Understanding the Business Side of Fashion

Welcome to the Fashion and Business Marketing for Success course. I'm the business growth consultant and podcaster Tavi Shima Ayede. If you're listening to this on the Learn Skills Africa site or their learning portals, then I'm assuming you've already taken all or some part of their most popular course on fashion fundamentals. That is the course that they have on the site that introduces you to the technical and the creative aspects of being involved in the fashion industry.

My course on the other hand, is going to walk you through the business side of fashion so that you can turn your passion into a career or even start your own business. Now, why is this important? To answer that, we have to consider two questions. The first question is technical ability. All you need to build a successful business and then #2 what is the purpose of a business? For the first question on the technical ability and how that relates to business success,

this is one thing we have to consider. The best designer, the best seamstress, the best fabricator. Being able to do all those functions in a technically competent way is not what is going to make you the best business person. Look around and you'll see that this proposition proves itself. You know someone who's a better designer than you. You know someone who's a better seamstress than you. You know someone who's a better fabricator than you, but chances are both of you are in the same boat, or you might be significantly better off than the other person.

So something else is needed. It's not just your designing skills, your seamstress skills, the fabricating skills, and all those other technical elements. What you need is also the ability to reach out into the market and be able to proclaim a few things. You need to be able to reach out to the market and say who you are. You have to be able to reach out to the market to say what you have to offer. You have to be able to reach out to the market to say why should people pay attention to you.

And you should be able to clearly state what your value proposition is. Now your value proposition is a whole host of things around how dealing with you is going to provide people the physical results, the financial results or the psychological benefits that you give to your customers or other stakeholders or other distributors or merchandisers who are going to be working with you. So clearly the things that we need for business success are all other kinds of non-technical information and non-technical skills that are necessary for business growth and for business success.

Now on the second question, what is the purpose of a business? Most people think that the purpose of a business is either one, money, 2 personal development, or three, social and environmental impact. So there are people who get into the fashion industry because they want to make more money. Then there are people who get into the fashion industry because they think it's going to be an entry into the glam life and then into the fame, and also they're going to expand the areas of personal influence.

And then there are those who have social causes in mind when they come into the fashion industry. People like that come in and then they get straight into things like capacity building and wealth distribution along the value chain. Those are those people who come in and who might be doing high end fashion but who are worried about the spate of women in the IDP camps in Abuja and other parts of the northern part of the country and do their best to help with capacity building and wealth distribution for the less privileged.

So all these things are good and worthy causes for a business to pursue. So whether you want money or whether you want the glam life or whether you want to achieve a certain level of social and environmental impact, all these causes are good. But this is not the main reason why a business exists. The main reason why a business exists is to create a customer. Because we don't have a customer, we are not going to be able to exercise our craft or exercise our passion and get these other benefits of the of the fame or of social impact.

It is only when we have a customer that we will get that good money. It is only when we have a customer and several paying customers that we can get to live that glam life and expand our areas of personal influence. And it is only when we have several paying customers that we can now worry about social and environmental impact. So the main reason why a business exists is to create a customer. And creating a customer just means you're creating someone or reaching out to someone to buy where that individual didn't exist before, or rather when you didn't have access to that individual.

So how you create a customer is achieved through two functions. There's the business function called marketing, and then there's the business function called innovation. The business function of marketing is where you let people know that you exist and you let people know how you can help. The business function of innovation on the other hand is where you're concerned about improvements in your product delivery, in your service delivery.

You have already learnt a lot about this if you are on the Learn Skills Africa site. So we are going to be paying a lot of attention in my course to marketing, which is the function of letting people know that you exist and how you can help. So all other aspects of the course from here on are going to be dedicated to helping you create customers and clients. It's going to help you create distributors, influencers, stakeholders.

And we're also going to try to make sure that you learn other soft skills in quote or interpersonal skills that you need to grow your business and your fashion career. So what's going to be next? Over the next couple of audio modules, we are going to be exploring a few things. We're going to be exploring market research and brand strategy. We're also going to be looking into fashion marketing and promotion. We're also going to explore how to launch and manage your fashion brand.

We're going to delve into and spend a lot of time on sales and conversion strategies because there's no point in doing all these things if we don't know how to get someone to buy when they've hit us up on the phone, when they slide into our Instagram DM, or when they walk into our studio. And then we're also going to have a few words about building a successful fashion career. Connect with me on LinkedIn. That is the best social network for business and career development and networking.

The name to look for is Tavi Shimmer. Thank you very much for taking my course. I'm looking forward to spending more time in your earbuds and meeting a couple of you live and in person. Thanks for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next module.