To own a successful online business, first you need to choose an effective business model. Like every other sector, fashion ecommerce too is divided into various segments depending on the varied customer demands. Which of the customer demands are still unfulfilled? Getting answer to this question will give you the direction to target right market. In clothing industry, businesses like custom clothing and dry-cleaning are still untouched. There is a lot of sellers for readymade collection but if you try to search fabric or tailor-made dresses online, you will be disappointed. Clothing has a vast untapped market that awaits new entrepreneurs and ensures stability as well as long term income. Following are few of clothing business ideas based on that.
Read about various ecommerce business models targeting clothing demands below to discern what fits in with your startup plans:
Online Retail Clothing Store
You can start your own online ecommerce store for selling clothes. This is the most obvious option and has widely been adopted by big and small businesses. You can start a multivendor website like Jabong, Myntra, Flipkart, Amazon, Ebay to sell ready to wear clothes as they are never out of demand.
Custom Clothing Website
A commonly ignored business option is online custom clothing. You can start online custom clothing store for men or women as everyone seeks perfect fitted clothes but there are very few stores offering this service. You can have your own in-house tailors or outsource orders to earn the profit margins by just giving a platform to tailors. You can sell the clothes at any price depending upon the competition and earn good deal of profits.
Designer & customized T-Shirts business
Designer stuff has grabbed attention of everyone and is quite demanded these days. It’s the current trend that is not going to change further as the online shoppers have already adopted it. Youth particularly likes to wear customized tees that involve unique quotes and photo prints. Starting such a business can be fruitful.
Marketplace for Renting clothes (party wear/wedding dresses)
There are costly designer suits, wedding and party dresses that people wear for once and twice and they lie unused in wardrobes for years. Creating a marketplace to start a dress rental business has proven potential when it comes to generating revenue and attaining success in the field of ecommerce.
Fabric/clothes/garments Marketplace (Wholesale Business)
Retailers look to buy all kinds of fabric and garments at wholesale rates but none of these businesses are operative online. It’s a huge industry and has lots of buyers who fail to get certain quality and quantity of clothes due to location barriers. Capitalize on their need and give them a platform to reach out to wholesalers. You can create a B2B network by launching a B2B marketplace or procure garments to sell further. Both the options are open.
Recommended reading: Script features & business model to launch online dress rental business
Online Laundry Business
Laundry is as essential as food and shelter to human being. There are local offline laundries everywhere but how many of them you know in your city/state or country that offer online pickups and deliver washed and ironed clothes at doorsteps. Offering good dry cleaning services online is good idea provided you target the region lacking this service.
Buying and Selling old clothes
Just like people want to rent their unused clothes there is a segment that prefers to sell off old clothes. Their old clothes either grace the wardrobe or are given away for nothing. This happens because we lack an organized system to put old clothes to use. You can create a portal where people sell good conditioned and highly expensive old clothes to somebody else. Earn a set amount of commission from their earnings.
To ensure the success of any clothing based website, you can target niche as that has more defined demands, which are easy to cater to; dealing in kids casuals, uniforms or teenagers/youth clothes are few of such segments.
Share your comment below and tell how do you find all the ideas or write another business idea that I missed covering here.