Will My Product Sell? 10 Strategies to Validate and Sell Your Product

We’ve got you covered. The Children’s Wear Design Academy helps you validate your product idea from floating around in your head to a physical or digital product in 10 easy steps.

1. Get the idea out of your head: How do you know if people will actually BUY your product?The first step is to get you idea out of your head and put it on paper; that includes drawing it by hand or completing a technical design in Adobe Illustrator, AI. For our purposes, I like to start with a rough sketch, any scribble will do to visualize your idea. You can add features, details, materials, color and notes as your continue the process. Now is a good time to start thinking about your “big picture” destination……do you want to create digital downloadable kids products or physical products that are cut and sewn?
2. Research Your Competition: Find out what your competition is doing; conduct online research and take note of styles that sell out fast. Speak directly to sales people at retail and ask them what their best selling styles are and why.
3. Build Your Samples: The next step is to translate your idea into a physical product or first pattern. During this process you will experiment with materials, styles, sizing, form, fit and function. Once you have chosen your styles you can move into selecting fabrics and sourcing sample yardage. First, I recommend ordering swatch cards (or head ends) to use for visual planning. You may be making 2-5 samples before you get it just right and you have a fully functioning product…the one you dreamed about. Now choose a digital product path or a physical product path. This decision will affect all future development.
4. Start Social Media accounts on Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube. Find your voice on one or all of these platforms to spread the word and show your audience what you are selling and promoting. Use you social media accounts to build your audience and grow your email list. Your email list will become the life-blood of your online business to share new products, announce a blog post, an instructional video or podcasts. Don’t forget to build your website and sell from your own platform using eCommerce.
5. Conduct Surveys: Plan your product offering or collection in groups by color, fabric, season, theme, size range or price. This is a combination of designing and merchandising which will be essential in creating your Vision Board to layout all your ideas in one place. I like to give test samples or rough prototypes to Moms with children, who can wash and wear them, then provide written feedback in an online survey. The latest interactive software are “Quiz’s”. Learn about how to integrate this process at www.quiz.interact.com.
6. Audience Feedback: If there is any part of your garment or product that uses unique features you may want to consider having your product idea “patented” and be sure to ask for feed-back. I highly recommend that you engage the services of a Patent Attorney for this phase of development or can do your own initial research online at https://www.uspto.gov/patents/apply.
7. Sales Page Test: When you set up your marketing online, create a sales page and send  your offerings to your email subscribers, Track subscribers and purchases and determine what’s really selling; the numbers will tell you everything.
8. Wait List: You can create a separate email to your subscribers to be placed on a waiting list; this also falls into Pre-selling. If worded correctly, the Wait List creates a “scarcity mentality” to buy before it’s gone.
9. Pre-Sell your product: You could produce a limited amount of physical product to “Pre-Sell” online before full production starts, maybe 50-100 units. This will give you an indication of the styles, colors and price points that are most effective. Use the data to prepare for production and modify as needed.
10. Crowdfunding: Funding your new product business using innovative methods is the first tier in a long list of financial options available to you. This online method will reach the most people in the shortest amount of time, provide you with tremendous feedback and an infusion of cash into your start up.

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