for consumers to notice that your brand isn’t very professional, and that will greatly reduce the chance of them purchasing something from your store.
So much more goes into planning a successful brand than just ideas for cool-looking t-shirts. You need to develop a brand image that encourages the consumer to purchase a product. Having a clean and user-friendly website, professional product photos, high-quality garments and exceptional customer service are just a few of the things that contribute to a powerful brand image.
The most important step to take prior to launching your brand is doing large amounts of research. You can never do enough research for your brand; there is always quality information out there to help build your brand.
Regardless of the amount of research you do or the quality of your business plan, you are going to make mistakes. The mistakes aren’t what matter in owning a business; what matters is your ability to recognize and correct them in order to promote continual growth within your company. Having a diehard passion for your brand and learning from experience is what will lead to success within the independent clothing market.
Chaz Matses is the owner of the brand Viscous History
Don’t Get Wrapped Up In Planning
After stressing how important it is to plan, you’ll probably go into a planning frenzy, trying to create the perfect plan for your brand to guarantee success. But while total lack of planning can guarantee failure, so can over planning. It goes along with the phrase “too much of a good thing is bad.” Planning your goals, objectives, and daily tasks will put you on the right path, but if you overanalyze your goals, second-guess your objectives, and obsess over perfection when trying to get tasks done, you’re not going to get anywhere.
When running our previous t-shirt brand, we used to meet every Sunday and spend three hours planning and evaluating our marketing efforts, creating new objectives, and writing new tasks that we felt would put us closer to our goals. We’d also go as far as projecting sales figures five years into the future and rewriting some of the same objectives and goals that we set last week, since we never accomplished them.
While some of the planning done during these sessions was helpful and served as a guide for our business, much of the planning was just a waste of time and an excuse for inaction. By the end of the month, we’d realize we kept ourselves busy with hours of planning, but no significant progress was made. We actually spent more time planning than executing. Nowadays, we keep planning sessions down to one hour, one day a week.
To avoid getting too wrapped up in planning, it’s best to focus on one or two main goals and the objectives surrounding those goals. If you set a goal that may take three years to achieve, break it up into smaller, one-year goals. Even further, break that one-year goal into goals that can be achieved within three months each. It’s easier to stay focused on something that can be achieved in three months versus three years.
If there are plenty of tasks you must execute to achieve a certain goal, consider writing only the daily tasks for the current week that will lead to some progress on the set objectives. Then when the next week rolls around, write the tasks for that week.
As obvious as it sounds, it’s important that you actually understand your own plan. We used to print out business plan templates from the Internet and fill in the blanks with a bunch of jargon about how we’re going to run our business, based on other business plan examples we saw online. While we had several pages full of planning written out, we couldn’t really comprehend our own plan. It looked like a professional plan (at least to us), but the only thing it guaranteed was confusion and lack of sufficient action.
It’s better to over-act then over-plan. Yes, there are financial risks associated with running a t-shirt brand, and mistakes can have negative effects on your bottom line, but don’t be afraid of taking action and making mistakes in the process. You can have the perfect business plan and still fall short of your goals. That’s okay. Just review what went wrong and reset your goals and objectives. The point of planning is to provide you with clear direction and focus to make your brand successful.
CHAPTER 5
RESEARCH
There’s no getting around it. You need to arm yourself with knowledge while developing your brand. It’s important for a brand owner to be aware of what is happening in the t-shirt industry in order to maintain an edge over other brand owners and to discover the best way of reaching the customers you want. Here are some of the most important things you should research prior to starting your t-shirt business.
Identify Your Niche Market
Chances are, you’re somewhat familiar with the term ‘niche.’ By definition, a niche is “a place or position suitable or appropriate for a person or thing,” “pertains to or is intended for a market niche” or “has specific appeal.” In other words, your niche market is a classification of the specific kind of people for whom your t-shirt brand is intended. To simplify this concept, here are some basic examples using fictional t-shirt brands:
The niche market of Ponies4Ever would be people who love ponies and horses and who have probably visited a ranch or rode a horse at some point in their lives. Monsta Truckas clothing brand might appeal to fans of the monster truck scene.
But neither of these fictional brands would be created to appeal to people outside of their niche, such as the niche market of “tech geeks.” There is less of a chance that tech geeks or any other outsiders to the brand’s niche would be attracted to the products released by either brand. Now, you might be thinking, “But I want to make t-shirts that anybody would love.” This is the classic mistake of trying to please everybody, and it typically won’t do you any good. In fact, every successful brand, whether it be in the clothing industry or some other industry, leaves out certain groups of people in their branding and marketing efforts in order to zero in on specific niche markets.
Identifying your niche market is a vital aspect of developing your branding and marketing strategy. Here are easy ways to decide who your t-shirt brand is intended for.
1) Identify different niche markets you would be classified under by listing your interests and hobbies. These niches might be suitable targets for your business.
2) Decide what kind of people you’d want to wear your t-shirts. Rock stars, you say? Your niche market would be rockers and fans of rock music.
3) Think about the kind of people who would find your products valuable or even benefit from them in some way.
Once you have identified your niche market, consider the estimated size of the market in order to determine if it is a profitable niche. Are there enough people in this niche market to keep your business running? Would the people in this niche market even be interested in t-shirts? The town of Beaconsfield, Iowa has a population of 11, making Beaconsfielders one of the worst choices for your niche market. Don’t make the mistake of choosing too small of a group.
Availability Of Idea
So you’ve got a great idea for a t-shirt brand. Maybe you’ve even designed some t-shirts or went as far as producing a batch of shirts already. Awesome! But hold your horses, buddy. Before getting overly excited about this new idea
