How to Start Your Own Clothing Brand
Today’s technology makes starting your online clothing store simpler than ever. But, simple does not mean it will all be easy. You still need to come up with a name, determine your niche and identity, and carefully select your products. Attract your intended audience and successfully complete all of your transactions.
We will assume that you already have a business plan, a budget adequate for your purposes, and you’re enthusiastic about getting things going.
Company Name
A business’s name influences all its marketing and branding. A memorable name is a valuable tool for your brand’s identity. The brand name is typically prominent in the URL and is what loyal customers will quickly recognize.
You must verify the availability of your chosen name, ensuring that you can legally adopt it for your clothing business.
Choose an Online Store Builder
Even online stores must be built. Services like Big Commerce, Shopify, Squarespace, and WIX provide the tools you need for this construction.
With its robust inventory and payment features, Shopify may be the best overall for online clothing sales. This easy-to-use platform has a huge app store to aid your business growth long-term.
Big Commerce stands out as the best multichannel platform with significant social media integration; it is often the choice at the enterprise level. The BC inventory system is among the best suited for bulk online sales of physical products.
Squarespace, with its award-winning templates, is a great choice when design is your focus. Coupled with its stellar inventory system and inexpensive startup plans, Squarespace is the choice of many entrepreneurs.
WIX caters to smaller online stores yet still delivers significant e-commerce features, including a sound inventory system for smaller enterprises. Their prices are immanently affordable, and WIX is among the easiest e-commerce platforms to use.
The Domain Name
Your domain name is how people will find you despite all the noise on the Internet. Ideally, your URL will incorporate your business name.
The domain name is a crucial piece of your brand identity and a significant contributor to your business success. Take your time, do your research, and make sure your domain name is relevant and easy for people to spell and remember.
You can buy your domain name from your online store builder or a third-party service like Domain.com. Using your store builder might be a bit quicker and possibly cheaper. Still, you may have difficulty retaining your custom URL should you ever leave that platform.
Now that you have the essentials in place, it’s time to build your store.
Choose and Customize Your Template
While you can accomplish a lot with a free account, purchasing a plan is a good idea. Doing so gives you access to more templates and other resources. It will also allow you to use a custom URL, eliminating the builder’s name and logo.
Make the template your own and customize it to fit your style and products.
Add Products to Your Store
Product pages are your store shelves where the customers will shop and make their choices. Be sure these pages are attractive, informative, and easy to read and follow.
In other words, make it easy for your customers to shop with you.
Research your competition, see how they display and group their merchandise. Can products be sorted by color, size, and other details? How many products per page?
You don’t necessarily need or want to follow your competitors. Still, it can provide good ideas and insight into what others are doing. You may spot an opportunity.
Set up Your Payment Processor
Your store builder will have the support and information you need to set this system up. Establishing your payment processor should be no more complicated than anything else you are doing. Choose the payment processor that best fits your business model and banking needs.
Preview, Test and Publish Your New Store
Verifying that everything looks and functions as it should on your website is common sense and best practice. The last thing you want to do is launch your store only to discover that orders are not going through or issues that scare customers away.
Take a few hours to review every page and every item. Buttonhole some friends and family to do searches and make purchases as if they are actual customers to verify everything is working as it should.
Once you are sure that all is well and functioning correctly, it’s time to officially launch your site.
Stand out Online
Getting noticed online can be quite a challenge. Understanding search engine optimization (SEO) is critical in this effort. Make sure that your page titles (the blue link in your search results) have a keyword focus (words and phrases people use to find your store). The Meta description (the text underneath the link) must provide insight into the page content.
Don’t worry; this will all become second nature before you know it.
Woo! That was a lot of work.
All of that effort will hopefully lead to great success. And, if it does, all of your diligence and hard work will be up for grabs if you don’t trademark your brand and its elements.
Why You Should Trademark Your Clothing Brand
Building a brand requires building trust in the name and the quality it represents. The hard work, time, and money that you continue to invest in support of building trust is something you want to jealously protect.
That hard-earned trust can be lost in virtual moments if someone steals your design and undercuts quality and price. Without trademark protection for your intellectual property, that trust is broken, and you have no recourse.
Situations like this arise constantly. Failing to take this critical step can be far costlier than pursuing trademark registration.
Your registered trademark provides legal cover against copycats. It allows you to license your product,
Registering Your Trademark
Step 1 in the process is filing your trademark application. This is also the easiest step, but it can still be a daunting prospect for many entrepreneurs.
You need to ensure that your chosen name is available and relevant, and distinctly different than anything else in the marketplace. Otherwise, your application will be rejected.
Performing a comprehensive search to determine the viability of your trademark can be grueling and time-consuming. You can entrust Trademark Factory® to achieve this due diligence when you choose our services.
There are many other considerations like classifications and details that can easily be overlooked by someone unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the process.
After filing, expect to wait a year or more before completion. Meanwhile, 68% of all applications will be challenged with at least one Office Action. Suppose you don’t respond to the notice within the allotted time. In that case, your application will be permanently closed, forcing you to start over.
Trademark Factory® attorneys will take care of everything regarding your trademark so that you can focus on what matters for your business. We still will keep you informed; you just don’t have to sit behind a desk and fill out all that paperwork.
Our Guarantee
Here’s the thing, we guarantee our work unconditionally.
We guarantee that you will receive a full refund if our search determines that your trademark isn’t registrable by choosing our full-service plan. Likewise, if your application is denied at the end of the process, Trademark Factory® will give you a full refund.
And, if you find the same offer of such comprehensive service and guarantees from another vendor online, we will process your application for free.
Conclusion
You already know it takes an immense amount of work to get your business off the ground. There is still more to do once you accomplish that initial goal. Trademarking your beneficial interests is one of those next steps.
Why not contract those specialized efforts to someone who can guarantee you results?
Most online trademark services will only process your application. They cannot offer legal advice because they are not attorneys and have no attorneys. Your filing will not have an attorney of record, and you will have no legal assurances regarding the viability of your filing.
You expect a complete, quality, professional outcome when you hire a tradesman or professional service. What is the point in hiring someone who can only perform halfway?
Contact Trademark Factory® today and take a massive load off your very full plate with our guaranteed results.