The athletic clothing industry has been witnessing a sudden upsurge and tremendous growth within the past few years, and therefore the sole reason behind this is often the rising consciousness of individuals to urge fit. The aim to be healthy and achieve an honest body has made the lads and ladies rush to the gyms, and take up different athletic styles, and this has increased the demand for activewear essentials. The increasing popularity of exercising globally has been noticed, and therefore the clothing brands are combining fashion and fitness to gift something very motivational to the freakiness addicts within the sort of versatile clothing pieces.

The sports and fitness clothing global market is apprehended to succeed in US$258.9 by 2024, with the increasing participation of individuals during this sector. The evolution of sportswear into street fashion statements has made these clothing pieces very fashionable among the non-fitness freaks, too. From the high-end technological innovations to the introduction of a number of the foremost functional nanotechnology-based fabrics, there’s nothing that stops this athletic clothing industry from growing.

This period currently may be a blooming one for the athletic clothing industry and if you’re also contemplating on starting your own workout wear wholesale business, then don’t drop this idea! this is often probably the foremost glorious period for the activewear clothing business, and you ought to definitely invest to start out your own wholesale athletic apparel business. But, no business is successful without a concrete and arranged plan, and implementing the plan with the right resources and money. So let’s read on below the full guide to create an athletic clothing online store for beginners. 

Start Sportswear Business From Scratch

What is your target market?

To get the proper supply of products from the manufacturer, you would like to know the target market very well. To blanket this, realize the people you’re looking forward to selling your clothes, too. Is your target market the college-going youth, the fitness junkie corporate people, the middle-aged crowd who is forced to attend gym sessions to urge back to shape or the athleisure fashion lovers? – Figure it out with research!

A concrete plan to reach out to the purchasers

To reach bent prospective customers, you’ve got to border a concrete plan. Here are some exciting ideas.

  • Go for promotional run through vlogs and videos, and for this, you’ll collaborate with the bloggers and therefore the YouTube enthusiasts who curate fashion and wonder content.
  • Concentrate on both social media and traditional media channels to market your workout wear business through creative ways. Run different contests and games to garner attention.

Create an online store website

The most important part of starting the business would be to construct a  well-designed website that would be your online portal to carry out the sales and reach out to maximum athletic wear lovers.  For this, instead of you wasting time, it is better to hire a good and professionally experienced digital marketing team or company that would act as a catalyst for your business.

Luckily, it’s fairly simple to set up your own clothing business with Shopify.

First things first, you’ll need to create an account.

Head to the Shopify homepage and you’ll see a box in the middle of the page where you can enter your email address.

Click on the ‘Get started’ button and you’ll be asked to fill out some information for your Shopify account.

Come up with a password, a store name (more on this in the next section), and fill out some information about your experience with entrepreneurship.

After you’ve done that, you’ll see this screen:

Once you’re on this screen, you’ve got a Shopify account, and that means that you’re officially on the road to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Next step? See our tips below: 

  • Buy a domain name.
  • Put the best images, the attractive graphics, and details of the tabs: be it the “contact us” page or the “returns policy page” and the like.
  • The website should be easily scalable, offer a neat presentation of color, fonts, content with less loading time to do away with bounce rates and exit rates.
  • After the designing work, it is time to integrate your online shirts business with a payment gateway.
  • Set up the shopping cart, and it is recommended to go for hosted shopping cart software to lend more security to customers.

Design your Shopify store

Don’t forget to customize your online store front so it has a different look from others. It’s important that you make your store your own, especially if you’re using a free Shopify theme for your sportswear business. After all, if over half a million people are using Shopify to run their stores, you can guarantee that you’re not the only one using that theme.

So you’ll need to head to the “Themes” page again in your Shopify settings.

From here, you’ll see this:

Then you’ll need to click on the “Customize” button.

From here, you’ll see a ton of options. And it might be a little bit confusing at first with what you need to do next.

I always like to start off at the top of the page, with the logo.

Designing Your Store: Logo Creation

Let me be clear here – I’m no design expert.

I like to play around with photo editing software, but I’m certainly not good at graphic design. But, honestly, you don’t have to be. There are tools out there, like Hatchful or Canva, which make graphic design accessible to beginners like me.

The best part? It’s free to use.

So when I was creating the logo for my sportswear business I just jumped over to Canva, signed up, and started messing around. There are some preset templates, and after a few minutes of work came up with this:

Perfect. That wasn’t so hard, was it? So you should go through next steps by yourself.

Sourcing & Dropshipping

Choose the most appropriate athletic wear manufacturer

You have to obtain inventory of the workout wear essentials by purchasing bulk and athletic clothes from various fitness apparel wholesale suppliers, manufacturers and distributors. For this there are two ways, you can either contact the manufacturers and suppliers directly or by visiting their websites. For getting in touch with them online, you can access the wholesale application online, and make your account with the details fed, like revealing your proof of identity, a sales tax or resale license number and few more.

Now, how would you understand about which manufacturer to choose? Here are some tips.

  • Ask your references like friends and business associates to shortlist the most reliable and renowned manufacturers.
  • Do some online background research about the best workout wear manufacturers present in the market, and understand which one would be best for you.
  • Check out the online ratings and reviews to choose one of the best manufacturers.

Find the niche

To be different from the other sportswear business owners, you have to choose a niche for your own product category too, and concentrate on a particular genre of workout wear.  The key consideration for your suppliers before they will do business with you would be to understand your niche, and whether you want to specialize in a special workout wear segment, or athletic clothing on a whole, you have to decide on this first.

Check out the merchandise catalog

Once you’ve got decided about the merchandise category and your niche market, you’ve got to see out the merchandise catalog of the manufacturer you’ve got shortlisted to business with. Ask them to send the merchandise catalog to you thru the mail, or visit their website to download it. Now, you’ll choose the kinds of clothing items that you simply want your business to possess , and go ahead with placing the order.

Check samples

Before you jump to put a bulk order of the products you’re trying to find your business, you would like to request a free quote to know what proportion would that cost and tally that together with your budget limitations. Now, if everything is sorted on your financial end, it’s knowing invite product samples in order that you understand the design and quality of the products that you are getting to sell to the purchasers . If you don’t just like the samples, you’ll always change your manufacturer.

Sort out the business permits

Running the athletic wear business would require certain permits, and these are to be sorted out before you begin everything in a full-fledged manner.  The permits include an assumed name certificate, resale permit or sales tax permit and much more.

Time to decide about the array of services you would offer

  • Now that you simply have decided about the sort of products category to concentrate on , you also should think about the services you’d offer to the purchasers which will cause you to a revered athletic wear business.
  • Always assure customers of safe and timely shipping of the products
  • The customer service desk must be competent and seamless enough to resolve any issues and accept complaints.
  • Time to time offers, seasonal discounts, and benefits are essential to bringing in additional customers.
  • The return policy of the products should be hassle-free.

Always keep your inventory up-to-date

You must choose the manufacturer that can entice you with the most updated products, and not something that is outdated and out of fashion.

For this, know about the details of how the athletic clothing world is functioning.

  • Check out the looks of the celebs and models in the athletic wear.
  • Explore the fashion shows that happen in the fashion world focusing on athletic clothing.
  • Read more fitness fashion blogs.

Pricing & Marketing

Pricing structure

The most important step is to seem at the market trends and consider the prices that you simply would charge to sell the activewear pieces to customers. To earn more profits, you’ve got to consider the proper pricing strategy, in order that you’ll have your share of the profit. Your expenses should be kept in mind while choosing the costs in order that you gain an honest margin of profit, and never incur losses. Remember, the cash you get from the purchasers also helps you to repay your loans and EMI’s.

Promotional strategy

You cannot take forward your athletic wholesale venture without the right use of a really effective and reliable marketing strategy and a promotional plan executed by a team of execs . Employ a really skilled and dexterous team of social media marketing experts who can sketch the right plan to advertise your business on the various online forums, from Facebook to Instagram. Also, put effort to put your business on the normal media channels like newspaper and tv . to use the right promotional strategy, you would like to take a seat with the marketing team and consider something unique and out-of-the-box, like running contests and running a trending hashtag. Also, keep your budget in mind as investing an outsized amount on campaigns to promote isn’t the wise step.

Couclusion

So, now you know exactly how you can start your own sportswear business – congratulations! Now it’s about taking those steps towards making your dreams of being an entrepreneur into a reality.

But again, before starting your own workout wear wholesale business, make sure to sit and prepare the plan and draw the framework which will get you closer to your aim. The main success mantra would be to be organized and have the right mindset to achieve your business goals and be a successful workout wear business enterprise.