10 Checklist Items For Emerging Fashion Designers To Do Pre Launch

When getting ready to launch a brand, you need to have several mission critical foundations in place BEFORE you launch. Some of these items take several months longer to develop than your designs themselves, so getting started on these things early on is urgent and important. Failing to establish your brand, is like having a baby with no nest at home to support the child, after you leave the hospital. No crib. No clothes. No diapers. No Support. No bueno. You wouldn’t do that to your child, so don’t do that to your brand because for many, your designs are your “babies”. 1. Have your logo, garment labels and branding identity in development or finalized as early as possible. This should cost anywhere between $250-$1000+. If you’re on a low budget start with fiverr.com or use a pro branding and web development agency.  2. Register your domain name. Make sure when choosing your brand name that the domain name is available. When deciding where to register, make sure they offer affordable email servers and hosting packages. SiteGround.com is a good choice because they have all the latest, state of the art back end equipment and servers unlike some others who have been around forever, but are still using old technology. Expect to pay $15 a year for our domain name and $4 a month for our hosting until you need to upgrade to a higher traffic plan. 3. Set up an email address for yourself at your domain name and start using it for everything. This will start establishing your brand in communications and look more professional than yourname@gmail. It will also prompt people to look at your website. 4. Make a landing page for your website with a teaser of what’s to come and subscribe box to built your Email list. This can be a placeholder while you develop the content for your website. Ask your web designer for a development plan that will gradually expand your site as you create the content and grow. You should have a budget of $500 or more per month to get started and plan on spending between $3,000-5,000 to get your full website up and running. This can all be done quickly if you have the content ready. 5. Putting a blog on your website is a good way to get traffic flowing and give you something to do. Write or share articles like this one, related to your brand or industry. Share your knowledge and what you’ve learned in your field. If you don’t know how to do this or don’t want to, hire a social media manager and content creator to do it for you. The budget for a person like this starts at around $250 a month and goes up from there for every other account you want them to manage including Facebook and Instagram. 6. Create a Facebook Page for your brand. If you’re not on Facebook you can make your page your profile or have someone create one for you under their account. As an administrator we can create and manage your content. A social media manager can create posts and share them to relevant groups and connections on Facebook to promote your brand. You can also pay to boost posts to gain more followers, which will eventually lead to sales. 7. Create an Instagram account for your brand and hire a company like KelpSocial.com to build your followers. Get a free month by mentioning Orlando Fashion District and 10% off!

This is a different kind of social media manager. Companies like this use computer programs to build your followers slowly and organically by targeting 5 accounts who’s followers you want to steal and 5 hash tags who’s posts they can automate comments on to gain your account more followers organically. Your goal should be to get to 10,000 followers by the time you’re ready to launch. It should take about 6-10 months to reach this level, so start NOW!! “Buying fake followers” is a thing that comes in handy when they instantly like a post, but it’s not going to help you when it comes time to launch. They are not buyers. Creating posts on Instagram can be set up to share to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, killing 2-4 birds with one stone. In the beginning posts can be sharing inspirational memes, industry related and coming soon posts. (Twitter, Tumblr and Snapchat accounts can help, but they are secondary, when it comes to sales.)

Another free month account with no credit card required is GoldNitro.com 8. Create a profile on LinkedIn and start connecting with all of your vendors, influencers, bloggers, fashion news media, suppliers, runway show promoters, retail account brokers. Connect with me, Gina Vincenza Van Epps and then my valuable connections will be available to you as a 2nd level connection. 9. Prepare a crowdfunding campaign. Unless you’ve got about $20,000-50,000 in the bank, ready to spend on marketing and production, having someone like me help you create a crowdfunding campaign to test market your designs and fund your first production run, can be a brand saver. Going into production with out market testing your designs, having orders or a retail contract in place can be an expensive mistake. All of the above infrastructure needs to be up and running by the time you’re ready to launch. Without all of it in place, you’re not going to look like you have your act together. If buyers go to a dead or underwhelming website or Instagram account with only a few hundred followers, they are not going to take your brand seriously, which is why all of that needs to happen before launch. 10. Talk to Shea Sullivan at ApexDrop.com about putting an Influencer Marketing Campaign into your budget. This will cost you a pretty penny, but it can raise you to the level of rockstar status once you have 100-400 influencers promoting your brand for you with guaranteed results. Fashionably Yours, Gina Vincenza aka Psycho Seamstress House Of Vincenza Mobile Wardrobe Services