Learning how to start a leggings business from home can seem hard, but it’s not.
Starting your own leggings brand from home is actually pretty simpler than you may think. You just have to know the steps. But once you take action and actually go through each step, everything all of a sudden becomes clear.
So let’s take it from the top.
Develop Your Best Selling Leggings Idea
Before you worry about any sort of manufacturing, you need to focus on marketing.
More specifically, you need a strong reason why someone should buy your leggings over everyone else’s. This includes why someone should buy your leggings over billion dollar companies like Lululemon.
This is what will help it become a bestseller.
Luckily, the process isn’t too difficult.
First, you want to come up with an idea of what it is you want. Who are your leggings for? What challenges do they face with their leggings? Where do they buy leggings right now?
Then comes the good stuff.
Take the answers to the questions above and map out what other DTC brands are trying to solve the same problems. Ideally, you list out at least 10 brands that you would consider to be direct competitors. If you happen to get Lululemon on that list, you need to pick a smaller or different problem to solve. You don’t want to compete directly with billion dollar brands.
From there, you should go to each brand on your list, go through their best sellers, look for all of the commonalities between them, and look for anything that stands out. Doing this will give you real data about what already sells and what untapped opportunities you can exploit.
Take this research to come up with your best selling leggings idea.
How To Manufacture Your Leggings
Once you know exactly what you want to make, the next step is to make them.
To do this, you might need to talk to 2-3 partners.
1/ Technology
2/ Fabric Mill
3/ Manufacturer
Basically, if you need high end fabrics and technology, then you’ll need to contact them first before talking to a manufacturer. If all you’re doing is adding pockets to your leggings though, you just need to talk to a manufacturer.
To find the technology, buy your competitors leggings and look at their tags. Chances are, one of their tags will contain the name of that tech. If so, google it.
To find the fabric mill, decide what types of fabrics you want and Google things like “merino wool manufacturer” or “merino wool fabric mill”. If you’re working with any tech, you can also ask your provider for any fabric mills they already work with.
To find the manufacturer, you can just type “apparel manufacturer” or “leggings private label”. You can also use directories like Maker’s Row, which I highly recommend.
Next, is your designs.
I highly suggest you talk to an apparel designer who can create the “tech pack” that contains all of your products details. This includes all measurements that your manufacturer can follow to create the product you want.
From there, it’s just getting the details down.
This includes costs, minimums, lead times, and capabilities.
This is by far the most frustrating part of the process, but all it takes is a little persistence.
The Official Leggings Business Plan: Build
The best way to learn how to start a leggings business is to start with a small, loyal audience of people who want to buy your stuff.
Considering the leggings business is the yoga business, this means starting a Youtube channel or TikTok about yoga. Doing this will make sure you build an audience of people who are likely to buy leggings. So start producing tons of yoga-related video content.
I suggest budgeting at least 6 months before you even work on your leggings.
After those 6 months, you should get started on manufacturing your leggings. At the same time, you want to funnel that traffic into an email newsletter that notifies people of your progress and your official launch.
This may sound like a long-winded way to start a business, but I promise it’s worth it.
The hardest part about any ecommerce is not the selling, it’s being able to make a profit. By building an audience of people who are ready to buy, you’ll have traction from day one. This will give you the profit you need to re-invest and the confidence to move forward with the idea.
The Official Leggings Business Plan: Launch
Once you have all of your ducks in a row, it’s time for the official launch.
For practical reasons, I suggest doing this in 2-3 rounds.
In every round, you are going to promote your new leggings to your audience. This means emailing your list to go and buy. It also means making content in whatever channel you picked earlier to go buy. It also means letting all of your friends and family know.
Your goal? To be sold out.
This will validate the idea for you. And because apparel is a very expensive niche to be in, it will give you the money you need for your next round. So once you’re finished with round 1, go ahead and order another batch of leggings.
From there, repeat 1-2 more times.
On the final round, you’re going to leave your store open permanently rather than closing it. This also means it’ll be your biggest batch of leggings, which is why doing 2-3 rounds is so important.
This is the secret no one tells you when it comes to learning how to start a leggings business. It’s a much more efficient way to get the numbers behind the business to work so that you stay profitable.
The Official Leggings Business Plan: Scale
At this point, you have a proven concept.
The rest comes down to adding more traffic channels and more products.
This included paid ads, PR, influencers, Amazon, and even retail. They all matter and they all should be things you try as your leggings business grows. With that said, the most important one is going to be paid ads as it’s going to be the most scalable and doable at your size.
And to make paid ads work, you need great creative.
This is the step where you hire a creative agency or at least a local videographer to help you create amazing FB ads. The better your ad creative, the better your Facebook ads are going to perform.
You also need a good sales funnel.
For this, you want to bundle your leggings. Either let people buy more than 1 for a discount or give them multiple pairs of leggings in different designs and let them buy it at a small discount. The purpose for this is to increase your AOV. Ideally, your average order value will amount to $75 or above. This makes your ads much more likely to be profitable.
From there, it’s a constant state of more ad creative and more ad budget to grow. This means if you really want to learn how to start a leggings business, then you need to get good at media buying.
That is, until you have the money to outsource it.