Printing Business Guide
A Guide to Sell Activewear Online Plus Bonus Tips on Getting Your First Sale
Summary
Yoga pants, criss cross tank tops, cycling t-shirts.
These are no longer just ‘gym wear’. The athleisure fashion trend is now on the streets.
This shift in activewear has encouraged retailers to maximize opportunities from this growing trend. And there’s no wonder that the athleisure market size will surpass USD 842.03 billion by 2028 at a CAGR of 10.33%.
Do you look at people wearing these, and say – ‘how do I sell what they are wearing? Then this blog is for you.
We share insights on how to start selling sportswear online and even give you tips on surviving in the market.
Continue reading!
How To Start an Activewear Brand?
Step 1: Find a Product
First things first. Find a product idea. Ideation could be time-consuming but it’s worth it.
What clothing items do you want to sell? The most common athleisure outfits are leggings, joggers, sweatpants, gym tanks, sports bras, hoodies, shorts, sneakers and many more.
Begin by doing a market analysis and competitor research to determine the demand. Add your creativity and interest to your desired result, and finalize a product.
Niche: Let’s say you decided to sell yoga pants. There are hundreds of brands selling yoga pants. This means there’s huge competition in the market. So, you focus on a specific segment, for example, larger-sized yoga pants. This will help you reach your ideal customers and make your entry into the market relatively easy.
Fabric: At this stage, we suggest you be realistic. You dream of being the next Nike, and that’s great. But as a newbie, it’s good to keep a reality check. Big guns like Nike have the resources and dedicated teams working on fabrics unavailable elsewhere. You do not have that right now. So, the best is to find manufacturers who supply quality products.
Trends: When starting your activewear business, consider the recent changes in the industry:
- Customers are becoming increasingly environment-conscious, which has led to sustainable clothing trends. You can cater to this demand by choosing products made with organic cotton, recycled polyester, and low-impact, non-toxic dyes.
- 90s products are making a return in the industry. Lightweight and breathable crop tops are in style. Additionally, oversized and asymmetrical styles have regained popularity.
(Source: https://uk.ryderwear.com/)
- Furthermore, according to Forbes, activewear and athleisure brands flourished more than ever during the pandemic despite struggles faced by the fashion industry.
- One-piece activewear is trending in the industry, with bodysuits, leotards, and catsuits seeing an 83% increase in popularity.
- Activewear’s growing popularity in everyday wear has blurred the line between activewear and fashion, creating a new apparel category.
Offer Personalized Activewear
Customization is the new cool in the apparel industry!
And offering custom activewear can help you offer your buyers the same.
Offering custom activewear allows your buyer to express their individuality with unique designs, names, or motivational quotes on their garments.
You can easily allow your buyers to customize by integrating a product designer tool.
This user-friendly tool features intuitive interfaces and an extensive graphics library, allowing customers to create their designs easily.
They can add custom text, choose from various fonts and colors, and even upload their own images for a truly one-of-a-kind creation.
The real-time preview feature ensures customers are satisfied with their designs before ordering
Moreover, the tool integrates seamlessly with your existing ecommerce platform, making the ordering process smooth and convenient for customers.
With high-quality output and responsive design, the product designer tool enables customers to create personalized activewear anytime, anywhere, and on any device.
Sell custom activewear to cater to the unique needs of your customers. Check how a Product Designer Tool can help you get started with product customization.
Step 2: Design Your Product
Most activewear brands adopt the ‘less is more’ approach to design. They create beautiful minimalist pieces with sleek lines and unadorned fabrics. For instance, Alo Yoga is known for its minimalist pieces with a touch of streetwear edge.
Next comes colors. Keep in mind your future customers and choose colors strategically. While you may think sticking to basic colors like white or gray is a comfortable idea, the trends say otherwise. People love fresh, bright , pastel colors like as lilac, aqua, and peach.
These tips will help you choose the right color:
Go monochromatic – meaning, choose various shades, tones, or tints of one color.
Analogous colors – these are groups of three colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. Analogous hues will help create a rich, monochromatic look.
Experiment – be bold and keep experimenting with different colors.
When choosing brand colors for your activewear business, it is helpful to consider six steps:
- Research existing brands in the industry
- Identify the desired emotion you want your brand to evoke
- Create a mood board to guide your design process
- Select primary and secondary colors that align with your brand’s values and aesthetics
- Test the colors to ensure they convey the intended emotion
- Review the results to make any necessary adjustments or refinements.
Step 3: Employ the Power of Personalization
At one time, customers were delighted with mass production—uniform products at a lower price. That’s not the case anymore. There’s a shift in shopping choices, and customers are willing to pay more to a brand that offers personalization.
Think this way: customer A wants a cycling t-shirt with ‘fitness freak’ written on it, while customer B wants yoga pants with pizza images. How will you satisfy their demands? Here’s when a product design tool comes into play—a tool that will let customers create designs they like.
This is a powerful tool. It strives to provide a singular shopping experience to users by giving them complete freedom to design their products. The best example is Nike By You where you can create your own iconic sneakers.
Personalization will help enhance customer loyalty. When customers have two options – one brand that gives ordinary sweatpants and the other lets them make the pants extraordinary by creating them create their own designs; naturally, they are likely to purchase from the second brand and purchase more often. This way, you can even increase customer retention. Secondly, this is a great way to increase brand awareness. Your potential customers are likely to share their experiences on social media platforms. This word-of-mouth publicity is only going to benefit you further.
Get started with product customization on your online store. See how a Product Design Tool can help your business.
Step 4: Choose a Way to Sell
Option 1 – Sell on an art/retail marketplace
If you do not have an online store and do not have the budget to create one, a good idea is to sell on marketplaces like Threadless. These sites, also known as print-on-demand sites, let you upload products and sell them to potential customers.
Here’s how such platforms work:
- Create 100s of print-on-demand activewear items
- Make your shop unique with a fully customizable storefront
- Set your own prices with the help of a pricing tool or let the marketplace do it for you.
- Let them handle the inventory, manufacturing, shipping, and customer care
- Get access to customer contact info for email opportunities
This way, you can sell your items to anyone in the world. While you will enjoy the web traffic from these marketplaces, you must also keep promoting your store.
You can even sell your activewear products on popular retail marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and eBay. As compared to art marketplaces, these could be a little costly as they charge (1) a listing fee per item you post, (2) a monthly subscription or service fee, (3) a fee for each transaction, or (4) some combination of these. But in return, you receive massive exposure in terms of traffic.
Option 2 – Sell on social media platforms
Is social media selling right for your business? Recent studies have found that businesses that practice social selling generally see a $5 return for every $1 invested. That’s possible only if you sell on the right platform and sell it correctly.
Before you choose a platform, consider audience demographics. In your case, your target audience will mainly consist of millennials, who make up a big chunk of the activewear market. So, Instagram and Facebook should be your top choices, not LinkedIn and Twitter.
Facebook social selling – Use the product catalog feature. This feature allows you to link your inventory to your Facebook business profile. Click good images, write good product descriptions, set the price, and you are set to begin selling. With Facebook ads, you can reach customers in a highly targeted way.
Instagram social selling – Instagram provides shoppable posts. When a user taps one of these posts, they see the item’s name and price. When they tap it again, they’ll get more information. If they like what they see, they can purchase it right there in the Instagram app. When selling on Instagram, remember that this is a visual platform. Make sure your image quality is top-notch to entice customers.
Social Selling Don’ts
Don’t ever ignore comments. People will ask you questions about your product which you should answer as timely as possible. The more you engage the more they are likely to make a purchase.
Don’t constantly try to sell. Maintain a balance between sharing product posts and informative posts. The 80/20 rule is a common guideline for social media content, which suggests that 80% of social media posts should be informative, educational, or entertaining while only 20% should be promotional.
A unique and valuable post will increase brand awareness, and more audiences will reach out to explore what you are offering.
Additionally, failing to define the target audience, not creating engaging content, and ignoring customer feedback are some common mistakes you must avoid while selling on social media.
Option 3 – Create an online store
An an online store will give you a competitive edge and a widened scope to expand customer base and potential revenue. Additionally, creating an eCommerce marketplace for a sports goods and merchandise business can be an excellent strategy for expanding the business and increasing sales.
Selling products online is not a cakewalk, but technology has made things easier. Even if it’s easy, it is expensive—that’s what you are thinking. Well, you, of course, need to make some investment. But when compared to the profits you get, it’s nothing. If you think building an eCommerce platform is feasible, go for it!
There are two ways through which you can build your ecommerce website.
- Hosted ecommerce website
- Self-hosted ecommerce website
A hosted site is suitable for someone with little or no technical expertise. If you want to create a custom store, go for a self-hosted website. However, this option will demand some technical skills.
If you think building an eCommerce site aloneall by yourself could be time-consuming and prevent you from focusing on your products, hire a development company with a team of designers and developers. With their experience and expertise, you can have a store how you want it,.
Boost activewear sales by selling products that best suit your customers’ needs. See how PrintXpand’ Web2Print Storefront Solution can make all the difference.
Step 5: Strategize Shipping
Shipping products yourself means taking care of product quantity, weight, packaging process, etc. If you do not have time for that, dropshipping will work for you. In the dropshipping model, you purchase products from third-party suppliers who will ship directly to the customer instead of storing them.
This is how dropshipping works:
- Your customer places an order for a product.
- You forward the order to the dropship supplier.
- The dropship supplier packages and ships the order directly to the customer with your brand’s name on the package.
Get Your First Sale
Giveaways: Seattle-based online store Girlfriend Collective, directed their entire marketing budget for the launch into giving away their gear for free. Customers had to share on Facebook or through email, and pay for the shipping costs (which came to about $20). The retail price of each pair was $68-78. The result was; the brand received 10,000 orders on its first day, and its website crashed within the first 2 days from heavy traffic.
product giveaways are an effective promotional strategy that helps increase brand awareness and potential sales. However, to reap their benefits, you need a solid strategy. Keep these things in mind when creating a giveaway promotion plan.
- Choose a prize that suits your target audience.
- Determine how long to run the contest
- Decide the platforms you’ll use to promote your contest
Influencer marketing
Customers trust reviews that come from third parties. Utilizing this approach can drive brand awareness, and cultivate a potential audience. There are different ways to benefit from influencer marketing – (a) you can ask influencers to share your product on their social media handles, (b) if you have an online store, you can publish blogs by influencers.
Some users buy thousands of followers. These are fake influencers. To avoid them, you must know how to qualify potential influencers. Hootsuite shared something called, “The R’s of influence.”
- Relevance: Is the influencer sharing content relevant to your business?
- Reach: Reach refers to the number of followers an influencer has on their social sites.
- Resonance: Is the potential level of engagement the influencer can create with an audience both valuable and relevant to your brand?
It’s not necessary that you need influencers on the level of Kim Kardashian. You can target fitness trainers and yoga instructors with, let’s say, 500,000 followers, provided the posts get you a good amount of orders.
Product reviews
Wondering how you will get a review when you are just launching the business? Give a group of people your product to test out and ask them to write a review on either your store or social media. Once you start getting orders, encourage customers to leave a review.
Survival Strategies
Activewear is a competitive market. How can you ensure your survival here? Remember, change is the law of life. You need to keep evolving.
Once you think your brand is well-established and earning a decent amount, try experimenting with products. How long will people like those same blue-gray sweatpants? If you start by selling cotton sweatpants, you can add 3-4 different fabrics like polyester or shift to organic materials.
What Are You Waiting For?
The activewear trend is here to stay. There was a time when buying activewear was just for athletes. Today, we find people going shopping or brunch in sneakers, and yoga pants. And with home quarantine becoming normal, the demand for comfortable wear is rising.
There’s no doubt there’s competition here. But brands offering some value to their customers by offering sustainable products or personalized activewear are doing a good job. Start selling personalized activewear using the Product Design Tool. Take a personalized demo of our product to understand how it works.
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