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Everybody wants to start a clothing line these days athletes, men, women, and even celebrities. With so much competition its beginning to be difficult to build a successful clothing line, but its never been easier than now to fail!

I’m here to tell you if you follow these 7 easy steps below you will be on your way to starting an unsuccessful clothing line in no time.

7 Steps to Starting an Unsuccessful Clothing Line:

1. Store payments

• Trust every store you work with and use consignment as a way of re-payment for your sold goods at all times. Offer extended payment options to new and established stores.
• Don’t reward stores for early payments with discounts.
• Be happy that a store pays you whenever they do. You have more important things to do than worry about unpaid invoices.
• Get in the store for now and worry about how they are planning to pay for the clothing later. A store wouldn’t place an order if they couldn’t pay for it…that’s just unprofessional.

2. Customer targeting and Promotions

• Work with any and every store that wants to order. Don’t worry about targeting stores based on your expected targeted customer.
• Marketing and promotions are for more established company’s spend most of your capital on production and employees. The more employees the better so you can focus on more important things like watching your bank account from the money your clothing company will be earning you.
• When promoting don’t worry about who you’re promoting to. Time is precious and you have better things to do than to target your customer and worry about who is wearing your clothing.

3. Startup decisions and Planning

• Business plans are useless for now until you have something to base your predictions off of. So don’t waste your time planning just wing it and you will eventually get over the learning curve.
• Don’t read Dobizo.com it is not what it is all chalked up to be. Most of the information is useless and outdated.
• Go all out at trade shows. Dress your booth up with models, flyers, a DJ and maybe even pay for a celebrity appearance if possible that will definitely your clothing company unsuccessful by spending all of your capital on one aspect of the business.
• Don’t replenish stock on good selling items
• Order a lot of inventory, because you never know when you might need extra garments for promotional reasons. You can never have enough.

4. Networking and Building Relationships

• Networking is alright, but you should spend more time only talking to people who are going to make your clothing line more money so stick to investors and rich relatives for now.
• Burn as many bridges as possible. What do they know? Your clothing line is the most original and creative clothing company to ever be released and you know that no matter what everyone says.
• Don’t bother designing business cards all they do is throw them away anyway and you’re trying to make money not lose it.
• Just focus on your clothing company at trade shows. If there not trying to buy your clothing then you have no reason to speak to them no matter what store they are in charge of or how beneficial the relationship could be to your company in the near future.
• If a consultant tells you they can make your clothing line a big hit than most likely they are telling the truth and not telling you that because you have funds at your immediate disposal. If it sounds too good to be true it is probably not the case this time.

5. Design and Creativity

• Stick to the basics don’t stray too far from what has already been done.
• If it isn’t broke don’t fix it. Do what everybody else is doing and join the bandwagon.
• Start a clothing line wit skulls, rhinestones, or gothic wings that will definitely do the trick.

6. Quality and Production

• Quantity over quality. Don’t worry too much about the quality of the production. Just make sure you can get the most produced at the lowest prices.
• Work with whomever has the best prices and worry about the quality later.
• Don’t bother visiting the production facility your working with. If they’re not following labor laws and conducting business properly it is not your problem and you can always find another manufacturer at a later time.
• Don’t have a backup what’s the chance of a manufacturer not delivering your goods on time anyway.

7. Financing and Startup Capital

• There is no such thing as spending frivolously when it comes to your apparel business. Buy whatever you feel is necessary to make it a success.
• There is no need to document every dollar spent on developing your clothing company. So keeping books and financial records should be the last thing on your list of tasks to do.
• Prepare your taxes yourself so you can miss out on any discounts you could of had deducted due to traveling expenses and food on business related expenses.
• Start the business with whatever amount you feel it takes to make the clothing line a success. Don’t bother creating a financial plan explaining where the money will go once your business is funded by an investor who will most likely invest millions into your clothing line, because there is nothing like it already on the market.
• Sell out to an investor who has no intention of keeping the integrity of your clothing line or your current staff on board.

Follow these 7 steps and your clothing line will be the most unsuccessful in the history of the fashion industry and you may achieve one hit wonder status. Also if you throw in a few of these 100 mistakes you might have a better chance at being unsuccessful.

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