With e-commerce, your brand is now able to expose to the world. But before that, is your brand ready to go global? Here's some tips from running our own DTC brand from only Malaysia to 7 countries now.
1. Brand Identity
What's so special about your brand? If you are running e-commerce, customer has no chance to touch and feel your products like we used to have in shopping mall. Your brand, what specifically your brand represent becomes more important to buyer in front of the screen. If you already own a fashion label, just want to increase your customer's bucket size by extending product category, you are advised to develop design/ color that fits your clothes. If you are just wanna start a shoe brand, then understanding your target audiences are extremely important to make your mind clear which type of design/ color fit into your audience.
2. Sell, Payment, Logistic and Return
Where do you sell? How do you collect payment and ship to your customer? Choose the right selling platform (Shopee/ Lazada/ Zalora/ Amazon/ Ebay/ Shopify/ etc) based on where your target audience shop. Are you going to charge customer based on local currency? Is your payment gateway able to support this? Which courier should I use to avoid high shipping fee? We will provide 1-1 support on marketing your products to global based on your business.
3. Lead Time
It's important to consider your targeted country's weather and season when you make purchase. Some countries have 4 seasons where countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc are either sunny or rainy day. Certain material like suede might affect customer wearing experience during rainy day as the material will absorb water.
4. Working with supportive factory
Most of the shoe factory in the world required relatively high MOQ to produce footwear, usually from at least 300 pairs - 500 pairs per design. If you have only limited capital, stock purchase is going to utilise most of your capital. Otherwise, you might need to get additional loan for operating expenses. If happen to have excess stock, the most common decision from fashion retailer is to sell on discount. At the end, it hurts your margin.
We are here to help small businesses to kick start their shoe business as low as 5 pairs per size. Your stress of keeping high level of stock is gone and now you can focus on selling and make profit.
