Clothing Line Start-Up

“Donald Young” is a clothing line that will cater for the urban young men and women of ages between 15- 30. The income group targeted will be the middle to high-income group. Offerings will include T-shirts, jeans/denim, sweaters, jackets/hoodies, caps, footwear, bags, eyewear, and time-pieces and jewellery. The funding required is for start-up.

Investment Summary

This is a business plan written for the company Donald Young, for the purpose of seeking funding to get operations underway. Donald Young is clothing company that will run a clothing line designed, manufactured, marketed and sold under the brand name .To make all of this possible, we are seeking a loan of ZAR300, 000 (USD38,000), to be paid back within nine months with 50% interest on the principal amount.

The Donald young clothing line will be catering for the urban young men and women of ages between 15- 30. The income group targeted will be the middle to high-income group. Our offerings will include T-shirts, jeans/denim, sweaters, jackets/hoodies, caps, footwear, bags, eyewear, and timepieces. Our entry markets will be South Africa, Nigeria, UK, and the Philippines. We will later expand into the USA, Australia, New Zealand and other penetrable markets. Our entry markets are big and growing. Nigeria, South Africa, UK and the Philippines have a combined population of 367,000,000, 66,000,000 of that being a part of our target market and growing at an average of 2.08% per year.

We will provide this market with a designer label with a line of clothing that is affordable without compromising quality in design, manufacturing and retailing. Clothing endorsed by public figures known well to the consumers in the individual markets, which we target. Even though we have not started production, the anticipation for Donald young is amazingly strong. We already have retailers willing to stock up our clothing in their stores in the UK.

In the early stages, production will be done in South Africa but will later be moved to Asia (Taiwan, Vietnam or China). This will also keep production costs comparable to that of our competitors in order that we do not give them a pricing competitive advantage against us. Also because we plan to take the brand global, we need to set up production at a more centralized location; centralized to our markets.

As of now we are planning for an event where some of our clothing will be showcased at a fashion show in Birmingham on December 8th 2011. This will help create awareness of our clothing line and also get feedback from the public about our products.

Investors can contact us on the site for further information.

We see our competition to be clothing brands such as La’Coste, Sis Boy, La Coq Sportif, Levi’s and Polo. La’Coste and La Coq Sportif are both French brands, Levi’s and Polo is from the USA. They all have built a global presence and recognition.

Our competitors have the advantage of already being well established, having the ability to expand due to better availability for funds, experience in the industry and economies of scale. However, most of our competitors are based in the United States and Europe, and because they have expanded there globally through importing distributors, they lack first hand information about the foreign markets they serve.

Our brand will work strongly with the industries that create most of the trends that our target customers follow; those being music, film, sport and other sectors of the entertainment industry. This being the case, we will commit a substantial marketing and advertising budget to this form of advertising by endorsers. This method of advertising has been proven to work, which is why clothing brands like Guess, Versace, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Nike, Adidas and many other fashion and apparel behemoths have adopted it.

They spend as much as US$25million for certain people to be endorsers of their brands. Most of the endorsers of these brands are hardly ever from countries other than those, which the clothing label is from, or rather the United States because, that is their largest market. This is not to say other territories do not make up a substantial customer base for these companies.

We intend to have South African, Nigerian, Filipino, Australian and endorsers from the United Kingdom too. Having endorsers from the countries, regions and continents we cater for will give people a more personal feel of our endorsed advertising campaign, our brand and what we stand for. Whereby they can buy clothing endorsed by public figures they actually know and may even see in person, as opposed to one they only ever see on TV.

Being that the advertising campaigns of our competitors are more globalized, we stand a good chance of taking a good chunk of their market share by building recognition of our brand from the core of each of our entry markets and letting the popularity spread outwards from within.

Our presence in the market may have our competitors’ distributors cutting down prices, but our pricing range is quite affordable for a designer clothing label of the calibre, which we desire to build. It would require some price-cutting on the part of our competition for them to use pricing as a competitive advantage