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I decided to share a more personal business experience with you guys today. It relates to a couple of my previous articles. I will reflect on each and link back so that you can see where each comes into play.

Before attending any shows my partners and I decided to take on our first orders by ?cold calling? (our second clothing line) and speaking with prospective buyers from a list of stores we had compiled from online sources and from magazines of the trade I spoke about ?cold calling? buyers in depth here. We had no shirts printed as of yet but merely line sheets.

We were thinking by calling and showing our designs as graphics that every store would be interested (because we had the greatest designs in the world right?) at least that?s what we thought. A common mistake by many startup fashion companies is thinking you can ?blow up? just off of great designs?.remember you are just one of many, many, lines and in order to succeed it takes WAY more than a great design?.okay back to the story. Our idea was that we could talk to buyers and get them to place orders over the phone with us and we new about factoring and purchase order financing (make sure and read up on it) which could help us with our cash flow problem. By the end of the process we end up with orders from 7 stores not bad for our first month in business with no trade show. So now we had a manufacturer, had the orders, no money, but we knew about processing orders with no-money upfront! We spoke with our manufacturer who gave us a delivery time of 10-15 days when processing orders with no ready product it?s good to have an estimated shipment time. So we gave our retailers a quote that they would receive their merchandise in approximately 15-20 days.

After confirmation from our retailers we went into production right away and that?s when most of the problems began. As previously stated we quoted 15-20 days we were going on our 20^th day since we placed an order with the manufacturer and still haven?t received our goods! Ouch. By this time our ?would be? accounts were getting restless. Threatening to cancel orders and asking for discounts! (Cutting into our already small profit) So we had to stall our accounts and tell them we ran short in production or shipment was stuck at the printing facility all sorts of random BS. By the time we received our orders it was over a month late. Whether you know it or not late orders=less selling time on the floor for an already seasonal product and we were over a month late. Two of the accounts cancelled and that?s only the beginning because now we are stuck with clothing that?s not going anywhere fast! In order to keep our other retailers from canceling we offered them payment incentive kind of like net 30, but not the full thirty because we had bills to pay (original was COD)! Plus this was the most our manufacturer would give us for them being late a whole month and then some. (original was for us to pay them in 10 days they extended it a measly 5 days?this was on orders in the thousands of dollars) At the time it sounded fair, (it definitely wasn?t) but we were in a bind. So we shipped out to the accounts that accepted our incentive. Even after the payment extension and all other problems the one we dreaded the most had yet to arrive?.they received our merchandise and failed to pay us to this date! Basically you have to be careful when giving incentives and using purchase order financing if you don?t have a responsible manufacturer with a history of good delivery time. (We did?guess it was just our luck) Make sure and check the background of retailers your dealing with before offering them Any payment options or apparel on credit.

As far as the clothes we had left over we set up an online destination to get rid of the remaining garments and started our first in-store sales that I spoke about earlier in How to start a clothing line from scratch you can take a look at that process here.

If you have any similar experiences you can share them in the Apparel Blog Forum or drop a comment.

Thanks for reading,

Fashion Industry Ceo

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