Learn how to compete against other businesses by distinguishing yourself from the rest of the competition. In this week’s episode of Apparel Academy, Bruce Ackerman, the Founder of Printavo, gives you expert advice on how to gain a competitive edge in the custom apparel industry, so that your business can be successful.

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The custom apparel industry is very competitive since anyone can buy an embroidery machine, heat press, or printer and start taking orders from people they know. To stand out against the competition, you should incorporate these four aspects into your business to prioritize customers and make workflow more efficient.

Sales

First off, you need to be able to track your quotes and know how many dollars are in each phase of every quote. This is called a pipeline, which is a way to track sales as they go through different stages, which are all related to following up with customers. If you follow up on more orders and give customers an easy way to say yes to the next step of the order process, you will close more sales.

Organization

Staying organized makes your life easier and sets you up to run the business. Before getting more into it, you need to know the three definitions of organized production. First, organized production means investing in your time by training the right people and creating a streamlined workflow. Next, organized production means bringing in more people and keeping your team on the same page. Doing so will remove a lot of tribal knowledge from your head, which is unwritten information that most employees in a company don’t know. And lastly, organized production also means creating fantastic customer experiences by ensuring no order is forgotten or lost.

Wow Moments

Wow moments are essentially customer satisfaction. They create sticky experiences, which is where the customer keeps coming back to your business. It’s not about the price of products; it’s about what the customer cares about and how much you help them with what they care about. You do this by being efficient with your sales process, replying quickly to customers, having a transparent production process, and more. Shops that do this and make customers feel like they matter will last a long time.

Online Stores

Online stores are essential to selling your products, especially with Covid-19 forcing everyone to stay home. They are like third party sales representatives that are continuously generating income. With online stores, you want to add value for your customers. When you add value with whatever feature or process you decide to implement, you can justify selling your items at a higher price. When it comes to working with stores, make sure they have a good social media following to promote your products. If you had a bad experience selling items to a store, it might be because they didn’t promote you enough.

Those are the four important characteristics of a business that will make you stand out from the competition. Make sure to consider this information when organizing your custom apparel business; it might just bring in more customers and profits.

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