Working in the textile industry and running your own business is quite rewarding, but as you could expect it comes with advantages and disadvantages. While working in the textile industry, similar to all other industries, many entrepreneurs fail in achieving success because they don’t know the challenges this business comes with. In all industries, difficulties are not something you can avoid, you have to face them and find a way to solve them. By being ready, you grow your chances to run a profitable business.
So what challenges should you be ready to face when starting your business?
Hiring the right people
Hiring the right professionals has never been so challenging. Finding employees can take you several days if not even weeks, and not the candidates are the ones that slow down the process, but the multitude of tasks you have to complete. It will take you many hours to review all the resumes, conduct interviews, and tests, and to create an attractive customized package for every one of them.
The solution is to be exclusive during the recruiting process. The job ad should be clear in terms of what qualifications the candidates should have when they will work, how many hours, and what salary they should expect. It will save you time if you manage to narrow the list to people who are qualified to work in the textile industry and who are willing to accept your working conditions.
Lack of capital
You may be one of the people who saved money to fund their clothing line, but chances are you have no capital to start your textile business because it’s quite challenging to save the huge sum you will need.
The challenge comes when you find it difficult to convince financial institutions to lend you money to start your business. They consider the textile industry too risky for a young entrepreneur and they are not willing to take the risk. And you would do the same if you would run a bank because fashion trends are changing every season. If you have a surplus of items, it would prove almost impossible to sell them because the buyers will be too caught with the latest trends to notice a clothing item from the last season. The only solution would be to sell the items at cheap prices, but even if you manage to sell them, your business still loses money. So, it’s understandable why banks are reserved in offering you the entire sum.
How can you solve the capital problem? You should start a smaller business, one that doesn’t need a large capital, and then grow it in phases. Manufacture the clothes in small batches and try to sell them before the season ends.
The production costs are higher than ever
The challenges are not over when you find capital for your business. You still need money to support the production process, at least until you gain revenue because the costs of production in the textile industry are growing daily. When you create the business plan you make a budget based on the production costs at a given moment, but you should expect the expenses to grow the moment you will start the process because the prices will probably multiply in a couple of months. The prices of materials grow proportionally with the number of producers, the more companies are the more expensive the resources.
The solution would be to have an alternative source of income, to support your business during the first months. It will take about three months for your clothing manufacturing company to be able to sustain itself, and about half of the year to generate a profit. Investing in forex is a smart solution, if you choose scalping trading you will not even have to spend too much time placing trades. You can do scalping trading manually or you can base your actions on algorithms and increase your chances to make a profit. Make sure you are collaborating with the best brokers for scalping trading if you want to make enough money to financially support your business.
Competition
As you could expect there are many people in this business, and some of them are quite famous. If it would be to ask you to name 10 clothing brands, it wouldn’t take you more than a minute to list them. Hundreds of companies are making clothes in every country and some businesses are so popular they sell worldwide. Your goal should be to compete with brands like Prada and Burberry, but for now, you will have to focus on going up against your local competitors.
As long as you are smart enough to collaborate with your competitors and to create a strategy to break the market and to retain clients, it should not be hard for you to grow a profitable business. You should use multiple strategies, from pricing methodologies to social networking campaigns, and promotional plans. Reaching your audience is crucial, as long as you offer them something your competitors do not, they will choose you.
One great idea would be to launch your products with buy one get one at 50% discount. People love discounts so you will definitely win some clients with this strategy.
Trademarking your products
Because of the size of the textile industry, copycats and counterfeiting are more than common. Many companies are too lazy to create their own designs so they prefer to steal popular ones and use them as their own. They have no problem in copying the designs you worked so hard to create.
The problem is that you spend a lot of money to pay your designers and to create unique clothing items and it will cost you money if someone steals your works and sell products at a cheaper rate. They afford to sell the clothing items cheaper because they don’t have to invest in design. The solution would be to trademark the designs before launching the clothing line, it will protect your business from financial loss.
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Mayedul Islam is a Founder and Editor of Garments Merchandising. He is an Expert in Garments Merchandising. Writing is his passion. He loves to write articles about Apparel, Textile and Garment Washing specially on Merchandising. Mail him at mayedul.islam66@gmail.com
Really, production costs, capital & employers are the three main factors for a new ventures. Great blog.
I think this headline is wrong. it’s really so sad i read one thing at headline, but i get another thing at description.