You may be a great fashion designer but the thought of designing a website can send shivers down your spine. Building a website is easier than you may think, and after you read this, you’ll overcome your fear, get to designing, so you can start selling.

Shopping online is a nationwide pastime. It can be an incredibly efficient and inexpensive way to attract your customers and sell to them. But designers fear they don’t have the skills to build and design a website. I have some tips and tools that you can use to get your fashion line up online, selling, and generating revenue. 

If you are still apprehensive about designing your own website, there are many companies and independent vendors you can find to do it for you. Here are a few things to remember. Make sure that it is easy to change your website. You may want to change an offer, or swap a photo, or post a new product. You will want to be able to do that quickly and correctly. If you get a web designer to help you, make sure that they will be there to help you adjust your site quickly as different needs come up or they teach you how to do it yourself.

Why do I Need a Website?

There are many reasons a new fashion line needs a website. It’s an online showroom that’s open 24/7/365. It showcases your apparel and actively sells it even when you are sleeping. It is an essential element for promoting and selling your collection. 

Your website is also a very good way to connect and communicate with your customers and convert website visitors to loyal buying customers. You can reinforce the community you build on Social Media, deliver valuable content  to your community that can help build customer loyalty, and make them aware of new offers, special offers, and exclusive members-only sales events. 

Your website is your online fashion showroom, sales generating engine, and priceless communication vehicle for your new fashion line. For those three reasons alone, you need a website and if you want to be relevant with your audience your website is an essential calling card for your fashion line.

How Do I Get Started?

Many designers are overwhelmed by the thought of getting started building their fashion website. They don’t know where to begin. But it’s easier than you fear. Here are a few tips to quick-start your website and simplify the process of designing and launching it. This is 2022 and the internet has been here for over 20 years. It has evolved and that evolution has eliminated the need to understand HTML and Coding. There are now Do-It-Yourself platforms that do everything from registering your domain name, allowing you to design your website, hosting your website, managing your shopping cart, and many other things all for one monthly fee. 

For a fashion website the platforms I like most are Shopify and Wix. They both make it simple to do everything yourself that you used to have to pay a webmaster to do. There are also others including SquareSpace and Cartel Boss. Shopify is great because it can be easy to learn through tutorials. You can follow pre-made templates or simply design from a blank page. It also allows you to integrate a robust shopping cart that accepts more forms of payment than Wix and some of the others. That is important because the easier and faster you can make it for your customer to pay, they will tend to buy more and have a better User Experience (UX) shopping on your site.

Of course, you can also hire a web designer to design and create the site for you. This can be easier and even faster at first, but also more costly and you give up control.  This can make every photo, inventory, and price change cost money because you have to go back to your webmaster to implement them. It can also slow the process down depending on the webmaster’s availability and response time.

The option that leaves you the most flexibility is to learn to do it yourself. Shopify offers New York City classes: “Webpage Essentials” by shopify in NYC. It’s a class you can attend in person or online. YouTube also hosts hundreds of “How To” videos on every one of the popular platforms so within a few hours, you can become an expert web designer.

Once you choose a platform, it is important to select a design for the look of your website. You should spend time thinking about your brand and also look at competitors’ sites, as well as larger more successful fashion websites. You can get a lot of good ideas and inspiration for what you like, what seems to work, and even what you want to avoid.  

Also Make sure that your Brand Kit and the design, color palette, logo, font, and background of your website are all in sync. That reinforces your brand identity and can build a stronger presence for you in your consumers mind. 

You might want to consult a fashion ecommerce marketing professional. That specialist can take a look at your design and give you some tips that you can pre-build in the beginning to help increase sales, trigger search engines, and improve the shopping experience on your site. Finally, you will want to choose high quality images and photos that look great and showcase your line on both desktop screens and mobile devices.

What Do I Need to Have on a Website?

Let’s start at the beginning. When a visitor arrives at your website, you will want to get their name and email address. You’ve seen the pop up window offering discounts on other shopping sites. If you put in your name and email, you get a discount on your first purchase. That is called a “capture” page pop up because it captures a name and email address for you. It also starts a good shopping experience by giving that potential new customer instant value. Plus it gives you the viewer’s name and email so it’s a win-win. That contact information can be priceless to you in the future as you create an email relationship where you can offer your list new products, discounts, valuable content, and other important information.  

After your viewer exits your capture page pop up they arrive at your home page. This can feature a special item you have for sale that day, new items in your line, a seasonal choice, or a special offer for the day or week or whatever. It can also feature important information about your fashion line and what makes it better than other competitors within the niche. 

Once your viewer is on your home page, they can simply buy what is for sale there and go straight to your shopping cart,  or they can go to a catalog page which features other items in your line. This catalog page is often a page or series of pages  with a grid set up that features thumbnails of the items that the viewer can click on for a larger photo, more specific information, size and color specifications, and a click to order button. 

You can add other pages that might highlight the features and benefits of your product, special animations and designs, and other information that is not for sale but informative about your brand and design. For example, where it is made, what it is made out of and washing and care instructions. 

It is great to add a Blog page where you can post weekly or monthly informational articles. This page is important for the search engines that review your site to get important keywords and new information so that they can rank you as more relevant than a site that never changes. This can attract important and valuable organic traffic who may not see your social media or advertising.

Finally, you need an integrated shopping cart where the viewers can store their favorite selections, check out, pay, and arrange shipping. In the do it yourself platforms, like Shopify, these shopping carts are pre-built for you and can even be easily integrated with your fulfillment house, your bank, and your office accounting and inventory system. 

How Do I Set up the Shopping Cart to Take Online Payments?

The importance of your shopping cart is it enables your customer to check out and it allows you to accept payments and even deposit the sales into your account. The good ones can be completely automated and if you use the ones provided by the platform you choose, the shopping cart can be up and selling in a few minutes.  

Almost all of the do it yourself platforms have plug and play shopping carts that process credit card payments without you having to set up and integrate a merchant account at your bank. This can save many hours of backend work and get your line  actively selling as fast as you can launch the site. 

What Do I Need to Drive Traffic?

Finally, a website that exists on an island in the vast sea of other internet websites will soon be neglected and forgotten. It is important to set up social media accounts and perform Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to attract and drive traffic from many different sources. These elements function as active satellites that send viewers to your website so that you can capture their information and sell them your product.

In addition to SEO and Social Media, it is important to set up an active and aggressive email marketing strategy. With the emails you capture from your viewers, you have an exclusive audience of interested consumers that are already interested in your fashion line. The good news is that there are even do-it-yourself email marketing platforms like MailChimp, Klaviyo, and ConstantContact that can help you launch an email marketing campaign. 

If you can create your website and set up SEO, social media, and email campaigns to support it, you can have an active and profitable home for your fashion line in a few easy steps. That online selling option can be an essential key in the success and growth of your fashion line launch. 

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