How to plan your second year with your lingerie brand?
Quite a lot of my blogs are written with the perspective of starting out, or the technical side of the actual design. There have been a few but not as many about running your actual lingerie brand. And to be honest, sometimes the second year of running your brand can be harder than the first - why?
When you launch your brand, you’re figuring out all the logistics, everything is seeming to come at once and you’ve probably had the years before starting your brand thinking about starting one, so therefore the time to ruminate your designs, what you want to design and for who. It’s exciting to start, to plan, to dream to cry out a whoop that you’ve launched your own brand, no matter how big or small your first collection.
What I always felt hard was the second collection and the second year. The second collection because you may only be starting to see money from your first collection come to you and you have to buy materials for your second collection. Let’s face it cash flow can be a killer. You may have had a good response or not a not strong response to your first collection and may questions yourself about quantity or style, should you change it up, keep going etc…
The second year, you become to realise that as well as having to design, source fabrics and get a new collection through production, you now have to deal with actually running a business, accounts, answering emails, dealing with problems that occur. Now I’m hoping that by the second year the love is still there, that although any problems you encountered you are viewing that as building your brand stronger and that your brand is going to exceed.
The most valuable thing I found regardless of what I had earned that year or how much I had sold, what was my goals/dreams that I wanted to achieve that year. A bit like a mini business plan, this is a=still something I do with this business. With Vanjo I usually put all the data into categories like how much press I wanted, how many shops I wanted to be stocked in, how much I wanted to sell in terms of money and amount. These were all usually targets I could hit, by listing them down, I then went on to brainstorm ways that I could make it happen. Sometimes I tried to think of the craziest ideas to make the non crazy ones seem doable.
Then it was usually linked, gain more press = gain more sales, gains more stockists = gain more sales.
Now comes the second part, I go through all sales and make a detailed list of top three’s, top three selling products, top three to bring most profit (there can be a difference). Top three places stockists, top three sizes. By gaining all this data you can see what is working what isn’t, if you are applying your time correctly (it should be mainly going to all the three top selling points. If you need to drop anything, or can you increase something similar to what is selling the most.
For example, if your website is out selling your stockists, put more energy into getting that noticed more. If one stockist takes a lot of your time but isn’t in the top three it may be worth saying bye to them.
This is the first actual round up of the first year I had back in 2005, so although the figures may not relate for today, you can see what I was I planning and how, I knew what sizes sold best, so when I approached shops to sell the lingeire I could guide them to place an order with the best selling items.
With the majority of lingerie designers I deal with today identify themselves as women so I think it’s important that you get to see this stuff, often finances are not spoken about. We often play down our successes, and success is different for everyone, some want monetary value, others want a time/work/life balance, others just want enough to get by to do what they love doing, others want to solve a problem in the lingerie design world and help other women.
If you want to start a lingerie label, I can recommend starting with this book.
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I’m starting to upload talks about lingerie design and running your business, the channel is laurie van jonsson