Selling: The Most Important Skill You’ll Build

Aug 22

If I had to pick the most important episode in this whole series, it’s this one. Selling. You can design the most beautiful line in the world, but if you can’t sell it, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby. And here’s the good news to start with: the desire people have to discover new, fresh, innovative brands is instinctual. It has always been there, and it always will be. Your only job is to figure out how you’re going to be discovered.

How discovery has changed

The old formula was simple and static. You created a line, you found a sales rep, they got you into retail stores, they booked the orders, and you had three or four months to make and ship. Same cycle, two to four times a year.

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Then e-commerce arrived, and brands started going vertical. Think Lululemon or Aritzia, both Canadian brands out of Vancouver. They designed, made, and sold their own product. Aritzia even built private labels in house, curated their own lines with their own designers and merchandisers under several labels, all made by Aritzia. That was the beginning of them 30 years ago.

For smaller brands, your own brick and mortar is a lot of money, so most of us do it differently. You still go into independent retail stores, but your own e-commerce becomes your storefront. And this is where people learn the hard truth: you have to spend money so that customers can actually find you.

Trade shows, and the long game

Brands also go to trade shows, and I want to be honest about these. They’re expensive, and you really need money behind you to do them well. If you don’t have a salesperson or meetings with retailers lined up, there’s no guarantee you’ll make sales. You have to be prepared for that.

I had a lingerie client who understood this. She started slow and had the financial means to play the long game. Her first show, she wrote maybe one order, and she was ready for that. Part of why buyers hold back early is they want to know you’ll still be around, that this isn’t a “let’s see if I can sell something” hobby. When a retailer takes on a new brand, they’re investing in you too. They have to build you up and promote you to their customer, so they want to know you’re in it for a while.

By her second show she wrote more orders. By the third she picked up some key New York boutiques. By the fourth she was on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily, which is the bible of our industry, and got real press. She did beautifully, because she could afford to play the long game.

If you can’t, I’m not sure a trade show is where you want to be. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of people, three intense days. There are better ways in. But if you’re in a targeted category like lingerie or outerwear, there are key shows that might work. Either way, walk the show before you spend a dime on a booth.

Trunk shows and pop-ups

One of the best ways to start getting your name out and building an email list is the trunk show. We called them trunk shows in the 80s and 90s, and now they’ve become pop-ups, but it’s the same idea. You partner with a retail store for one or two nights. They notify their whole email list, you notify yours, and you sell your inventory in their space.

Several good things happen at once. You sell product. You collect emails to market to. And if you’ve done your research and that store’s customer really is your customer, the retailer sees their people respond to your line, and they might place a small order. Now you have your first retailer. Rochelle of The Shirt built her business on five of these.

The difference with a pop-up is time. It sits longer, maybe two to five days, and it started with retailers renting an empty space for a couple of weeks and filling it. You might be a pop-up brand inside a retail store, or you might do a trunk show. Either way you’re collaborating to put your brand in front of their customers and yours. You’re not paying rent, you’re selling at full retail, and you can work out a percentage for the store, say 10 or 20 percent, because they’re opening doors for you. It’s a genuine win-win.

So how do you know which stores to approach? Research. This is where knowing who you want to hang next to matters. There’s a difference between a competitor and a comparable. A comparable is who you’d put yourself in the same category with, the brands you’d want to hang beside on the rack. Walk into an independent boutique, look at which brands sit side by side, and picture yourself there. It goes right back to knowing your DNA, knowing who you are and who your customer is, and it helps you set your retail price too.

Building a real sales strategy

The magic of trunk shows and pop-ups is that you’re selling at full retail, building your list, and getting feedback in real time, which is priceless. When Lululemon had just one or two stores, the design and product team spent hours on the retail floor so they could hear exactly what customers said about fit, design, and comfort. That kind of instant feedback makes your next iteration stellar, and the one after that.

These events are also how you find the retail stores you’ll eventually want to be in. You do want to position yourself in some, whether that’s six or twelve, it’s up to you. Yes, you make a smaller margin selling wholesale into them, but it positions you as a brand and gets people knowing you. Start with a handful of stores in your city, then the next city over, then the next. That’s how you build your retail base and drive more eyeballs to your site. It takes time and research. It does not happen overnight.

And here’s the part I really want you to hear. As you get busy, you’ll learn where your strength is. If you’re strongest in design and product development and weaker on selling, the first thing you invest in is sales. Sales, sales, sales. You can handle fulfillment, you’ve already done the product work. Hire the salesperson, then later a product developer or a project manager for logistics. But protect the selling.

I’ve watched what happens when you don’t. My cousin runs a distribution business and he’s the best salesperson I’ve ever met. When he moved more into the back-end business side, the sales dropped, because that’s where he shone and there wasn’t the right person to replace him at it. So know what you’re genuinely great at, stay in that lane, and hire where you’re weaker. That, by the way, is a good problem to have.

If most of your business is e-commerce and you’re already in a few stores with traffic coming to your site, the person to bring on is a great digital marketer. Not ads, the unglamorous stuff: SEO, organic search, and managing your Google AdWords so people can actually find you. That’s the engine.

Start small, get in front of your customer, iterate

Let me leave you with a real one. We had a student, Shirley, who went to Parsons and started selling on Depop because she knew exactly where her customer was. She went from nobody knowing her name to underground wrappers to magazine covers, doing five to eight thousand a month while making everything herself. Her stuff ended up in Paper magazine. She’s now in a few stores, Sense, APOC in the UK, Lucky Jewel in New York, selling online, doing beautifully, and she’s young with a full-time job.

None of that happened because she dumped everything onto Amazon hoping to sell gazillions. Her product wouldn’t have sold there, and her customer wouldn’t have found her. She did the research and used the right platform for who she is.

So start with what you can afford, get it in front of your customer, and take the feedback. Instead of blowing a hundred grand on inventory before you know how your customer will respond, spend ten. Do a couple of trunk shows, watch what sells, listen, and reiterate. But there’s no way around one thing: you must have an e-commerce site. Doing all this work with nowhere for people to find or contact you is a waste. Get your e-commerce set up before or as you launch, find key stores to partner with, do your trunk shows and pop-ups, get selling regularly, and drive traffic to your site.

It all works. It’s just hard work, and there’s no shortcut. I scroll Instagram too, past all the people promising a million dollars a month on Amazon. I’ve met a lot of people in this industry, and I’ve yet to meet the one who actually did it out of the gate. I’m still looking for them.

Many people have found success doing this. You will too.

Listen to the full Selling episode of Launch Your Line, wherever you get your podcasts.