Lavish makeover, perfect style, flawless look. These are all terms that you associate with the clothing sector, and if you own a small clothing reseller business, you’re always on the lookout to source precious items for your store.
Running a clothing business is interesting and challenging due to the many different clothing tastes that you can focus on. Nowadays, people are highly prudent and meticulous in selecting their attires. Their goal is to achieve the most extraordinary look for themselves. Price is often a less important factor in the equation.
The second-hand clothing industry is experiencing around 13 to 14% growth annually. To achieve your business goals, you’re going to need to know how creativity and professionalism go together.
Creativity vs Professionalism
The most important thing is to realize that it doesn’t matter how many designs your business can offer that are in line with today’s fashion trends, but rather that it’s more about how you can get your creativity in the picture.
Many innovative thinkers come up with pleasant designs and strategies. Still, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee business success. Often, the business doesn’t turn out as profitable as expected due to the lack of knowledge of the business’ particular industry.
Professional sellers, on the other hand, are well-versed with regards to what knowledge and skills they require to put their creativity into the picture. They know exactly which idea will be applicable how and where. Therefore, creativity on its own falls short if you want to grow your clothing business successfully. Hence, for making your business thrive, you need to be professional and creative at the same time.
To summarize, creativity comes from within and gives you your product, but you’ll need professionalism to ensure that your product can be sold in the real world. This is what a professional does.
Below, you can find five tips on how you can become a professional and manage your reseller business more effectively:
Know your marketplaces and competitors
You just cannot manage your business without knowing what your competitors are selling and where they are selling it. You need to have a good idea of the type of clothing you’re selling and which marketplace fits the story you’re selling. For example, if you’re mostly selling womenswear, you don’t need to list on Grailed, which is a store exclusively for menswear.
Also, you’ll need to apply some tips and tricks to accelerate your business. A good way to do is by listing your inventory on multiple, suitable marketplaces, which allows you to expand your customer’s reach. If you’re only selling on Poshmark, you’re missing out on an entire community of people buying used clothing on Mercari.
Luckily, there are a few tools available to allow sellers like yourself to list your products on multiple marketplaces at once, such as Crosslist.
Crosslist is one of the best tools in the market for multichannel listing on marketplaces such as Ebay, Poshmark and Mercari.
You can choose the marketplaces depending on your needs and your competitors. By making use of applications like Crosslist you can be one step ahead of your competitors as you are making your products available to a wider range of customers.
Know your customer
This is the very basic element for the clothing business, and your ideas should be in consent with the fashion desire of your customers. To do so, you need to consider their region, financial situation, age and even temporary aspects such as the season.
We are in an era where likes and dislikes can alter the fate of your business in the blink of an eye. You need to be well aware of the current trends which can lure your customers in. And more importantly, the customers your brand is targeting. For example, it makes no sense to advertise on a trendy platform such as TikTok if your target group consists of elderly women.
Your innovations need to feel right to the buyers. For example, you can come up with unique seasonal-based collections; or you can sell items designed specifically for a local region, like a preowned Louis Vuitton handbag. Knowing your customers well is the key to business growth.
Don’t let profit maximization affect your creativity
At the top of this article, we explained how important it is to remain professional while running a reseller clothing business. However, your business still needs your creativity to thrive. And creativity comes with hard work.
A major trend that can be observed lately is that many businesses are immediately going for profit maximization without having a viable product. Without a viable product, you’ll never be able to get a foothold in the market. Creativity and professionalism are not mutually exclusive, but go hand in hand.
Ensure that employees receive proper training
Your employees are one of your most important assets. To have them perform well, train them accordingly. Nobody learns in a day. And skilled employees are hard to come by. By teaching your employees well, you can achieve fruitful and sufficient results.
The training should be aligned with the capability of each employee. This will result in better teamwork. And better teamwork paves the way for better business management in any field.
Listen to your customers
Customer feedback works as a shortcomings provider. You should always encourage your customers to give you honest reviews about how they have experienced their shopping experience. Even if they are negative, you can consider them as constructive criticism and work on them to rectify your mistakes.
What else would be the better way to know the likes/dislikes of your targeted customers?
Also, reward regular customers as this will encourage and increase their interest to spread the word about your brand. This is a good way to get your brand “in the picture” and achieve better results.
Conclusion
Given the rapid growth of the second-hand market, especially due to the availability of many online marketplaces, we have witnessed a rising number of clothing business owners. And they are all working very hard to achieve a maximum number of customers. As a result, it is very important as a small business owner to work as efficiently as possible to acquire a competitive advantage.
You should get your act together and leave no stone unturned in employing good strategies for your business management, as it will result in better outcomes. The tips mentioned above will surely be beneficial if you can apply them correctly. All the best!