Fashion design is a business that addresses one of our most basic needs: clothing.
When compared to housing and transportation, fashion is one of the most lucrative sectors for making money.
The good thing about this is that fashion requires the least capital to start of all three businesses that addresses our basic needs.
In this post, we’ll look at how anyone could start a fashion design business that makes at least 1million Naira per month, whether they have the capital or not.
To do this, we’ll take a look at some aspects or types of fashion design businesses and how you can fit in to make money.
Let’s dive in.
Fashion eCommerce
Fashion eCommerce is a fast moving fashion business that anyone can start, even from home.
You can either produce fashion products and sell online, or you can buy from wholesalers and sell online.
If you don’t have capital to buy from wholesalers, you could have a deal where you collect wares on credit, make sales via eCommerce, and repay for the wares.
In Nigeria, fashion eCommerce can be done either via online stores like Jumia and Konga, or via classified sites like Jiji.
The good thing about eCommerce is that you could set up shop anyway you like.
You could even set up a bespoke fashion online store where you target a particular segment of the market such as corporates, women’s wear, sportswear, etc.
The options for this are almost limitless.
Fashion Contracting
Fashion contracting is an interesting area of fashion design.
It is perfect for people who want to do business part-time while focusing on their day time jobs.
In this business, you don’t necessarily need to invest in inventory unless you get a contract.
This way, you can keep your costs low and only spend when you know you are getting money.
Many of the tailor shops you see today are into fashion contracting. They don’t produce until a customer gives them a job to do.
However, they mostly operate on a small scale and mostly serve people looking to make clothes for occasions and events.
With fashion contracting, you could focus on serving specific fashion segments and even build a brand with it.
For example, you could focus on producing uniforms for schools.
You will most likely be tasked with procuring the uniform materials and then producing the uniforms.
So, you could make money from the material procurement and then the fashion production.
Another segment you could focus on is home decor, where you produce home fashion such as curtains, bedsheets, duvets, etc.
If you can find a fashion segment where you are well skilled and vast, then you would be making millions as a fashion practitioner.
Fashion Trend-making
Fashion and trends go hand in hand, so it is quite possible to make fashion products that go viral.
You could design fashion products yourself or recruit a fashion designer to make trendy fashion for you.
The idea is to be conversant with popular trends, especially on social media and use your creative sense to decipher which trend would fit your fashion product.
Example of fashion trends is making trendy imprints on t-shirts. This is by far the most common fashion trend these days and it is quite easy to do.
You can purchase plain t-shirts and then print different creative trends on them, and try to sell the fashion on social media.
During elections, these trends sell the most, where followers of political parties or candidates purchase them for rallies.
Another way to do fashion trend-making is to create a local copy of a global fashion design.
This could be a cloth design, footwear or jewelry.
If it is trendy, then it means that a lot of people want to pay money for it.
So, why not create a local version that is cheaper and probably more relatable and make money from the fashion trend?
Fashion Distributorship
Fashion distributorship is basically a sales enterprise, where you focus on selling the most sellable fashion products.
Fashion distributors work to move products from factories or manufacturers to retail markets.
To become a fashion distributor, you need to have a huge capital to start with, and also know how to identify sellable fashion.
The most common form of fashion distributorship in Nigeria are those who move bales of used clothes from a location of supply to a location of demand.
There are different categories or types of bales that are in distribution:
- Male t-shirt bales
- Female t-shirt bales
- Corporate bales
- Female skirt bales
- Female gowns bales
- Male jeans bales
- Female jeans bales
- Suits & jackets bales
- Underwear bales
Most distributors would first purchase truckloads of clothings of different types and then separate them in different bales.
They could purchase a truckload for 500k and then separate the wears into 50 bales priced at 50k each.
That’s a 500% pure profit.
Another form of fashion distributorship is to work directly with manufacturers to produce specific fashion items for the market according to your own specifications.
This is quite risky as the fashion may not sale as quickly or if a trend goes out of fashion.
However, most distributors have a host of retail shops that they supply on demand, so they only produce when there is demand.
To have a successful fashion distributorship, your focus should be moving fashion goods from manufacturers to retailers.
You don’t want to venture into addressing the needs of the customers directly, because that could be time wasting and risky due to changes in customer wants.
Conclusion
Just like many other lines of businesses, you can make millions in fashion design if you know the market well enough and know your place in it.
You have to find the category that you are most skilled at and have the most resources for.
And you must find a way to carve a niche for yourself, keep evolving with market demands, and then grow from there.