Your collection needs more than great design
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You can create a beautiful collection and still struggle to build a profitable fashion brand. Creating the product is only one part of the equation. You also have to think about what belongs in the collection, what has the strongest sales potential, and how those decisions support the business you're trying to build. That’s where merchandising comes in. Merchandising helps you look at your collection through a business lens, not just a creative one. And I think that’s especially important right now as designers gain access to more tools that can help them create faster, analyze information and streamline parts of the process. Technology can give you more information and more options, but you still have to know how to make good business decisions with them. Understanding things like sales forecasting, identifying your key sales drivers and making more strategic decisions about what you sell can help you build a collection with a clearer path to profitability. That’s the focus of Build a Profitable Fashion Brand: Merchandising Strategy for Independent Designers, taught by Alicia Appleton, a merchant and entrepreneur who also serves as a judge on From Pencil to Production. Alicia brings a merchant’s perspective to the course, helping independent designers think more strategically about the business behind their collections and make product decisions with sales and profitability in mind. If you’ve been putting most of your energy into creating the product, this may be the right time to strengthen the strategy behind it. → Learn more about Build a Profitable Fashion Brand Mikelle |