Automation and Integration- How to Create a High Performing Fashion Business

Building a fashion brand can be overwhelming. It is important to develop business systems and add automations to make things run seamlessly. In this blog, I will show you why systems and integrations are so important for your profit margin.

Take two individuals who have the same skills. One is tied to old habits and old ways to get things done, and the other uses new technology to manage their time efficiently and effectively. While learning a new skill or new way of getting a task done can take time, ultimately the winning individual is the one who streamlined their workload. 

When it comes to running a fashion brand, especially at the beginning, a key component is being able to operate efficiently. Efficiency doesn't always mean fast, but rather performing in the best way possible to  reduce redundancy and mistakes. 

Setting Up An Integrated Business System:

There are many things to consider when setting up a cohesive business system.

Everyone’s business is run differently, and while modeling your business after someone else’s may sometimes work, the core element is that your business needs to work for you. Things need to make sense and operations need to work for your personality. For example, at V.Mora we all use Google Suite. This allows our team to create and share documents, schedule meetings and appointments, and send and receive email all within one platform. Microsoft Suite can also work well for this, but the key to making any of these systems work, having  everyone who works for your company operate on the same platform. It may seem premature to think about your systems early on during your business development, but the sooner you develop a fluid system the easier it will be to manage in the long term. Some things you want to consider when developing your personalized business systems are: What email platform is best for me? How will I share documents? What bookkeeping software is easy and convenient to use?  Will I be working with team members? What will be easy for a whole team? When I sell my product, what e-commerce platform will I want to use? What email marketing platform will I want to use? Etc. 

Find Ways To Make Operations More Efficiently: 

Once you've developed a core platform for organization and communication, It is time to use integration and automation programs to make your business run even smoother. So, what is integration? Integration is the process of combining one or two elements of a process to make them seamless and efficient. At V.Mora, we utilize Google Suite as our core system, but we also use ClickUp, a project Management software to plan, manage, and track our day to day tasks. This allows our team to get clarity on all of our to-do lists to make sure we are on track. Some project management softwares have Chrome extensions. For example, ClickUp has a Chrome extension that you can use in the extension bar. You can also integrate ClickUp to Google Suite which adds the ClickUp icon to all the Google Suite sidebars and even in each individual email. This integration saves our team tons of time. 

What is Automation? Automation the process of taking the integrated system and making it perform automatically or with very little interaction. Automation’s intent is to provide consistent, predictable, and constant results. For example, a human can enter data into a spreadsheet but there might be a “typo” resulting in a number that is not correct. When an automated software performs this task it is  statistically measurable to diminish or eliminate errors. An automation like this would eliminate the need for an employee to physically input the data and at the same time reduce the expense of “human error”. 

Automation can be triggered without human interaction by using a defined structure of rules and tasks. An example of an email marketing automation would be something like Mailchimp that collects an email from a landing or query page. The email would immediately be given a tag which would trigger a “Welcome” or “Introductory” email, but it doesn’t have to stop there. You could set up and  automate a series of many standard emails that would go out at predetermined times and build your brand’s relationship with that customer and market your products to them.  Each new customer could be taken through the same sequence even though they joined you at different times. How many hours would that save if your other option was to do it by hand and keep track of it all yourself?  Not only would you save time and money, you would actually be doing a more effective job of onboarding your customers and building your relationship with your brand.

Our team at V.Mora uses a software platform named Zapier to connect and automate different applications. It can even automate and integrate tasks that start with one system and go on a journey that may include several other systems. It allows you to let different systems work with each other.

Here are some questions to ask yourself: Am I keeping track of all the day to day and long term tasks? Am I able to answer all my emails daily? Do I show up to work and already swamped with everyday tasks? Am I spending so much time “working” that I am not able to spend quality time “thinking”? If you answer “yes” to these questions, your business may be able to make some profitable and efficient improvement simply by adding some common integration and automation systems to your operations.

By helping designers create and launch several brands at V.Mora, we know that the structure and organization of your business can have as much impact on your business as the success of your brand and fashion line. An efficient business organization can help you maximize revenues which will result in more options for your brand in the future. For help streamlining your fashion brand please contact: vmorainquiry@vmora.com

Stuck on product Production? At V.Mora we can help you through the entire production process from designing, to sourcing and so on through our Production Development services. If you are in need of the following Development and Production services: 

• Sourcing 

• Technical sketches 

• Pattern Making

• Prototype making 

• Sample Making

• Fittings 

• Digitizing and Grading

• Marker Making

• Manufacturing

Please contact us at: vmorainquiry@vmora.com