Developing New Product Ideas for your Clothing Brand

There is no other niche in which new product development is more important than the clothing niche.

Fashion is constantly changing, styles come and go, and fads are unpredictable and unreliable. Customers are always looking for the next trend and to change up their look every season. Competitors in any given clothing space seem to be dropping new launches every week.

How can you keep up?

You need to start with a large flow of new product, style, and design ideas by building your own product development systems and taking control of your own innovation. Below are four simple ways your brand can take advantage of the new product development process.

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1. INTERNAL - HACKATHONS

Popular in the tech industry but not so common in ecommerce, especially in the clothing space. A hackathon is typically a 1-3 day project/case sprint to develop solutions to a company problem. In the case for clothing, this can be along the lines of developing the next summer collection, new designs for an existing product line, or coming up with new product extensions altogether.

Hackathons are a great way for everyone in the company to get involved and utilize that competitive spirit. Have fun with them!

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2. INTERNAL - 20% TIME

Again very popular in the tech industry, with Google being a great example. At Google, employees are allotted 20% of their working hours to pursue their own ideas relating to the Google ecosystem. Ideas that they can then pitch to a committee to have them developed as prototypes.

Again, this is a great way to pull in your team and get them more involved in the product development step. Everyone has ideas. And utilizing your team’s entrepreneurial spirit with a similar program can be a huge benefit for the ideas pipeline.

3. EXTERNAL - COMPETITORS

Competitors can be a great way to generate new product ideas. The marketplace is always moving, innovating, and coming up with new styles and designs. Take inspiration. My favorite way to keep tabs on competitors is to create a fresh Instagram account and follow 50-100 brands in my immediate space. Do the same with email, TikTok, and so on. Come to this when you’re in need to fill up your ideas pipeline.

Make use of competitor reviews as well. Reviews are a goldmine of customer feedback and new product development ideas. Sometimes customers straight up tell you what they want and how they wish the product would be.

4. EXTERNAL - SUPPLIERS/DISTRIBUTORS

Wholesale suppliers and distributors are aggregators of all kinds of clothing products and styles. They have the advantage of having a pulse on the entire market and see what’s moving and what’s struggling. They might even have an idea of what’s going to coming up and do well next season.

If you’re using China to manufacture, the right factories and agents on Alibaba are happy to share this information. Wholesalers right here in the US such as LAShowroom and FashionGO also have market data you could ask for.

5. EXTERNAL - CROWDSOURCE

Who better to ask for new product ideas than the people buying them? Get your customers involved!

Whether it’s through a popular crowdsourcing platform of just through surveys or sending an email flow, have your customers engage with their feedback and opinions on what they would like to see next. You also could ask them to vote on existing ideas. You could even hold a contest, similar to a hackathon or competition, but externally facing, to generate new product ideas.

These techniques and tactics may seem unfamiliar in the clothing niche, but it’s the brands that take risks, go against the grain, and do something different that end up being successful. And for the benefit of having a constant flow of new product ideas, it’s well worth it.