How to Ensure Your Apparel Reflects Your Brand: A Linear Process

There are three basic steps to the apparel product development process: brand definition,  brand positioning, and consumer focused development. While the process is far from simple, it’s actually quite linear. In this article, we’ll walk through the necessary steps to arrive at an apparel line that fully reflects your brand’s vision, mission, and values. It’s important that you don’t skip the early steps in brand development and positioning as the product marketing will be easier if you have a strong foundational understanding of the brand’s story. Because, ultimately, your apparel line is your brand, and your brand is its story. If that’s confusing, keep reading!

A Logo Isn’t a Brand

First, begin with the brand fundamentals: mission, vision, and values. If this sounds like a huge first step, we’re glad you’re listening. It is a lot to consider at the beginning and it’s not to be taken lightly. It is crucial that your brand is differentiated in the market and, by taking the time to dive into these fundamentals, you are much better off setting the brand up for success. It’s easy and low risk to start an apparel line by printing some logos on a cotton tee shirt but how does this tell your brand story? It’s true that some individuals will buy products just for the logo, but a logo isn’t a brand, and these screen-printed logo tees are a dime a dozen. Do you really want your shirts to have the same look and feel as so many other brands in the market? Or are you looking to cut through the noise instead of adding to it?

We won’t sugarcoat it: this initial step is hard, and it will take time and work. All three of these fundamentals should ladder up to the brand’s story for a compelling and cohesive identity. The more energy you spend in this first stage, the clearer the brand will be to you, the marketing team, and the consumer. Once you have these foundational pieces in order, you are then able to move on to the next step, which is brand positioning.

Positioned in the Market

If you know who you are and why you exist, you can carve out your conceptual space in the market. Your brand positioning is an internal statement of strategy to guide external implementation, i.e., brand and product marketing. This strategic exercise gives you a better understanding of the benefit consumers think of when they think about your brand. It’s a way to help you create brand associations in a customer’s mind, so they perceive the brand in the way you want them to. Too often, brand communications center around either price or product features. Consumers want to be emotionally connected to “why.” The brand story behind why you make what you make, not just what you make and the price.

If you’ve a spent time developing your brand fundamentals, then the positioning work will flow more easily. Humans are wired to think in categories because of the vast amount of information we are privy to at any given time. This categorization helps us think in an orderly way without becoming overwhelmed with all the information available to us. Brand positioning leans in to this natural tendency by giving the brand a category to fill. You’re probably aware that many brands fall under the same category, so the difficult part is getting your brand filed in the consumer’s mind at the top of the category. It sounds complicated, but thankfully there are plenty of worksheets and template exercises available online to help you navigate this task.

Constructing the Apparel Line

All of this brand building and conceptualizing will lead you down a path of deep knowledge about the brand. And you should now be set up to develop a product line that fully reflects your brand and its story, all the way from the hem to the hang tag. Sport Casuals International helped a running company accomplish this final step when they were looking to launch a premium in-house apparel line that could compete with the big global athletic brands. The brand was established but they needed to revisit those early steps to better identify what the consumer needs were that they were trying to meet. Initially, the premium line idea was focused on making their own version of their current best-selling items. The problem was that those best-sellers were specific to other brands they were selling in their store and might not translate to being a best seller for the new premium line.

So, we asked the company to think more strategically about the consumer before developing the line. With this push, we identified three audience categories the brand could develop product for. From there, we helped build customer profiles: competitive runners, recreational runners, and athleisure runners. The degrees of difference between competitive and athleisure were vast, with the recreational runners crossing into a little bit of both profiles. These consumer insights and profiles helped the premium line identify what apparel products would best serve members of each audience. The result was a product line that laddered up to the brand story and worked just as well for the elite runner setting records as it did for the individual just starting their journey.

The low-risk approach to starting an apparel line certainly can be appealing, and is a quick way to get your brand out in to the market. We hope this article has helped you identify where you can strengthen your brand story and how that will impact the consumer’s perception and understanding of your brand. You can cut through the noise of apparel brands; you just must listen first.

Before you launch your performance apparel line, reach out to Sport Casuals International for a consultation on how to get your brand DNA to run through everything you do.