Starting your own brand is not as easy task as it is pronounced or vocally sounds good. There are many questions comes in mind when you step in for new brand like What should it look like? How should it make people feel? Will it resonate with my target audience?

But good planning, right smart and creative moves and correct strategy can bring you product market competitive without harming financial resources and time wastage.

We at H2MS Apparel, Our consultant for brand development are always available for working with you on your brand from start to end, navigating your every move of strategy into a right direction to achieve the goals set in the planner.

STEPS TO CONSIDER WHILE MAKING YOUR OWN BRAND

 Making your own  brand need some essential steps to keep in mind or consideration on a paper before taking any step or making any product blindly.

These step of consideration are following:

1. Market Research For Product
2. Range & Category
3. Target audience & market
4. Brand Name, Slogan
5. Brand Colors & Font
6. Branding Developments (logo, etc)
7. Estimated Budget
8. Mood Board
9. Concept Development
10. Product Design & Samples
11. Sourcing
12. Sales & Marketing Channels

1. Market Research:

Market research is a process of evaluating the feasibility of a new product or service, through research conducted directly with potential consumers. This method allows organizations or businesses to discover their target market, collect and document opinions and make informed decisions.

There are many potential ways of doing market research in a specific field or market.

it can be done through a Survey or Questionnaire Form, Direct interviews with customers, Focus Group or Self Observation.

WHY IS MARKET RESEARCH SO IMPORTANT?

Market Research is important because 

• It give you analytical data and Analytics gives you the ’what,’ but research gives the ‘why.’
• It doesn't lie on assumption and Research beats assumptions, trends, and so-called best practices.
• Research keeps you from planning in a vacuum and blind making you able to know customer feedback or interest in a product or market.

2. Target Audience & Market:

Brand cannot be established for everyone and everything, Specially when you are starting.Therefore you have to select a target audience for your brand before initializing your product or service.

A target audience is a group of people identified as being likely customers of a business.

Target audiences share similar demographic traits including, but not limited to:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Education
• Socioeconomic status

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TARGET AUDIENCE AND TARGET MARKET?

A target market is the set of consumers that a company plans to sell to or reach with marketing activities. A target audience is the group or segment within that target market that is being served advertisements. This makes the target audience a more specific subset of a target market.

3. Brand Name & Slogan:

Brand name is a very important and crucial step to start a brand as it reflect your brand image and tells your customer a complete story of your history and product. Therefore, always Find a good name for your brand which is them based, name which have some history or story to tell to attract customers, or some background related to the product you want to launch or market. 

A slogan is a line or catchphrase that is used to identify a specific product or company. Slogans are an important for marketing and advertising. A slogan can make or break the popularity of a business. A slogan is what customers relate to the name and image of a brand and tells your customer a complete story of your brand.It reflects the brand specialities and attract customers towards your product. so always think deep and smart to choose slogan and brand name before making a decision.

4. Brand Colors & Font:

After Selecting Brand name Selecting Color and fonts are an important task. Selecting color not only defines the looks of your brand but also identify or makes you different from your competitors, also convey the feeling you want to communicate and help you make it consistent across everything you do. The strongest brands connect with people at the emotional level, and color plays an enormous role in conveying your brand promise and personality traits. Don't just choose colors that your team likes or that you've used in the past; select a color palette that supports your brand promise and personality traits.

Source: The Logo Company

Similarly Fonts

are potentially even more important than your colors because they're used in every written piece that your company delivers, and fonts can convey an enormous range of personalities.

Choose a font that is consistent with your branding. The first decision is whether to use a serif or sans serif font. Here are some examples of standard, web-safe fonts.

5. Branding Development (Logo etc.):

If your name is the first touchpoint of your brand that your market experiences, your logo is most likely the second. It's a key component of any brand's visual identity.

Logos for consumer products are clearly very important. But B2B companies shouldn't treat this lightly either — a good logo can strongly influence the market on an emotional level, before business buyers engage in the sales process.

While a well-designed logo can anchor your brand experience, a bad logo can diffuse it.

Ideally, you’ll want to create your brand with a logo that’s unique, identifiable, and scalable to work at all sizes (something often overlooked).

Notice how the adidas standar logo has both the “mountain”"three stripe look" icon and the wordmark, which can be used separately.

6. Estimated Budget:

According to a study done by CBinsights, a few of the top reasons why small businesses fail include include pricing and cost issues, losing focus and running out of cash. These issues can be prevented by having a realistic budget in place.

Before you can focus on the budget, however, you need to identify what aspects of your business you’d like to improve. This will allow you to decide what can be done with your funds. Based on that list, you can set up short-term and long-term goals.

These goals will be directly affected by your incoming and outgoing cash. A short-term goal can be paying off a debt or purchasing new equipment. Long-term goals, like keeping aside marketing expenses, are crucial because they are connected to the overall growth of your business.

You should be practical about the goals you set. They should be purely based on your business’ capacity to spend and save.

A budget will help you:

• Forecast what money you expect to earn

• Plan where to spend that revenue

• See the difference between your plan and reality

8. Concept Development:

Concept development is a crucial stage in the new product or service development. It takes place early on in the process and helps to identify key perceptions, user needs and wants associated with the product or service.

What is concept development?

Concept development involves coming up with a detailed description of an idea, explained from the perspective of your customer. A concept typically highlights the best features of the proposed solutions in terms of:

• convenience
• usability
• quality
• functionality
• performance
• price
• values
• experience

When developing a new product or service, it is common to work with a large number of concepts and only develop the select few that show the most promise.

9. Product Design & Sampling:

After building concept its a time to design your product, the most important and unique element of a brand.

product design describes the process of imagining, creating, and iterating products that solve users’ problems or address specific needs in a given market.

The key to successful product design is understanding the end-user customer, the person for whom the product is being created. Product designers attempt to solve real problems for real people by using empathy and knowledge of their prospective customers’ habits, behaviors, frustrations, needs, and wants.

When design process is completed and final designs are picked from all collection for manufacturing its now time to bring these designs to sampling before making into bulk.

WHAT IS SAMPLING?AND WHY ITS IMPORTANT?

Sampling is a process of making a product proto-type prior to starting bulk production. The same process is applied to garment sampling. In mass garment manufacturing, where apparel brands source garments in bulk quantity, sample making is an essential step before placing the bulk order.

IMPORTANCE:

Sampling of garments is given great emphasis. It determines the approval of future orders from buyers and fetches business for a garment manufacturing or export company. Sampling is one of key elements of the pre-production processes in a garment industry. Before a manufacturer produces bulk orders, a prior sampling of styles is done to get approvals and jumpstart the fabrication of garments.

Sampling is not just for buyers, but the manufacturers can also derive estimates of yarn consumption for development of fabric, dyeing, printing, and stitching cost for a particular style or pattern given by the buyer. Companies can have a separate sampling department or a merchandiser, who works closely with the sampling section to source raw materials, and processes for developing a quality product for an affordable price.

Sampling includes details like a product/style code or a reference number, color specifications, kind of fabric, composition, description, quantity, and details of embroidery, buttons, zippers, or any other sort of accessories used. Hence it can be said that samples of garments work as a bridge between buyers and the producers.

10. Material & Product Sourcing:

The process of sourcing products or services is the first step in the supply chain. It’s about finding the balance between the quality of products and raw materials you need and the affordability. The less you spend, the more you’ll make. However, poor-quality goods won’t do the job.

Sourcing involves the following:

• Finding quality sources of goods and services
• Negotiating contracts
• Establishing payment terms
• Market research
• Testing for quality
• Considering outsourcing for goods
• Establishing standards

Why Is Sourcing Important?

What is sourcing in supply chain? Done well, sourcing allows companies to establish consistent supply chains. This keeps your shelves stocked and customers happy.

Strategic planning in the sourcing process is central to cost structure, profit margins, and competitiveness for businesses of all sizes.

11. Sale & Marketing Channel:

After Product Manufacturing and Bulk production main task it to market your good and sale out them all in a specific time frame.

sale and marketing strategy enable brands to follow a path already decided for their product to follow without throwing it in the market blind eye.

Sales channels are the paths a product takes from the manufacturer to customers. They can be direct, meaning your business conducts the sale directly in contact with the customer. Such channels could be your own brick-and-mortar store, or your own online store.

Widely used sale channel is B2B channel.

A marketing channel is described as the set of people, organizations, and activities that work together to transfer goods (products and services) from the point of origin to the point of consumption. The primary purpose of a marketing channel is to create a connection between the organization that creates a product or service and prospective customers who may want to purchase it.

For physical products, there are four basic types of marketing channels:

1. Direct selling, where products are marketed and sold directly to consumers without a fixed retail location
2. Selling through intermediaries, where products are manufactured at the point of origin and sold to customers by downstream intermediaries such as agents, brokers, wholesalers and retail stores
3. Dual distribution, where manufacturers combine multiple types of channels to sell products to the end-user. This could mean that the manufacturer sells directly to customers and also does business with wholesalers and retailers who sell to customers through their own distribution networks
4. Reverse marketing, where products move from the customer back to the manufacturer. Typical cases of reverse marketing include recycling and product recalls