Fashion designing business in Nigeria is not necessarily the business of sewing both local and foreign fabrics.
To start a successful fashion designing business in Nigeria, you must have a drawing skills and sense of creativity as this is what will help you to come up with unique designs or styles. You must also have to be patient enough as sewing and other activities in fashion designing cycle require carefulness.
However, the directives below may help anyone that aspires to start a successful fashion designing business in Nigeria and perhaps anywhere else in Africa.
Steps To a Successful Fashion Designing Business In Nigeria.
Here are the top steps to starting a successful fashion designing business in Nigeria:
1. Must have Interest
Nothing beats interest and when someone has a deep drive or motivation to succeed in some certain profession, and then the ways to achieve it will become much easier.
Interest, endurance no matter how to tough it is to start or manage it and desire to excel in fashion designing is a must for every startup.
2. Acquire Training
To start a successful fashion designing business in Nigeria, you must acquire training from a qualified fashion designer school for him/her to be certified as a fashion designer.
A talented fashion designer goes the extra mile to develop the skills and potentials in him or her in this trade. Such skills and potentials include the ability to design unique style, sewing skills, and others.
There is also the need for you to acquire the skill from more experienced person in the fashion and designing field if you think you have not acquired enough knowledge. This is very important as skilled fashion designers have an advantage over unqualified fashion designers.
As an expert in the fashion and designing business, you must have areasonable knowledge of thequality of textile materials, the best styles that can bring out your hand work, tailoring materials that can bring out the beauty in a particular cloth and more.
3. Develop Sense of Creativity
Don’t rely on the existing styles, you need to be creative try to have a shift and you will come up with a new style which is different from the existing ones.
This will attract customers to you and by the time other fashion designers started adopting your style, you would also have come up with another design.
4. Don’t Rely on Existing Styles
The difference between a busy fashion designer and the one looking for customers is dependent on skills. Fashion designers who rely solely on the existing styles will no doubt continue to struggle to make a living while those with knowledge about textile and have creativity in designs will always be busy in their shops making a large profit.
Now, there are a lot of great benefits and potentials for fashion designers in Nigeria and Africa in general, because more and more people are willing to wear African fabrics and clothes designed by a good fashion designer.
5. Think Like An Entrepreneur
To build a fashion business, you must be prepared to think and behave like an entrepreneur. You must come out of your design studio, meet those who know the business, and benefit from their experience.
Find out how businesses work. Build solid relationships with a wide range of people such as manufacturers, investors, and buyers.
6. Set Right Prices
Another aspect of running a fashion design business successfully is setting the right prices. Find out the amount that your target customer is willing to pay. Then, calculate how much your business would spend on raw material and manufacturing.
This way, set the prices in between the highest prices a customer can pay for your fashion product and your overall cost of production. Make sure that the price you set gives you a decent profit.
7. Advertise Your Business
Social media is a powerful medium. A majority of your target audience of fashion business are on different social channels like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Without putting your brand on a wide range of social platforms, you cannot think of doing a successful business. Social media marketing is important to reach out to more and more consumers.
