I speak to lots of people who want to start a fashion brand, but don’t have a ton of money to do it. And I get it! I was exactly the same when I started both of my fashion brands. The good news is that I believe anyone can start a fashion business if they are willing to put in the effort. It’s true, you’ll still need money though so in this post I wanted to share with you my 2 favourite ways of funding your fashion business. Personally I don’t believe in taking out loans or credit, or getting investors, so we won’t be going into that. If you’re interested in how I started my fashion brand with just a few hundred in the bank, you can read the related post on that by clicking here.
Working on the side
Before I get into my 2 favourite methods, I will acknowledge that having a paid job and using that to live off and/or fund early stages of the brand is ideal for a lot of people. My 2 favourite ways to fund your business have more advantages than putting in your own cash, in my opinion, but having a job can be ideal for supporting yourself financially until you’re up, running and making a profit that you can pay your salary from.
The Quick Launch Method
I’m sure there’s probably a fancier name for this option, but I like to call it the quick launch method, because there’s nothing like it when it comes to starting your business on a budget, and fast too! This method involves;
Customising existing product so that you can have it available for sale in less than a month, rather than waiting for months or years like traditional manufacturing methods.
Only manufacturing products when you make a sale, so you don’t need to order stock in advance. This is ideal for reducing the risk of the business vs traditional manufacturing methods and reducing the costs too as there’s no upfront production costs.
The drawback with this method is that you have to customise the products that suppliers have already, so you can’t create 100% custom product, but this method can be a great way to fund your own design development and production. Some of my clients use this method alongside their custom-designed items so they can offer more variety to their audience. This is the method that I started my second fashion business with too!
I have a free ebook and training series on this method which you can join below if you’d like;
Pre-Selling
In some ways, the basic principles of this method are similar to the Quick Launch Method in that the idea is that you get customers to buy in advance and use the sales money to fund the production. Where it’s different is that instead of using customised product, you’re developing fully custom designs that are unique to you. In this method you;
Create your own designs, make the tech packs and samples, this is why this method is more expensive than the Quick Launch, because there’s development costs associated with this process.
When you’ve got a manufacturer, confirmed timeline and price you can advertise the products for sale and let customers know the date they’ll receive them.
There’s a ton of different options here with specifically what you do, for example you might work small scale (like I did with my first fashion business), or you might partner with a large scale factory to produce thousands of units.
There’s also options in terms of who you sell to, for instance, this could be direct to customers, or you might sell wholesale to other websites and boutiques.
If you’d like to learn more about the process of manufacturing your own products, I have a free Masterclass on that here, or for more in depth help, my signature Fashion Startup Online Course has all the details to go from idea through to launch.
I hope this post has helped you to see that you don’t need to be rich to start a fashion brand, it’s possible to get started with a much lower budget than a lot of people think! Don’t forget, if you want to learn more you can join my free training and get my ebook via the button below;
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Pickleball outfit inspiration……