Living and learning. I always thought that this is one of the best statements I ever heard. Nobody knows everything. Neither our biggest leaders and business inspirations (AKA Steve Jobs and Anna Wintour) know everything. It feels like we live in a circle of doing things, messing up, doing it again, and getting better at it. Even though product development and production management are my shit, there are still challenges and difficulties I face daily. Last week was no different!
I have mentioned in other posts that I am not a marketing specialist. I obviously have experience and education in marketing, but I am not the one to come up with a marketing strategy that will analyze your brand and promise a certain amount of sales each month. I am the one who helps you build your business plan, budget, costing, and the entire collection. When clients are jumping on high investment and large production, I am putting numbers together, creating a timeline, building their sales plan, etc. I am not stepping into marketing but, at the end of the day, both product development and marketing are things that work together. At the same time.
If your first investment is a large production with thousands of units, your marketing plan needs to be coherent to how many units you are planning on selling - except if you want to be sitting with inventory and do not make a profit (lol, but for real). Besides a marketing strategy which is the size of your inventory, budgeting marketing and start working on it is something that should happen during your product development. Not after when you are ready to sell.
Building your brand’s image and marketing is something that should start right when you start thinking of your fabrics. As I mentioned, I usually do not step into marketing at all, and sometimes, when building clients' budgets and business plans, I assume that clients know they should be working on their marketing budgets. That was the mistake I made last week.
Bringing up the marketing plan only after looking at the size of the fabric order is something I should not have done! By the moment you choose your fabrics, you know vendors' MOQs and know how much fabric you will have to order. This is when your marketing comes in. You will never know the exact amount of fabric you will need per garment until later in development when you have your production markers (ps: I am not going to go into what is a production marker. It is complicated and nobody really gets it lol!), but you estimate how much fabric will be needed per garment and that is how you can calculate how many units you will produce based on the fabric vendor MOQs.
Marketing means sales and you want to make sure you will be selling your products. That is the main reason they should work together and you should be worried about your marketing strategy since the very first stage of your development. Not bringing up the marketing plan before the fabric order was approved and assuming the client knew about this is a mistake I made and it is worth sharing here. Admitting that I made this mistake was hard, but opening up here about it was even harder! I know this makes me completely vulnerable, but with the promise to always keep it real around here, I felt like I had the duty to share this experience with all of you and, most importantly, to advise you to not do the same! Developing your collection and working on your marketing needs to be done together - especially when you know you have a large budget to invest in a new company that people do not know yet.
Living, learning, and becoming the best. That will always be my goal!
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