The Fashion Business Coach

Manufacturing Fashion Products - The Biggest Challenge Startups Face

Industry how toVicki WallisComment

One of the most common questions that I get asked by new startup fashion brands is what is the biggest challenge that I'm going to face when I'm manufacturing my products? Or what are fashion startups biggest manufacturing challenges?

I recently recorded a free video to answer these questions. Below is a direct transcript from the video, or if you prefer, you can click here to watch the free video.

So what is that challenge? It's the MOQ.

If you've not come across the term MOQ before, it stands for “minimum order quantity” and it's something that you're going to be facing all the time as a new or small brand. MOQ means that you have to order a certain amount of either units, if you're having a manufacturer sew your products together there will be a minimum order quantity for that, but also for things like fabrics and trims, buttons labels, you name it, most things are going to have a minimum order quantity, particularly when you're working direct with a vendor rather than through a third party or buying it in a retail store for example. And we definitely don't want to be doing that because the price is going to be more expensive if we're buying from a brick and mortar store or if there's some kind of third-party middlemen, or middle woman involved.

So this minimum order quantity becomes a problem because the minimums are often very very high. As well as working with startups and as well as having my own fashion brand, I also work on the factory side, which is great to kind of see both sides of the argument when we're dealing with pricings in negotiations and things. The factories that I work with, typically our minimum is 20,000 units and that is per color and style. So obviously as a small fashion brand that is completely unworkable.

The good news is there are smaller minimums available. You do have to do a lot of detective work though, particularly if you're looking for something and very small 50 units is about as small as you can go again, this is per style/colour and a minimum as low as 50pcs is hard to come by.

The fewer items you have, the higher the cost per item and that cost difference can be quite substantial as well.

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How to Overcome This Issue

So, how do we overcome this one of the major challenges faced when manufacturing fashion products, that is, issue of the minimum order quantity? What do we do if we can't meet a supplier minimum and we can't find an alternative who's going to do it?

The good news is that we can basically for see this problem coming.

When I'm working on my own fashion business, I also have this problem because I don't have the facility at my fashion brand to order a thousand units, plus that wouldn’t align with my brand values anyway. So, I'm really strategic in the way that I plan my collections and as much as I would love to offer like 10 colors have lots of different prints and patterns I have to be restrictive I have to rein myself in with the options. I don't often have many different color options because I need to remember that I'm going to have to buy a lot to meet factory requirements and to meet supplier requirements. I keep minimums in mind when designing and consolidate the fabric and trim options needed as much as I can, to help myself out with the minimum order quantity later.

Designs Need to be More Than Just Pretty

If you can I would definitely recommend not to just sketch in a things and then going all guns blazing trying to find a factory to make them but actually put a bit of thought into design process rather than just designing something that you think looks good. There's a lot more to design than just something that looks good.

Effective planning can really help - make sure that you're not ordering a little bit of something here and a little bit of something there, but actually consolidating what you need to buy so that you're not ordering a small amount of this and that, but just one big order of a particular fabric or colour for example.

What I would say in general to a start-up and a brand is that we need to compromise, we can't have everything that we want at the price we want, we just don't have enough power as a small business to have everything and a good price as well.

So be prepared to make some compromises.

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Is that the challenge you were expecting?

I’d really love to know if that was the challenge you anticipated me saying! Or, if there's something that you are struggling with or that you're worried about that is stopping you from getting to the next stage with the manufacture, definitely comment below and I can keep it in mind for future videos.

Not feeling confident on your fashion terminology? I have a free ebook which has 100 of these must know fashion industry terms and abbreviations, the things that people are going to say to you in the industry. You can click here to find out about the free ebook.

I hope you've enjoyed this video. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.