How to Take Your Fashion Brand Around the World
Starting your own fashion brand from the ground up can be such a fulfilling experience, as you get to design and create your own clothing brand. You can sell clothing that you’re truly passionate about and would wear yourself, making you ever prouder when you make a sale. This will start out as a local business, as you attract customers from your local area who can return in the future. However, for real growth, you’ll eventually have to expand your fashion business and take it around the world.
In this guide, we will explore how you can successfully take your fashion brand around the world, expanding your horizons and gaining loyal customers from new locations. Continue reading to learn more.
Fashion Brand Global Expansion Advice
Multi-Currency Payments
Having multiple different payment platforms available to your customers can be the best way of getting purchases from all over the world. You can use platforms like Adyen or Stripe to localise the checkout experience through multi-currency pricing and regional payment methods. Klarna is currently the most popular payment platform in Europe, so it should be considered if you’re opening a store in a European country.
When you have multi-currency payments, you can maximise international conversion rates by routine transactions through local acquirers to prevent your card declining. Cross-border financial platforms also allow you to hold foreign currencies, so you can bypass expensive conversion fees.
Read: How to Build a Capsule Wardrobe That Actually Feels Like You
Live Duties
Implementing live duties at checkout is now crucial for global fashion expansion. The United States has recently suspended its $800 duty-free exemption and the European Union has eliminated its €150 de minimis threshold. This means that duties now apply to almost all international fashion shipments regardless of value.
Collect all duties, local taxes, and carrier fees transparently at your digital checkout. This completely removes the risk of any surprise fees on delivery.
Local SEO
If you’re currently open in multiple locations, having a unique landing page for each of these can allow your business website to rank for each location’s primary keyword. For example, if you sell T-shirts in London, you can use local SEO to optimise your page so that you can rank on Google for that keyword. You can also translate content to match language preferences instead of just replicating your original storefront on each location page.
You can also add LocalBusiness markup schema to each of your pages, as this will let Google know that your fashion business is operating in multiple locations.
European Marketplaces
You can focus on getting your clothing in the European marketplace is your best way of becoming a success in more countries. If targeting Europe from the UK, you can leverage platforms like ASOS to reach millions of consumers without having to establish a localised web presence instantly. This means that you don’t need to set up your own business website, as ASOS will sell your products for you.
Getting your products on these marketplaces can also give you effective language translations, as product descriptions, sizing guides and customer services must be translated into the local language to get customers to shop with you.
Influencer Partnerships
Partnering with influencers who already hold credibility with the local audience is a good way of growing your brand and getting it recognised in more countries. It’s important that you target the right influencers who best match your niche, as getting someone who usually has makeup promotion on their page won’t make sense for a fashion brand. You need to pick someone who is already releasing fashion content to their viewers.
It’s ideal to also target influencers from countries that you aren’t currently popular in, so you can reach a completely new audience of overseas customers.
Pop Up Stores
The best way to build brand buzz in specific cities is by running pop up stores and events in locations where you aren’t currently active. This can give local consumers within this area a taste of what your fashion brand is all about, hopefully turning them into loyal customers down the line. For the most popular brands, they focus on cities like Paris and New York to get themselves known within the fashion world.
The bottom line is, the more eyes on your fashion brand from across the globe is the best way to grow your business. Pop up stores are nice, small introductions to your business that can go a long way in promoting the clothing that you offer.
Effective Delivery
For your fashion business to be a success across the world, you need to have an effective delivery service so that you can ship your clothing to any location. Utilising HGVs can allow you to transport a lot of goods over a long distance, helping you to fulfill as many international orders as possible. There’s many different places that offer transport training where you can become road ready in a HGV within a few days.
Lifft Group offers affordable HGV lessons that will give you a licence within a few days of training, so you can use these new skills to deliver your fashion products.
