Are you looking to begin your e-Commerce journey by starting your own streetwear clothing business? You’ve made the right choice, with online clothing stores being one of the most popular e-Commerce niches out there, you are on your way to earning a few thousands, or millions if you’re successful enough. There is a lot of potential in this industry, but not every online clothing store manages to gain sustainable profits and become successful. Here are some of the steps in order to guide you with your first streetwear online store:
Step 1: Identify your brand identity
What do we mean by brand identity? Well, there are many streetwear clothing brands out there. What makes your brand different from them? A few things you should do to get started with branding would be your logo and tagline. Brainstorm a few ideas on how to make your brand stand out among the competition and identify the gap in the market that you are planning on filling in. Do some research and create a brand that not only showcases the personality of the brand, but also what makes the brand unique. Branding helps to draw customers in and make them part of the community. The key to building a successful clothing brand is to make customers want to grab every item without thinking twice. You have to build the hype of your streetwear clothing brand to encourage them to purchase your products.
Step 2: Narrow your target audience
After you’ve got your brand identity figured out, the next thing would be to find out who your target demographics are. Without a question, streetwear are usually targeted towards young adults or teenagers ranging from the age of 18 to 30. Hence, your designs should be youthful and appealing to that particular target audience. Some designs may not work for a certain group of people, though. Once you get your target demographics settled, you are able to choose your products more effectively as well.
Step 3: Choose your products
Streetwear could be anything ranging from tops, shoes, and more. When you’re just starting up, it is best to start small with a focus on a few selected categories. Eventually as you grow bigger, then you can venture into more categories. For now since you’ve just started, you can opt to select the few categories and specialize in them first before moving on to the rest. Once you have decided what kind of products to offer for each category, you can start planning out how you are going to sell them.
Step 4: Outline your business plan
Now you’ve decided the kind of products to offer your potential customers, determine how you are going to make them. Are you going to look for a clothing supplier, or are you planning on doing dropshipping instead? You don’t have to outsource them as well, if you want, you can hire an in-house designer team that sews and makes all the clothes. There are many types of business models, so you should carefully decide on which model you should go for.
Step 5: Creating your online store
Now here comes the more technical part – setting up your online streetwear clothing store! Okay here us out, it is not that complicated as you think. The first step is to decide on which web hosting company to go for, and the rest will be a breeze! Since you are running an e-Commerce store, it is highly recommended to go for SEO web hosting. When you chance upon all the web hosting companies available, there are several types of web hostings available such as cloud web hosting, shared web hosting, etc. Skip all of the unnecessary information and just go for the web hosting that offers SEO (search engine optimization). Depending on the web hosting itself, there are a few types of content management systems (CMS) to choose from. We suggest going for WordPress as it is the most beginner-friendly CMS. Why should you choose the web hosting service that includes SEO? It will be explained in the next point!
Step 6: Decide on your advertising and marketing strategies
So you’ve got pretty much everything covered right at this point. Now, here is the hardest part of all – advertising and marketing. Without these two things, your sales won’t grow. Your brand will be unknown. Nobody is going to be purchasing from you. There are a few ways to leverage on online advertising, with SEO being one of them. SEO is all about making sure when customers are searching for your products, your website appears on the search engines. In this article, we’re not going to go in-depth with what SEO is, it’s best for you to read up on your own. Niel Patel has one of the articles for beginners to understand and learn.
With that being said, this concludes the 6 steps on how to create your own streetwear clothing store online. All the best in your journey; and always remember: branding and marketing is the key to building a successful online clothing store!
