 How to start a clothing line from scratch, a step-by-step guide. Okay guys, you've been thinking about selling t-shirts or jackets or wall hangings or whatever it is. Starting a clothing line has never been more competitive than it is right now. However, if you watch to the end of this video, you'll have a complete guide on how to start your clothing line and actually be successful. According to Wix, their e-commerce stores from 2019 to 2020 had a jump of 151% in sales. So it is something that's worth getting into and with this guide you'll be able to do it and know what to do, how to do it and actually be profitable. Do me a favor, if you haven't subscribed already, hit that subscribe button down there and ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or I upload a new video. Now, in this video I'm going to walk you through step-by-step and if you follow these steps, you won't have a problem. It doesn't matter if you're going to be doing drop shipping, it doesn't matter if you're going to be doing t-shirts or jackets or dresses or whatever it is, if you just follow this guide you're going to be successful. Now this is a guide and there's 10 different steps. You don't necessarily have to do them in order, it may make it a little bit easier. However, I would suggest you doing all the steps because if you miss any of these, it could cost you a lot of money. So let's get on with it and let's talk about number one. Number one is choose your brand strategy. This is super important. Your brand strategy could be supporting some charity. It could be naturally made clothing. It could be low-end price clothing. It could be high-end price clothing. But figure out what your branding strategy is. This is super important so that it feels right to the customer. Next thing you want to do is look at your USP, your unique selling position. How are you going to be different from anybody else? That's super important to do. A lot of people miss this step because they don't think that it really matters. But it does. It matters a whole lot. You should be able to say in one sentence why your company is different from your competitors. If you can do that, you're off and running. The next thing you want to look at when we're talking about setting up our branding is what is your niche? Who is your niche? This is super important. I think a lot of people forget this. I was at a function the other day and I talked to somebody who was doing drones. They did drone footage and I said, who's your niche? She said, well, I don't have one yet. I'm just making videos. Well, if you don't have a niche, if you don't target your product to somebody, then of course you're not going to do well. And here's why. Think about this. If you're trying to sell to everybody, let's face it, not everybody wants your product. The people who do want your product don't even hear you. So if you're selling to everybody, you're essentially selling to nobody. It's really important to pick a niche. We sell some survival to. So we have a survivalist. We have people who want to take care of their families during emergencies. We know what that niche is. What is your niche? Who are you selling to? Number two, create your brand identity. What is your brand identity? So if you're in a clothing line, let's say that's for hikers. Maybe your brand identity is that you have very durable clothing, t-shirts and jackets and shorts or whatever. Maybe you're in the discount area. So maybe your brand identity is you can't beat our prices and we always offer free shipping. But you've got to set up some type of brand identity. So when people go to you, they know why they're going to your particular products. Number three is decide what products you're going to sell. What fits within your market? Now I think t-shirts fit in a lot of markets, but necessarily ball caps may not. Ball caps may not work in a high-end market for let's say women in their 40s. That may not be a good product. So you want to look through because a lot of these sites that we're going to talk about will have all kinds of products from wall hangings to t-shirts to jackets to hoodies to all types of different things. So it's really important that you sit down and you decide on the products that you want to sell. Now once you've decided on these products, you've got to decide if you want to do drop shipping, if you want to do inventory, print on demand. So those things are also very important. So start factoring in all that at this time because depending on which one of those, you're going to be limited to whatever products are available in those areas. Number five, check out the cost. Check out the cost. The cost is so important. When you go into a niche, what I suggest people do is they go into that niche and they look for products that are already selling in that niche and they look and see what they're selling for and how they're selling it. If your niche always offers free shipping, keep in mind you'll have to do free shipping. You'll need to factor that in when you look at the cost. If you're doing high-end type products, those products obviously are going to probably have more of a profit margin. However, if you're doing cheaper products, maybe you can make that up with volume. But it's super important that you understand you've got to make a profit. Okay, if we're not making a profit at this, all of this goes out the window. Number six is your packaging. Now, if you're doing print-on-demand, you're going to have to go along with whatever packaging they have available. If you're doing inventory and you're selling your own products, of course you can decide on your packaging. Now, depending on your product, packaging may or may not matter. If you're selling some, let's say, high-end clothing, maybe that packaging could really help your branding if you had some imprints put on those boxes. Maybe it's something that would really intensify the value of that product. I know if you look at Apple, the type of products they sell, their packaging is super important. It looks high-end, it looks high-quality. We own a company that is survival food, and that would actually hurt our product's brand if we had high-end packaging that had advertising all over it. People who are buying survival food don't want people to know they bought it. They want a plain brown box to show up at their house with hardly anything on the box outside of just a label. So think about what you're doing in your packaging and how it's going to enhance your business or possibly hurt your business. Next thing you want to look at, number seven, is shipping. Shipping is really, really critical. I remember when we first started our survival food company, we started in Virginia. We were shipping out of our own warehouse in Virginia. And in doing so, if we had to ship to something like California or Washington State, it was very expensive to do so. We then moved the company to California and we were still shipping out of our own warehouse in San Diego. But then, once again, once we shipped to the East Coast it was very expensive or Florida or something like that. We now have a shipping facility that is centrally located in the middle of the United States. Now that cut down our shipping costs tremendously just by where we ship out of. So you do want to think about that. Can you include shipping? Free shipping is a big enhancement. I know every time I do an email out and I say free shipping, we get a whole lot more sales than when I don't do free shipping. But you have to factor that in. What is it going to cost you? You got to look at what the cost are and can you still make a profit? So shipping is super important. Number eight, make sure you follow the law. Okay, what do I mean follow the law? I have people all the time who say I'm going to be selling online, do I need a business license? And I'm like, yeah, yeah, because you sell online. Okay, so if you sell online guys you have to have a license. Now, what that license is, I don't know, okay? Depending on your country, depending on your state, depending on your city, I know we have to pay fees to the federal government, we have to pay fees to the state and we have to pay fees to the city. So we have three different levels that we have to do. And then some states we have to collect tax and it gets really complicated. So understand you've got to go by what the law is. And when you're starting a business online, when you're starting a clothing line online, like what we're talking about in this video, you're still gonna need to follow all the legal requirements. I think it's a good idea to get some legal advice. I would say don't go to a lawyer because they're very expensive. I would say go to an accountant and say, hey, I'm shopping around for accountants and I want to know what advice you have on getting licenses for my business. They will know all this, accountants know all this and generally they will give you a free consultation. So that's just a little pro tip right there if you want to get a free consultation, interview two or three different accountants. And I think it is a good idea to interview two or three different accountants because you're gonna have difference in fees. You may even have difference in advice and then that's when you'll want to check further. You know, one may tell you you need a license for something, another one may tell you you don't, then that's something you're gonna want to check further with, okay? Because if you're getting conflicting advice, that could be a problem. Make sure you follow the law. Number nine, you need to sell from somewhere. You're gonna need a website. Now, I want to kind of temper that a little bit because when you're first starting out with your products, I would say test some products first before you build an entire website. Now, how can you do that? I suggest you using Cartra. Cartra will build your sales pages for you. It will help you sell things. It is not a full blown website so you can get a page up and running in an hour. You don't have to build a whole website. I think it's a good idea to get a domain name though in advance of name of what the website will be. And the thing you can do with Cartra is you can put some products in there and test them to see how well they sell. And once you find some that sells, you can actually build your website. Now, why would you have Cartra and your website? Well, because Cartra does the marketing for you. It sends out emails. It has email automations. You can do sales presentations in there. You can do sequences in there. You can do so many things. You can host videos in there. You can have membership courses in there. And I know you think you won't be using that. And I never thought I would either but I have tons of them now. Cartra is a really dynamic email marketing, digital marketing platform. And I highly suggest you get it. Now, in the description below, there's gonna be a link for a video that you can watch all about Cartra so you can see what it does. And if you choose to get Cartra and you use my link, you can get it for $1 as a trial. So check that out in the link below. Now we've come to number 10. It is the thing that most people never do and that is marketing. You've gotta market your products. I remember I was so naive when I first started my first website. I built the site and as soon as it went live, I waited for sales and nothing happened. Crickets. Yeah, so that's not what you need to do. You need to market your site. Nobody knows you're there, okay? And if you're thinking, well, JR, I'm just gonna do SEO and I'm gonna do social media post and I'm gonna drive a bunch of traffic. If you were that good at that, there's a lot of companies that wanna hire you, I'm telling you. It's not that easy to do. SEO, first off, will take you months if not years to build up any real SEO traffic. And SEO, if you don't know, is search engine optimization. That's where you use keywords on different pages when people search for those keywords. But that's gonna take time. I would suggest you have some budget for advertising, some budget for advertising, something, okay? I have a lot of people say, well, do I really need any money to start an online business? The answer is 100%, yes. Unless you're selling on somebody else's site, okay? You can list products on eBay or Amazon, something like that and you could sell products. The problem with that is you're competing with a whole lot of people and you're also in a race to the bottom. What I mean by that is both those sites, you're gonna have to add one of the cheapest prices. It's very hard to compete on those sites now. The people that sell a lot there at extremely low prices, they have small profit margins and in the beginning it's kinda hard to do that. So you're gonna wanna set up some money for marketing. That could be Facebook ads, that could be YouTube ads. It could be native ads. And if you don't know about any of those things, look on my channel. I have videos on all of those things. You can check that out. Just search in my channel, type in video marketing, type in YouTube ads, type in Facebook ads and you can also find more information on that. So that is basic outline for starting your clothing brand. It's not that hard to do if you do some research. I recommend you also look at some of my print on demand videos on this channel. By doing that, you can start off with print on demand. Print on demand, you don't need to invest in any inventory. What happens is you actually sell the product. Once you sell it, you send the order to the print on demand company. They then print that item up and they actually ship it out to your customer and you don't have to touch it. So it's pretty nice and that's a great way to start your clothing line. I hope you enjoyed this video and do me a favor. If you did, give me a thumbs up, just like this, right, thumbs up. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live and I do one of these videos. Also, I'll notify you when I upload a video. So that's an added advantage. So make sure you do turn on notifications for that purpose. Thank you so much for watching this video as a present in the description below. There's a $97 course, you can get it absolutely free. All you gotta do is click the link and learn 100% free. Thanks a lot for watching guys. I really appreciate it. See you in the next video. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.