This is a story that happened on Upwork.
Our team rarely uses Upwork, but we have an account on it for many years.
Due to being busy with work every day, we rarely pay attention to Upwork…
Until One Day…
Jack received an Upwork push in the email
SourcingBiz is accustomed to responding to customers’ requirements as soon as possible, and Quanzhou City, the city where SourcingBiz is located, also is a clothing industry base.
So Jack logged into Upwork and responded.
So we started interacting on Upwork.
Further Communication
After communicating with the English customer, Jack learned that the client is the founder of a start-up brand, and uses Shopify+Ads promotion to manage the brand.
This is very challenging. Because this business model requires the following advantages:
- Choose a good niche product with unique features. Nowadays, new clothing brands emerge every day, and competition is fierce. If there is no uniqueness in the products, it will lose competitiveness compared to e-commerce platforms such as Shein, Amazon, eBay, etc. Some successful cases, such as Dia&Co for plus size women’s clothing and LILYSILK for silk clothing, have their own unique positioning and selling points.
- Powerful supply chain. To make a product unique, customization is necessary, and supply chain management capabilities become the core competitiveness. Having a mature supply chain means having complete product design capabilities, bargaining power, quality control capabilities, and inventory capabilities. On the other hand, this requires huge capital, time investment, and stable and considerable sales to drive it. it’s too hard, too hard.
- Web technology and advertising placement technology. It is obvious, the main sales channel for the England customer is online sales. Customizing one’s own website on Shopify without relying on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon requires some technical support, even though Shopify has made web design applications simple enough. In addition, in order to pursue high ROI, Ads require a certain level of advertising experience and technical expertise.
This is a challenging brand journey.
The current situation of the customer is that they have launched a series of products and urgently need to expand more SKUs. There are two personnel operating this project.
Jack shared some clothing related DTC brands with the England customer, such as Dear-Lover, Shewin, Bumblebee Linens, CHICME, etc.
Business Consulting
The England customer sent Jack a clothing design technical pack for the spring-summer season of 2025 and hopes that Jack can help find a factory that can customize this clothing.
The products that the customer has already launched was created through this process, 4 SKUs in total.
Jack contacted several Chinese clothing factories to inquire about their customized service scope and delivery time.
These factories are very professional. By reviewing the drawings and providing feedback on some precautions, they can cooperate with customization. However, the delivery time is relatively long and may miss the spring launch time.
Quickly, Jack discovered that if the production method based on design drawings were to be used, the expansion efficiency of SKUs would be very slow:
- It takes a lot of time to communicate about the customized patterns, fabrics, and other processes, and then send the samples from China to the UK. After the customer reviews the samples, they can make adjustments or finalize the design.
- High cost. The factory needs to prepare customized materials and production lines. If the purchase quantity is small, the customized price of a single piece of clothing will be very high.
- Due to limited manpower, it is necessary to quickly obtain profits in order for the project to have sustainability.
So Jack suggested to the client: choose the supplier’s existing version, upgrade and customize on the existing version.
The suggestion was adopted.
Rapid Advance
The England customer started selecting clothing styles from existing suppliers and combined them with 1688.com, and determined several styles finally.
We also have the initial product list.
There were a total of 16 clothing styles! If we continue to follow the previous working way, it will take us a long time and we can only complete one style of clothing.
Procurement & Quality Checking & Transportation
Jack started purchasing and waited for the samples to arrive.
After obtaining all the parcels, Jack began to check the quality of the clothing samples.
Jack took pictures and videos of every piece of clothing, especially important details such as collars, sleeves, buttons, and fabrics.
Quality checking results:
Unconsciously, working until late at night…
The next day, we sent the samples out via DHL, and three days later, the customer received the samples.
Keep Moving
Next, we will also complete product upgrade customization, packaging customization, and so on.
Although the road to branding is not so easy, we are still on the path forward…
