Why is collaboration essential to custom apparel entrepreneurs?

It may be true that healthy competition can benefit the consumers and drive the desire to innovate. But in the long run, too much competition can also kill innovation because of the "island-effect" that it can cause.

The custom apparel industry in the Philippines is considered fragmented. No single big company controls the entire industry. The downstream companies (raw material and equipment suppliers) are quite few in number but the upstream players (manufacturers, sewers, subcons, marketers, designers, printers, etc.) proliferate and they are now distributed all over the country, from Luzon to Mindanao. The fragmentation results to less bargaining power among the custom apparel players, which can result to more intense competition.

The buyers in the custom apparel industry are a mix of big and small ones. On one hand, those who serve the big buyers suffer from more intense competition such that the "island effect" becomes more prevalent among them. On the other hand, the players serving the small buyers face less intense competition. Overall, competition is still intense.

If the fragmentation continues, more custom apparel players will perish and new ones will appear, creating a faster cycle of "rise-and-demise".

So, how do we reverse this trend and stop this vicious cycle to happen. The only logical thing to do is to encourage the custom apparel players to compete vertically and collaborate horizontally.
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Yes, you can start your own brand of customized sportswear now. Be one of the those whom we have helped become entrepreneurs over the years. And the best time to start your own brand is NOW!
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• No big capital. All you need is a free social media account or free website account
• Your own brand. You can develop your own brand, market it, and leave the manufacturing to us.
• Basic designing skills. You just need to have appreciation of sportswear fashion and designing. If you have limited skills in digitizing your designs or your customers' designs using Adobe Illustrator, we can assign you a freelance artist to help you with minimal fee.
• Just NETWORK. Not hardwork but smart work to develop your own network of customers who need team uniforms.

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When consumers look for answers, discover new things, or make decisions, they're often turning to videos for help. Video content helps guide potential buyers through a long and complex customer journey.
Today’s customer journey is long, complex and involves a lot of consumption of various types of content through digital channels. This makes video the perfect medium for engaging potential customers. Why?  

• Website visitors are 64% - 85% more likely to buy a product online after watching a video.
• The chances getting a page one listing on Google increase 53 times with video.
• Using video on a landing page can increase conversion by up to 86%.
• On average, sites with video content get an extra two minutes of dwell timecompared to sites that don’t.
• Video allows brands to connect with customers on both a rational and an emotional level. 

Simply put, videos will attract and keep visitors on your site longer, significantly increasing the chances that they will make a purchase. Now that you’re convinced that you need video content, let’s explore the customer journey and the types of videos that are most effective at each stage.

Be a reverse entrepreneur

More than 5 years ago, I coined the word Reverse Entrepreneur, which was the title of my website blog. I came to realize that the reason why so many small entrepreneurs failed is because they forgot this principle. Unsuccessful entrepreneur starts from the left. The successful entrepreneur starts from the right, that is why it is called Reverse Entrepreneurship.

​The proliferation of business seminars focusing on low-capital-and-easy-to-produce products have resulted to so many start-up failures. Examples of these seminars include soap-making, candle-making, screen-printing,  flower arrangement, and many others. As you can see, the focus of these business seminars is the low technology requirement as well as the low barrier to entry (meaning, anybody can join the industry without much capital). They are so simple such that the focus of the seminars is to show you that they are so easy and inexpensive to produce. The focus is the left side of the above diagram. 

What you will not learn is about the right side of the diagram above - the customers, the competition, and the industry you will be competing in. What do customers really need and how do you compete in their minds. 

Later, you will find out that learning how to produce the product is not the end of it. What makes the venture fail is the need for skills and big capital to spend for packaging, advertising, and distribution. They totally forgot about the growing competition from big and small companies, which sprouted because anything that is easy to produce invites many competitors. The seminar participant, who only have a few hundreds in his pocket is made to believe that if only he can learn to produce the product in small quantity, he will have a business and can be successful. That's not totally true! Been there, done that. 

The whole point here is that you should be deeply analytical and not believing anything at face value. Start with the customer and the industry analysis.

How is reverse entrepreneurship applicable to customized sublimated sportswear

First, customization is a highly reverse business operation. Every order starts from the customer. No production can start without a firm customer need. Custom team uniforms are not something that you produce after a one-time market study and customer analysis and interaction, and then sell them. The customization market is a fully reverse operation. Interaction with the same customer continues all throughout the business life.

There is no doubt custom team wear business is profitable. If it is really profitable, how come the big brands are not doing it. Actually, they are venturing into customization but they don't seem to be that successful. 

One possible reason I know is that the big companies are structured differently. They don't own the factories who do their products. and these companies are designed for big lot production (and not small lots needed for customized market). Their marketing outlets are not organized to take customized orders and doing a reverse business operation for every sale is a whole lot of logistical and control nightmare. 

So, I believe, the customization market will remain a domain of the smaller and more flexible companies who can do guerilla operation.

In the customization industry, sublimation technology offers the best alternative because it is much faster and economical to do in small batches. The traditional cut-and-sew team uniforms require longer turn-around.