The fashion market in recent times has seen new fashion brands springing up each with new business models. With the retail value of the luxury goods market standing at $339 billion, and the global apparel market hitting a peak growth rate of 6.2 per cent in 2020 according to Statista, the fashion industry continues to grow even after the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though these numbers keep increasing with a promising growth rate, to make profits in the fashion market, it is more important for you as a fashion business owner to understand how to scale your fashion business.
In this article, we will give a brief overview of the fashion market, and also five methods to scale your fashion business.
What Does it Means to Scale a Fashion Business?
Scaling a business and growing a business are two different terms when it comes to expanding a business. Scaling a business simply means creating a platform that enables and supports growth in your company. After growing your fashion business, scalability gives the ability to grow without facing obstacles, and as such requires adequate planning, funding, the right business operations, new technologies, the right partners and even investors.
A fashion business that has successfully reached the scaling stage will have no issues with the infrastructure and tools to handle an increased sales volume. For example, a fashion brand that started from the house of its founder, then a few years later becomes a brand with stores globally. To manage the business in this case, the founder will deal with multiple locations, hundreds of workers and thousands of customers globally.
5 Ways to Add More Revenue Sources to Your Fashion Business
Fashion Pricing – How to Set Prices for Your Fashion Business
Five Steps to Scale your Fashion Business
To scale your business, you have to go through all these stages as it takes time to develop lasting and profitable results. Below are five steps to scale your fashion business for sustainable growth:
- The Desire to Scale
In simple terms, without a desire to scale, you can effectively scale your business. This is because even though most fashion entrepreneurs want their business to grow, they don’t see it growing past a certain level. However, it is also important to know when to scale. According to SmartBooks, 74% of startups fail due to quick scaling. Also, if scaling your business is your priority in its startup phase, then you must develop a plan and framework to achieve this.
- Automate your Processes
To scale your business, you have to find ways to automate your business operations. To think about scaling your business and also combining your normal business operations, you need to find ways to automate your processes. Investing in the IT customer support system will help you properly delegate responsibilities and certain business tasks. For example, you can automate customer support, hiring process claims processing and also purchase orders.
- Identify your Competitive Advantage
Identifying your competitive edge means looking at what makes you different from your competitors. To do this, you must answer questions like what sets you apart from others? What kind of feedback do I get from customers? What unique problem do I solve? This question helps you identify your competitive advantage which helps you understand what sets you apart in front of your customers.
- Focus on the Right Operations
Most times, entrepreneurs are not able to scale their business because they are not focusing on the right things. They focus on growing their business but are not able to focus on the right operations needed to scale their business strategically. Even though there are basic daily operations that must be completed, you must also focus on key activities to help scale your business.
- Build Your Network
The business industry depends on connections and networks between key industry players. To succeed in business, you have to develop your network, from customers to industry players and even competitors. Building your network can be through:
- Participating in industry meetings/networking events
- Encouraging referrals from customers
- Creating an email list
- Paying close attention to calls or meetings with clients
Ensuring business success is not about growth, but in identifying ways to scale your business. This involves running your business daily operations while keeping these operations fairly low. Most importantly, it is necessary to always identify the best time to scale your fashion business to avoid failure, increasing expenses and miscommunication.
