3 Creative Services to Help Bring Your Ideas to Life

If you’re a designer looking to launch a creative fashion line, you need a solid grasp of all of the elements of a successful collection. In theory, it sounds like a simple design, clothing manufacturing, and selling. However, there’s a stack of moving parts most overlook to get clothes on the shelves. Ultimately, creative services like thoughtful strategy, consistent branding, and quality fabric sourcing contribute to high fashion achievements.

At the end of the day, you need to work freely in a creative studio with an established fashion consultant team, who can help you work out the kinks and create the fashion line of your dreams. It’s no one-man show! It takes a village to produce a quality collection that not only perfectly represents your vision but also has your customers racing to buy. Here are three services that contribute to a powerful fashion line. 

1. Fashion Product Development

Whether you’re a budding or established fashion designer, you’re always working towards a beautiful piece of art. After all, fashion is a form of creative self-expression, and each piece must reflect your unique style. But unfortunately, you can’t just design a collection and expect it to sell like hotcakes unless you have an established marketing strategy in place.

According to Crowdspring, “…a clothing brand needs more than just an exquisite apparel design to create a lasting business. It needs all the trappings of a successful business as well. Apparel retailers need to master marketing, manufacturing, and retailing, among other things.”

Using a product development consultant at the beginning of creative conception can be beneficial because this stage lays the foundation for the rest of the collection. There are multiple sectors of this initial phase, from the first creative sit-down session to merchandise planning and competitive analysis, so let’s break down the details. 

Product Development Details with Creative Services

Firstly, you’ll need a general creative plan to work out things like basic inspiration and the direction of the collection. It would be best if you also considered merchandise planning to narrow down types of garments and how they’ll complement each other and a collection development strategy to figure out manufacturing logistics. Then, consider the overall design, which will help work out any foreseeable issues for the next design stage. 

In the fashion product development period, it’s necessary to crunch some numbers, too. For instance, working out your target pricing and budget in detail and researching your competitors to gauge their tactics. You’ll want to do something different so you stand out in the best way possible. Lastly, consider any extraneous details you wish to add to your brand, such as sustainability.

To wrap it all together, put the above elements into an easy-to-follow plan with measurable goals and deadlines, especially if you’re gearing up for a seasonal collection. Make sure your manufacturers have the capacity and availability to meet your dates! 

These initial to-dos may seem annoying; you’re a designer after all– not a business manager. However, think of it as laying the groundwork for your designs. In the end, they’ll make the creation process much simpler since you’ll have a better idea of direction. At TEG, our development consultants are masters at generating in-depth creative strategies and plans that will not only bring your collection to life but also help it succeed during your launch and beyond. 

2. Design Services

Wondering how to develop a brand? If you’re not an established designer, you can work with a professional specializing in design services to bring your inspiration to fruition. And even if you’re a pro in the fashion world, you can still work with other experts in the field to help you with flat drawings and various creative elements. 

As you know, the designs are everything; they’re the essence of the collection, and each one is the blueprint for your patternmaker to eventually develop the pieces in real life.

Typically, when you work with a fashion design studio, you’ll cover things like fashion mood boards, fabric color palettes, line sheets, and more. In this stage, you’ll get down and dirty with your expectations, vision, and little details like belts and zippers. Clear communication with your patternmaker, manufacturer, and other designers on the team is vital. Otherwise, any misunderstandings will be directly reflected in your collection. 

This is why it’s crucial to work with a creative design studio that understands your vision to a tee and can meet you where you’re at, regardless of your fashion experience. Our Los Angeles fashion designers do just that and more, working tirelessly to ensure your collection lives up to your desires with multiple revisions, detailed fashion illustrations, and weekly check-ins to ensure a smoothly run launch. We put everything into your project to have peace of mind knowing your collection is in good hands. 

3. Fabric and Trim Sourcing

It’s easy to cut corners when you source your fabric, going for the cheapest materials on the market. This might seem like the best option if you run a tight budget. But in actuality, you’re setting yourself up for failure in the long run. 

If you’re an emerging fashion designer, you need to blow your first customers a way to stay in business. Cheap materials are lower in quality, meaning they tend to rip, shrink, and fade quickly. You can fool your customers once, but you can’t fool them twice! Eventually, they’ll walk away from your line in frustration. This goes for established designers, too. You have to uphold a solid reputation to keep buyers coming back for more. 

Here’s where sourcing the best possible materials comes into play. However, if you rerun a tight budget, you have to find that balance of quality and price, which can be tricky! There are many elements to consider, from gathering swatches and trims to negotiating fees and minimums. 

‘A Blend Between The Ideal And The Attainable’

According to MasterClass, “Whatever you’re designing will have to be produced in a cost-effective manner. Being a successful fashion designer is always a blend between the ideal and the attainable.”

For the perfect results, designers should stay in their zone of genius and not worry so much about fabric sourcing when it has such a massive impact on their collection. Thankfully, you can hire sourcing managers to do all the grunt work for you. 

For instance, TEG’s sourcing managers work with you from the start with a sourcing intake session, where you discuss the ins and outs of your material needs. Then, with their expert input and planning, they work with you to gather the necessary swatches and trims, negotiate with vendors to save money, guide you around PO’s and ordering, as well as even track the delivery of your orders.

Having a dedicated sourcing manager can save you hours of trouble– not to mention headaches, so you can focus on what you do best.

Choose the Right Creative Services Partner

Creative fashion requires more effort since it involves so many other factors like marketing strategies, productive designs, creative services, and high-quality materials. It can quickly go wrong when you try to do everything yourself as a designer. There’s so much to keep track of and plan for! 

Here at TEG, we work with both emerging designers needing extra guidance and established designers who outsource specific roles. Our team of in-house fashion experts can fill the gaps you need, whether it’s initial planning, designing, sourcing, or all of the above.