Open Fashion Boutique and Start a Clothing Business: This 5 Steps Guide to Open a Fashion Boutique and Start Clothing Business from home.
While writing down and sharing my stitching experiences, I noticed how many of you want to open your own fashion boutique but in dearth of a proper boutique business guide, you fail to understand where to start.
Table of Contents
What’s A Boutique ?
Boutique meaning. noun - [ boo-teek ]
As per dictionary meaning -
a Boutique is a small shop or a small specialty department, which sells fashionable clothes and accessories or a special selection of other merchandise.
You can also define a boutique as any small, exclusive business offering customized service.
How to Avoid Boutique Disasters
5 Steps to Start a boutique
#1. Write Your Boutique Business Concept and Vision
You would have wondered why I started with the meaning of boutique. If you read boutique meaning well, you are able to understand what kind of fashion boutique you want to open.
Understanding the boutique meaning will clarify your business concept and vision for your clothing business. You can start with one of the products or services and later as you establish yourself as a business, you can keep on adding more services.
4 Success Tips to Be Your Own Fashion Designer
#2. What boutique user experience you want to give your customers
You can start a boutique at any level and define the user experience that you want to give to your customers.
Do a little bit of market research and find out -
- what kind of services your competitors are providing,
- what is customer expectation from your type of boutique business model and
- how you can add value to your customers' needs and wants.
You can define the user experience by assessing the type of services you are ready to provide. These could be -
#3. What is your boutique business model
In other words, you can ask yourself - where the money would be coming from ?
- Your boutique can sell your own products and services and get money from direct sales to customers. What you get : Selling Price -Manufacture & Sales Cost = Profit
- You can refrain from manufacturing and concentrate your efforts into reselling products and brands from wholesale vendors. This way you can keep a profit margin. The simple formula is : Selling Price - Procurement Cost & Sales Cost = Profit Margin
- The third revenue source could be to buy from small product sellers and sell on a margin to your customers.
- If you want to concentrate your efforts on services, then you can outsource some of the work to enhance your productivity and margin.
Decide on Details
Step 1 - Boutique name
Choose a name for your fashion boutique. A boutique name should be 1-2 words long. It will help your customers to remember the name. Too long a name would be difficult to remember.
The most popular way is to name your fashion business on your name. Most of the designers keep their name as their brand or business name.
This way, you'll become a brand to reckon with. Over a period of time you can launch your own label.
If this is not your liking, you can choose from many boutique names based on your imagination, liking, synonyms, antonyms in different languages, flowers, beauty, apparel, chic, trendy or anything which you want to associate with your brand image.
One thing to remember here, you brand name can be different than your registered company name.
Step 2 - Boutique Logo
One your boutique's name is decided, you can get a logo created. You can take help of a logo designer or create one for yourself using Canva.
Based on the theme you choose for your boutique design, you can use same color scheme for making the boutique logo.
Simple logos are popular these days. But if you have any particular design in mind, go ahead as long as you are willing to live with it for a long time.
Step 3 - Boutique Design
The next step is deciding on your boutique design. The location of your boutique and interiors, overall layout, placement of merchandise, sitting and moving area, entrance accessibility, mirror placement, fashion visuals; all these things make a difference in the larger canvas of your boutique design strategy.
Before You Start Up:
How to Prepare to Make Your Startup Dream a Reality
This book helps you with the preparations before you startup and also how you can overcome challenges to make your startup dream a reality.
You get a feeling like a mentor or a teacher is sitting next to you and guiding you to prepare for the journey by telling you -
- what are all the worst case scenarios,
- how to tackle them, and
- his personal challenges.
#4. How Much money to put into boutique business
You can start a boutique business with zero money or invest everything that you can imagine. There is no limit.
For instance, if you start a home boutique business,you need your technical skills, stitching skills, marketing skills and your stitching machine to start with your home boutique business (I assume, you have these things or you can acquire them ) -
- you can form a whatsapp or facebook group, provide your contact details and
- from the very first day, start stitching a few dresses and
- put them on sale. Or may be,
- you can start selling your stitching services for exclusive dresses.
If you have a bigger vision for your boutique business, you can finance your boutique with -
- your own money - savings, investments etc.,
- Small loans from friends, family and banks,
- if your vision is for long term business, then you can take business loan to start your boutique.
Where to Buy Wholesale Clothes for Your Boutique
#5. Observe the pattern of your boutique business
Once you have started getting orders and you spent some months working; start observing the patterns of customer behavior.
In business, this customer data is also called analytics, which you can assess looking at your inventory, sales and stock registers.
If you are running an online clothing store, you can read website analytics to understand what you customers like and dislike.
Based on this data, you can align your business to buy next lot of stock, put up a sale, clear your dead stock, add or remove your existing services from your business portfolio.
Your dream of opening a boutique is about to become a reality!
And if it's already your reality, it's about to become better!
No matter what stage of your career that you're at, whether current boutique owner or future boutique owner, there is something in this book for you!
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