How to Grow Your Clothing Business: 9 Practical Tips

Are you planning to grow your business? Do you want to know how your commercial business can be the best it can be? If so, you’ve come to the right place. That’s because we have the best 9 tips for you to grow your clothing business. To find out more, keep reading!

Tip № 1. Develop Your Brand

First what you need to do along with defining your target audience is to create your brand visuals and overall brand identity. If you want to be memorable in people’s minds, you need to have a “face” of your business. This includes logo, mission, vision, and making the list of what type of clients do you serve to. After the research of the market, customers, and competitors you are ready to make your brand stand out from the crowd.

Tip № 2. Build a Sales Funnel

If you want to have a successful business, there are a few things you should do first. A sales funnel is the journey your customers make on their way to purchasing your products. To know more about how to build a sales funnel, read this section.

Research the Audience

If you want to build a business, you need to know who’s going to be shopping at your store. You also need to know what your potential customers expect of you so that you can figure out how to meet their needs.

In the process, you should research what your target audience doesn’t like about shopping. You can use Google Trends and statistics from leading research websites like Statista to predict what the demand will be on your product.

Create Buyer Personas

Because your customers are unique, you’ll want to create different personas that are based on several factors. You’ll want to consider why different people buy their products, how they use products, and what motivates them to purchase products.

When you consider all these factors, you’re going to create your buyer persona. You will write their age, gender, salary, and particular user flow to show why they will buy your product. Then, you name each persona. Next, you will have your 3–4 buyer personas and will use them to create your marketing strategy.

Tip № 3. Develop eCommerce Business Marketing Strategies

This part is especially useful if you’re wondering how to grow your sales. The way you market your business is one of the most critical factors in running it. This will help you to attract customers, increase the № your leads, and double your sales results.

Create Valuable Content

When you have a qualitative content as one of the points in your marketing strategy, this ensures that your customers keep coming back. That’s because your customers will be interested in what your business has to say and as such, you can see your sales increase drastically.

Examples of valuable content including blogs, videos, social media posts, advertisements. Look at famous brands’ examples. Puma made a campaign called #rundalism that has gathered Puma running teams from all over the world to conquer half marathon in Lisbon.

Why did they do it?

First, to attract customers’ attention to their Hybrid collection of sneakers. They’ve gained the loyalty of people by making the event in Lisbon and used different channels to promote the whole campaign (social media as Instagram).

Also, like sportswear and accessories company, they used influencers, professional runners and enthusiasts to attract different people to jogging as a lifestyle. An excellent way to improve your business’s content is to have influencers develop it. As such, your customers can read about your products from people who have tried them.

Involve Influencers

Influencers are some of the best ways for you to spread the word about your clothing store. You can send them free samples of your clothing so that they can post their personal opinion about your products. This will give your customers a real sense of your business and they’ll be more inclined to buy from you.

Also, influencers can create a video, photos and other content types based on your marketing strategy and needs. It will save you time and make your content richer and customer-oriented.

To effectively start with influencer marketing, try some useful tools to find them and analyze the results of your cooperation:

• HypeAuditor — help you to find the best influencers in Instagram and get the report about their account activity to choose the best match for your clothing brand;
• Brandwatch — explore the database of Twitter users and find influencers to reach the right audience;
• Kred — paid tool for finding influencers as well as monitoring, analyzing, and involving them to your marketing campaigns;
• Traackr — a program for managing your influencers’ network and measure the results of content, events, and campaigns with them.

We also found a great example of successful influencer marketing from Boxed Water. They use micro-influencers from Instagram to attract people to their environmental initiative campaigns.

Thousands of influencers and their followers are involved and participate in initiatives called Better Planet. It is great when you commit to world problems and promote your brand through social and environmental initiatives. Try to identify the demand by creating a sustainable clothing line and use it as the advantage of your brand. You can check the examples of Scandinavian clothing stores and their sustainable campaigns in our previous article.

That’s not all. Next, we will tell you how to connect with your customers through advertisements and creative ideas.

Tip 4. Identify New Opportunities

Recognizing when you have an opportunity to improve your marketing strategy, it’s important to use all possible ways to attract customers to your store by providing them something valuable.

Build an Email List

You can do this by creating a pop-up section on your website so that interested customers can sign up to receive emails. In doing so, you can provide them with updates and information about your online clothing store. You can also add a subscription box to your footer, add an abandoned cart extension to return customers to their carts.

Look at the example of Riley Rose — Forever 21 beauty boutique. They made a recognizable pop up on the main page by giving 15% off for the subscription.

The second great placement for an email subscription box is a footer. They named customers who will join their newsletter as VIP clients. That makes it a unique interaction with their clients.

Build an email list by creating a pop-up section on your website. It can be placed on the main page.

Create a Customer Loyalty Program

This is one of the best ways for you to get your customers to spend more money, more often. Clothing companies like Forever 21 have been doing this for years. This company provides customers with points for every dollar they spend and after they’ve accumulated enough points, the points translate into money they get back. For every 300 points they gain, they earn $5.

Tip 5. Open a Pop-Up Store to Test a New Market

If you want to test out a new market, you should consider using a pop-up store to help you decide whether your products would work in this market. That’s because you never know how you’re going to do in a new city or a new target population and as such a pop-up store is more effective than immediately renting out space.

Tip 6. Partner with Other Companies

You may want to collaborate with a famous brand to develop your fanbase more efficiently. When brands collaborate and create eCommerce business partnerships, their fan bases can be combined. As such, you may find your consumer base increase considerably when you decide to do this.

An example of this is that of H&M and Kenzo, who launched their collaboration in 2016. This eclectic collaboration was named Kenzo X H&M and it was designed for customers to have the perfect summer look.

Tip 7. Learn From Other’s Examples

If there’s anyone you particularly admire or a business plan that you want to model, you may want to consider doing research on how these business owners have run their businesses. This can provide you with a good idea of how you can improve your business and how you can adopt more efficient strategies to grow it.

Watch the video about How to Create an eCommerce Brand with Gretta Van Riel, an eCommerce entrepreneur who run 4 businesses and made 8 figures selling products online.

Tip 8. Keep Your Eyes on Trends

When you have a clothing brand, it’s important that you keep up with trends. This will ensure your clothing is always in style and as such, you don’t have to worry about your customers outgrowing your clothing.

Market Most Popular Products

If you are already selling some products that you think won’t make you succeed, you need to look at the trending products to sell. These are the products that are popular all over the world or in specific markets. We can’t provide you with a full list of such products, because the trends are changing continuously. However, we have a complete guide on how to search and monitor changes in trending products.

Tip 9. Diversify Your Product and Service Offerings

One of the best ways for you to reach a large number of people is to have a different way to promote your existing products for new consumers or find a new market opportunity to expand your current product line. The more diverse your products, the more people you can speak to. When it comes to clothing, every individual has their own style and if you can produce products that speak to some of them, you’re ensuring that your store will be selling more.

Consider a Franchise Model

There are all kinds of business models that you can follow. One of the best ones for you could be a franchise model. In this, you can take the opportunity to expand your clothing business exceptionally. In doing so, you can have stores in multiple towns and countries that function across different populations.

A perfect example of this model adoption has the GAP company. It offers franchise opportunities for international markets. It is available for business owners who have extensive experience in retail.

Think Outside the Box

This is lifetime advice, but you know that creativity stands in the first place when it comes to developing something. Look at what you have now, and think about how you can change or improve some business processes or products/services that you sell.

For sure this list can be extended to more tips. But, we’ve highlighted only tested strategies that you can use for your business benefits.

Summary

If you’re a clothing business owner, you know how difficult it can be to expand and to establish yourself in the industry. That’s why you may be looking for some tips and tricks to help you do so. If this sounds like you, you’ve come to the right place.

We suggest a number of things, including building an email list, considering a franchise model, paying attention to trends, opening a pop-up store, collaborating with famous fashion brands, developing a marketing strategy, creating buyer personas, and researching your audience.