The new year is here and, after all the holiday festivities, it is time to get back to what matters: focusing on your fashion career. Alright, since we have gone through all steps of developing a successful clothing line, it is time to move forward and keep growing your brand, plan on your next collection, and make mature decisions before investing in a new production.
Your second run should be more organized and more cost-effective than your first one. After all, on your second run you know your market, you have already seen what styles sell best and made profits to reinvest. That is how a business works and, to make smart decisions, you have to pay attention to the results you are seeing in your business.
But before moving into all the technical stuff, let’s remember all steps to developing a successful clothing brand:
Now, working on your second collection should not be any different than the first time. You will search trends, work on a mood board, create sketches, select colors, and materials. The difference here is that you already know what styles are your best sellers and you already have patterns developed, so your second development can always bring new adaptations from your first collection. This means you do not have to start your patterns from scratch - aka your development cost should be lower.
This is a lot to take in right now. I know! But we will go by parts and, most importantly, the INSIDE THE FASHION INDUSTRY blog series will bring you all steps of developing your second line and how to be more cost-effective during your second run. But before moving into technical steps, let’s focus on getting your inspiration, mood board, and sketches going.
By now, you should have your trend research done. So the next step is choosing your inspiration and starting to select pictures for your mood board. Even though I am saying that you can adapt styles from your first run and bring back the best-selling designs, your new collection should be NEW. A new mood board, new colors, and new fabrics.
No, the fact that you can bring back styles does not mean you can simply repeat the same designs over and over. You want to keep your best sellers, but you have to innovate and adapt to the market. The fashion industry is constantly changing and, if you do not adapt, you will not survive. Except if you are a brand like Luca Faloni, a men's clothing brand based on classic designs that never (never) change. All they do is add new colors according to the season.
Luca Faloni has a great and consistent line of classics that works really well for them, but thinking about the women's fashion market, especially if you want to develop an exclusive collection, being creative and adapting to the market is crucial for your business.
So let’s start gathering all your inspiration pictures, trend research, and move into sketches. Be creative and work on adapting your best sellers to this new season. Look at your mood board pictures and what are the trend colors, what can you use according to your inspiration theme, and the fabrics that would work well on your new collection.
After this is done, we will look back to the development process, which you should be familiar with by now, move into budgeting, and budgeting is where I will be guiding you through the technical steps and tell you about working on a cost-effective development.
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