Planning to start a luxury fashion business? - Your Know-Hows

In today’s competitive market, the luxury brands have been emerging at quite a fast pace. According to the study done by Deloitte, “the average goods sales for a top 100 company is now US$2.2 billion.” If you are looking forward to starting your own luxury fashion business, this may be the perfect time to do so as the competition is in full form and so is the need of luxury fashion. As a shoe designer, Christian Louboutin said, “Luxury is the possibility to stay close to your customers, and do things that you know they will love.” You would have work the smart way to get across to your customer base, build confidence in them, show them what your brand does and do a lot more things like that as a part of your marketing strategies.

India is one of the largest hubs of fashion where consumers consistently look forward to buying luxury fashion that builds their style appeal and starting up a luxury fashion business and being able to successfully get it across to the target audience, you’d be a success in no time.

I am going to share a few aspects of starting up a luxury fashion business that’ll help you through.

1. Marketing research should be the first

Starting a business requires having a thorough plan in place, a process that takes a lot of time and research. However, before you But before you start your business, there are a number of questions and considerations you need to address. These are more than just passing thoughts, as they require lots of attention before you can even think about opening your doors.

Your customer base or the audience that you want to target should be thought about. Whether you’re looking for the elite class who can afford to shop Jimmy Choo shoes, Prada bags and much more or the mediocre class?

2. Create a Business Plan for your fashion business

Your fashion business would need a lot more than fashion designers qualified to do the task for you.

What you’d actually need is a constructive business plan to help you identify your potential costs and create a roadmap that you can follow.

Following are the key aspects that would be helpful for you in making a business plan.

What would your business offer?

A luxury fashion business is not only about outfits for the genders for sure. When you have a “luxury business” in mind, you’d know that there’ll be numerous categories that would be catered on your store(s). The categories would include ready-to-wear, footwear, accessories like watches, bags, sunglasses, and so much more. Plan your business according to the categories you’re planning to offer to the consumers.

Would your business be open to the other luxury brands?

The next best question to ponder on would be - whether or not are you going to offer other luxury brands as a part of your business or not? Brands like Prada, Gucci, Burberry, Jimmy Choo, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and so many others are available across the globe but aren’t easily accessible in countries like India. So, would you be focusing on bringing them on-board or not with your own brand (if you’re planning to have one)?

Would your business be offline retail or an eCommerce type?

If you decide on having or starting with a retail store in a metro city, you’d have the perks of getting all the attention of the fashion-conscious consumers that reside nearby. On the other hand, having an eCommerce luxury fashion business opens the options for you to deliver all across the country (and abroad) and acquiring more consumers looking forward to buying luxury fashion.

Keep in mind who to hire and how many to hire?

Being a startup, you would really want to figure out this depending on your budget kept aside for the hiring. Depending on the size of your business, you would need designers, market analyst, business head, and a lot more positions. See which are the most essential ones in the beginning and there’s always room to add more in the times to come by.

Plan your marketing strategies

Every retail business needs to employ a variety of tactics to ensure a steady stream of customers, both new and recurring. Well, that can be done by upgrading your business to an SEO-friendly website with traffic being diverted to the right spots and offering the potential customers with attractive discounts and more. Talking about marketing strategies the right way, email marketing counts a lot.

3. Financial end matters

Starting up a luxury fashion business can take a toll on your finances in the first place. This is the reason why getting the business financed is always what the businesses look forward to. As a new business, you may need to raise the capital from family, friends, and personal loans.

4. Look forward to the designs for a great user experience

In every business, customers are the keen aspects around which the business revolves. When you want to kick-start your fashion business, you would want to provide a great user experience to your consumers. If you want to give your customers a good experience, here are some ideas to get you started.

Design a website that is functional and appealing

When you display your products on the website in the right way and design it for the consumers to find what they’re looking for effortlessly, conversions happen. All you got to do is - have a simple interface, good quality product images, detailed product descriptions, and more.

Get your SEO team to work

When you have a website for your luxury fashion business, you would want to rank in the top position in the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others. For that, hiring an SEO team with the right skills would be beneficial. Every executive would know how they have to promote your business by building the brand image among the potential consumers.

5. Analysis is important

When you talk about analysis, there are so many things that need to be analyzed according to the business. Get your best minds to start doing the analysis part and what to analyze is mentioned below.

Analyze your competitors

Competitive analysis is all about getting to know who’s in your competition in the same field. The process of analysis includes data collection and review of information about rival firms. It is quite important to conduct the research every once in a while to have the knowledge of what the competitor firms are up to so that your business and finances are not harmed.

Customer behavior

Customer behavior analysis is what you should do in order to have a better understanding of what they like about the different aspects like “What do they want from your store?”, “What brands would they be expecting?”, “What would be the price bar that would be appreciable to them?” and so much more. All these and other questions would be the customer analysis for your luxury fashion business.

Designers that you’ll be focusing

Your potential customers would certainly be expecting the luxury brands at your store(s). From the collection of luxury names, you can have any of names like Tod, Valentino, Calvin Klein, Jimmy Choo, Alexander McQueen, Ralph Lauren and so many other names.

All you got to do is be focused, have patience and move in the right path to achieve what you’re looking for.