How to Start a Clothing Line with No Money! 

Let’s get right into it. We are going to discuss how to start a clothing line with no money. Yes with zero dollars you can literally get started with your fashion line today. We’ll also discuss the four things you can do right now that won’t cost you a penny, the number one way to build a following, the true definition of what commitment is, what a sales funnel is, and so much more. 

How many of you have no money? How many of you are bootstrapping it? On a shoestring budget? Be honest! You want to try to save as much money as possible especially when you are learning how to start a clothing line with no money. That way, you’ll have money to actually build your line and any money that you do make from the line will most likely be poured back into it. 

A lot of people come to me, wanting to hire us, but say they can’t afford it. Or they want to start a fashion line but don’t have any money to invest. First off let me just say that our prices are super affordable. I spent $50,000 on my college education–four years of college–and I didn’t even learn 90% of what I teach my clients. I learned this stuff in the industry by starting my own fashion line and by having my own mentors. We have live trainings for as low as $29, and courses as low as $67. If you can’t afford that you honestly shouldn’t even be starting a business in my opinion.

We had a student one time who literally did so much research, she came to us and she said ‘you are the most affordable option out there for fashion coaches.’ I pride myself on being able to work with everyone no matter what their budget is and I try to offer a lot of free information too. 

What if I told you there’s a way you can actually get started with your fashion line for free?! I’ll give you the secrets on how to start a clothing line with no money! With no money you can literally start today, right now, this minute! But what I’m about to tell you, most of you won’t do. 

Watch the Video Here or Read Below!

The Importance of Commitment

How do I know? Because I’ve shared these secrets with hundreds–if not thousands–of startup designers and only a handful actually do them. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. If you’re not serious, not committed, not willing to do whatever it takes, you won’t even have a chance!

So, at that point if you’re not totally serious about starting your own business, you might as well stick with your job. Stop the madness, stop the craziness, and just stick with your job. Don’t even start a fashion line, because you really need to have that attitude in order to succeed in this industry.

The definition of commitment is doing what you said you would do long after the mood or the feeling that you set it in has left you. So throw those feelings out the window, throw that mood out the window, and make a commitment. I’m going to challenge all of you to make a commitment to do these 4 things right now. All you need is time. You don’t need money to do these 4 things. Just commitment. Want to know what they are? Read on to learn how to start a clothing line with no money! 

#1: Market Research 

The first step in how to start a clothing line with no money is to do market research. This costs you nothing. We go through a lot about market research in one of our online courses. 

You need to do your homework and know everything that’s going on in your market–past and present–before getting started. This includes looking at your target customer, direct competitors, price point, USP, etc. What’s going to make you stand out from the rest? What’s going to make you stand out from your competition? You need to know who you are selling to and what’s already been done, so you can make yourself stand out. There’s no sense in creating a line unless there’s something unique or different that you have and people who want it.

If you do enough market research you’re going to start to notice patterns. You’ll notice certain trends. Things that people are producing over and over again because they keep selling. And that’s going to help you determine what you should actually make for your own line. 

So do your market research. We have an entire online course called the Market Research Made Easy that includes a ton of free and low-cost tips on how to do market research. I literally walk you through using the actual tools right inside the class.

Don’t tell me you can’t start a fashion line because you have no money because this is the first step. And it’s absolutely free. You can do your market research right now and it won’t cost you a dime. So put in the time and start doing your market research.

#2: Build a Following  

After you’ve started doing all your research, it’s time to start building your following. Doing this is crucial if you want to learn how to start a clothing line with no money. You need to build your tribe, you need your customers, and you need these people before you actually launch. That way when you do launch, everyone will buy your product and you will be profitable! You don’t want to launch your e-commerce shop and hear crickets. You want to have sales on day one, you want to have buyers, and you want to be profitable in your business as soon as your website launches. The only way to do that is to build your tribe now. 

Think about it. The Kardashians became famous FIRST, then started fashion and beauty lines that ALWAYS sell out. Kim Kardashian could sell you a doughnut with her name on it and you would buy it because it’s Kim Kardashian doughnuts. She can sell anything she wants because she’s famous and she has that loyal following.  She didn’t start with her fashion line first or her makeup line, she started by becoming famous. You need to be like a Kardashian and gain your own following! Basically, you need to be famous first and have fans, then you can sell just about anything. Build those fans, build that tribe in order to get those people to go to your website and buy what it is that you are going to sell.  

So, what is the number one way to start building a following? I bet you it’s not what you think it is. 

The Best Ways to Build a Following with No Money

Email Marketing 

The number one way to build a following is your email list, or email marketing. How many of you have started building an email list? This is the number one way to reach people. It shocks me how many people are not doing email marketing or don’t have more than 500 people on their email list. Email marketing is still the number one way to build a following. It’s 40 times as effective as social media. An article in The Wall Street Journal from January, with the headline – The Latest Hot Tech Secret – Your Email, says it all. 

Why Email Marketing is SO Important

Email is the only guaranteed delivery option that the internet has left. Email has become a way to fight back against all the algorithms. Facebook and other social media platforms all have algorithms that try to dictate what people see. But unlike on Facebook, email readers receive everything they signed up to receive in neat chronological order alongside all of their other emails. No one controls it. No one company controls email, so no company can get between a sender and its recipient. That’s powerful.

Your Facebook fans could be gone in a second, your Instagram page could be shut down. And I have seen it happen. I have seen people with a twenty thousand follower Instagram account that gets shut down and they lose everything. If you don’t have your followers emails, you have no way of contacting them if–god forbid–something happens to your page. What would you do if your Instagram account shut down tomorrow? You want to capture these people and the only way that you can capture them is with email.  

So, start building your email list now. Put everyone on the list, your friends, your family–I don’t care if you are just starting out and you don’t even have a product, you can start doing this today. Don’t wait until you have a product. Don’t wait until your website is perfect. All you need is a landing page with a little pop-up with a free offer or a freebie in there that gets people to leave their emails. Give people a reason to leave their email and they will.

Emails are so valuable because you have them forever. Yes, they can unsubscribe but it’s way better than trying to rely on Facebook’s algorithm and how many people are going to see your post and all of that nonsense. We actually teach twelve different ways to grow a massive email list inside our Mastering Digital Marketing online course. 

Blogging

The second way to build a following is blogging.  Blogging is one of the top ways to drive people to your website. I increased traffic on my website by 500% just by being consistent and blogging twice a week. But it was not easy, and I definitely had to hire a lot of help. In the beginning though it was just me and I did what I could. I did it like once a month, or once every other month. I put out a blog as often as I possibly could. So start blogging because it doesn’t cost you anything to blog. 

Creating new content frequently is going to help your site get higher on Google and make it more searchable. Every time you update your blog on your website or posting a blog on your website you are telling Google ‘hey my website is relevant, put me higher in the list’. Then if you do your blogs correctly and you do your SEO correctly, you’ll be even more easily searchable. If you do the right keyword research and figure out what’s the best keywords to put in your blog, post them in the right places, do the meta description, the alt tags, and all that SEO stuff, then you actually get higher on Google. 

We have a lot of people that find our company solely off of Google. 70% of my website traffic came from organic searches, which means it came from people just organically searching on Google. That doesn’t happen overnight but it’s highly highly due to blogging. 

Want to Blog But Don’t Know How?

We teach how to write your blog posts and seven places to post it because it’s not just about writing the blogs, it’s about knowing all the SEO stuff too that will increase your searchability. And then you have to know how to promote your blog. So we teach how to do that inside our mastering digital marketing course.  

How many of you would love to blog but you feel like you don’t have the time to do it? Are you struggling with blogging? Have you started blogging? For those of you who are struggling with content, I will give you a little tip. You have to think about your target customer when creating blog content. Usually, if you’re struggling with content, you don’t know who your target customer is and the things that they would like to read. Go back to your market research, do your target customer profile and think about the things that your customer would be interested in and that’s what you need to blog about. 

Social Media

The number three way to build a following is social media. Instagram is probably one of the number one platforms for fashion as well as Pinterest and Facebook. And the best part is: it costs nothing. These platforms are free! Yes, there’s advertising–and you can pay for advertising and different things like that–but don’t forget at the end of the day they are not charging you to use this program. They are free services. While we all hate the algorithms with the way that things keep changing and the harder it keeps getting, at the end of the day it’s still free. It only costs you your time. 

And you can still start marketing on Instagram and start your Instagram page without even having a product to sell. I talked about over 25 different things that you can post on your Instagram page inside our online course, Mastering Digital Marketing. A special client of mine, Daniella Jax of Jax Odyssey, has doubled her Instagram following in such a short period of time. Daniela is killing it on Instagram and the best part is she doesn’t even have a product. She has not even finished her product and she is killing it with over 20,000 followers on Instagram. The day that she launches her website, trust me, she will make sales. 

How to Grow your Social Media

A few things to keep in mind if you want to build up your social media following are using tags and hashtags properly, using locations, and that you have an aesthetically pleasing feed. People don’t want to follow a feed if it’s all mumbo jumbo and it doesn’t look that good. Your Instagram feed needs to look like a magazine not a catalogue. It’s not about your product, it’s about the lifestyle of your target customer. You want people to notice you and follow you and they are not going to do that if your feed looks like crap. Be sure that you also have a business page set up for your Instagram account because that will allow you to have the email signup box right in there. 

If you guys need help we also launched a new service called our Instagram Starter Pack where we give you 30 posts, 30 captions and two sets of 30 hashtags all for an incredibly affordable price. Maybe you’re having some trouble, you don’t know what to post on Instagram, you don’t know how to make it look aesthetically pleasing, we can help you with that.  

#3: Strategize your Sales Funnel

We went over doing your market research, the number one thing you can do without having any money to start a fashion line. Number two, build your following, the second thing you need to do that also doesn’t cost any money. Now, the third step of the four: strategize your sales funnel.

No one seems to think of this until after they have product, but you don’t have to wait until you have a product to think about how you are actually going to sell it. Before you even start manufacturing, you need to think about how you’re actually going to sell this new line. You don’t–and shouldn’t–have to wait to think about this until you have product. Start thinking about it right now! 

What’s a sales funnel? AutoGrow defines it as, “a series of steps designed to guide visitors towards a buying decision. These steps are composed of marketing assets that do the work of selling for you.” Think about what a funnel looks like–wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. At the top you want a ton of people, and as they go down through the sales funnel, the not so serious ones get weeded out and only the serious buyers are left at the bottom of the funnel. So, it does the work for you. Not everyone that comes to your website is going to buy something–even if they click add to cart! Basically, you want everyone coming in at the top and then they funnel themselves to the bottom where you have the most serious buyers.  

How to Draw Customers In

First, you need a way to get potential customers into the funnel. How do you get people in the funnel? One of the most common ways to get people into the funnel is to have a free offer or a ‘freebie’ on your website. You need to offer them something of value that will make them want to leave their email address to sign up.

For example, on our site right now we have a free quiz that helps fashionpreneurs predict how successful their fashion business will be. That’s how I get you guys to leave your emails! It’s the same thing for your website.

If you don’t have a product yet, you can’t offer people things like discounts or free shipping. There’s lots of stuff you can offer though! Offer some sort of a guide. Let’s say you’re a bridal business, you could offer ‘10 steps to planning a wedding without becoming a bridezilla’, or if you’re fitness you could give ‘10 smoothie recipes geared towards HIIT workouts’. Things like that will entice people. Then obviously once they have your free offer hopefully you have set up some kind of a sales funnel that will keep them coming back to your website so that they do eventually buy.  

How to get your Customers to Keep Buying

Once they buy, you want to get them to keep buying. To do this, you need traffic. How are you going to drive people to your website? Think about how most people are going to find your website and make it as easy as possible for them. I gave you 2 examples above–blogging and social media. 

Let’s say your sales funnel starts with Instagram. Instagram’s your thing, you’ve built up a following, so you want to use that to drive traffic to your website. You post your freebie on IG which then makes them click a link in your bio to go to your website where they enter their email to get the freebie. Hopefully, once they’ve downloaded that free offer, you have a call to action–for example a coupon code. This will compel them to go to your website and buy something. At the same time, you need to have set up your email marketing sales funnel to be automated. So now they’re receiving an automated sequence of emails that take them through getting to know your brand and eventually buying something from you. 

Think of a sales funnel like building a relationship. First you start out with your first date, then your first kiss, and then you eventually get married. You don’t just go up to a stranger and ask them to marry you. Same thing with this. You can’t just post your pics on Instagram over and over again saying buy me, buy me! That turns people off. People don’t want to be pushed into buying something. They have to get to know you and get to know your brand. Know, like, trust! That’s the KLT factor. It’s a process that you need to go through in order to gain their trust and for them to buy from you. 

This is a process that you need to go through in order to gain their trust, so they will actually buy from you. Start to think about your sales strategies, and strategize your sales strategy and your sales funnel now. It doesn’t cost you anything but time. You just need to sit down and plan these things. Plan out how you are actually going to drive traffic to your website and get people to buy. 

#4: Commit to Learning 

Finally, if you want to know how to start a clothing line with no money, you need to be committed to learning. This is not an easy business. Fashion is crazy and if you are really serious about making this a business–not a hobby–and actually making money, you need to invest the time to learn. How many of you know what a Meta Description is? Or a flat lock seam? Or what the average click through rate is for FB Ads? You need to learn these things. 

There are so many things that you need to learn when starting your fashion business. I have so many people coming to me telling me that they can’t afford our services which honestly if you can’t afford I don’t know what to tell you. I give away so much information for free. But you need to be taking advantage of the free information available to you. 

Now that you’ve learned how to start a clothing line with no money, are you up to the challenge? Who is up to committing to doing these four things right now, this very minute? Do it so it can be the best year ever for your fashion business. Do it so that you can launch and have people dying to get your product. Don’t forget to check out all the free information there is out there. Challenge yourself! Make a commitment now. 

If you want more FREE information on starting a fashion line on a budget, be sure to join our Fearless Fashionpreneur Facebook Group!