How would you go about starting a fashion label? To answer that question, CGTN Europe spoke to fashion brand consultant Elizabeth Stiles and Thierry Bayle, founder of Global Fashion Management. 

Having accumulated years of experience in fashion buying and design management while working with fashion names including Miss Selfridge, Next and New Look, Stiles believes that independent fashion brands are the future. 

Bayle launched Global Fashion Management as a way of helping clients with the advice of internal and external seasoned professionals. He offers key insight as to how to grow a brand on a global as well as knowing what it takes to launch or manage a retail business. 

1. Set up your brand and choose a name 

"My number one piece of advice is to keep it really simple for yourself," says Stiles. "Don't try to launch with too many products or too many different fabrics: start with one hero product that you then become known for."

For Bayle, the critical pillars of launching a fashion label are "creativity and business. You need to be able to have the skills, the expertise and the mastery, not just in design, but also in selling, marketing, media - it's about management of people, agents, trade shows. 

"The second aspect is being able to have great processes, because as you scale up the business, you'll have to put more training and processing in place.

"The third thing is consistency - not easy in 2020. You need a sounding board, a coach, a mentor - you need to bring critical thinking into business. Ultimately your ego is certainly your biggest strength, it's gonna give you the creativity to produce a global brand - but don't let that ego also be a liability." 

Bayle, who has worked alongside some of the biggest names in fashion including Calvin Klein and Versace, stresses the importance of having a name that captures the attention of those that hear it. 

"You need a name which will capture somebody's imagination so you want a name that fits purpose and ideally suits the customer base you have in mind," he says. "Afterwards it's going to be really about marketing the name locally, regionally and globally to be able to get that maximum impact on the consumer worldwide. 

"Today, thanks to digital, you can certainly reach out to the many.” 

2. Source your materials 

In order to launch a fashion label, you need the materials to make the clothes in the first place. Stiles says that sourcing materials can be difficult if you don't know where to go for them. 

"The best place to start is going to trade shows and meeting the owners of the fabric mills who are producing the fabrics," says Stiles. "There's a trade show on in Paris, twice a year, called Premiere Vision, which you can go to and also learn about what the fabric trends are that are coming up."

However, Stiles warns that prioritizing profit over ethics is not the way to go. "The future of building a fashion brand is definitely going down a more eco and sustainable route, so trying to use fabrics that are either organic or BCI (The Better Cotton Initiative) cotton approved and making sure people are being paid fairly I think is really important and being transparent in the way people are being treated in the factories."

3. Use social media 

Stiles and Bayle agree that social media is vital to not only launching a brand, but also attracting consumers and encouraging people to buy your products. 

"A lot of businesses looking to launch ask me when the right time is to start their Instagram page," says Stiles. "My answer is 'Yesterday.' You need to start it as soon as possible and really start building that audience before your product launches." 

Bayle also emphasizes the strength of social media in garnering brand awareness worldwide: "Make sure you understand the segment of customers you're trying to reach and whether you're going to be focusing mainly on consumers or trade buyers - or choosing whether you're going to focus on LinkedIn, Facebook, maybe Snapchat, TikTok…”

For Bayle, social media is "not necessarily a cash generator, it's a brand-building exercise. Therefore, making sure that you have clear goals and that you treat it as a real project."

4. Attract consumers 

Stiles she likes to see gaining customers as "attracting consumers rather than going out to look for them" - and one way to do this is "by having an opinion on something. 

"If you think fast fashion is the way forward, you can talk about why that's great, or if you think eco-fashion is great or why you think maternity fashion is great... Just having a niche and a specific way of speaking about your product so that your audience also believe in the same thing.

"But you've got to have an opinion - you can't have a vanilla style about your brand. It's got to be really exciting for people to be able to love you; if that means some people don't like you then that's also ok, but you want people to have a really strong opinion on your brand." 

5. Don't give up! 

Although Stiles notes that "there are lots of independent labels launching at the moment," that's partly because there has "never been an easier time to launch a brand.

"There's platforms like Shopify that you can put your brand on. Five or ten years ago it would have cost thousands and thousands of dollars to launch a website, but now you could do it for under a hundred. 

"A platform like Instagram is free to be able to speak to your audience online, emails make it really easy to speak to wholesalers and there's lots of trade shows you can go to - so now is a brilliant time to launch a business," she enthuses. "But know that there's lots of other people doing it, so you have to have a unique selling point."

When also warning that the early stages of launching a fashion label, or any business for that matter, can be challenging, Stiles says it's important to not let yourself be discouraged by aspects of running a label that you might find slightly more challenging. 

"A lot of people who set up a fashion brand are very creative people and so the business side of things becomes a little bit harder. Know that there is support out there for you if you are a creative - you have to stay on top of your numbers. 

"You have to keep your cash flow going, you have to make sure that you're always talking to your audience online and building that community around your business - not just getting involved in the creative side of things, but also making sure that you look after the business side of things as well."

READ MORE CGTN's Fashion Week special