The fashion industry is ever-changing. Good designers are always in demand. People want to look their best while being both stylish and comfortable. Coming up with the inspiration to develop appealing designs is a challenge. Here are three suggestions for fashion businesses to use to come up with winning designs.
- Use Surveys to Gain Insights About What Your Customers Want
Online market research surveys are affordable and effective ways of knowing what potential customers want. Such surveys take the guesswork out of your designing. According to a Harvard Business School Professor, about 95 percent of new products fail.
You can zero-in on a target audience and gain insight into how they want to look or what fashion conveniences they are interested in buying. Online social media platforms make getting your survey before the eyes of your target audience simple. As individuals, signup for these platforms, they have to fill out a demographic section. Launching ad campaigns on these platforms can automatically send your survey to your target audience.
To get the highest response rate for your survey, consider these four tips as you create your survey:
- Introduce your objective briefly and concisely. Tell the survey takers why you are asking questions and how their opinions will help.
- Keep your survey short and focused. Respect the survey takers time and clearly word your questions.
- Run a pre-test of your survey. At first, send the survey to a small audience. The feedback you receive may show up some problems with how the questions are worded.
- Keep rating scale questions consistent. If one means “great” and five means “terrible,” use the same meanings throughout the survey.
- Follow Up with Your Existing Customers for Product Feedback
Often when we like a product that we have purchased, there are still things we wish were different about it. If you ask your customers to provide feedback about your product, you will have powerful insight on how to enhance your design.
If your customers are retailers, keeping up with them on what styles are selling or what customers are asking about can be invaluable. These business owners should have a real feel on trends and customer desires.
If you sell your designs on your website, then there are other ways to get customer feedback. Try these ideas:
- With every order, send a postage-paid feedback card.
- Make sure your website is capturing the emails of your customers and send each one a feedback survey for each order.
- Create an online community. Occasionally post a short survey on the platform.
- Put a feedback form right on your website.
Getting people to respond to customer surveys is not easy. Keep the survey short and let them know how long it will take to fill out. Use multiple-choice questions and offer an incentive to complete the survey.
- Manage Everything with Fashion PLM Software
A quality Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software will connect all parts of your fashion business. All areas of your fashion business can be handled with the fashion PLM provided by Centric Software:
- Concept
- Development
- Sourcing
- Manufacturing
- Retail
A fashion PLM links all of the people involved with your product. It will help you cut out waste, operate more efficiently, and get your product to market in less time. The company-wide coordination it provides will help to eliminate the need for multiple emails, creating spreadsheets, and maintaining a variety of types of document storage.
Gaining insights from customers or potential customers will help your company to be at the apex of your industry. You will be providing what people want instead of wasting time guessing. Using technology like Product Lifecycle Management software will create an efficient and organized approach to getting those winning designs quickly to market.
