Any profession that deals with selling of services requires a lot of efforts to get exposure from the people who might want them. Similarly, fashion designing is a niche and very specific work profile in which professionals and practicians serve and deliver projects to clients based on their requirements.
But for that to even happen, people need to acknowledge fashion designers’ presence. So this is where you could market and promote yourself as a fashion designer and gain customers on a regular basis. Unlike products or material goods, fashion designing is a service industry, and accordingly, it has distinctive ways to promote yourself as a freelance designer, fashion agency, or large company. In this guide, we’ve discussed several ways you can use to reach out and market yourself as a fashion designer to a specific audience. So without any further ado, let’s begin.
Methods to promote and get clients as a fashion designer
Working in the fashion design industry is not sustainable when you don’t have a regular flow of leads. Here are various methods you can use to promote and pitch potential clients in the industry.
Promote yourself on social media
In the internet era, social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram serve as a great medium to promote a brand or an individual. Through concise planning and strategic techniques, you can attract and gain a good chunk of the audience who would be interested in your services, in this case, cloth and attire designing. To really connect with such an audience who is willing to acquire fashion designing services is through a personal brand. To elaborate, a personal brand is a way of promoting yourself as well as your services on the internet. But it should not be done in a manner in which you only run after sales and getting clients onboard.
An impactful personal brand is one that understands the audience’s requirements and pain points and accordingly provides tailored made services. From time to time you can deliver fashion designing tips, some guides, and even educate them on anything related to fashion designing. This way it builds trust with your followers and the next time they want expert help, they would surely approach you with a design project.
Network with others in the industry
Networking is the key to getting to know people and ultimately landing projects for you. Apart from interacting with peers and colleagues, break out of the bubble and try to meet others in the fashion design industry. This could be through fashion events, launch events, organisational meets, parties, etc. Make you carry your personal business-related card with you at all times and hand it over to potential clients. Apart from that, you can follow and connect with others on job portals such as LinkedIn as well and who knows in the future sometimes they might need your help with a certain task or project related to fashion design.
Collaborate with others on design projects
There can be times when you land fashion designing projects which are on a large scale and require a couple of people working on specific tasks such as sketching designs, procuring clothing, selecting fabrics and patterns etc. Such projects are an opportunity to ensemble a group of fashion designers sharing the same passion and mindset with unique capabilities of their own. In this process, you get to meet talented designers and get to learn about their techniques by working together. In the future sometime, they may land a project with a huge workload and may approach you for the same. This way you will gain work opportunities from time to time and even build connections with talented people in the industry.
Build an agency
Building an agency could be considered as the ultimate goal for a self-working or freelancing fashion designer. In an agency, you work on a large scale on multiple projects simultaneously. It is more than obvious various tasks cannot be handled by you alone. For that, a team of skilled personnel should be hired. Having an agency puts you ahead of your competitors as you have a registered brand and having prior client testimonials can help in gaining future clients as it builds trust. With proper marketing and delivering exceptional projects, you can end up being one of the best fashion designers in your town or city. This gives a huge exposure and people start recognising you for your expertise.
Get referrals from clients
Clients’ referrals can certainly boost your freelancing or agency fashion designing business. It simply means that once you deliver the required assignment or project to your existing clients, you can ask them for leads from their connections or friend circle. What’s even better is your clients can refer you to others who are on the lookout for fashion or cloth designing services. This way there’s a flow of leads at your disposal at all times. To explain it in a nutshell, your priority should always be to deliver top-notch work for a change to get referrals from others. At the end of the day, people only recommend the positive outcomes of what they’ve experienced, in this case your clients.
Build up a portfolio website
With the technology being so advanced, one can create a website in a matter of minutes through no-code platforms such as Wix and WordPress. With just a few clicks you can build your online fashion portfolio which can contain the projects you’ve worked on, your learnings, client testimonials and even list out your services.
Apart from that, to generate some organic leads to land projects, one can create and publish blogs and get some sweet traffic from Google search so that visitors not only read your content but also approach you for handling their fashion designing projects. This also enables an organic presence and can go hand in hand with social media profiles, which we talked about earlier.