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Have great designs with sketches, but don't know how to start ?

Finance, manufacturing, sales, these are 3 main difficulties that most start up designers face.

1. When you give a sample to a manufacturer and ask him to replicate, he may charge huge considering the fact of small volume, sourcing of fabrics and trims and many other issues. How about going to a small manufacturers factory, move along with him and source the raw materials by your own, make sewing patterns in his factory by yourself and just give him a sewing contract.You may be able to cut down 60% of the cost.

2. Finance - May not be a bother if you are ready to tie up with small manufacturers. They will finance your whole supply chain cost if you are willing to partner with them and give them regular sewing contracts.

3. Sales - Always do this with the help of independent sales rep based on commissions. For that you need to work backward by developing samples and hand over to him.

In effect if you have talent and are willing to travel a bit in the beginning, fashion industry is a goldmine for you.

Thanks / George

Reach me at aju.geo@gmail.com

Tags: a, an, aspiring, clothing, designers, designs, fashion, find, for, how, More…investor, line, start, tips, to, your

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Permalink Reply by jony smith on November 3, 2010 at 2:27am

This is really nice info and suggestion relating fashion you have shared with us. I like it bcz i was seeking for such type of info. I hope it benefit all who land up here.

Thanks !!

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Permalink Reply by Fashion Business Designer™ on June 29, 2011 at 2:40pm

Yes, George!

I agree with you! And besides those these are other challenges emerging fashion designers commonly face:

- PR-buyer dilemma. PR agencies usually don't want to work with starting designers that don't have stockists and haven't matured their relationships with manufacturers to develop quality products. Problem is that a lot of buyers won't buy if there was no hype supporting the emerging brand.

- Manufacture management. Loads of fashion designers graduates don't have a clue about how to deal with manufactures (and the same goes for manufacturers). Perhaps they haven't even been in a factory! This results in poor communication and loads of late deliveries (so putting at risk their fashion businesses and reputations).

- Stylist Inaccessibility. Even though fresh and creative designers attract stylists designers still have problems accessing them! This is a typical problem of designer's self-sufficiency.

- Retail relationship management. Most of the time designers don't know how to handle and effectively manage their relationships with retailers! Usually don't know how to educate retailers on how to sale their collections. And it's important to remember that sales end only when the goods have been sold by the retailer!!!

- Money, money, money to fund the pre-development of the collection (research, design and sampling) and for the development of the promotional material to start generating wholesale orders and, obviously to finance the collection's fabrics, manufacture and distribution (from the factory to buyers' facilities)! This is one of the main reasons why it is very difficult for the designer find business investors. But designers still have the supportive 4 F's (friends, family, bank and supplier funding!). I have talked about this in another of my posts.

- Wholesales orders. If designer doesn't gets enough wholesale orders he/she will be forced to pay premium prices at fabric and manufacture levels! This hugely impacts his/her final wholesale prices, even putting at risk his/her fashion business.

- Cash flow management. This is THE fashion business assassin. Because of the nature of the industry (production cycles) a new fashion business could be running without receiving any money even for a year (from business set up to sampling to wholesale to sourcing to manufacture to distribution to promotion to sold at store....!!!).

But there's no time for despair because for each challenge there are hundreds of business opportunities that await to be uncovered by the fashion designer that compensate the bad and the ugly, and different ways for securing money.

Rod