E-Commerce gurus et al - need some business advice!

[UltFamCar]

A good friend of ours is a clothing tailor, specifically women's clothing, with over 25 years of experience. She currently operates her business in a local tailoring shop but would like me to help her enhance her business by selling online. She would like to be more focused for the online clientele, i.e. what makes more business sense and meets client needs/wants. I proposed the following two ideas:

Either Custom tailoring for bridal gowns, bridesmaid dresses, etc. OR custom tailoring for non-bridal clothing, e.g. party dresses, gowns, skirts, blouses, etc. where the emphasis here would be ... say a customer sees a dress she wants in a magazine but couldn't purchase it locally and does not want to pay full retail; or perhaps wants the dress in plus or petite size. For either ideas, the customer could provide the fabric or we would be able to provide the whole service. We would provide detailed instructions as to how to do the measurements, etc.

So my questions are:
1. Which idea has a greater market potential? Any other ideas that would sell?
2. What do you think of an online tailoring business in general? Would you or your lady be interested if the pricing was attractive (versus buying retail or at a local tailoring shop)?

Any comments or feedback would be much appreciated as I have much respect for everyone's comments on this board!

I am personally very excited as this will be my first experience with e-commerce!

TIA
Charles

[JJJ]

Difficult one Charles........I can see some potential though. My wife buys a lot clothes on-line, but she sends so many back ( pheww ), maninly because the net can't show the true colours, texture etc. If you could address that, maybe with posted samples, it could work. Good luck.

[DrewT]

the biggest problem with tailoring cloths is that if they are not done in person they tend to be extremely inaacurate. I do not see the benefit of the web for a service business that one must visit to truely get the best service, especially if this woman is above average in her profession. Now advertising on a local web page or something like that may work

[SeanAron]

The biggest problem with marketing clothes online has always been the factor of perception vs. reality. Colors show up differently on everyone's screens--Macs and PCs have different color pallettes, everyone's monitors are calibrated differently, resolutions differ, desktop hues can alter perception of colors, etc. etc. etc. As has been stated, people who buy clothes online tend to be disappointed and return them at a higher rate than regular shoppers do because of this. Personally I only buy clothes online from the Gap (because I know it) or weird stuff on EBay (because it's not available anywhere else).

From your description of your business plan, it sounds like her intention is to increase her offline business, not branch into e-commerce. You'd still have significant interaction with the customer beyond someone simply filling out a form and clicking "buy". They'd still have to come in and get measured, etc. A shopping cart site isn't going to help you much in that aspect, and they cost quite a bit to put together. For that reason, I would venture that you should go with a simpler route--a simple site that's just a promotional tool for her offline business. It sounds like you've got a unique business there, one that fits nicely into a niche that not everyone has access to. Describing it as such on a good site and marketing it the right way (getting up there on search engines and such) should yield you some out-of-town customers for a minimal cost. You can always expand it.

[UltFamCar]

Thanks everyone for all your feedback so far...very timely and insightful!

JJJ: What I have in mind is not so much marketing what she has already made and have in stock, and just trying to sell that. People can just go to a retail bridal store or a Jessica McClintock's to buy it "off the shelf", or they can just go to Nordstorms and pick up that Armani or Narciso Rodriguez dress...and then have a tailor alter it. I'm thinking about a more niche market of custom tailoring. So a customer (assuming not local) would mail the tailor a magazine cutout or send a digital photo of a dress that she wants made. The customer would specify the color, texture and material, and may perhaps even send her the sample material. Or the customer would send her the whole fabric and magazine cutout along with her dimensions and say "Make this!" So pics that I would post on the site would be sample works that she has made and show dresses that the tailor is capable of making at a much lower price than retail.

DrewT: Well, according to the tailor, she thinks that if we provide the right instructions online for the customer, detailing how to properly measure, then this would not be too much of an issue. But I see what you're saying...I must address the issue of 'if the dress was made and sent to the customer and it's not perfect, then what?'

meener: I hear what you're saying about perception vs. reality. I'm hoping to market this business by posting good testimonials and samples of her work to build customer confidence. I'm still waiting to see where she's going to take her brick/mortar business, but that's good advice as far as keeping it simple in the beginning as a promotional tool for her offline business. But I'm trying to expand beyond just an extension of her offline business via e-commerce.....

So if I can address the issues above, my question to you all is still...which idea is more marketable: Custom tailoring for only the bridal market - bridal gowns, bridesmaid dresses, etc. OR custom tailoring for non-bridal clothing, e.g. party dresses, gowns, dresses, skirts, blouses, etc.

Thanks again!
Charles

[Mspeeding]

I was the director of eCommerce for one of the largest IT firms when the dot.com boom hit. We investigated hundreds of online business models for everyone from large multinationals to small businesses. For the most part the businesses which have succeeded online so far tend to be the ones who have a successful business model already, and leverage the web as merely another sales channel, an extention of an already well-defined business process. For example, in the clothing world it has been the firms like Speigle (spelling?), Victoria's Secret, etc. who already had a healthy catalog business in place, and thus the infrastructure established to deal with large numbers of returns and exhanges. In other words there are no magic bullets on the web and truthfully few new business innovations (there are some, eBay for example, but they tend to be the exception).

And the products that sell well on the web tend to be commoditized, standardized, volume unit-products, rather than custom designed products (for many of the reasons already stated in previous responses). Consumer electonics are a good example.

Honestly it doesn't sound as though your friend's business logically translates into a web-based initiative. I think most women begin the wedding dress process with the hope that it's the one and only time they'll be doing it. And of course they want it to be as perfect as possible. So the web doesn't add any value to the buying experiance for a shopper with that kind of profile. In fact it might detract from it.

But there are things you can do. Promotion and tie-ins to other wedding related businesses might be a good place to start. For example, I might start by contacting known wedding planners in your area and seeing if they have web sites on which you could advertise or post content.

Even better, perhaps you could get a consortium going of wedding businesses (a planner, your friend's dress business, a wedding cake baker, caterers, reception halls, etc.) and cooperate on a Wedding Portal. A one-stop web site that had planning tools, tips and tricks, guidelines, timelines, and so forth might be something that would provide value to a young couple planning a wedding: "Here's a group of vendors that cover all aspects of the process, who understand how to avoid the usual pitfalls, and who know each other and who are used to working together synergistically, etc...." If you got more sophisticated you might even partner with people to create package deals: "$10K dollars for Wedding #2, which includes the following....."

Even if you don't get this far, advertising on the web is the way to start and may bring in incremental business in a cost effective manner. In fact, if you want to dip your toes into the water before diving in (and I highly recommend you do), try the local version of CitySearch for your area. They charge by the hit, and it's usually just pennies, so you spend say 30 cents of so per qualified lead - a bargin. I helped a friend of mine who owns one of the top Italian restaurants in our city do this, and he was shocked at how many people now use these sorts of community web sites rather than traditional search tools like the Yellow Pages.

[Mako5]

I am working now with a company that does the custom made clothing on the Lands End Web site. Excellent model. I cannot give you the name of the company but the founder had tried to bring the concept to Levis Strauss. They botched it and so he left and formed this very successful company. However he has a lot of intellectual capital on how to accurately size different people (see Lands End site) He then setup a mfg. infrastructure in Asia and Mexico ( he get's much better results from Asia). If you want to find a Asia company to do the back end mfg. Look to Li & Fung. They are the worlds largest intermediary in the soft goods business.