Clothing Brand Marketing: Sell Your Clothes Correctly

It really is the dream, isn't it?

Making a living selling clothes that you design and create yourself sounds incredible.

Luckily, this doesn't have to be dream... But it remains as one for most people that start a clothing brand.

This is because most people don't understand the essentials of clothing brand marketing, and without them, you simply won't make the sales you need to stay afloat.

That's why I've compiled the main ideas you need to know regarding clothing brand marketing, and having an understanding of these points will put you leaps and bounds above the thousands of other brands.

Believe it or not, it's not enough to just create some cool looking clothes and call it a day.

It's called a clothing 'brand' for a reason, as there's a central brand and theme behind everything that you're doing.

It's pivotal to identify several things before jumping into the design and clothing creation stage of your company.

What's the mission statement of your brand?

What's the reason you're putting in all this work?

Why should people buy your clothing?

Identifying all of these things will allow you to better cater your advertising and general business to your target audience, as well as give you direction on how to build out your brand.

Everything comes back to this mission statement, even if it isn't very deep or thought-provoking. Just make it yours.

The thoughtfulness doesn't stop at the brand's conception, though. Designing provoking and appealing clothes is obviously a key step.

Starting out, placing a logo on a Gildan t-shirt and calling it a day simply won't cut it (unless your logo is a beautiful work of art).

Once your brand is affiliated with a feeling, and that feeling is affiliated with your logo, then you can fall back on that simple concept of a design.

Initially, most brands need to start out with designs that really "wow" people, either in their beautiful artistic appearance, thought-provoking design, or a mix of both.

Create designs that resonate with you as the creator and go hand-in-hand with the mission statement that you defined earlier on.

With thousands of brands available for, most likely, a cheaper price than yours, you need clothes that people can't pass up.

Don't rush this process, as you want a solid track record of designs from the start.

You'll obviously improve the overall quality of your brand over time (at least I hope so), but that initial quality will really push you in the right direction.

Designing a simple, clean, appealing website is almost as important as the design of the clothes themselves.

A website and the clothing that's sold on it should pair perfectly together. You don't want a disconnect between the two, where one design brings down the other.

Take into account your target market, and heavily consider what your average consumer would respond best to in terms of website design.

Do they like simplicity with the clothes being front and center, much like on Chinatown Market's website?

Or perhaps they enjoy a website with a more artsy feel to it, similar to Belle XO Boutique, a brand owned by an acquaintance?

If you want an idea for how to match a brand to a clothing store, look at the merch websites for any big musician. The website almost always excellently fits the music of that musician.

If you don't have a physical, brick and mortar storefront, then this website is your storefront.

Make it appealing, functional, and trustworthy, with an appearance that doesn't look like the brand only exists to make money.

Once your designs are made and clothes are ordered, the marketing stage begins almost immediately.

If the brand that you're creating is one that plays into your own interests and tastes (which I would absolutely recommend), wear the clothing yourself and act as a billboard.

Now, you don't want to become the obnoxious person that only peddles their clothing brand. Simply just present it to the world in a casual way.

Getting your brand off of the ground is always a difficult stage, but there are a few ways that you break through that initial stage of zero brand awareness that aren't self-advertising or cold Facebook ads.

The world is built on social connections. When you have friends and allies, almost any venture that you're pursuing becomes some magnitude easier.

These methods may not be possible for you depending on your circumstances, but for most people, these should be possible to some degree.

Initially, you can give some of your clothes out to friends to have them wear, with the promise that they post about it on social media.

A lot of clothing brands start local and branch out, and it's a great strategy to use.

Giving clothes out to friends is practically free advertising that only costs, well, the cost of the clothes themselves, which shouldn't be too much when bought in bulk.

Additionally, this creates a massive amount of social proof. When people see others similar to them wearing these clothes, they'll be a lot more inclined to purchase them for themselves.

As an additional point to the above strategy, make sure that the people that you're giving the clothes to actually represent the brand values and image.

You don't want to create a brand based around nature and the outdoors with ambassadors that have never set foot outside of their screened-in patio.

Owning a local business also has a lot of perks, with one of the main ones being the simple fact that people generally prefer to support a business local to them with solid values.

It's one thing to have an Instagram account for your brand where you post pictures of the clothes.

It's a whole other thing to have a brand Instagram account where a way of living is perpetuated and your clothing acts more to unite a community.

Therefore, presenting your brand in a unique and intriguing way is ridiculously important in getting your brand to succeed.

Overall, you want to create a lookbook feel for all of your social media accounts.

Post pictures of your clothing itself, pictures of customers and ambassadors wearing your clothing, as well as pictures related to your central brand theme to further perpetuate your image.

Curate a feed that people will want to follow and need to get involved with by buying your clothes.

This requires you to take a step back and really view your brand from an outside perspective. It's easy to get tunnel vision when working so closely with your brand.

Remember: People aren't buying just buying your clothes. They're also buying the lifestyle. You need to show off this lifestyle and present it as one that they can't miss out on.

That's the difference between a brand and a company. A company sells a product, while a brand sells an idea.

Convey that big idea, and that's going to make your brand stand out from all of the other ones. That's the not-so-secret strategy to this entire thing.

If you carry on the strategies discussed above, your brand will naturally grow through simple word of mouth (or sharing on social media).

The reason why we really strive for word of mouth is that advertising a brand to cold traffic generally doesn’t work.

People need to get excited about your brand, the designs, and the image you want to put off.

You really can’t do that very well with a Facebook ad targeted towards people that like things that are semi-related to your brand.

Also, I figured that I should through this point in here: You can get a little bit wild by scaling up your "ambassador" approach in a way that some brands have had great success from.

You can send your clothing to minor and major celebrities that exude your brand image in the hopes that some of them will wear your clothing.

While this may cost a decent amount of money, the payoff can be immense.

I would recommend going for the smaller influencers as the chances are much higher that they'll give your brand the time of day.

It's not guaranteed anyone will showcase your clothing, but if you have the money to spend, this is potentially a great investment.

Learning from failure is a great way to succeed, as failure tells you what to avoid/do differently.

In my experience and through years of observing clothing brands of all sizes rise and fall, there's a clear trait shared by all of the failures.

That trait is, unsurprisingly, a lack of creativity.

This lack of creativity is both in the actual design of the clothing and the marketing of these clothes.

Non-creative designs absolutely ruin startup brands, as they're both visually unappealing and uninspiring to their target audience because it doesn't creatively display your brand image.

Basic marketing of these failure brands usually only includes posting simple, uninspired pictures of the clothing on an Instagram account.

Why would people support a brand with such minimal effort put into it?

Be different from brands similar to you, artfully display your brand image, and just have a good time!

Owning a clothing brand is fun, and you've got a much higher chance of seeing success when your heart is in things.