GLOBAL SOURCING- Week 2- Brand Start Up

BRAND START UP (WEEK 2)

This unit is about coming together as a group, assigning roles to each individual person (eg. marketing director, creative director) and creating a hypothetical business plan/ entry strategy for a new niche brand. It could be a retailer, an app, a service- anything you like.

Our first Global Sourcing session after Christmas Break was aimed at simply deciding on a niche brand and it's name. We started to bounce ideas around and came up with the idea of a unisex children's wear retailer with a focus on sustainability. We wanted to narrow our target market down to age 7-12 which we chose because we wanted an age range of children that were old enough to pick out their own clothes, but still young enough that their parents buy their clothes. 

We thought about the needs of parents and the typical issues they face when regarding their children's clothes. We thought about how children grow up so fast, leaving parents with lots of unwanted clothes and how we could offer a service in our store, similar to H&M whereby parents could donate unwanted clothes and receive a voucher that would entitle them to money off products in our store, dependant on how many items of clothing were donated.

Unisex brands have a tendency to use a generic 'minimalistic and neutral' colour pallet but when discussing this as a group, we thought this sort of colour pallet is not what kids want. Kids want colour in their lives because what other age can you wear 20 different colours in one outfit and it be considered socially acceptable!? We feel that children are pressured to grow up to fast and we want our colour pallet and general design aesthetic to mirror what it's like to be young- what it should be like.

We wanted there to be a sustainable aspect but sustainable usually equals expensive. Because children grow up so fast, parents don't want to spend silly amounts of money on their kids clothes. We are going to look into the costs of sustainable processes and sustainable fabrics and agree on a happy medium, so that our brand is at least partly sustainable, and our customers get a price they can afford at the same time.

We spent the day deliberating and then sharing ideas with the rest of the class to get feedback. Our brand name 'Innosence' was not very popular as it apprently reminded people of the smoothie brand. So we are currently thinking of a name to replace it.