In a nutshell
On this hats project, I have been literally wearing a number of different role-hats: project management related to fashion where caps are to be produced, branded and sold in the shortest time possible.
The brand
The brand “Chap Pa” was created in Paris in 2014.
It’s dedicated for all people from the early age to the elderly, who like fashion, more specifically anyone who liks hats. The ideal positioning was for the brand to be worn primarily by people from Reunion Island and then in other markets.
What means Chap Pa?
Chap Pa name is coming from the french slang of Reunion Island and mean “Totally”. People specially young one will be using it when they want to express themself in the way to confirm that they are agreed with the person they are having a discussion.
Chap pa!
Challenge
The goal was to build a new cap brand and sell one thousand caps in the first year. The mission included conducting the research of finding the supplier, creating the product and content for the e-commerce that will be used in marketing across all sales channels.
The challenges for a fashion-related project like that is staying creative and analyzing the market research data.
Process
The research involved finding out as a priority why people love using caps, where the market is densely populated, and the extra features that could distinguish this particular brand of cap from the rest in the market and followed by many other questions in secondary research.
We applied different research techniques, looked closely to what the competition does and what the online trends were projecting.
To mitigate the risks, I have decided to start a trial with 100 caps of 4 different types of colors and fabrics.
1 – Expenses
To maintain control of the budget, I created an expenses and plans tracking sheet for the project and maintained it regularly.
As an illustration I had to ask myself a number of business questions such as:
- How much will it cost to ship or post the hat from a storage location to the buyer location?
- How am I going to sell it? Direct Retail or E-commerce or both?
- Which framework to use for the payment and what is the percentage of fees I needed to pay per transaction ?
- How to setup and manage customer service? A number to call to reassure people?
- How and where I will be manufacturing the product , what is the ideal supply chain?
- What would be the legal status?
2 – Graphic and Visual Design
In the meanwhile the implication was that the cap’s logo has to be designed and the hat sketches created in order to give the product an identity.
We know that a brand is defined by its logo and the representative artwork, and needs to be recognizable to end users within its specific demographic.
Since the name of the brand it’s from Reunion Island I needed to find a way of showing a symbol which represents the cultural community.
From now on how will the logo look on the cap?
After analysis from most of the competitors we learned that stickers are a value-add that are selling their hats with stickers . From there I have decided to add stickers to our project too.
3 – Retailer
Identifying a manufacturing partner, we have started to work selecting the correct material, the accurate color of the piece.
I prepared the necessary specification documents related to the logo with different views of how the hat would look like and decided from the given sample which item we should begin the project with.
4 – Digital Content
Besides the logistics planning, others questions become a priority such as:
- To show the product to people we needed visual representation of the product so, which type of picture I need?
- Where could I rent the material?
- Where is the shooting photo going to be ?
- Only the product needs to be shown on e-commerce materials ?
- What type of picture will be standing out?
- How does it look compared to the product of the competitor?
- If I have a model for the photoshoot do I need to find a make-up artist?
- What about the legal documents?
- What about the budget controls?
In a meanwhile I have decided the direction I wanted to visually give the brand.
To advance the project, I have started to search the models that will represent the brand: https://www.modelmanagement.com/fr/model-images/
5 – E-commerce
First of all which framework to use? Our experience included working with applications like Prestashop.
I have started to create different wireframes of e-commerce and how the product catalogue will be organised and presented.
The layout had to meet two objectives: promote and sell, so the user flow mapping was a critical design step.
Desktop view:
Mobile View:
6 – Marketing
We have a product, We have a digital design.
Take a short break.
What is marketing going to look like as a plan?
Having an e-commerce shop and presence facilitates the selling, but the work on marketing is just beginning. As my father says “You can have the best cooked meal in the world but if you are not inviting anyone to your table to eat how will they know it?”
In terms of Marketing how could we make the product special?
Finding a complete social media marketing solution.
- We can use hootsuite.com
- Define the frequency of our postings to maintain a good control of our budgets
- Continuously analyse the results and make new decisions of pushing live adverting
- Pre-Planned all the digital content by creating an analytics tracking tool aEnsure that you know your customer and keep interacting with them
Invite people to join the community from a newsletter on your e-commerce
- We can use mailchimp.com
- Define the content you are sharing and how often you will do it
Lead newsletter:
Create content for social network:
Produce content for special sale:
7 – Turnover
Before the conclusion and as a thank you I would like to share world wild web photography taken from customer who have trust me on that project.
Conclusion
We had to define the project risks and project risks arise as a result of ignorance of problems, limited knowledge. or poor planning at any stage of a project.
It is important that such risks are identified and plans are created to mitigate them.
Undertaking thorough evaluation of the objectives and goals as new risks are identified saves a lot of pain along the project.
Working on specified timelines is advantageous because it makes the team focus on the important issues. If the team members acknowledge and contribute to defining the the amount of time required for each activity it leads to increase the chances of yielding the expected results from the project.
In a few words:
- Start small with one product
- Document things Keep partner, colleague and yourself motivated by being kind
- Focus on one social network at the time
- Do not manufacture thousand of product
- Find a local retailer it would help for controlling the quality of the brand
- Keep faith and be constant