Practical Brand #1 - What is brand and why is it important?
Brand is an elusive topic for people working in fashion ecommerce.
We can all point towards brands that we admire and whose success we would like to emulate, but deconstructing them and applying the lessons to our own label often proves impossible.
I typically work with 8 - 10 fashion brands in a given year in some capacity, and have active conversations with around 3 times that amount, and in my experience this lack of brand knowledge is the number one invisible blocker for ecommerce growth.
It’s not a technology problem, or a lack proficiency in Meta ads management. It’s quite simply the case that most ecommerce teams don’t understand what brands are, why they are important, or how they grow.
This realisation lead me to write a practical guide to brand for fashion ecommerce.
I call it Practical Brand for short.
In entry #1 we’re going to cover what a brand is, and more importantly, why you should care.
A brief history of fashion branding
Examples of branding can be found in almost every era of recorded history. Starting as a way to identify ownership on cattle, the practice evolved to give information on origins and quality of goods from precious metals to pottery.
Examples of branding and advertising exist throughout history. We know of a company called White Rabbit Sewing Needles because historians found a copper printing plate they used to make posters advertising the superior quality of their needles.
Modern estimates say this was used somewhere between around 960 - 1279BC!
“Jinan Liu’s Fine Needle Shop: We buy high quality steel rods and make fine quality needles, to be ready for use at home in no time.” (loosely translated)
The first example we have of what we would refer to as a ‘modern’ fashion brand is House of Worth, founded by Charles Worth in 1858.
Worth is credited as the first person to sew branded labels into his garments which adorned European Royalty, and in turn spread quickly through high society.
In 1920 the swimwear brand Jantzen added a logo onto their swimsuit and then in 1933 Lacoste popularised the practice with their famous embroidered crocodile being featured on their iconic polo shirts.
All principles of fashion branding can be sourced from this series of events and by the late 1960s large, oversized logos started to appear on clothing (likely originating from sportswear) to give us what we commonly associate with modern fashion branding.
What is a brand?
The House of Worth didn’t become a haute couture phenomenon because Charles put branded labels in his dresses. He got his start by winning industry awards for his work, which attracted the custom of Empress Eugenie of France. Her patronage attracted other European royalty, and naturally the women of high society followed soon after.
The actual House of Worth, located in Paris, became a socialite gathering spot where merely visiting could increase ones profile amongst the elite. Customers could expect to see new designs showcased on live models each season. Top performers would wear his clothes, further increasing his reputation amongst the cultured elite.
All of this contributed to the House of Worth brand, which despite not trading in current times, retains its place in the history books.
This leads us nicely into what a brand is.
It’s not a logo, a label or anything that you yourself say about your business.
Your brand is the memories and expectations you create amongst your audience. Those memories and expectations will ultimately dictate whether a person buys from you, or somebody else.
The socialites of Europe shopped at House of Worth because the circles they aspired to shopped there. They knew that shopping there put them at the edge of contemporary fashion. And they knew that visiting the store meant opulence, hand measured fittings and the chance to run into royalty.
It’s the job of your marketing to create similar high expectations and deep emotional memories.
Those memories can come from many different sources:
A celebrity wearing one of your pieces in a popular TV show
Stumbling across a particular lookbook image on Instagram
A good customer service experience
Seeing your collaboration with another brand
Advertising
Literally every touch point a person has with you is an opportunity to cultivate memories which contribute to a strong brand.
It’s not enough to rely on advertising, which ranks as one of the weakest ways to build emotional connection.
Everything you do plays a part.
Why should you care about brand building?
Quite frankly your potential for growth in apparel and footwear depends on your ability to build a strong brand.
This content is intended for small to medium independent fashion labels, and for that type of brand, other routes to growth are either unviable or unsustainable.
Garment quality is difficult to quantify and most customers can’t distinguish good from exceptional manufacturing.
You’ll never be able to compete on price. And if you do find a way, you’ll quickly get muscled out by bigger brands who can squeeze costs more.
Garment design can be a hit with potential customers, but they need a strong brand to justify RRPs.
On top of allowing for sustainable growth, a strong brand can protect you against some of the common pitfalls of operating in a fashion brand.
A strong brand makes your customers less sensitive to price increases meaning your margins can be protected as your production costs increase.
A strong brand makes you less reliant on paid media such as Meta/ Tik Tok ads. The more reliant you are on ads, the harder it is to grow profitably. And that’s ignoring the huge swings in media costs that happen each year.
A strong brand means you don’t have to constantly reach for discounting to move the revenue needle.
I’m hoping that as we come to an end of the first instalment of this series you have a solid understanding that brand is the key that truly unlocks long-term growth.
In the next entry we’ll be going into the practical side of measuring brand within the context of ecommerce.
For now, I’m going to leave you with a quote from Sir Richard Branson.
“The way a company brands itself is everything–it will ultimately decide whether a business survives.”
Key Takeaways
A brand is composed of all memories and expectations you cultivate with a person.
Positive memories and expectations increase the likelihood a person will buy from you. Negative experiences will decrease the likelihood.
Advertising, logos and taglines play a part, but only a small one in the grand scheme of things.
A growing brand means you can grow revenue in a profitable manner and makes your business more robust.