In the world of online sales, the clothing niche occupies the very first place. The products of this niche are the most sold in the market. The dropshipping of clothes has completely revolutionized this niche, because you can have your online sales store without spending astronomical sums in setting up a warehouse, in stock management or in the means of delivery.
Like all other niches, the textile niche also has its particularities that you should know before you start. Discover here all the other profitable niches in dropshipping.
In this article, we will see the different aspects necessary to take into account to start dropshipping clothes.
What is clothing dropshipping?
Dropshipping itself is a business model that consists of selling without having a stock. It is a business model that is recognized for its profitability, but also for its simplicity of implementation.
You can start your dropshipping business with a small capital (less than €5,000). All you have to do is find a winning product and start selling it on an online store (Shopify, Woocommerce) that you can create with just a few clicks. Once you receive orders in your store, you pass them on to your supplier who will deliver them to customers.
For the clothing niche, the process is almost the same. You will find a supplier who produces the types of clothing you want to resell on your store.
Here are the 5 steps to start a profitable clothing dropshipping business.
- Building your brand to start dropshipping clothes
- Find the supplier for your clothing dropshipping business
- Creation of the store
- Implement the marketing plan
- A few pro tips
Building your brand to start dropshipping clothes
The brand is the set of elements that make it possible to highlight a company in relation to its competitors. It’s not just about the logo. Rather, it is the collection of all the other elements that define the company.
It can be the product, colors, slogan, logo, typography…
In other dropshipping niches, it is possible to create a store and sell unbranded products that consumers will pay for without thinking. This is not necessarily the case for the textile niche.
First of all, you should know that for clothes, consumers buy the brand and not the product. This is what makes the strength of the big brands.
Indeed, no one will buy clothes from an unbranded clothing store. Even if your products are of very good quality, prospects will always prefer competitors who offer the same product with a mystery around their brand.
Here are the main steps in creating a brand.
Identifying the customer and their needs
Identifying the customer and their needs is the very first step in setting up a profitable dropshipping business. We talk about the buyer persona.
Clothing dropshipping is a big enough business to be subdivided into small categories. You can decide to focus only on men’s, women’s, teen or baby clothing.
Whatever product category you want to sell, you will be able to make sales if you succeed in your positioning. This is why you must successfully identify your typical customer and their needs.
There are several ways to find the needs of your prospects. The best that I recommend that will allow you to identify the needs of your prospects very quickly is competitive intelligence.
This is just to spy on market competitors who sell the products you want to sell and find out about their customer complaints. For example, there may be complaints about the weight of the clothes or the fragility of the fabric that does not hold up during washing.
The advantage of going directly to see competitors and that you are sure that these are products that are already selling and that you will only have to improve them to attract more customers.
To do this, you can go to platforms such as Amazon, AliExpress or eBay and search for reviews relating to the product of your choice. You can also use Dropispy which will allow you to directly identify dropshipping shops that already sell the product you want to resell on the shop.
The tool offers you a ranking of the best dropshipping shops in a given niche. All you have to do is go to these shops and then research the pains of the customers who use their products.
Do not hesitate to communicate around you to collect information on what your loved ones would like to have in terms of quality of clothing. All this will allow you to identify needs that you can fill.
Now that you have identified the customers and their needs, you now need to analyze your competitors to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
Competitive analysis
Competitive analysis consists of identifying all direct and indirect competitors in order to analyze their particularities. In dropshipping, it is quite difficult to identify all the competitors, because there are thousands of sites selling the same product online.
This is why we are going to focus only on the Top of the best in the field. You can use Dropispy to have a ranking of the best dropshipping shops that sell products from a given category.
For each store, analyze the marketing strategies and the different approaches they use to promote their products. There are online forms that allow you to collect all this data in a table for easy reading later.
The objective here is to have enough information on what is already working on the market and above all to have an idea of the products not to be sold.
The next step will be to create your graphic identity.
The graphic identity
The graphic identity of a company represents the identity document of the latter. It allows you to recognize a company without even seeing its product. These are the logo, colors, typography and all other visual elements related to the brand.
The constitution of your visual identity is a very important step and you necessarily need a professional who will be able to associate a good visual identity with your brand in creation.
You can find them directly on Freelance platforms like 5euros, Fiverr or Upwork.
Make sure you have a qualitative rendering, because it is this visual identity that will be used on your products and your website.
The trend of the product
In general, niche clothing products are mostly products that follow a specific trend.
You must therefore identify the trend, the moments of peaks and declines of the product you want to sell. This will allow you to identify the periods when you should focus the least effort on your marketing.
In addition, you will know when to launch your store to take advantage of the trend. There is no point in launching a shop selling sweaters in the middle of summer. You will have enough trouble selling even if you have the best product with the best marketing arguments.
Use Google Trends to know the trend of a product.
Find the supplier for your clothing dropshipping business
Finding a supplier is quite tricky in clothing dropshipping. You need to find reliable suppliers who will agree to put your visual identity on the products.
You can find it on AliExpress. The difficulty is that the majority of suppliers require a minimum quota of orders before agreeing to manufacture products under your brand. However, you can always negotiate this quota according to your budget.
Opt for a supplier whose customer satisfaction score is greater than 4.3 and who already has a seniority on the platform.
In addition, it is always better to start by testing neutral products without a particular brand on your store. The results of the testing will allow you to make the best decisions for the evolution of your brand.
Here is our list of the top 20 dropshipping clothing suppliers.
List of the best dropshipping clothing suppliers :
Clothing Dropshipping - Creation of the store
For a physical business, entrepreneurs invest enough money in their sales shops to have the best presentation possible. This principle is also valid for online sales businesses, particularly in the dropshipping of clothing.
Your store should feel quality and showcase your products in the best possible way. Indeed, even if dropshipping shops are created more and more easily today thanks to manufacturers like Shopify and Woocommerce, it is still important to put the necessary means into them to have a very good result.
Do not hesitate to call on professionals in the creation of online stores. You will spend a few hundred euros, but I can assure you that it is definitely worth it.
You will also need a Copywriter who knows how to use the right words on your sales pages. In addition, do not neglect the SEO of your site. Apart from paid advertising, SEO optimization of your website will allow you to have qualified traffic on your website for free.
In reality, to find products to buy on the Internet, users search for terms related to their needs on search engines. These terms represent keywords and the results that search engines show depend on these keywords.
Therefore, the better your site will be optimized for given keywords, the better it will be referenced and ranked in search engines. Therefore, you will get more traffic to your site. Also, remember that optimizing a website requires enough work and is a long-term investment.
Implement the marketing plan
The marketing plan includes all the methods and means that you will use to make your product known to your audience. It can be paid advertising on social networks or search engines (Ads), email marketing, influence marketing (influencers), or acquisition by free natural traffic (SEO).
You just need to find the marketing medium that matches your product. This requires good market research. Market research will allow you to identify your audience and know their areas of interest.
If your audience is more likely to check emails, then email marketing is your best alternative. On the other hand, if your audience is relatively younger and frequents more influencers on social networks, influence marketing is what you need.
On the other hand, generally in textile dropshipping, dropshippers prefer to promote their product through influencer marketing. Indeed, this marketing strategy is very suitable for this niche, because influencers will be able to wear your products and show their audience how impeccable quality they are.
This encourages more purchase than simple photos found on a website. However, influencer marketing is quite expensive and requires quite a lot of experience. The risk of losing all your capital is higher.
It is not uncommon to come across influencers who have several million subscribers, but who are not profitable. The choice of influencer is therefore a very important step in the implementation of influence marketing.
Fortunately, there are tools that allow you to have qualitative data on influencers to make the best choice. Minea is one of those tools that collect information about the audience, profitability, and performance of the latest product placements made by an influencer.
By using this tool, you increase your chances of easily finding influencers that you can monetize.
Once you define your marketing strategy, you can start executing it by starting with a small budget. Above all, do not put all your marketing budget into your first advertising campaigns.
Experiment first and gradually increase your marketing budget based on your results.
A few pro tips for Clothing Dropshipping
Here are some tips you can use to stand out from the competition in your textile dropshipping business.
Suggest the right sizes
The problem of clothing size is very common in the dropshipping of textiles. In reality, ratings differ from region to region. So take the trouble to learn about the sizes used in the market in which you want to sell your products.
This way you will avoid a lot of negative feedback from your customers.
Have a very active customer service
The quality of your customer service is one of the parameters that will make you stand out from your competitors. You must have an active and available customer service department to respond to your full-time customers.
Indeed, in clothing dropshipping, customer service is very much in demand to respond to buyers’ concerns regarding the size, color, fabric, origin of the clothing, etc.
Sell products from already recognized brands
You don’t have to start your textile dropshipping business by selling your own products. You can, at first, sell products from other recognized brands that have already won the trust of consumers.
You will also have an easier time selling these products, because you will benefit from brand awareness and you will spend less on advertising.
To sell existing brand products, you can refer to vendors like Brandsgateway, Chinabrands or Buy2Bee
Try other e-commerce platforms
You can start your textile dropshipping business by selling on already recognized platforms like eBay, Amazon or Etsy.
These platforms receive millions of visitors every day. Admittedly, the competition is quite high, but by using the right SEO strategies, you can very quickly rank and earn some of the traffic from these big websites.
Offer packages and subscriptions
It is often quite difficult for consumers to choose an item of clothing from the hundreds of others offered to them on a website. Many end up abandoning the purchase due to the embarrassment of choice.
You can fix this by directly offering combination packs to your customers. It can be a pack of 3 to 5 clothes. They will be more likely to make a choice very quickly and proceed to payment.
You can also offer monthly or quarterly subscriptions. It’s a great way to build customer loyalty.
To take your dropshipping a step further, you can even dropship custom clothing. It is a mode of dropshipping that works just as well if you find a good approach and a good positioning.
How to Dropship Custom Clothing
Dropship custom clothing is not that different from anything we’ve discussed so far in terms of methods and techniques for dropshipping clothing.
The difference here is that you are going to be making custom clothing. For example, you can choose to add a message from the customer. This type of product can make a good gift for a loved one.
You can therefore position yourself during the holidays, the festive periods, or even in February where many gifts are offered. However, to be successful in this type of custom clothing dropshipping, you need to find a good supplier who will accept customizing each garment according to customer demands.
There are several dropshipping suppliers that specialize in producing custom clothing. We can cite for example:
- Printful
- SPOD
- Printify
- Appliiq Dropship
- Tee launch
In addition to clothing, these suppliers also offer the customization of several other products such as shoes, gadgets, bags… By doing a little more research, you can also find dropship clothing suppliers USA.
Now that you know how to dropship clothing, here is our list of top 10 winning products from the clothing niche that you can test on your dropshipping store.
TOP 10 Best Products of the Clothing Niche
Product 1: Beach Shorts That Change Color
This product is shorts that change color when in contact with water. It is perfectly suitable for holidays at the beach, at the swimming pool.
Suitable for sports, vacations, and daily life.
This product was one of the best-selling clothing products during the summer.
To sell this product well, you must have a well-made summer clothing dropshipping store that reflects the quality, because there are enough dropshippers selling the product.
This product was found on Dropispy, our winning product finder.
You can find it for $15 more on AliExpress.
Product 2: Slimming Body Shaper Under Shirt
Slimming Body Shaper Under Shirt is a product specially dedicated to men who want to look lean, and strengthen and flatten abdominal muscles instantly without exercise.
It is a revolutionary slimming underwear for the chest and midsection.
A tight, yet breathable and comfortable compression shaper for all-day wear. It is ideal to wear under any shirt for any occasion.
To successfully sell this product in dropshipping, you need to find a supplier who will be able to ship the product very quickly.
This product costs around $10 on AliExpress.
Clothing Dropshipping Product 3: Body Modelling Strips
This zipper belt is one of the best-selling products in the clothing niche. You will find it on all the best dropshipping sites for clothes.
It is a product that allows you to shape and lift the parts of the buttocks. Which helps the user to have more rebounded buttocks easily and faster.
It is a product that any woman would love to have. The product costs around $10 on AliExpress, you can easily sell it if you have the right marketing arguments.
Product 4: Classic & Cozy Turtleneck Style
This product is clearly a potential winning product unearthed on Dropispy, our search tool for winning dropshipping products.
These are knit dresses for an ultra-cozy season that you can wear with pants or alone in autumn and winter.
The product has great potential, therefore, you can sell it quite expensive in your store if you use the right marketing arguments.
Product 5: 4-in-1 Waist Buttoned Bra Shapewear
If there’s an all-in-one product to sell in dropshipping, it would be this waist-cinching and shaping bra that best shows off your good posture and slender figure. It is suitable for all types of women.
With it, you can better show your good posture and slim figure. Slip it on quickly and easily for maximum everyday comfort.
As a marketing argument, highlight the fact that this product is suitable for all types of athletes and can be used everywhere, even at home.
Clothing Dropshipping Product 6: Beanbag Beds
Comfort is something people value a lot. This product is an ottoman that turns into a bed and offers all the comfort in the world.
Its ergonomic design can perfectly support your body and is comfortable for sitting, napping, and lounging.
With a good presentation of the product, you can easily sell it on your dropshipping store.
On AliExpress, the product costs around $50.
Product 7: Multipurpose Pants
Multipurpose Pants is a great pant or set product that makes the wearer more stylish and fashionable. It is mainly intended for women.
As a marketing argument, highlight the fact that the user of the product can wear it in several styles. It is also a product that can be used by any type of morphology. These pants are among the best-selling products in apparel dropshipping.
Product 8: Stylish Beanie
This product is one of the latest products in the textile niche. It’s the perfect addition to the winter wardrobe with this stylish beanie.
It is a product that helps prevent catching cold in winter. For a purchase price of around $10 on AliExpress, you can resell the product for $29. Do not hesitate to check if you will find a better price on other marketplaces.
Clothing Dropshipping Product 9: Clothing Patches Repair
This product is a self-adhesive patch, waterproof stickers for repairing holes on clothes.
It saves time and money and makes clothes even more stylish. It is easy to use, no need to cut, just tear it off and stick it where there is a hole.
This product is clearly an innovation that can be of great interest to customers.
The advantage of this product is that its strong adhesion makes it not easy to fall off, can be washed by hand and remains intact after washing.
On AliExpress, the product costs around $1, you can resell it for $5 on your dropshipping store.
Product 10: 2 in 1 Harness Coat
The last product on our list of the best clothing products to sell online is this pet coat. It works as a protection and allows your pet to avoid catching cold.
It is suitable for all dogs.
For around $5 you can get it on AliExpress and resell it for $10 on your dropshipping store. It is a reasonably profitable product because it is already known.
Clothing Dropshipping - Conclusion
In this article, we have covered the main aspects of setting up a clothing dropshipping or apparel dropshipping business. Your success in this niche will depend on how you implement each of the steps seen above. It is a rather special niche that requires rigorous monitoring from the identification of your customers’ needs to the marketing of your products.
Also, there are several sub-categories within the clothing niche. For example, you can specialize in dropshipping women’s clothing or dropshipping men’s clothing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you find dropshipping clothing suppliers in the USA?
Yes, you can find dropshipping clothing suppliers USA. By the way, the best clothing dropshipping suppliers are based in the USA and in this article, we have discussed some custom clothing dropshipping suppliers.
We have also made a list of the best dropshipping clothing suppliers for you to check out.
What is apparel dropshipping branding?
Apparel dropshipping branding is simply creating a clothing brand in dropshipping. Instead of selling unbranded clothes, you will instead create your own brand and stick your identity to it.
This will allow you to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Apparel dropshipping branding is ideal for those who already have experience in the market.
Can you dropship baby clothes?
Yes, of course you can dropship baby clothes. We have also written an article on the dropshipping of baby products that you can consult here.
You should know that the dropshipping of baby clothes is quite special, because you will not use the same methods and marketing strategies to highlight your products in front of potential customers.
Similar articles
