Category: Fashion

Choosing the name for your fashion brand can be a surprisingly complicated process. While it may initially be simple to come up with a name you love, you also need to perform your due diligence to ensure it’s not already taken or trademarked. When Lafayette 148 New York first started out in 1996, they underestimated the process of securing their name and brand.

Their name, chosen because it was their street address in iconic New York City, was challenged three years into business by a French department store with Lafayette also in their name. Lafayette 148 already had a few stores, branding, and stationery in their name at this point. Luckily, their trademark infringement claim was denied since the department store did not have a brand presence in the U.S.A.

After winning the U.S. trademark case, Lafayette 148 New York expanded their fashion business into Canada and also won their trademark. The process of securing and protecting their brand name was one country at a time and involved costly legal fees. In their case, they must always include the numbers and New York in their name.

When deciding on the name for your fashion brand, it’s smart to look up any potential names on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website and see if they are already a registered trademark. If not, you can apply for a trademark in your specific category as well as secure your website domain and social media handles.

Many people choose to use their own name or initials for their fashion brand. Using online fashion education and noting what makes your brand unique or what words describe your aesthetic can help you come up with a classic name that accurately conveys your brand.

In the head space of the consumers and the industry, brands have a front door. The front door that makes the first impression on the world. This is the name. Coming up with a name that’s going to resonate is super important for your brand. It should be something that people can remember. It should be a name that’s going to stick around.

It’s a mystery why some brand names resonate and why some don’t. We can ask, how did this brand become a huge brand and this brand not? Ultimately, determining why some names stick is hard to kind of quantify. How these brands endure has to do with what’s behind the name. Names are certainly important.

When naming a brand, it’s important to consider a number of factors. If you are starting a brand that you want to have a global scale, you have to consider how the name will translate. For example, you have to ask yourself how this name will translate into Mandarin for a business in China, which is a really important market. Ask yourself: How is this name going to project around the globe?

Thinking about a brand and the name for it can be tricky. “There are certain things that I love for my personal aesthetic. For example, I love genericness, but at the same time it has to be searchable, it has to be found in the world. Like for example, there’s a music group called Men or there’s another music group called The Internet. And I think that’s so fun, but at the same time, it is impossible to find, and it’s not really but it is. Then also, I think personal connections again, make the most sense,” says [INSERT SPEAKER HERE].

What’s in a name? The choice of branding is one that’s fraught with potential pitfalls in fashion business. The eponymous brand means naming the brand after yourself. The world is rife with eponymous brands and some of the biggest brands are named after their designers. Even the great fashion houses of Europe are named after their initial designer.

There’s a precedence for this type of naming, but it also puts the designer in a difficult position once they need investors. Investment comes with degrees of control. If an investor buys into your brand and your brand is Douglas Hand, and you are Douglas Hand, that investor wants 33 percent of the company that holds the trademark Douglas Hand.

Investors will have a lot of input on how the Douglas Hand name is used. You may not agree with those things, but your name is outside of your own control. Now it’s in the control of a constituency that is usually focused on return.

In the 1980s, you had Calvin Klein with his name sewn on really cheap underwear. They made a lot of royalties, but Calvin himself probably wasn’t very happy about it. That is one pitfall of the eponymous brand.

Lawyers and fashion education experts advise clients to come up with something fanciful when deciding on a brand’s name. Why fanciful? You have the benefit of not having to possibly give up the rights to your personal name in the future if you decide to sell your brand.

Another pitfall for names is you can’t choose something that’s purely descriptive. American Apparel, for example, was selling American-made apparel, not the brand. They didn’t have trademark rights until the world recognized American Apparel meant it’s from the Los Angeles-based company run by Dov Charney. It takes a while to build up that name recognition in the mind of the consumer.


Retail has rapidly changed over the years, with some fashion brands opting for alternatives to the traditional brick & mortar, physical store concept. You’ll find brands focusing solely on e-commerce and not having a physical location. Others have a more hybrid approach. Their physical store serves as more of a showroom for potential customers to see their brand in person before later purchasing online.

The innovative use of the showroom concept for fashion retail locations has been adopted by major brands including Bonobos. Potential customers can check out the brand in person, assessing quality, materials, colors, and sizing. Unlike a traditional retail store where you can purchase on site for instant gratification, the showroom concept has customers place their order at the showroom or online for pick up at the showroom.

The showroom model has become a marketing and advertising play for a lot of retailers. Physical retail is also turning into industrial fulfillment, where they’ll do a hybrid model where there’s the showroom and the goods will be at the fulfillment center.

Nordstrom is currently doing this model where half of their stores use this concept called the “bricks to clicks effect.” Through fashion education and trend spotting, a lot of fashion brands are starting to reevaluate their sales channels. Ifthey have a brick and mortar location for consumers to see the styles in person, they’re starting to see in increased online sales in that geographic area – the bricks to clicks effect.

This sales data is being monitored by performance analytics tools like like the Guest platform. Also, point of sale (POS) companies are starting to provide more granular data to their customers and their retailers, so they can use this data to make better qualified buying decisions going forward.

We talk a lot about making customer journey maps. When creating these journey maps, we think about what channels we are operating in—marketing or distribution channels.

So we say, “Let’s design a retail experience travel map.” Then we’ll create another for an entire sale experience where the customer starts in a department store. We might even make a journey map for someone who buys on Instagram. Perhaps we make a journey map that doesn’t necessarily end in a sale. Yet, it could begin with a repair or someone who comes in for a cleaning or an event.

Consider the channels, personas, and touchpoints as you create your journey map. Underneath each of those small touchpoints, write down some of the characteristics you think you’ll be able to capture and identify about that consumer that might be useful for you to market and sell to them.

Make use of any archetype of your choice. When shopping online, consider walking through the consumer journey. A Google search is an excellent place to start. People come across the webpage and visit it. They’re looking through the filters. Consider all of the possible filters that someone would desire. I’d like you to go over each of those processes with me online. Walk through the gaps and consider where you will spend the majority of your time and where you will waste it.

Consider whether they ever make it to the point of purchase. If so, how was your experience? Then give me an overall timeframe because the most crucial factor will be how long it takes our consumer. Are they taking the time to read your blog? Do they pause to read the reviews? Include all of the facts you’ve gathered so far.

Now imagine us moving through a person interacting with an ad on social media, clicking the ad, and seeing where they go, where they land, how they buy, what their feelings are, and what’s going on in their heads.

This is how we choose where we spend our money and what we should prioritize. This exercise will undoubtedly assist you in better understanding your customer journey to choose the most effective route.

Building from a single product to a collection can be a challenge. We’ve seen brands, in particular, that start small. They have one or two silhouettes with a variety of different colorways. They found that one shoe that sticks.

If you look at some of the brands like Yeezy and Allbirds, they’ve come to the table with one or two styles. There is not a plethora of different types of shoes that they’ve come to the table and greeted their consumers with. They have a ton of different colorways. They have also expanded a little bit beyond their original offerings, but at the same time, they’ve had one or two shoes that have carried the day.

All it takes is that one shoe that connects; that Chuck Taylor, that Sperry boat shoe, or one of the Yeezys.

So, trying to create a successful collection, hits at every step of the way, and drives a lot of sales, is often not the model that our companies have. What you can define your company with is maybe one or two types of shoes.

Then, beyond that, you can build out a kind of secondary or supportive offerings that may help drive sales, interest, or meet certain needs of your consumer you’re trying to meet.

However, it’s often that one shoe that drives us and the company to success. We’re able to grow from there.

So, I would focus on one or two things that you do well: One design technique and/or one style; a colorway (or two), or a function that you think is much needed in the footwear marketplace. Then, put all your effort into those areas.

Success will breed the opportunity to expand your line in certain ways, but that just takes time.

Intro

Watch the full video to learn about:

Turning innovation or research into a profitable business model might not be the first goal. The first goal might be solving the problem. Moving away from Milton Friedman’s idea about companies’ sole purpose being money, to E. Freeman’s theory to focus on the stakeholder, because the stakeholder has a need and an expectation from your brand.

One of my favorite ad campaigns ran before Black Friday. Patagonia released a slogan, “You don’t need this jacket.” They think about the planet, the environment, and start to solve a problem that exists in the consumers’ world, but not necessarily in the product world. Releasing a statement to tell consumers to not buy their product resulted in the bottom line of profit. What it allowed them to do is focus on the things they needed instead of material items or to be different.

This goes back to the better piece. You’re going to experiment and innovate your product. Not everything will work. That’s part of accepting good instead of accepting defeat from trying to achieve perfection.
In the past, we used business models called the fashion life cycle. It was profitable and maintainable because businesses found the decline and the obsolescence and repeated the process. That isn’t feasible in today’s industry.

Today, we need to understand the consumer’s problem, solve the problem with both a strategic and business plan. To build a new business or even think of new ideas is about asking the right questions and gathering the right information, to connect to the right people and services. People don’t have to mean actual humans; it can be AI. It could be a part of our future we need to learn to adapt to.

We speak of technology that will help us to understand how to build new ideas to establish new businesses. You know, back in the day, we would say, I got a million-dollar idea or a billion-dollar idea, today, we have to say, I have a great idea and I’ve sourced it out, and I’ve done my homework. I know there is a consumer audience out there that this idea, this brand, this technology, this service, this product, whatever it might be, will work.

Many people spend vast amounts of their personal money and don’t realize how much they will need to pay because it’s tough to figure out when to step out of that process. While many businesses worldwide are started this way, there needs to be an understanding of how far you can go with that. It is also wise to line up another source of funding for your business, both for peace of mind and to allow your business and your personal life to have some separation.

Other people are much more savvy about finding funding very early through networking. So, find people, investors, and other founders willing to take on a young brand or project. Do thorough research. Network a lot. Figure out how that works, what the risks are, what the opportunities are, and then make sure that you understand how much of both your own money and external investors’ money you’re going to need to spend in order to get to the level of success that you aspire to.

That’s where having a business mind, a business mentor, and a business partner is critical from day one. Because you don’t want to be in a position where you’re either spending all of your savings to make your dream come true, or you hit success, and you don’t have the financial means to achieve it. In other words, that you can’t meet the demand. So it is highly critical that financing comes into the picture from the get-go and that you are able to scale your financing according to the brand’s success and goals.

Fashion and footwear collections typically begin with moods, and this is why we call it the “mood board.” A mood board is made by finding inspirational images that fit your mood or theme, cutting out pictures from magazines, newspapers, and physically putting them on a cork board or pinning images on Pinterest. The mood board creates the vision of the collection, whether it’s dramatic and dark or resembles a softer aesthetic.

It will depend on the season as well as who you’re targeting in the footwear business. Who’s the target audience? Creating your footwear collection requires both creativity but also practical online footwear education on seasonal trends, forecasting, and catering to your goal customer and retail stores.

You’ll want to know what’s happening in retail stores simultaneously. Visit stores, such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, to observe and see which colors and details resonate for your own collection. What fabrics and embellishments strike a chord? You may see something at the back counter, or a small detail on a bag, or even the woman walking on the escalator captures your mood. Inspiration can be found at every turn.

The footwear education and design process is important for everyone to know, not just the designers. The process to get there needs to be, and is, touched by all different people throughout the shoe company. It includes the research of color, material, trends, design ideation, and the editing process to get to the best design.

Making shoes requires an extensive product development period where you’re not only working to resource your materials, prototype, and sample, but you’re getting the fit right. All of this needs to be done in a timely manner. This all happens before any pre-production or production and many people touch and influence the design process from marketing to customer, designer, and executives.

A customer profile is extremely important because if you’re trying to sell to everyone, you won’t sell to anyone because you’ll be too spread apart. You have to have a focal point on the kind of customer you want to go after because after you grow, your customer profile will grow, and you will gain others. You have to have that strong focal point in the beginning of what’s the customer you envision wearing your brand or wearing your shoes. One customer profile is a sexy, sassy woman or man that loves wearing stiletto heels.

When identifying a customer for your product, it’s important to know who your customer is, but also what is your product and service? After identifying what your product or service is, you’ll be in a better place to identify who your customer is. Start customer identification through demographics. What is their income? What is their location? What do they do for a living? What is their age? What is their ethnicity?

There are cultural nuances that influence a customer’s buying decisions as well. To further that customer selection, it’s also important to know customer psychographics. What are their hobbies? What do they enjoy doing in their free time? What are their favorite colors? What is their personality?

A lot of times this research is readily available, and you can search past footwear outlets or resources to find that information. Another great way to find this information is through social media. You can maybe hold a small focus group. You could reach out to your friends and family to get their insights.

If there are different groups on different social media platforms, whether those are sneaker lovers, leather shoe lovers or Timberland lovers, you can reach out to these groups to really tap into finding out what it is that they look for in their footwear selection.

If that is your customer, that is a great way for you to identify them. Talk to them and get inside their mind. What are their hobbies? What do they like to do? Are they the ones who are going to be purchasing your shoe? If not, then maybe you need to direct and find someone else. When you are doing the research to identify your customer, keep these things in mind: demographics, psychographics, and everything else will fall into place.