How to begin your lingerie brand on a shoe string budget

I’m a true believer of beginnning something with what you have, rather than thinking you need everything perfect to begin.

For example with this 'my business ‘Van Jonsson Design’ I launched lingeri-E-courses with a PDF and links to the videos within the PDF, to the private videos of YouTube. Now I know there is a market for them, I am organising the E-courses so they follow a format of videos and PDFs in separate sections whereby you can mark off each section and work through it all. Now I can commit to paying for video software to host the videos, by simply starting you get to learn what works and what doesn’t rather than spend time and money trying to figure a new way out.

So, how can you start your lingerie brand on a shoe string budget and know what to pay money for and what to handle yourself? I’m going to go through how I started my lingerie brand, the costs and what I though was important to pay for and what I minimised my costs on. Full disclaimer though this was back in 2005 when the cost of simply breathing was free, I was able to work part time to cover my bills (literally just cover them) and spend the rest of my time working on my brand.

For those who don’t know my back story, I was due to launch my lingerie brand and the factory I was using went bust, taking all my patterns, my fabrics and any deposit I had paid for sampling and manufacturing. I didn’t see any of it back so had to begin again.

I enrolled in Invest NI business course where I received £750 grant and I also took a loan of £3,500 from Princes trust.

There are certain things I believe in which you need to invest money in, you can’t do everything on a shoe string, and other things which if you want a certain style you don’t need to compromise on the style you just need to pivot on what is availabe to you to go at it from another angle.

So, with that £750 I spent it all on underwires, this was because my size range was from C - FF from 28 to 34 inch back and the underwires were so important, I didn’t want sturdy ones that would cause rubbing, nor did I want too flexible ones; so I bought the MS20 branded ones where the minimums were 1250 per size (yup a lotta underwires). In context this worked out 3p a pair compared to £1 a pair at the time in shops which made a big difference when it came to profit per bra.

In turn what I was able to do was approach other independent brands and sell the bra wires in packs of 10-50 at great to them as well as being profitable to me.

Another thing I spent money was grading, I knew it would take me too long by hand to grade the full size range, get each one sampled up and then grading altered if needs be and patterns altered in turn. The grading back then cost me around the £1000 mark. For my first range I had a good camera so took flat-lays pictures of the bras or close up of bras on me just the boob part. For the second range onwards I paid for a photographer but got the models for free offering them the prints of the pictures for their portfolio and offering them any style shots they wanted to do whilst I was paying for the photographer. They also got to keep the lingerie.

Things I spent little money on: labels, I wanted clothing labels to look retro, to fit in with my brand, like those name tags kids have to sew in their clothes. Turns out when getting them designed was so expensive compared to off the standard labels, so instead of giving up on them, I actually went and bought the name labels but put ‘Vanjo lingerie’ on them for the samples and for the bulk I got them made with vanjo.co.uk and then underneath the size, this then led to having less labels made as the size range was on the branded label.

Swing tickets were another thing I found expensive back then. You need the fabric content and where it’s made so I ended up printing on clear labels to stick on the swing tickets. I also didnt want just a plain hole on the swing ticket, turns out getting fancy shaped holes put the price up by a lot. What I ended up doing was buying business cards in portrait orientation, then used them as swing tickets, bought a hole punch which took off the corner and gave a star shaped hole in the swing ticket (yup my Saturday nights were wild punching out all those holes).

Another thing I began with were domestic machines for sewing all the lingerie, this allowed me to start to see if everything was viable.

I think when you begin you need to learn what to spend your money on and what you can get cheaper, the swing tickets for example wouldn’t have made a difference to my brand if I had gotten them with a hole in the centre instead of a star shape, however I was able to achieve what I wanted cheaper than if I had just gone with what I could get in the style I didn’t want.

If you would like to start on your lingerie brand but have no idea where to begin then the book ‘How to be a lingerie designer’ is a great place to start as well as the first lingeri-E-Course ‘how to design and refine your first lingerie collection.’