Learn how a B2B fashion marketplace like JOOR helps your wholesale fashion brand overcome scaling challenges. Maximize resources, build retailer relationships, and enhance distribution to drive growth in the global wholesale fashion market.
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Growing and scaling a wholesale fashion operation is a complex, fast-moving challenge. To stand out from the crowd and generate interest, sales and repeat orders, you’ll need a range of different elements to come together at once: great products, great service, great marketing, great logistics, and great relationships. All critical factors in generating revenue and ultimately driving growth.
Of those five elements, relationships are often the most underestimated factor. Strong relationships with retailers unlock so much of what’s required to scale a wholesale fashion business: new sales opportunities, introductions to potential new retailer partners, and the possibility of entry into new global markets.
But building those relationships can be incredibly challenging, especially if you’re operating on a limited budget, as most companies are in a challenging retail environment.
To counter those limitations, having access to B2B fashion marketplace capabilities and a robust set of tools designed to help you grow your business is key. And that’s why selecting the right wholesale management platform is a critical business decision.
Implementing a modern wholesale management platform into your business means you can access a B2B fashion marketplace alongside additional elements that all simultaneously work to strengthen your business.
Online marketplaces now play a big role in the global fashion industry. In a relatively short period of time, they have transformed how brands and retailers interact, trade, and grow their businesses. But what are they? Here’s our definition:
A B2B fashion marketplace is a component of an online platform that helps facilitate transactions between businesses within the fashion industry. They are designed to cater to retailers, brands, distributors, and other businesses involved in the fashion supply chain.
A traditional online marketplace can offer a wide range of fashion-related products, including clothing, accessories, footwear, textiles, and fabrics. Wholesale transactions typically involve bulk orders or larger quantities of products compared to retail purchases, with retailers buying in bulk to secure better prices and meet their inventory needs.
In short, a wholesale fashion platform like JOOR is a more comprehensive tool than a marketplace. In the best wholesale management platforms, a marketplace is simply part of the overall ecosystem.
Instead of being the sole focus, the marketplace is complemented by additional tools and features designed to streamline and optimize all the supply chain processes involved in fashion wholesale business operations. The very best wholesale management platforms are scalable and can adapt to the growing needs of a brand as it evolves through time.
Leading wholesale fashion platforms like JOOR are designed to help ambitious brands accelerate and scale at speed. If you’re looking to expand your market reach, identify new sales channels or potential retail partners, and increase your brand’s visibility and customer base, then choosing the right digital wholesale fashion platform is a crucial factor.
Here are eight ways a powerful B2B fashion platform with marketplace capabilities can help you achieve your ambitions.
Challenge: Like almost every SMB in the world, smaller and growing fashion businesses have to maintain incredibly tight control of their finances. They might also have ambitions that are larger than their current manpower or infrastructure can handle.
Solution: The central offering of most fashion marketplaces is the ability to present collections and individual pieces to retailers in a cost-effective manner. Virtual showrooms, replete with advanced imagery and video technology, eliminate physical and traveling costs, meaning even the smallest operations can get in front of potential retailer partners.
“One of my brands uses JOOR, and it’s the best market experience of anyone I’ve bought from. It has great photos and even a 360-degree model view. They do a screenshare where we go through the linesheet, and it’s just like going through the showroom together.” - Heather Darrington, buyer, Maison Michel
Challenge: Making an impact as a smaller fashion brand, when you are competing with thousands of other brands, is incredibly difficult. Stores only have limited shelf space. To compound matters, larger brands can incentivise retailers further by offering bulk discounts.
Solution: Innovative digital fashion marketplaces help to level the playing field, enabling any brand to force its way into consideration with retailers big and small. As well as digital virtual showrooms, look for a platform that offers a ‘Find New Brands’ directory or something similar, enabling retailers to filter down (by category, price point, etc) to the precise supplier they need to fill out their collection. At the same time, ensure your platform allows you to initiate connections with retailers through similar filtered searches. That way you can be proactive with your outreach.
Challenge: Setting up distribution networks, managing inventory, and consistently making timely deliveries are all essential for building trust. Big retailers have big expectations—and SMBs are often in the situation of being just one messed-up order away from losing their opportunity.
Solution: Wholesale platforms are designed to assist with a range of diversified distribution and logistics challenges. Look for one that enables you to sync to your inventory management systems, giving you peace of mind you’re aligning your orders with your actual inventory. You should also be able to manage expectations and grow positive relationships by setting delivery windows on your linesheets. Finally, look for reporting tools that help you understand your most popular styles and plan your production accordingly.
“JOOR has changed the way we work and supports our vision to be a leader in digital adoption for luxury lifestyle brands. The platform makes ordering simple. The reports are robust, and lookbooks and linesheets are consistent with the desire to present our brand to an exclusive community of current, new, and future partners.” - Lalique
Challenge: Key to accelerating your brand’s growth and resilience is developing relationships with retailers who align with your values, audience, and products. If you struggle to identify these relationships, you may find yourself working with retailers who don’t understand your USP and don’t place in front of your target audience—limiting your growth potential severely.
Solution: Once you’ve established credibility and a loyal base of retail partners aligned to your offering, you are well set up to leverage these partners to expand your network by word of mouth (chat to them), engaging with like-minded retailers, all of which is imperative in a close knit community like the fashion industry.
Challenge: With limited marketing, PR and travel budgets, opportunities for smaller brands to network and grow across the industry can be negatively impacted. And with many retailers looking for ‘sure things’, you might also find yourself shunned because your consumer following is perceived to be too small or weak.
Solution: Search for a platform that enables your brand to get in front of key decision makers. JOOR’s Retail Centre Banner, a marketing and advertising opportunity on retailers’ homepages where brands can advertise their products and showroom, is a perfect example. The JOOR Passport platform, which aggregates and displays similar brands to retailers, is another opportunity.
The ‘search’ functionality of a good wholesale platform can also offer several ways to build your brand awareness with retailers. In the best of these tools, retailers can search by brand category, brand profile name, and wholesale price range, as well as the newest, most popular, and most recently uploaded line sheets.
“Another secret to success is using JOOR. If we want to target new areas, it’s no secret that being present – being physically there – is a key to success. But in this day and age, we can’t be everywhere all at once and we want to limit travel for environmental reasons as well. Instead, you can reach out to these clients on JOOR. You don’t even need to know them. There’s a magical button that says ‘Find Connections’. We use JOOR to create those connections and then they can see our beautiful products.” - Holzweiler
Challenge: When you don’t have years of trading to point to, or huge orders that demonstrate your ability to deliver time after time, it can be difficult to convince retailers you have the track record and wholesale experience they’re looking for.
Solution: Today’s best wholesale platforms enable you to bring external data into the equation, such as connecting your social media profiles to your virtual showrooms to demonstrate to retailers the strength of your product, trust, and consumer following.
Challenge: Becoming known for something is vital to give you the foothold you need to build your fashion brand. Somehow, you need to find a way to clearly communicate your value proposition. However, this can be incredibly challenging due to saturated markets where thousands of other brands are also competing. In this environment, retailers are naturally risk averse. They can be hesitant to allocate shelf space to unproven brands when they know they have proven winners elsewhere. This can significantly impede the growth of fashion SMBs.
Solution: Try to find a wholesale fashion platform that lets you embed engaging brand and product videos into your virtual showroom. This lets you quickly and powerfully showcase your brand story to potential buyers. Platforms like JOOR enable you to add videos (such as press interviews, teasers, and runway shows) to your virtual showrooms. This can make your case more compelling. Retailers can also search for the best-selling brands. If your sales are going well, this can help you make new connections, fast.
Challenge: Negotiating and agreeing mutually beneficial terms with retailers can be complex. Larger retailers can leverage significant bargaining power. But agreeing to unfavorable terms simply to secure an opportunity can hinder your medium- and long-term growth.
Solution: Look for platforms that offer great financial services such as advanced pricing tools, enabling you to set prices by retailer, region, department, or sales rep. This gives you full control on who can see what price. You can also improve your cash flow by giving buyers the opportunity to use their preferred payment method. Tools like JOOR Pay are great for facilitating this.
If you’re looking for a powerful wholesale platform that includes the functionality of a B2B fashion marketplace, JOOR is likely to be your best possible solution. As a genuine market leader, JOOR delivers, in style. It gives ambitious brands the power of connection, access to international markets, and the tools and features necessary to help to grow and nurture blossoming long-term relationships.
“I can’t believe some of these brands don’t have JOOR. I honestly don’t know what they’re doing!” - Michelle Farmer, fifth most active retailer on JOOR Passport
Book a JOOR demo today and see how the right digital wholesale platform can support your business goals across your short-, medium-, and long-term strategies.
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