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Summary of Episode 01
In this, the first episode of Fashion Forward Podcast, hosts Richard Gregory and Skye Della Santa discuss some of the basics of starting your own fashion label, including:
- Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses
- Identify Your Market and Your Target Customer
- How Much Does It Cost to Start a Fashion Label
- How to Get Started
Full Transcript of Episode 01: Basic Requirements for Starting Your Own Fashion Label
Introduction
Richard Gregory: Hi everyone. I’m Richard, founder and CEO of Prototype and host of Fashion Forward. A new podcast dedicated to helping small fashion businesses succeed in the cut-throat fashion industry. We’ll give you real information and actionable advice that’s guaranteed to get you motivated and moving forward with your brand.
Skye Della Santa: Hi guys! I’m Skye Della Santa, co-host of the show and COO here at Prototype. I’m super excited to be here and chat with you all today. This week, we’re going to talk about all the basic requirements to start your own fashion label. These requirements are number one, identifying your strengths and weaknesses. Number two, we’re going to chat about identifying your market and your target customer. Number three will be how much will it all cost? Always a fun one to chat about. And lastly, and most importantly, what you need to do to take the plunge.
Richard Gregory: So let’s jump right in. We’ll cover each topic for around four minutes and then we’ll move on.
Identify Your Strengths AND Weaknesses
Skye Della Santa: All right. So I am going to start with topic number one, which is identifying your strengths and weaknesses.
Richard Gregory: Awesome. Yeah. This is a great topic. Anybody that has started a business knows how intense it can be. The number one enemy of any small business is underestimating the difficulty of what you’re about to do.
Skye Della Santa: That’s it. I think it’s such an important thing before you do start a business to really sit back and look at who are you, where do you come from? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? What’s your prior history? Have you done a business before? Have you got any special talents? Are you a marketer?
Are you maybe an amazing designer? I think it’s a really good opportunity to sit back before you even take the plunge and evaluate who you are. What’s your background knowledge, and then focusing on what you need to do to fill in the gaps.
Richard Gregory: Yeah, that’s true. And I think a lot of people that are just starting out, there’s this culture online, especially if people that are trying to encourage you or boost you, pump you up about starting your business. And it’s all about confidence. It’s all about believing in yourself and it’s all about, you know, planning for your success. And it’s almost like you’re, you’re spending your money before you even earn it.
And I feel differently about the topic. I think it’s great to celebrate your strengths. Of course you should. But it’s going to be a long road, and you gotta be prepared for, you’ve got to plan for success, of course, but you also have to plan for failure. You have to anticipate the parts of your business that you might not be so well equipped to deal with.
Skye Della Santa: That’s it. Potentially you’ve come from an amazing marketing background and you know that if you can get a product, you know that you can sell that product and that could be your strength.
However, your weakness might be, you’ve never designed before. You don’t even know what the product should be. You kind of have an idea of what you can sell, but you need someone to help you informing that very first initial part.
Richard Gregory: Yeah. I mean, it’s not a deal killer just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. Right? It doesn’t mean anything. If you can identify that you have a weakness. And maybe your weakness is I have no experience in this. Fine!
You know, that’s no problem. You just got to find somebody that that can help you. That’s all.
So that’s our time on topic one. Let’s move on to topic number two: identify your market.
Identify Your Market and Your Target Customer
Skye Della Santa: Identifying your market is really looking at who is your customer. Who is going to buy your stuff? Who is your customer avatar?
Something that I like to do is picture my end game customer. So describing who they are, what age are they? Where are they looking? Where are their eyes? Are they someone who’s going to be looking on Facebook every day? Are they someone who’s going to be going to the shopping center every day? I feel the more that you can target and really get your exact customer hone in what I’m thinking of. The more you can hire an in. I like Richard, you had an example before of, you know, my customer is Linda. She is between 36 and 38 years old. She shops at whole foods. She is into sustainable products. It’s good to really, from a marketing point of view to really understand who’s your customer and where are they going to be looking?
Richard Gregory: Yeah. Yeah, that was a tough lesson for me. I remember distinctly when we first started we were concerned about who’s going to buy. Right? So we didn’t know, we had no idea who was going to buy. And we were trying to avoid limiting ourselves, which happens all the time. People are always concerned about, well, if I, if I focus too much here, then I’m going to miss out on all this other stuff, which makes sense. You know, like intuitively that, that makes sense. But the reality is that there are so many people in this world that you can’t market to all of them, and you shouldn’t even try. Any marketer. Any real marketer is going to tell you that you need to define your customer with laser-focus. Even giving them a name, I think is helpful.
Skye Della Santa: Absolutely. And even when it comes from a design point, yeah. If you’ve got that, if you’ve got that customer in mind, it makes it so much easier as well from the creative aspect to design for that customer and to design around that customer.
Richard Gregory: Yeah, for sure. All right. So I guess we’ve covered the customer avatar, identify your market. What’s next?
How Much Will It Cost to Start a Fashion Label?
Skye Della Santa: So next is a big one and it’s one that I find for businesses starting off it’s always the very most asked question and that is… how much will it cost?
Richard Gregory: Yeah. We love this question. How much will it cost? And what does Skye like to say?
Skye Della Santa: How long is a piece of string? It’s sometimes very hard to determine how much something will cost in the initial stages.
Richard Gregory: Yes. And it’s understandable that people ask this question. When people are just starting out, it’s you, you always want to know how much something is going to cost, but the fact that you want to know that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s an answer and it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is one good answer.
The answer will change completely depending on the person and what their needs are.
Skye Della Santa: Yeah. That’s it.
Richard Gregory: We often get clients inquiring about how much is it going to be to buy, let’s say, 25 bikinis and you know, I’m going to be able to get those bikinis for 20 bucks a piece, and then I’m going to flip those around and I’m going to sell them for 50, and then I’m gonna have so much profit. Right? Well, I mean, that would be great if we could just buy and then resell and it was that simple, that clean. I would love that. Imagine! But the reality is those first twenty-five bikinis that you buy, you’re not gonna sell them for a clean profit, right. You’re going to spend that money on photography or website or something.
It’s super important to understand the difference between a cost and an investment. When you have a small business, you have two different types of financial reports:
You have your profit and loss statement or sometimes you call it, uh, operating your operating costs for that month. But you also have your capital expenses, which is your investments you’ve made in your business and the amount of money you actually spend in any given amount of time is both of those. It’s never just one or the other.
Skye Della Santa: Absolutely. And when starting a new business, you need to be aware that a lot of the initial expenses are going to be investments. They’re going to be assets that you’re spending money to that are going to help you through the future. It’s not something that you’re just going to burn through straight away, but it’s an expense that is going to build your business up and to create things easier in the future.
Richard Gregory: You know, Shopify released a report where they said that according to their research, the average small business owner spends $40,000 in their first year. How much do you think they profited on that 40,000?
Skye Della Santa: Yeah.
Richard Gregory: Probably nothing. Right? The first costs that you have, you won’t make money back. You will not profit on the first money you spend in a business.
Skye Della Santa: That’s right. You need to be aware of that and you need to understand that those initial expenses are the building blocks to push you forward. You’re making an investment and you need to know what you’re putting out for to start with, but also you need to be realistic.
Richard Gregory: And it’s, again, it’s not bad news.
Skye Della Santa: That’s it. These are the initial expenses that you need to be aware of. You need to be super realistic in when you’re starting the business of what you need to pay for.
Richard, I know you’ve got a good story to tell about this, but something that was speaking about earlier is you need to, you need to be willing to pay for a good quality or a good service.
Richard Gregory: So I’m going to tell you my story. A few years ago, before we moved here to Bali, we were living in Utah, in Provo. And I was living there with my buddy David and my wife and my first kid. And, um, we used to go to the owl bar at Sundance resort a lot.
That was kind of our favorite spot and anybody that’s been to the Owl Bar will know that is the coziest bar in America. It’s amazing. Beautiful. My buddy David, he was raised in a, in a godless household and he didn’t understand how, , culturally things could be different in Utah and how the dating scene could potentially be different in Utah
So he asked out this one super cute girl. She was in college, you know, probably, I dunno, in her early twenties or something like that. And he took her to the Owl Bar and we were all sitting there and she picked up the menu and she goes, so is this, is this alcohol? How much does alcohol cost?
And we’re all chuckling about it. Cause we were like alcohol, like what alcohol? She just was, you know, everything on the menu was just alcohol to her and she couldn’t understand. And she was asking like, why are there different prices? Like why is this one $5? And this one is $14. And we’re like, well, this, that, one’s a beer. And this one’s a cocktail. And she was just like, yeah, but what’s the difference? It’s all just alcohol, right? And we were like, well, yeah. I mean, I guess it’s true.
You know, she wasn’t wrong. She was, she was naive. She’d never been around alcohol. She obviously had had zero experience with alcohol and, you know, that’s similar to what happens here sometimes. People will come in. Well, how much is a ball gown?
Skye Della Santa: Yeah. That’s why I like this story. It’s a lot of what we get. And a lot of the questions that we get, you know, how much is a pair of bikinis? How much is a dress? Well, a dress could be anything. So it’s our job to educate our clients and explain to them the differences and also the differences in quality.
This is a big thing that I find when clients are discussing about cost to start with is you could have a lingerie set, which is quite cheap. It’s not going to last long. It’s not going to look amazing, but it’s lingerie. Or you could invest a little bit more money and have something that’s going to be much more higher end and last a lot longer. And that’s the difference in the cost.
Richard Gregory: Yeah. So there’s. Such a, a range there, and I’m sure we can fill another episode talking about cost. But we are going to move on to the next topic,
How and Where to Start Your Own Fashion Label
Skye Della Santa: Which is topic number four: how and where do I start? So this is the topic that’s all about taking the plunge.
Richard Gregory: What we always say is you start where you’re at! Start from where you’re at right now. Don’t worry about trying to be somewhere different, trying to be someone different, trying to tip the odds in your favor. No, you just, you gotta start now
Skye Della Santa: Got to start now and you’ve got to be realistic. And this brings us back to the very first point of identifying who you are, where, where are you starting it and where can you move forward? We have a lot of our clients that are a lot of different starting points. Some have no design experience at all, but they might have an amazing background in marketing.
Some more industry clients who have been in the industry for years, they know the game and they come to us for the very end part of the project. So I think where you start absolutely depends on where you’re at.
Richard Gregory: Yeah. And, and where are you where you’re at right now has a huge effect on the cost too. Of course. If you’re a fashion designer and you’ve been in the industry for quite some time, you’ve probably got, you’ve got your designs. Of course. You’ve got your, your samples, maybe. You’ve worked out your prototypes. You’ve probably worked out some points of measure and maybe your, you maybe have patterns. Maybe you have a tech pack. Who knows, but the further you are along, clearly, you’re saving yourself money. So it’s a good idea to find someone to help you that can accommodate who you are and where you’re at right now,
Skye Della Santa: That’s it. Some of our clients are at the very start stages where they need a lot of handholding. They need a lot of guidance. They need someone who’s been in the industry for years. Someone who’s seen the mistakes and knows how not to make them. I think that is very good of finding someone that you can rely on, that that can take you through those very initial stages.
Richard Gregory: So that’s exactly what we are here at Prototype.
That’s why we started this company in the beginning was… we were those people, we needed that help. We were looking for it and we were struggling to find it. And our brand died! Fortunately Prototype was reborn in the ashes of our brand because we realized, wow, there just aren’t resources out there to help people like us.
If you’re going to start your own company, you need a team of people behind you. You need real knowledgeable resources.
Skye Della Santa: Yeah, we made the mistakes and we learnt how to tell our customers what not to do.
Richard Gregory: Yes. We’ve had some, there’s been some tough lessons along the way, for sure.
Skye Della Santa: But the good side of that is now we can share everything that we know and guide our customers to have a much smoother experience moving forward, because that’s what it’s all about.
And that brings it back to what was talking about at the start of working out who you need to fill the gaps. Where are you missing and find the right team members to do that?
Richard Gregory: Yeah, so I guess your best path forward right now is to give us a call, fill out our form, talk to us, find out what we can do. Maybe we can help you out. Maybe we can help you move forward. And if not, we can certainly point you in the right direction. So that’s our topics for today.
That was our first ever podcast. We hope that you will tune in for the next one. Next week, we will be talking about sourcing,
Skye Della Santa: Ah, sourcing. Sourcing in Indonesia, sourcing internationally, we will discuss sourcing fabrics, sourcing factories, sourcing everything that you need to do to start your business.
All right, so tune in next week and we’ll see you then!
