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If you’re launching a startup fashion brand, you’re entering a highly competitive world. On one hand, you’ve got the brands that have existed for over a hundred years building up loyal followers and enormous brand recognition. On the other hand, you’ve got fellow startups who are the current flavour of the month.
If you’re about to take your new brand to market, you’d better have an innovative marketing strategy capable of attracting eyeballs and prying consumers away from their favourite brands. Here are five ways you can make your startup fashion brand stand out.
Personal Brand
First of all, you need to think about ways you can differentiate your brand from competitors. What better way to do this than through yourself? Personal brands have become a common marketing tactic in recent years, and brand founders’ identities have become a massive part of a brand’s story.
It’s not a new phenomenon for founders to be at the heart of their brands. Ralph Lauren, Tom Ford, and Tommy Hilfiger are all examples of brands named after their founder. But today, personal branding is about more than just the name of the brand. In fact, many fashion brands today aren’t named after their founders but that doesn’t stop the founder or founders from being seen as the poster boy/girl of their company.
Brand founders today harness the power and reach of social media, sharing their own thoughts, soundbites and general life updates with their thousands of followers help build a closer relationship with their customers.
If you’re a budding fashion entrepreneur, consider putting as much time into your personal social media channels as you do your business’s social media channels. At the end of the day, it’s easier for people to build relationships with humans over businesses, so it makes perfect sense to let your followers into your daily life.
Unique Experience
Brick-and-mortar stores have changed. Once they were a necessity and the only place you could purchase a brand’s product. Nowadays, more and more brands are choosing to move their business entirely online. But the physical stores that are proving to be the most successful today are the ones that offer a highly unique experience.
Gymshark’s first physical store on London’s Regent Street is a great example. It’s far more than a place to pick up the brand’s latest products. The location hosts gym classes, run clubs and personal training sessions for the Gymshark community. Athlete meet and greets also commonly take place there.
Consider if there’s a way your brand can offer something different in person. This is a great way to get people talking about your new brand.
SEO
If you’re starting an online fashion brand, search engine optimisation (SEO) will likely appear somewhere in your marketing strategy. But rather than simply employing a general SEO strategy, consider how you can tailor it to a small business that hasn’t built up a big following yet. This will strengthen your digital presence.
Try ranking for more niche terms instead of short-tail keywords. For example, it will be difficult to rank for men’s tracksuits, whereas men’s full tracksuit or men’s relaxed fit tracksuits would have fewer searches and be easier to rank for.
If you’re about to launch, consider having a flagship product that you can put most of your SEO efforts into. Consider optimising this product page in terms of keywords, headings, and internal links.
Community
When it comes to modern-day marketing, it’s common for brands to build communities rather than customers. A community member implies that a person’s relationship with a brand goes beyond being just transactional.
Building a community rather than a customer base isn’t easy with every other brand trying to achieve the same thing, so it’s important to get creative when it comes to your marketing efforts. Try incorporating brand activations that go beyond what people would usually associate with your brand.
For example, swapping a pop-up store for a run club is a great way to get people interacting with your brand whilst also going against the norm.
Corporate Social Responsibility
Today, consumers are more concerned than ever about brands’ social efforts so incorporating some form of social responsibility into your brand is a great way to win the hearts of new customers. TOMS shoes gained massive traction after launching by utilising the Buy-One-Give-One model in 2006. This approach saw the brand give away one pair of shoes for every pair it sold. As such, customers felt they were doing good whilst also getting a new pair of shoes.
This is a great lesson for every startup fashion brand. Simply replicating other brands’ approaches might be seen as lacking creativity and authenticity so again, it’s important to get creative with your approach if you’re looking to combine your business with a good cause.
Simply donating a certain percentage from every sale to a charity has been done before, and it’s not uncommon for brands to give to charities in 2024. Limited edition product drops in collaboration with a chosen cause offer a more creative approach.
