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If you’re a fashion brand looking to increase revenue and expand globally, you should aim to master year-round wholesale selling. This guide will provide strategies and tools to help you secure more orders from fashion buyers throughout the year.
Brief Summary
While there are set times of year when most fashion retailers are preparing for the next market season, a recent JOOR survey uncovered that 66% of buyers are always seeking exciting new brands to add to their assortment. This means retailers are open to new connections, want to carry differentiated product, and are shopping continuously for their target customers.
The smartest fashion brands try to capture year-round buyer engagement with digital showrooms, shoppable linesheets, flexible payment terms, good communication and collaboration skills, a strong collection, and global appeal to generate more sales and drive business growth.
What is Always-On Selling?
Always-on selling is the ability to facilitate wholesale fashion orders from buyers around the world, 365 days a year, 24/7. This type of approach provides brands with the flexibility to meet demand when it surfaces, nurture global business relationships, and accept wholesale orders on a year-round basis.
How Can You Sell to Wholesale Fashion Buyers All Year?
Selling year-round requires preparation, but with the right tools, it’s something that any fashion brand can tackle. Below are the key factors to be considered when looking to build year-round buyer engagement.
Gain Access to a Wide Network
For the best chance of success at always-on selling, top fashion brands ensure they have a presence in multiple markets. They join exclusive retailer networks to gain access to both established and emerging markets, and so they can prospect to a wide range of retailers across various locations and time zones.This is especially crucial if you are a brand selling a seasonal product like swim or resortwear.
When the local market slows due to weather changes, you can use a diverse global network to find retailers in the other hemisphere who will just be coming into the appropriate season and will be looking to shop your line.
Access to a global network maximises your brand’s visibility, in turn increasing the opportunities for sales and helping you to secure more orders.
Join a Digital Platform
Gaining access to buyers around the world is one thing, but being properly equipped to sell to them is another. Fashion brands looking to master always-on selling will find it critical to join a digital platform and set up a virtual showroom. This is a digital space that allows buyers to shop your line 24/7, regardless of their timezone.
An online space that they can peruse at their leisure is much more convenient and time and cost-efficient than an in-person showroom visit and also requires less work from a brand.
Buyers can log in to your showroom from the comfort of their own office and shop for their assortment by themselves. In just a few clicks, they can instantly place an order without any assistance required from you.
Worried that you might lose a degree of control by letting buyers submit their own orders? Not a problem - you can set parameters to require that submitted orders need to be reviewed and approved prior to being confirmed.
Create a Balanced Collection
Year-round buyer engagement doesn’t necessarily require year-round new collections. While many brands launch multiple collections throughout the year, this is not essential.
Rather than solely focusing on new styles, try to create strategic collections that balance seasonal trends alongside your bestselling evergreen designs.
Your core style signatures can maintain consistent demand, while your seasonal product can be marketed to retailers based on how the styles align with retail trends and their customers' current needs. This two-pronged approach to merchandising collections results in the best chance at securing repeat orders.
Utilize E-Commerce-Like Linesheets
Linesheets with e-commerce capabilities allow buyers to click ‘add to cart’ and build out their assortments easily. Savvy fashion brands personalize their linesheets to each specific retailer they are trying to target, for the best chance of order success.
To effectively customize a linesheet to a buyer’s preferences, consider the major holidays or events coming up in their market and offer product accordingly. The more you can showcase product that matches their customers' needs, the more likely they are to place an order.
Offer Flexible Options
Buyers want to place orders based on their inventory levels and current customer demand. The more flexibility you can offer them when it comes to placing orders and payment terms, the more likely they are to purchase larger quantities and become a repeat customer.
JOOR’s Spring Market survey found that more and more buyers are placing a smaller initial order to test a brand’s performance when they first work together (30%, up from 26% last year).
By offering a lower minimum order quantity, fashion brands can show they understand the challenges retailers face with optimizing their open-to-buy. Buyers also want to place later orders closer to delivery in order to minimize their risk, so a brand that can offer flexibility in terms of extending their ordering time frame can capture these short lead time orders and generate more sales.
Be Open to Collaboration
To maximize your fashion brand’s potential for year-round wholesale selling, be open to different avenues of collaboration that retailers might be interested in. From exclusive products for retailer anniversaries to seasonal pop-ups and sales, there are multiple ways to work with a retailer to generate incremental revenue, even if you don’t have new styles to showcase.
An in-store customization activation, for example, can be a great way to drive traffic to their store while also building brand loyalty and helping to maximize sales.
Become Excellent at Communication
While all the strategies listed above can help drive year-round buyer engagement, none of them are possible without good communication skills. Buyers want to work with brands that are open, honest and share information quickly and clearly.
Nurturing a buyer-brand relationship through email, instant messaging, phone calls, or in-person meetings is the most crucial step for securing lasting wholesale success.
In Conclusion
If you can consistently offer buyers suitable product, keep a good line of communication and adopt a digital wholesale platform like JOOR so buyers can easily shop a virtual showroom and digital linesheet in just a few clicks, then you are on the path to establishing year-round business.
Ready to take your fashion brand to the next level? Try a demo today!
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