Building a Product Range: An insiders guide to making smart choices when creating a sportswear collection.
Breaking down tips and tricks which will help you get the most out of your product range.
Talking design and product
This is a topic that I am quite excited to talk about. My love of product and design is something which drives me everyday to get up and grow Torsa. When you’re a founder building a business, there’s always going to be some areas more exciting than others; for me, that’s product.
However, that’s not the only reason I’m looking forward to talking about this. The other reason is because when building our core collection, I made a lot of mistakes, and I am keen to share how to avoid them. I overlooked certain things when developing our first product range because I didn’t have the experience. Now, having gone through the process of design and development, manufacture and delivery, and selling DTC and wholesale, I am really confident in sharing the tips and techniques of making a successful product range.
What’s your distribution strategy?
At the start of your journey, it’s so easy to get caught up in the excitement of product development. You have an idea for a collection, and you immediately start designing and developing a range of products to launch. However, you’ve missed the most critical step of starting an apparel business, your distribution strategy.
Now, there are elements of creating a business which are of significant importance; branding, product design, manufacturing partner, art direction, marketing and so on, but distribution strategy is so easily overlooked, but why is it so important?
The DTC vs wholesale dilemma
The significance of distribution strategy lies in the difference between the two main distribution channels, DTC (direct-to-consumer) and wholesale (selling into retailers). When I started Torsa, I wanted to focus on selling DTC. Simply put, this was the first mistake I made. What I have learned over the last three or four years is that selling direct-to-consumer is very difficult as a start-up breaking into a new market. Acquiring customers is a challenge for a number of reasons;
They are loyal to other brands
They lack trust in your brand because there is no credibility in the market
You don’t have the luxury of word-of-mouth marketing when starting out
As a start-up, you don’t have the capital to invest in paid media channels, so exposure of your brand is low
With Torsa, I was very fortunate that we featured in some major publications such as Monocle, GQ, Gear Patrol and Financial Times before and through the first years of our launch. Without this exposure, I am not sure we’d have grown our DTC to where it is today.
The reason why this is so significant in relation to building a collection is that DTC and wholesale adhere to a very different set of rules. For example, if as an apparel brand you want to go to wholesale, you can’t just build a product range of one or two items, you need a collection.
Wholesale expectations
When I was approached by Selfridges back in 2021, I sat down with the buyer and showed him the collection. I had 8 SKU’s at the time.
SKU’s stands for “stock keeping unit.” It’s a term commonly used in apparel to indicate an individual style. For example, in our case, our Onyx T-Shirt in Sage Green would be classified as 1 SKU, and our Onyx T-Shirt in Lilac would constitute as a different SKU.
Remember, at this stage, I had not planned to go with wholesale. I didn’t have much experience in how the process of launching into wholesale worked. After chatting, I soon found out that 8 SKU’s wasn’t enough products. What he told me is that they needed at least 11 SKU’s to fill one rail on the Selfridges shop floor. In an ideal scenario, he said we’d have at least 18 SKU’s to choose from as a start-up. This is because buyers want a choice of products, they want to build a range within your range to suit their customer and story.
After our initial discussions, I went away and started working on three new colours in our core styles, bringing our 8 initial SKU’s to 11. The buyer bought the whole range for the upcoming season and six months later we’d launched in one of London’s leading luxury department stores.
The choice to make
Why I wanted to share that story is because it gives a clear indication of the impact your range depth has on your strategy. If you decide to go down the wholesale route, make sure you know how many SKU’s those retailers need to even consider your collection, and make sure you design more than they need. Remember, buyers want to curare their own collection from your range of products, so don’t design the minimum number of SKU’s they need, and don’t put yourself in my position, where you need to up your SKU count to fulfil one wholesale order.
Being smart when building
One thing I wish I knew when building a collection is the ability to make things a lot easier than I made it. When creating Torsa’s core collection, I produced five individual products, all completely different to one another. This was a mistake, and I’ll share why.
1. Developing five products from scratch
Five products may not seem like a lot of products, but when you start getting into the development stage, you’ll soon find out that building five completely unique products is time consuming and not a financially sound decision. The reason for this is that you are firstly having to work with someone to design those five products. This requires more time and money spent with a designer, more time brainstorming, building concepts and so on. You then have to go on and develop those five products with the factory and product developer. This stage requires a lot of trial and error, including the factory or your pattern maker having to build five individual patterns for your garments. It then requires a lot of fabric and product testing, design reviews of individual products, fit sessions and analysis of each garment. So, what would I have done differently if I were to build my core collection again?
The answer, simplify. I can’t stress the importance of this enough. Let’s say you want to build a 16 SKU collection to show to wholesale buyers. Don’t waste your time and money building 16 different products, especially as an early stage start-up. Let’s say you start simplifying by building 8 products with 2 colour-ways each (16 SKU’s). Yes colour, of course, is the easiest way to simplify a range and build SKU count. But wholesale buyers also want depth, they don’t just want 4 styles in 4 colour-ways to make up 16 SKU’s. So how can we get around this?
The answer is take a core style from that collection, and tweak it. Let’s take a running t-shirt for example. Depending on the season, take that t-shirt and simply double or triple it’s SKU count by either adding a longer sleeve (to make a long sleeve version) or removing the sleeve (to make a vest). You then have that style in a short sleeve, long sleeve and vest version, without the need to develop completely new patterns with your pattern maker, as you will have the bulk of the pattern from your original short sleeve option. You also don’t have to source other fabrics and trims, or go through completely new fit sessions, or face completely new problems. You essentially have three individual styles, without the stress of actually building three.
2. Fabric consolidation
When you’re starting out, designing a range is all about simplification. I’ve touched on the importance of building core styles and tweaking them as a simple way to build up SKU count. Another technique to use is the consolidation of fabric.
As it goes, the logistics around sourcing fabric for a start-up is difficult. The issues mainly revolves around the fabric MOQ’s. In Europe, an MOQ for a fabric will likely run from 300 metres and over for one colour. Let’s take a lightweight woven fabric sourced from Italy for example. Let’s keep it simple and say the consumption for one pair of shorts is one metre. Simply put, one metre of fabric will make one pair of shorts. Therefore 300 metres of fabric will make 300 shorts. But, 300 units in one colour is a lot of units for a start-up, and you’d need to have a lot of wholesale accounts or a strong DTC business to shift that many units. That’s just one colour as well, imagine you had three colours (900 units across 3 SKU’S).
Let’s say you have been able to negotiate with your factory 300 units per style, but split across two colours. In the reference to this pair of shorts, you therefore only need 150 metres of fabric per colour. But, in this case the fabric mill can only produce 300 metres of one colour, and therefore you’d be left with excess fabric. The solution? Either hold it up in storage until you reorder that style (not ideal), or what I wish I had done is explore other styles you could use the fabric for.
This is a technique that is commonly used across small and big brands alike. Consolidating fabric is both financially and logistically savvy. There are multiple examples of brands splitting fabric across different styles; I have highlighted a few examples below;
Reigning Champ: Dot Air
A Japanese pin-dot material, the Dot Air fabric has been used by the activewear brand across three core running styles. The lightweight and durable weave allows for air permeability and breathability, whilst structured weave helps with durability and longevity. These two combine to allow the use across three styles, making the Dot Air collection cohesive whilst enabling Reigning Champ to split the fabric across three styles.
Klättermusen: Oculus®
Klättermusen Oculus fabric is a featherweight ripstop fabric which the brand uses across three styles, including a running short, windbreaker and cap. The ultra-light, quick-drying fabric is frictionless and silent, making it ideal for garments with movement, such as a pair of shorts and jacket.
Naturally, both Reigning Champ and Klättermusen have designed the garments to pair with one another, building a cohesive ‘fabric’ story, but also leaning into upselling opportunities and increasing UPT (units per transaction).
3. The power of offcuts
Another thing I wish I knew when building was the power of offcuts. In the Klättermusen example above, they have cleverly used their offcuts to create another product, the Sol Oculus cap. If you think about creating a garment, the way it works is that pieces (patterns) are cut from a roll of fabric and then pieced together. The example below represents a roll of fabric and the patterns which are cut out of that roll to create a garment.
I have used a lighter colour to represent the roll of fabric to highlight the unused parts of the fabric. These unused parts can then be collected and used to create accessories such as caps (as these of course require far smaller patterns).
Using this method is smart for so many reasons. Firstly, you’re able to create a whole new product from fabric which would otherwise be wasted. This can be a great margin driver as well as usually things such as caps and accessories are relatively cheap to produce. Secondly, you’re building up SKU count if you decide to present your collection to wholesale, offering a cohesive fabric story and product range. Thirdly, it is a very sustainable use of fabric. Throwing away offcuts is bad for the environment and you can also tell the story about how you use your offcuts in your marketing content.
Final note
Creating a collection depends on a number of factors. You first have to look at your distribution strategy and decide whether you need to build a proper range for wholesale, or whether you can focus in on just a few (or even just one style). Understanding how to simplify the collection is also a critical step. Look at ways of consolidating fabric and styles to ensure the process is as pain-free as possible, especially starting out.
In our previous example, I showed how you can build three t-shirt styles (short sleeve, long sleeve and vest) from just one fabric. I can’t stress just how important this is when it comes to the product development stage. It’ll make your life so much easier in the long run, saving time and money on development costs. If you go down the wholesale route, the introduction of style variation like this helps build SKU count whilst limiting the need for constant style redevelopment.