Here are a few steps to take when researching and creating a brand identity for your shoe line.
Understanding The Business Of Fashion
Before starting out, it is important to understand fashion trends and keeping up-to date with the seasonal trends for Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. Having a basic understanding of The Business of Fashion will give you an upper hand when designing your footwear collection. Some popular blogs to keep upto date with trends are BOF, Footwear News and Google Footwear Industry News.
Find Your Niche
When thinking about how to start a shoe brand, it’s important to do your research before starting. There are still a lot of gaps in the market when it comes to footwear and leather accessories, therefore finding your niche is important.
To identify your niche, here are some questions to ask:
What pain point am I solving?
How am I different?
What is my target audience?
Who else is selling a similar product to me?
What is their marketing strategy? How can I learn from that and differentiate my marketing strategy?
It is important to perform an analysis of popular shoe lines and to find gaps where you can differentiate your marketing strategy and approach.
Create a Moodboard
Creating a design requires creativity, brainstorming, and organization. Whether you are new to shoe design, or already familiar with the the creation process, design requires time, patience, and inspiration. Most Importantly, moodboards can help.
Moodboards allow artists, designers, and stylists to visualize their product, and then organize their thoughts and ideas into a concrete concept on the board, which they can then refer back to when creating original designs. This can help with organizing ideas alongside trends and market branding to assist in the creation of a saleable product that customers want to buy.
Building a moodboard can be as simple as gluing photos to a pasteboard but it is crucial to consider the elements, expression, emotion, and value of the components included. In this guide, you will learn to carefully consider style, content, and goals, so that you can create a moodboard that adds value to your project. This should help you with organizing creative thoughts, finding inspiration for new projects to make them more relevant and interesting to consumers, and communicating ideas or designs with others to receive feedback and input.
Create Your Brand Identity
Coming up with a catchy brand name for your shoe line will attract interest. It can be your own name or you can come up with something that will resonate with your target niche. Once you come up with the brand name, the first step is to check if the domain name and social handles are available. While, registering your business and getting a trademark is important, it is not necessary in the early prototyping and sampling stages. However, while we are working on your shoe sample prototype it is always a good idea to get started with the registration process.
Create Basic Sketches
Once you have created a mood board and have your perfect shoe design in mind, it’s time to start sketching. It is completely okay if you are not a professional sketch artist, basic image references of existing designs along with sketches with modifications are acceptable when contacting us. We also have a Tech Pack Guide with an excel template which will help you create a specification sheet in order to get an accurate production quote from us. As part of the Startup Package, we offer technical consultation and make 2D paper patterns which help us translate your sketches in to technical drawings.
