Why You Should Never Underestimate Your Brand’s Core Items
Clever designers know it’s not necessary to build a collection from scratch every season to wow customers. Unless you have the means and resources to pull a Marc Jacobs, with each collection (i.e. doing something completely different) you will drive yourself into major creative burnout and eat up your finances.
By sticking with the pieces your customers keep coming back to, your brand reflects consistency and your fans will appreciate investing in products that don’t date so quickly from one season to the next. It gives them a long-term value of their purchases and extends the relationship with them in time, as Marco Bizarri, CEO of Gucci, said to The Business of Fashion last February.
Offering staple pieces has been the building block of long-standing brands and new designers alike. For example, Burberry, under Christopher Bailey, gave a new life to the iconic trench coat, and keeps revamping it season after season experimenting with new fabrics and prints.
While newer labels like Mansur Gavriel, which launched in 2012 with only two styles, including their famous bucket bag, maintains the shapes of the product but refreshes them with different colors and finishes with every new collection.
Mansur Gavriel Bucket Bags. Source: Mansur Gavriel
Clearly, every brand needs to discover its balance depending on its unique selling point and offer, however the basic idea involves complementing core items with new styles each season. As obvious as it may sound, many fashion entrepreneurs ignore this simple truth and try to do 180° turns every time, quickly driving their businesses into a financial catastrophe.
Don’t underestimate the power of having your own classics
A few essential items can be the entryway for the purchase of trendier garments, either in the present season or the ones to come, so don’t underestimate the power of having your own classics.
Saint Laurent Pre-Fall Campaign by Hedi Slimane. Source: Saint Laurent
Well-made basics are likely to be worn the most, thus reminding the customer regularly of the brand.
Largely thanks to their ingenious crafting of luxurious basics like leather jackets, classic suits and denim, Saint Laurent, which had been previously struggling to survive, became a huge retail success during the tenure of Hedi Slimane.
When you go back to certain styles you can cash in on your development investment over a longer period as Boaz David of Human B points out on his site. And this is where building the perfect tech pack plays a key role, it makes editing your products so much easier, so you don’t have to start the whole process from zero every time.
And if you do need to develop a product from scratch, a perfect tech pack will be the single best tool to realizing your vision and translating what’s on your mind to a solid, real wearable (and saleable) piece.
Luckily, new software technologies like Techpacker help eradicate the overwhelm of juggling several styles in one development, and they allow you to experiment and revamp brand favourites without requiring the workforce or financial muscle of Burberry or Saint Laurent for that matter.
Here are a few key points to remember when looking for your brand’s super-star item:
Finding your hit product requires patience. It’s not as simple as “wash, rinse, repeat”. Finding a core winner may take some time and testing. Some people find a customer favorite from the beginning others may take several seasons.
Introduce small changes or tweaks. When classifying your best sellers, take note of why your customer is coming back to them. Maybe it’s the fit, the quality of the fabric or a flattering cut. For example, If your client loves a certain dress for its particular fit, see if you can replicate that fit in a shirt or a skirt. Another option may be to recreate that fit with a different fabric.
In this sense, Techpacker comes in handy for creating folders and saving your cards in your personal or team library and accessing them quickly. Its tools allow to quickly prep sketches for manufacturing, so you start working with factories and monitor developments right away.
Don’t stop dreaming, creating, and mostly: keep your eyes (and mind) open. Fashion weeks and Pinterest are great for inspiration, but pay close attention to your everyday life. What are people actually wearing? How do they wear it? How does that relate to your product? Maybe it doesn’t, and that itself can be a finding. Perhaps your best-seller is already out there and the public hasn’t met your fantastic version yet.
Repetition is great, and practice makes perfect, right? You’d be surprised how much someone can thank you for easing the novelty overload which is the norm nowadays. Re-issuing some of your brand favorites virtually unedited can allow for quality improvements and re-cutting the same product makes your manufacturer happy.
Today, it’s very easy with Techpacker’s My Favorites and Copy feature that allows you to duplicate sketches, Bills of Material (BOM), Point of measurements (POM).
Think about it as a super moodboard, don’t miss any details, add inspirations. Note down ideas ASAP onto your design sheets. Remember, Techpacker is a great tool for explaining everything visually with flats and sketches instead of (boring) data-entry. Take advantage of features like ‘Drag & Drop’ Images and ‘Annotate’ which make it easy to explain even the most complicated ideas.
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By Graciela Martin. Techpacker contributor. Journalist and fashion stylist graduated from the London College of Fashion and regular contributor to the Business of Fashion, Modern Weekly among other publications.
