MMM
TRIPLE M By: Mikaela Larsson for Byuing and Product development Tutor: Eleanor Warrington at London College of Fashion 2016
What is a buyer? A buyer works together with a designer and merchandise planner to find collections that will sell out in a short time. As a fashion buyer you need to have a knowledge and understanding of trends, brand, colours and styles that are appropriate to the target costumer. When you work as a buyer you need to put your own taste a side and focus on what the customers your are targeting want and like to be able to cover their needs and create success. A buyer needs to be a critical thinker as well ass analytic when it comes to sales and trends. Some key characteristics for a buyer is to be flexible, efficient and positive. They need to understand how to foresee future trends and current trends across different markets.
What is a product range? A range is a total fashion look. If you’ve manage to create a good range it’s possible to mix each garment with the entire collection. All the products has to go with each other and look good together and it has to consist of different choices for the customer that can be worn together or on their own. It’s important to know what the target customer wants and look for to cover its needs. It also has to reflect the company or brand that sells is as well as choosing the right fabric for the right garment and guarantee the quality that the target market needs. When you’ve created your range you must decide on the size and figure type suitable for your target customers. If you manage to coordinate these aspects you’ve made a range statement, it’s important that there’s a connection between all the individual pieces to make the range statement.
About Triple M
Launching Plan
Triple M is a London based brand established in 2016 that works with vegan, sustainable and organic materials for faux fur and Pinatex products in a sporty design with a feminine touch. Our garments are long lasting in high quality. The clothes are meant to be used across the seasons and finding a permanent and loving place in your closet.
Our collection will be released for the first time for Autumn/Winter 2017, we will launch our website in may when the pre-fall collections goes in store. From the launch our product range should cover the first 6 months of business. Since expensive products doesn't sell as much as for example high street brands and considering the fact that we are still unknown to the market we will produce and buy 8 of each jackets and 13 of each shoe in various sizes that we will sell on our web shop.
MMM
Mission Statement “Triple M is about finding an alternative, animal- and environment friendly way of producing fashionable and classy garments for the ethical and fashion forward woman who’s exploring the world in a fun and stylish way. We only work with sustainable materials to save the resources of our planet and to make it a better place for generations to come – sustainability is the future“
Sustainable Fashion To call yourself a sustainable fashion brand you need to be producing clothes, shoes or accessories in environmentally and socioeconomically sustainable ways, but it’s also about more sustainable behaviour of the customer in terms of spending and usage, which demands a shift in the individuals attitudes and behaviour towards consumption. The main concern for a company that wants to do sustainable fashion is to change the way of production, distribution and marketing practices and strategies to a better alternative that equals sustainability. But companies also have the possibility to contribute to a more sustainable consumption behaviour.
It’s important to Triple M to not only use sustainable materials and produce our garments locally but also to make high quality pieces in a timeless design to try to counteract overconsumption
CUSTOMER PROFILE Our target customers are environment and animal friendly girls and women how thinks about tomorrow and who would rather spend some extra money to get a timeless and long lasting garment then to buy fast fashion to make a difference. They are in the age group of 20-35 and they are active, healthy, ethical and trendy early adapters in the middle to upper class.
The Diffusion Curve & Our customers The diffusion curve was introduced by Everette Rogers in the 1960’s. The curve represents the different stages in the lifespan of a product. A buyer can use this this theory to as a way to trend forecast the potential duration of a range.
Since we are working with a new material that has not yet been noticed by the crowd makes our target customers early adapters. This means that they are fashion forward people who sets trends instead of follow them and that they are willing to try new things. We need to target them because it’s after this stage that a trend goes viral.
SWOT New innovative material. Unique. Great quality. Highly sustainable.
Expensive. The material is still in the developing stage. We are a new brand who doesn't have the same experience as our competitors. Small budget.
Developing other garments in Pinatex. Because of our sustainable materials we can win over customers from less sustainable competitors.
Others start selling only Pinatex products. The material is not suitable for a variety of garments.
One of the main objectives of a SWOT analysis is that by examining the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities of the existing strategy you can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses. This tells you about the impact of the organization's environment and helps to identify opportunities to manage the world around constant change requirements.
Fabrics Our Pinatex Products: - We are the first web shop to use only Pinatex leather for our leather products! By using Pinatex we help the planet. It’s a bi-product which equals no waste, no extra land, water, fertilizer or pesticides. It brings additional income to the farmers and has a better quality than synthetic materials. Its texture and look is identical to real leather. Our Faux Fur Products: - Our faux fur products are made of 100% GOTS organic cotton, the fabric is designed and made in Europe which helps eliminate carbon dioxide emissions due to transportation.
Competitors -
Love is Mighty (Vegan Shoes) £153-£217
-
Matt & Nat (Vegan Bags) £60-£98
-
Vege Moda (Vegan Bags & Accessories) £55-£63
-
Unreal Fur (Faux Fur jackets) £201-£241
These brands and web shops also offers vegan products. What makes us a better option is that we only use highly sustainable and organic materials whilst these brands sell products made of plastic materials that are made with a lot of chemicals and that makes us a better alternative for the environment aware customer.
Marketing Strategies We will try to approach our customers through social medias such as Instagram, Facebook and twitter where we will promote our new products and build a relationship to our customers by sharing news and information about what we do. We will also use the advantage of being the first web shop to sell only Pinatex leather to promote our products and collaborate with different organization that works for animal rights and environment defending organizations such as Green Peace and Peta. Fashion and sustainability is a very popular subject right now and we can benefit from that.
Range Plan - Buying We provide our customers with sneakers, bags and accessories all made of Pinatex leather in a great design with great quality and without any bad impact on our planet. The colour palette is in black, white and gold. We sell timeless high quality pieces that can be worn for a long time. Sneakers are a mega tend that has been around for a really long time and never goes out of style, the bags are timeless and can be worn at any time of the day.
Range plan -Development Pinatex has this far only been used for bags and shoes, we contacted AnanasAman to see if it would be possible to do leather jackets which they told us it is but they have not yet done it which would make us the first brand to introduce Pinatex leather jackets on the market. They will be available in one long and one short model, and the colour palette is black, white and gold. We will also sell faux fur jackets made of 100% Global Organic Textile certified organic cotton. Our design is not focused on current trends, it’s more about classic pieces that lasts a long time to try to counteract overconsumption. All our products will be made in the UK to help avoid transportation emissions.
The Complete Collection
Future Plans In the future we will work to develop more and different types of products made of Pinatex leather and continue help spreading the word about the fabric. We would also like to come up wit more and better ideas on how to make turn fashion in a more earth friendly and conscious industry.
Sizing & Product amount Shoes in European sizes 36
37
38
39
40
41
1
2
4
3
2
1
Jackets in European sizes S
M
L
2
3
3
Pricing While producing new and innovative fashion we want to keep our prices as customer friendly as possible. We wanted to keep our range small to focus on quality pieces only. Our Pinatex leather jackets cost around £350 and our fur jackets around £250. Our shoes and bags vary from £80-£270. We’ve spent 50% of our budget on buying and 50% on developing new and exciting products. During our start up period we will ship to customers in London to keep the shipping costs down and to minimize transportation. Our weakness at this point is that we have a small budget, a small range and expensive garments don’t sell as much or easily. The money we could spend on products for our website was £ 20.000 and after we spent £ 9380 on buying products and £ 10322 on developing our own range we had spent £ 19702,8 in total which leaves us with a margin of £ 291,2. For more information about costing and pricing see the appendix.
Website Visuals
Product description