creating your mood board, it is time to take a look into profits made from your first season and how you should reinvest the money. To keep working in the right direction and make sure you will grow your business income, you have to reinvest your money wisely and pay attention to your market.
Even though this is no rocket science, there are a few tricks that you should watch out for when planning a cost-effective collection. Let’s go over each one of them.
1. Reproducing the best sellers
After your first season, you will know exactly what styles sell best. Reproducing your best sellers is always a good idea, but you have to be careful.
By reproducing your best sellers I am not telling you to make an exact copy of your previous styles. To create the exact same copy you have to make sure those styles are very atemporal and work well in any season. Like t-shirts, hoodies, basic dresses…
Maybe changing colors to more trendy options or maybe changing the fabrics is always a good idea to keep the cost low, since you already have this style developed, and you know this will generate sales.
2. Adapting the best sellers to the new season
This is a little bit different than making an exact copy of previous styles. When adapting previous patterns into a new design you will need a new development, yes! But, when the style is similar and only needs a few adjustments (for example, the sleeves are different, the dress is shorter or longer, the neck design is different, etc), you can use the previous patterns, which already have measurements and fitting approved, to work on your new design.
This helps in time and cost because even developing a new style that will need a new style number, you can use the pattern base from your previous collection, and if that pattern is 100% good to go, you will only need one prototype, one final sample, digitizing and grading the new style, avoiding a whole new size check run.
If you do not remember what the size check run is, go back to INSIDE THE FASHION INDUSTRY - Size Check Run blog post.
3. Creating an add-on seller
If you are trying to save as much money as possible on your new season and you want to relaunch most of your best sellers, creating an add-on is a great way to increase sales.
Yes, it will cost you to develop an add-on because it will be a whole new style, but look back to your branding and what could be a great gift that people would love to buy from your brand? Maybe a scrunchie, a shopping bag, a small wallet, a cardholder. Whatever can fit in your budget can be an extra sale.
4. Material leftovers
Some materials are hard to reutilize. We all know that! Especially when it comes to summer fabrics and “dressy” materials. But, a good way to reutilize these fabrics and avoid any waste is by creating add-ons, like mentioned before.
Another thing that needs to be considered is the fact that you should have leftover labels and trims from your first collection. When ordering brand labels, care labels, size labels, hangtags, etc. vendors usually require a high minimum per order, which means you should have some left for your new collection. This might seem like a small expense, but when producing three thousand units per label at $0.59 cost, that is $1,770 that can be avoided in your next collection.
When you are a brand new business, looking at all costs, strategizing your future collections, and working on a cost-effective production is major to survive your first few seasons. I have seen different brands that were successful in their first two seasons, but for the lack of planning and organization when reinvesting profits, the brand failed.
Your target market is everything for your business. They will dictate what you should produce more and where you should invest more. Listening to your customers along with working on these four steps will give you options when planning a cost-effective production and increase sales in your future seasons.
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