Thanks to social media and the accessibility of e-commerce sites, almost anyone can open an online store. Now more than ever before, we’ve seen the creation of many fashion brands. Plus, with Instagram’s major facelift on their shopping experience, it’s even more accessible for customers to engage with brands’ e-commerce store. Therefore, brand development is more crucial than ever before.
With online shopping on the rise, it can be extremely difficult to stand out in this competitive landscape. Yes, you can create an e-commerce store, but that doesn’t mean you’re ready to go. You need to nurture your brand and make sure it’s on the right track to continually grow. This then begs the question: how does one nurture a brand into a “healthy”, successful business?
Organization
The key to success in anything is organization. Without organization, your company will lack drive and focus. Your team should always be working toward a certain goal, and if you’re all disorganized the goal may never be met. However, when managing multiple aspects of your business, it can become overwhelming. We recommend finding ways to stay on top of your responsibilities.
As a business management system, we provide a task management tool. It will take you beyond your typical lists and post-it reminders. With this feature, you can set priority levels for each task, assign duties to yourself or team members, set reminders, and due dates. The great thing is each task is connected to an object like the Customer, Order Vendor, Sales Rep, Purchase Order, Cut Ticket, Pick Tickets, Invoices, Credit Memos, Materials, Factors, or Production Jobs.
Finding what works for your business is crucial. If there’s no proper organization set up, it’ll be more difficult for you and your team to tackle on new operations as your business develops.
Understanding the Importance of Your Product
If you’re just starting your fashion business venture, don’t overwhelm yourself with multiple fashion collections. Rather than setting unrealistic expectations for your brand, start small and grow from there. Start with one product or line that represents what your brand is and then keep it consistent moving forward. It will be easier for your customers to understand your brand and recognize it.
Once you develop your product and customers start purchasing your items, it can be rather difficult to determine how much of that product you’ll want to replenish for future sales. Most fashion businesses, especially beginning fashion brands, must estimate how much to reorder based on past sales. This can be tricky; if you order too much, you’ll have to liquidate your inventory. If you don’t reorder enough, you might lose customer retention and be boggled with customer orders. AIMS360 offers its Production Forecasting Report. This algorithm looks at past sales and inventory data and predicts the units needed in the near future. This eliminates the concern of over or underproduction and maximizes profits.
Start Off with a Strong E-commerce Store
Some shoppers don’t want to visit malls or department stores to shop, and instead find what they want online. As mentioned before, it’s about accessibility, so it’s best practice to make sure your e-commerce store is user-friendly to navigate around. Having a user-friendly e-commerce store that showcases your collection in an engaging way is vital for your success.
After creating a business plan of what you want to achieve with your e-commerce store, you’ll need to decide what platform would work best for your business. Is Etsy the right choice for you, or Shopify? Maybe eBay? Do some research and determine which would make the biggest impact on your brand.
Some fashion ERP systems, like AIMS360, offers integrations with e-commerce stores like Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon and more to enable powerful omnichannel solutions for managing inventory, styles and more.
Outdated Software
In today’s society, it can feel a bit challenging to stay knowledgeable about technology. It’s constantly evolving and changing making it harder to understand all the advancements. However, this is not an excuse to use outdated software when running your fashion business.
As your business grows, your outdated system won’t. In fact, it might hold your business back, which will force your business to plateau. It’s recommended that every year you receive feedback from end-users to identify where the problems are occurring to see what need to be fixed. If you and your team discover through this evaluation that you outgrew the current system in place, you might have to investigate into getting better software for your brand.
One final takeaway is that you don’t have to do this on your own. There are software and tools specifically designed like ours to help you manage your business operations. We’re one free consultation call away and supported by a team of industry experts to help you.