How To Start A Fashion Business in 11 Excruciating Steps
20 min. read | A.M.
The fashion world is one of the most exciting places to spend one’s time and talents. However, starting a fashion business is one of the hardest things you can do. From logistics to consumer purchasing habits to the demand for new collections every season, this industry will age you rapidly if you let it. And with new technologies, and demand for sustainability and transparency, new problems arise every season. But all is not as dire as it seems. And success (however you define it) is entirely attainable. While no two career paths are entirely similar, there are common steps that provide handrails as you venture forth into the unknown.
Step 1:
READ THE FASHION BUSINESS MANUAL BY FASHIONARY COVER TO COVER.
STEP 2:
MAKE THE DECISION AND DON’T LOOK BACK.
STEP 3:
BE A RELENTLESS FORCE OF POSITIVITY as you design your life first.
STEP 4:
SOLVE YOUR OWN Fashion Crisis.
STEP 5:
FIND YOUR TRIBE.
STEP 6:
DEVELOP A TRIBE OF MENTORS.
STEP 7:
DO THINGS THAT DON’T SCALE.
STEP 8:
WRITE OUT YOUR BUSINESS PLAN.
STEP 9:
BECOME A MASTER STORYTELLER (OR FIND ONE).
STEP 10:
DO THE HARD THINGS YOU’VE AVOIDED.
STEP 11:
SCALE UP.
Importantly, these are not steps. Not really. They are a place to start as you wade through a sea of thousands of similar steps, all compounding over time. But the rewards for fulfilling your dream are the reason you’ve read this far. So keep an open mind as you investigate the large-scale apparatus that is the fashion industrial complex. And above all else, don’t go it alone.
After all, you love to sketch. Textures and silhouettes are your artistic language. You see beauty everywhere. You’re fiercely independent. And you are happiest when your artistic vision comes to life in the lives of others. So you attended college where you learned fashion design. Or you gained expertise in fashion technology and logistics. Or maybe you chose a path outside of formal education.
But in either case, there exists a gap between your career and where you’ve dreamed your life would take you. What you feel is normal. And what you lack might not be fashion knowledge, but a strong network of professionals that can guide you along the way. So let this encourage and redirect you to where your journey may have gone off course.
You don’t need another list of 10 things that will make you rich and happy. There’s plenty online already. And if your goal is to feel better, then by all means use them. We have only one life, and limited time and resources with which to live it to its fullest. But you’re probably not here for a pep talk. You want results. And the business of fashion is often reduced to a single line on a P&L spreadsheet.
You may be reading this as a seasoned fashion professional with every intention of correcting our apparent errors. Excellent. You are exactly the person someone here is looking for. Help them see the path forward as you have and be available to offer them the next step.
You may have had another career—or currently exist in one—but it hasn’t offered the satisfaction you receive when you connect art with service to your community. Again, excellent. Let this be a springboard for your journey of discovery into new and uncharted territory.
But remember, this is not a list. Not really. Merely a modality that serves as a starting point into your journey of thousands of similar steps to come. Everyone’s path is different. And we all want different things. But every venture into the fashion industry has certain critical things in common.
The Fashion Business Manual by Fashionary is exactly that—a fully formed, well-articulated, reference manual for everything you’d ever want to know about how to plan and execute a fashion business. It offers clear images and infographics that illuminate the journey, from developing a brand identity to setting up shop in your own brick-and-mortar location.
While every business will need to address specific nuances that may deviate drastically from the plan they’ve laid out, FBM does an incredible job of giving you all the basics that are all too often left out of a formal fashion education.
Chapters include sections like “Brand Value Worksheet,” “People In The Industry,” Where To Source Materials,” “How To Find The Right Factory,” “8 Things To Remember When Faced With A PR Crisis,” “How To Negotiate Sales Terms,” and a ton more.
Whether you’ve gained this knowledge prior, or this is entirely new to you, their illustrated guides make for an engaging refresher as you refocus your energy on your latest endeavor.
So much of what holds us back is making the decision to start in the first place. And there are plenty of excellent reasons for the malaise. Where will your paycheck come from? You. Where will your health insurance come from? You. Can you treat this like a hobby and chip away at it in your spare time? No.
This will be, by far, the most demanding, competitive, and grueling thing you will endeavor to embark upon in your creative and commercial life. It requires absolute dedication to excellence and customer service. You will need to become fluent in logistics and economies of scale. You will need to acquire skills you may have never considered in order to meet the simplest production deadlines. In short, prepare to grow in ways you’ve never considered.
But it’s unfair to demand anything of ourselves without the honesty of introspection and the courage that comes from the humility to admit we may be asking more of ourselves than we are willing to risk. It’s in this stage we must recognize that we are at a crossroads between nearly limitless possibilities. And many of them are viable. But only a handful make us feel truly alive.
In her book The Crossroads of Should And Must, Elle Luna guides us through a wonderfully illustrated journey of discovering—and eventually following—the path that leads to your must rather than your should. Your must connects deeply with who you are. It delineates your method of income from your life’s calling, and eventually integrates the two. You can read her original Medium article or watch her video from the Wisdom 2.0 Conference in 2015.
If, after your investment in self-discovery, you find that your magnetic pull towards a career in fashion intensifies, then it’s time for a redesign of your most important asset.
Perhaps this goes without saying. But as you embark upon this journey, you will encounter things that will rapidly age you if you let them. It’s of paramount importance that you develop the kind of work/life balance and self-awareness that works for you and will get you where you want to go.
The allure of chaos calls to the deepest of creators, and for many of us, it is our native operating system. With so many details at the tyranny of the urgent, the world of fashion will feel overwhelming and disempowering at the very least, crushing even those with the best intentions.
We are Artists, after all.
Instead, begin to apply design thinking and engineer your path from first principles. Where do you see yourself ending up once your brand has taken off? In stores? Online? Both? Apply this thinking to your personal life as well. What practices fill you with peace and harmony? Allow you to operate from a place of power and creativity? What is the minimum viable amount of time you can devote to work while still producing optimal output? What fills your tank with joy? Invest in yourself first, your business after. Only then will you have the strength to devote 100% of yourself to your company.
In their book Designing Your Life: How To Build A Well-Lived, Joyful Life, Bill Burnett & Dave Evans (co-founders of the Life Design Lab at Stanford) describe practical methods for increasing vocational fit while eliminating unwanted elements from your life. It begins with developing a designer’s mindset, which feels in many ways like learning how to see the world with a childlike passion, positivity, and curiosity once again. And the correlation between life-design and fashion-design is undeniable. Watch Bill’s TEDxStanford talk for a primer, and watch Bill & Dave on CreativeLive where they put these practices into action.
The world has changed in so many ways this past decade. One of the key standouts is the rise (and fall) of fast-fashion empires. Too much effort is spent on copying other artists and trends in a race to the bottom. They may have mastered scale, but they failed sustainability. And they don’t solve universal problems, other than where to find inexpensive clothing that falls apart after two launderings. It’s not enough to plan for scalability. Doing so merely contributes to the waste that accumulates with every unsold collection, every season. Instead, take a note from Sara Blakely.
Spanx began with a simple problem: Panty lines. The solution: What if you cut off the feet from a pair of pantyhose? And what if you reengineered the construction to make the garment seem like it’s invisible under clothing? And what if you could use this same product to shape the body? Turns out a lot of people were into that idea. But it all started because Sara was addressing a real need she experienced in her personal life. And using herself as her own marketing personae, her story resonated with others that had the same problem, even if they didn’t know it yet. Sara’s MasterClass on self-made entrepreneurship is an intimate look at her professional journey, in her own words, and with an in-depth look at key moments that propelled her career forward into becoming a self-made billionaire.
Seattle designer Kelly Su began her line Cami&Tank with a question: Why can’t I find tops that fit my length in colors and textures that look like anything I want to wear? It’s a fair question, and one we’ve all asked innumerable times. Her solution? Make them herself. Cami&Tank has become a full line of daywear designed to meet Kelly’s fashion needs while exemplifying her worldview. And the community she serves benefits from having the same problem solved—the right styles in the right length, every time.
And the problem doesn’t have to be technical. It can be aesthetic. It can be aspirational. It can be related to process. It can be use of materials. It can be how to stand out in a sea of similar product offerings. But whatever it is, it needs to resonate, especially in an industry with so much competition.
So much of the early battle with product fit and validation comes from either a bad product or a lack of storytelling resonance (i.e. sales-speak). But it’s usually the product in the beginning, followed by your ability to help others see how it solves their problem. And the best way to gain resonance is to masterfully solve your own problem first. From there, you can build your confidence and your collections in the direction your customers want it to grow.
In this video from Y-Combinator, Kevin Hale describes how to evaluate startup ideas. He also provides a useful template on how to identify good problems. His criteria for a good problem is the following: Is it Popular, Growing, Urgent, Expensive, Mandatory and Frequent? If you answer yes to any (or all) of these, you’re on the right track.
We don’t live in a big-box world anymore. We live in a long-tail world. In other words, department stores are places where we go to experience things. But online is where we go to buy them. This isn’t always true of sundries and necessities. But it’s absolutely true for luxuries. And in the fashion world, you are in the business of selling luxury.
But what does luxury even mean? It has different meanings to different niche audiences. Some define it as expensive and scarce. Others define it as well-made, long-lasting, and with attention to detail. And everything in between. The key is to know who you want to sell things to, make things that will delight them, and let their definition of luxury guide you as you determine what that means for yourself and your brand.
In his book This Is Marketing, Seth Godin coins a catchy aphorism: “People like us do things like this.” In other words, you are people, and the people you are trying to serve are us. And things like this are everything that unites us and that we have in common—our goals, aspirations, values, and ways of operating in the world. This is your Tribe. This is who you seek to serve. And the power of this approach isn’t motivated by profit. Rather, it’s motivated by changing culture for the better.
Ask yourself tough questions. Who are you really? What do you want to say with your art? What does your worldview have to say? What kinds of things do you want to make? Who do you want to make them for? Are there enough people like us that want to wear something like this? How does this solve our problem? And is it better than other solutions on the market?
Maybe for you, the answer isn’t to make a better mousetrap. Your answer might be to make a better change in the industry itself. In that case, listen to every episode of the Akimbo podcast and decide for yourself if you have what it takes to do something really hard that really matters. And if the answer is yes, you’re in the right place. Seattle is ready for exactly the kind of change that sets the tone for fashion’s next chapter.
[ Editor’s Note: In his book, Seth argues that one should identify a potential market they want to serve first, then make products that will delight them. While this is sound advice for community building, we believe a more forgiving route for beginners in fashion is as we’ve previously stated. Begin with identifying and solving a problem you have and that other people have. Then make things that will solve the problem. The net effect is a delighted community. And we agree with Seth that the next step is identifying the minimum viable audience that wants the solution. ]
This one’s directly from Tim Ferriss. You’ve found your Tribe, discovered your creative voice, identified the change you want to make in the world, and are ready to make something great. But it’s worth your time at this stage to stop and identify 10 people (or more) that might be able to help you along the way. The more diverse your list, the better.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you will ever share a Mai Tai with Anna Wintour on a private yacht after Paris Fashion Week. But it means you are resourcing yourself with books, Podcasts, blogs—everything that can give you the education you need when you need it (and not when you don’t). The Cutting Room Floor podcast, The Business of Fashion podcast, British Vogue’s documentary The Future Of Fashion Series 1 and Series 2 are all great places to start.
You don’t have to know everything. You just need to know where to go to find the answers you need when problems happen. And they happen all the time. Problems like, What do I do if I chose FBA for all of my inventory, but no one is buying through Amazon? Where can I find sustainably sourced silks that offer small batches or no minimums? How can I keep costs down if I’m manufacturing different parts in multiple countries? How do I manage a network of subsidiaries? How does licensing work, and is that a direction I want my label to go? Is wholesaling a viable source of revenue, or will it keep me from other opportunities? Are social media influencers an integral part of marketing in the Northwest, and is there data to back that up?
If IRL mentorship is more helpful, you’ll need to give before you get. And the answer sounds too simple, perhaps, but there are millions of people vying for a handful of positions in this industry. The prevailing advice we hear time and again from fashion professionals is this:
Get an internship at a business that’s most like the one you want to build and that prioritizes learning opportunities.
Additionally, consider the benefits of belonging to a professional organization that resources fashion professionals. CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) is a not-for-profit organization devoted to elevating the economic impact of American fashion on a global scale. Members receive access to mentorship opportunities, manufacturing indexes, supplier lists, partnerships, the Fashion Calendar, and many other benefits designed to accelerate fashion professionals throughout their journey.
FGI (Fashion Group International) has a Seattle chapter and hosts local discussions and meetups that are relevant to the Northwest. You can signup for their newsletter to receive info on their latest industry gatherings and to hear from fashion professionals with a variety of specializations.
If education is where you really need to begin, consider online programs designed to equip students with business essentials in addition to art and design classes for a more well-rounded experience. Parsons have partnered with Teen Vogue to offer a Fashion Industry Essentials course for students as young as 13 years old. Or, if your schedule (and pocketbook) allows, it may be well worth your investment to consider a formal education at Fashion Institute of Technology or LIM College in New York, Central Saint Martins in London, ESMOD in Paris, or among the many options on this list from Fashionista. You will build relationships with people whose job is to help you succeed, and gain peers you may very well spend your career with.
And don’t forget to be social. It’s remarkable how effective an email or direct message to someone you think is inaccessible can truly be. A great place to start building a contact list is LinkedIn where some of the world’s top performers in every field interact with each other everyday.
Above all, remember this Golden Rule: Always give before you get. You are beginning a relationship, not a business transaction. The squeaky wheel might get the grease, but no one wants to waste time on takers.
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Paul Graham is a legend in the startup world, particularly in Silicon Valley. Perhaps best known for co-founding Y-Combinator and early-stage investing in massive tech companies, Paul provides a great deal of wisdom that has corollaries to the fashion world. In particular, where it pertains to gaining early traction, momentum, product validation, and scaling.
In his article on doing things that don't scale, note the case study on Airbnb and ask yourself, What are you willing to do to make the best products possible? Are you willing to host parties and trunk shows? Are you willing to incentivize focus groups and really take their feedback to heart? Are you willing to spend a significant amount of your time devoted to fundraising and selling? Are you willing to go door-to-door, or stand outside Westlake Center, to gain valuable marketing insights? Are you willing to find a co-founder or business partner that can do the things you can’t?
Looking at this another way, let’s say you want to design and execute a plan to provide the most fashionable outerwear for a market of gamers. Narrow your focus. Which gamers? Which games? Will this involve cross-licensing agreements with third-parties? Get granular. What would the best jacket look like for someone who loves video game culture and works as a back-end development coder for Amazon? Is this everyday wear or for special occasions? What are the best textiles for this application? What unique aspects of the design give you an advantage in your market position? How many pockets does this person require? What goes in their pockets? Is a hood necessary or even desirable? How can your design elevate both the person you dress and the market as a whole? How can you design sustainability into the process? Can you get product validation from a constituency of coders that resemble your target market? Can you arrange for them to be your fitting models and try the product for themselves?
When you do small things with great love and masterful execution, customers can tell. The cream always rises to the top. But remember, you are in the service industry. And it’s GIGO (Garbage-In-Garbage-Out). If you scale poor quality, you reap poor results, and you will lose everything you’re trying to build. Instead, make something truly great using methods that don’t scale, at least to start. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s iteration. When investors see the validation, scalability will naturally follow.
Invest time in watching some of these videos from Y-Combinator to get an idea of the kind of businesses being funded in Big Tech and the speed at which they deploy.
This might seem odd. Why wait so long to come up with a business plan? The answer is simple. You might have had a million dollar idea, but you might not have been the right person to execute it. Even now, you might have reservations.
And that’s okay. It’s still your idea. It’s still your passion. You are the Captain of your ship. But you needed a little education in sailing first. Now that you’ve got it, it’s time to plot your course. A business plan doesn’t need to be a 300 page prospectus. It can be a one-page writeup. All the better. But it must have a few key things, including your elevator pitch, firmly nailed down. There are innumerable resources for this. Pick one and run with it. This video from The Business of Fashion gives a brief walkthrough worth your time.
Even more important than cap tables, supply chains, and P&L projections, make it crystal clear that you understand your target customer and the market to which they belong. Believe firmly in how much you charge for your product. Create acceptable margins for profit without fleecing the people you serve. Stand for something bigger than yourself that delights your customers, incentivizing them to remain loyal to your brand. And above all:
Be the kind of person others respect and want to do business with.
And whatever you do, don’t leave this part out: Ensure you’ve secured all necessary domains, logos, trademarks, DBAs and other business formation applications and licenses. If your concept involves patents, get them pending. Do everything you can to prove to yourself and others that this plane has wings and is leaving the runway. No one wants to wait on the tarmac. Get moving ASAP.
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You’ve become exceptionally resilient. You found your Tribe. You’ve got your brand figured out. Your prototype is amazing. Your business plan appears solvent. Your supply chain is nailed down. You found an initial backer or business partner. The clock is ticking. It’s time to get the word out.
Whether you want to create an event, pitch your product to retailers, or hire high-performing employees, you’ll need to convince them that exchanging their most valuable assets—their time and reputation—are worth the trade-off you’re prepared to offer them. In other words, your brand’s story needs to resonate. And to have resonance, you need to know how to tell a great story. And every great story has a few things in common.
You need to immediately identify conflict. Conflict simply means that the pathway to getting what they want for free has obstacles or problems. And the solution to that obstacle is what you have on offer.
25%-Off, First-One’s-Free, Limited-Time-Only—these are emotional triggers that convert people on a FOMO level in a race to the bottom. But they don’t have the power to deliver what we truly want—which is to know that we are safe in your care, that you’re going to solve our problems, and that the decisions we make have good outcomes based on good intentions. And at the very best, offer us the dénouement—the catharsis, or the release in tension, the end of the story—in knowing that in some small way, we’re making the world a better place by interacting with you.
You need to have a clear hero. And that hero is always the customer. You need to take your hero on a journey from where they are to where they want to be. And where they want to be should ideally align with the product you are selling. But it’s never a bait-and-switch. You have to mean it and stand by your commitment to serving them in ways that allow them the opportunity to be a better version of themselves because they are entrusted into your care.
You need to have moments of pain, struggle, and a path toward redemption. For Seattle based fashion company Girlfriend Collective, that pain was in the form of plastic filling our oceans and destroying marine life. They struggled to develop solutions and work with companies overseas that convert reclaimed plastic into sources of renewable textiles. And they redeemed a broken cycle of fashion by offering store credit incentives to customers who return worn garments to be recycled into new ones.
Excitement. Tension. Release.
And finally, you need to constantly point to aspirations and change. You don’t need to remind us who we are—we know who we are. You don’t need to tell us the world is on fire—we already live in that echo chamber. Rather, we need to know we’re on the same team moving in the direction of progress. We want to be a part of results. We need to be continually reminded of who we can be and how you can help us get there. We’re more than happy to exchange money for something that solves our problem. And sometimes the biggest problem is that we don’t know what life could look like if only things were different.
That’s where you come in. Show us a world of infinite possibilities, each more beautiful than the last. Share your vision with us. It’s the only way to see if your brand can resonate.
However you’ve chosen to organize your company, it all comes down to getting the right people in the right roles for the right reasons at the right stages of your brand’s development. In his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things Ben Horowitz details some of his most anxiety-inducing moments. He describes how tough calls often resulted from having the wrong people at the wrong times, as well as the path he chose to course-correct.
Do you need someone with retail experience? Who’s an expert in chemical engineering? A master at cutting-and-sewing? Is innovative and not afraid to do things differently? Has a vast network of textile suppliers? Has experience with direct marketing and sales via social channels?
You’ll need proper incentives to entice and retain top performers. And you’ll need excellent negotiation skills to achieve the goals that are right for you. While every business has different needs and different company cultures, you know what your brand needs. And if you still need help, lean on your Mentors. You made a list for that.
Sometimes the hardest thing we can do is manage our time effectively. We’ll invent a multitude of tasks unrelated to our objectives in order to avoid doing the hard things that actually free our time and make us money. We do this for a lot of reasons. But the point is simply that we need to address the root cause of our paralysis and ineffective busywork before we can free ourselves to do the things that matter.
In his book The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss builds a case for eliminating unnecessary things from our lives in order to focus on the things that align with our purpose. In fact, it’s part of his acronym D-E-A-L — Definition, Elimination, Automation, and Liberation. In Chapter 5, Tim describes the obstacles he encountered with his former business that led to dissatisfied distributors, bloated workweeks, and complete burnout. Additionally, he offers a keen solution using the Pareto Distribution (aka, 80/20 Rule). Apply this thinking to your current lifestyle. Eliminate 80% of the activities that do not increase your effectiveness and happiness. And focus on doing the hard things that will bring the biggest return on your investment. Results vary. But you can expect the greatest impact from eliminating what doesn’t work, and identifying what does work and doing more of that.
And watch Tim’s TED talk on fear-setting in which he outlines the impact that stoicism has made in his life, working through depression and anxiety, and turning some of his worst fears into a source of great strength.
It was one thing to make 20 dresses for clients in your hometown. It’s an entirely different thing to create a platform that sells 20 thousand garments nationally, or 20 million garments globally. Or perhaps you opened a lifestyle brick-and-mortar location with locally sourced apparel and accessories, but your investors are pushing you toward a franchise model. Or maybe you want to invent a new textile that’s biodegradable and easy to deploy at scale, but are under pressure to meet deadlines and running out of runway. As you scale up, you’re confronted with new and exceedingly costly problems that could easily bankrupt you without warning.
But you prepared for this.
You are a relentless force of positivity capable of inspiring others to solve really tough problems. And the biggest problem facing you now is how to retain all the best aspects of your brand and what you have on offer, while modifying them to accommodate new designs, collaborators, licensing agreements, materials, manufacturing processes, shipping routes, languages, regulations, governance, and a host of others. Speed is the key, but with that, quality control becomes more difficult to manage. And so you have to trust that the people you’ve hired—and contracted to represent you—share the same values and commitment to excellence that you do in order not to water down your brand.
You’ll need to consider whether your current business associations are right for you at this time. As we mentioned earlier, partners that were ideal for you when you had 1,000 units in your inventory may not be the right ones to help you navigate logistics in the business of mass production.
You’ll need to consider how quickly you want to grow in direct proportion to how much of your company you want to give up. And you’ll have to consider the demands of your investors, stakeholders, board members, and those who might exercise voting control. You might want to have something that’s “yours” but if you’re in need of capital, something has to give.
Again, lean on your Mentors and other reliable, trustworthy people that can help you see the lay of the land as well as the sunrise on the horizon. It will never be smooth sailing. But you are now on the greatest adventure of your creative life. The sky is the limit. And good things come to those whose lives reflect the change they seek.
Fashion is genuinely one of the most exciting industries. Its utility is obvious and fits all the criteria for problem-solving and disruption. And its artistic nature helps weave vivid visions of a future to which we want to belong. But it’s not without inherent difficulties. And the obstacles—as well as the targets—change seasonally. You must be agile in management, flexible in decision-making, and able to change course immediately when threatened with insolvency.
And that’s why you’ve chosen a solid foundation, investing in yourself first, and surrounding yourself with people whose input you trust to guide you along the way. You are a life-long learner who understands that class is always in session. And interest compounds over time. There are no get-rich-quick methods for success in this industry. But if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you will arrive at your destination.
Show us your world of infinite possibilities. Because there’s a good chance that’s exactly where we want to be.