How To Design Fashion Products With Profit In Mind
How To Design Fashion Products With Profit In Mind
Designing great products is indisputably one of the most purely creative experiences around and it's easy to get lost in the creative pursuit. However, as the owner of your your fashion brand, it's important to ground your designs to ensure they are not only appealing to your end customers, but they also serve your new business as well by generating strong profits.
The good news is that the Apliiq platform is setup for fashion brands to be able to tap into services that mass produced fashion brands utilize to keep their designs professional and their profits strong. With this backdrop in mind, we want nothing more than to be your indispensable partner to help you create amazingly profitable products and we hope the following tips and tricks will broaden your vision for how you can create products while at the same time giving you some great tips to keep profits strong.
Less Imprints Is More Profit
Each service (print, embroidery, etc) you add to a product design increases the overall cost to produce the item and it will reduce your overall profits if you cannot charge more for that design. You have to factor that into your design considerations. For example, a t shirt with a front print and a back print costs more than a t shirt with just a front print.
Wait a second, does that mean you should never create a shirt with front and back artwork? Well, no not exactly. However, you should certainly be conscious of designing products that use 3 or 4 different design elements as the design will quickly become cost prohibitive. As we mentioned before there are different ways to create "rich designs" which we will elaborate on further in this article.
Understanding Service Costs
Having a solid handle on how much different services cost can help you make good design decisions upfront in your product design process. For example, printing and embroidery don't cost the same price, embroidery is more expensive by $3.01 per product. Services costs for dropshipping are as followed from least expensive to most expensive;
Woven Label: $1 - $.80 per label, depending on amount you purchase at a time
Embroidered patches: $2.00 - $3.50 per patch depending on size
Private Label: $2.50 per product
Digital Print: $6.99
Transfer Print: $6.99
Embroidery: $10 per file ($11 to setup artwork)
Design Strategy Means Making Good Service Choices
Let's look into a couple specific design scenarios to understand how you can use good design strategy to plan product designs that will accomplish the visual aesthetic you want, but will also accomplish your profitability goals.
You just worked with an amazing artist to create an awesome print file, you know that it will look great as a back print on a Comfort Colors t shirt. However, your instinct also tells you that the design feel "empty" without a little left breast print on the front. That's a good intuition. But when you mock up the design you realize that the drop shipping price is $21.98. Now you maybe able to charge $34 for the t shirt and feel that is $7.03 is an acceptable amount of profit (remember $4.75 shipping fee plus 1$ fullfullment fee). However, you may also want to consider if a lower left hem label on the front of the shirt would also fill your aesthetic need for something on the front. The price of the t shirt with the label and the back print is only $14.99 and that would yield a profit of $14.02 per shirt, just about double the profit.
You just heard about our ultra heavy weight t shirts and want to release a heavy weight shirt to your customers. Given the heavyweight nature of the shirt a chest embroidery feels like a great option, as it's a good idea to match the weight of the embellishment to the weight of the garment. Quickly mocking up the product shows the shirt plus the embroidery will be $22.30 and you think $38.00 for this crispy new t shirt will fly for your customers. After shipping that design will yield $10.71 profit per product. Another design approach you could consider would be to utilize a small embroidered patches instead of direct embroidery. This design would cost $14.30 per product and would yield $18.71 per product and would nearly double your profits.
As you can see there are multiple ways that designs can be constructed and considering the prices for different approaches to your design will ensure that you make the best possible decision for your brand. Another important thing to consider is allowing the garment you select to "tell the story" as opposed to having your artwork and embellishments tell the product story.
Premium Products Drive Massive Profits
Apliiq's unique approach to labeling and relabeling products allows us to work with garments that a lot of other dropshipping providers don't touch. From lightweight waterproof jackets, to denim jackets, to camo hoodies and tie dye shirts these products can all be relabeled as your brand. These highly specialized unique products invoke strong consumer sentiments without much embellishment at all. Most can be cost effectively relabeled and resold with minimal additional branding required to create a highly desirable well branded consumer product. Let's look at a few examples;
The Independent Trading Company's Camo Hoodies come appointed with beautifully designed camo patterns. This hoodie can be relabeled and have a woven label sewn on for $29.75. Selling that beautiful heavyweight camo hoodie for $59.00 yeilds a profit of $18.26 per product.
The Independent Trading Company's Puffer Jacket is a highly functional winter jacket and can be relabeled and resold for $44.50. This jacket easily fetches a sales price of $68.00, leaving you with $18.51 in profit.
As you can see, selecting unique products and rebranding them can be an insanely cost effective way to improve profit margins while creating standout designs for your clothing line.
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