How to Start a Lingerie Business?

The idea of starting a lingerie business has somehow got into your mind, become strong and you’ve begun taking efforts in the right direction - for one, you’re here reading this blog.

While starting a lingerie business is a great idea to make money, doing it right is more important, starting with knowing how to start a lingerie line business. And that’s what this article is all about.?

We’ve talked about,?

• Why this is the right time for starting a lingerie business
• The “what you need to know” to start your own lingerie line
• How to start a lingerie business
• The cost factor and other important things

So, sit tight. Let’s create your own lingerie line and increase the wardrobe count for ladies!

Pro Tip: Start Your Own Lingerie Line Business Using xMarketplace by Adent

Why Starting a Lingerie Business?

Here are a couple of points we’ve gathered that tell you why starting a lingerie business is the best choice you can make.

1. Ever-growing industry: Lingeries, no matter what happens, are always going to be one of the essentials. In 2020, the lingerie market was valued at approximately $38.5 billion and is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 4.9% from 2021 to 2028.

2. Growth of the eCommerce Sector: The boom of eCommerce has made online purchases easy & accessible for everyone. This makes selling lingerie online a walk in the park. You don’t have to worry about potential customers reaching out to you. With proper marketing, the sales will be on autopilot.

3. Penetrates All-Financial Customers: Everyone has their own preferences when it comes to lingeries. Some like to spend more on lingeries while others don’t do as much as them. What you should understand is, you can target all kinds of customers - both the luxury and the opposite.

4. Scale as Your Grow: The best part about starting a lingerie business is, you don’t have to invest tens and thousands of dollars initially. You can slowly grow at your pace and invest more when you see fit.

5. Quick Conversions: The sales cycle is very short when it comes to selling lingerie online. Customers choose lingerie to their liking, add it to their cart and complete the payment. The best part is, they come back for more.

6. Unlimited Earning Potential: There’s no limit on how much money you can make by selling lingerie online. The stronger your marketing and entrepreneurship skills are, the better your income.

What Do You Need to Know Before Start a Lingerie Line Business?

Before we talk about how to start your own lingerie line, there are a couple of things you need to know about starting a lingerie business. And that’s what this section is all about.

1. Different Types of Lingeries You Can Sell

Lingerie = women's wear.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. When you dip your feet into it, there’s a whole lot you need to know. “Lingerie” includes women’s underwear, nightwear, frillies, robes, etc. So, when you say you’re selling lingerie online, you will be selling all of the above.

Here are some of the wide range of lingerie items you can sell,

• Thongs and G-strings
• Petticoats and Slips
• Nightwear
• Loungewear
• Sports Bras
• Maternity Bras
• Bridal Lingerie, etc

When starting a lingerie business, you need to decide on the items you will sell. We’ll talk about it later.

2. What Are the Different Lingerie Line Business Models? What to Choose?

What’s going to be the business model for your lingerie selling adventure? Now, that’s a question you should be figuring out yourselves. And to do that, you need to know what are the different types of business models in the first place.

Allow us to take you through one by one.

1. Manufacturing Lingeries On Your Own

Putting it up front, manufacturing lingeries on your own requires a lot of planning, resources and money.

To start with, you need to,

• Look into the design and aesthetics - color, pattern, style and more.
• Select the appropriate fabric - silk, satin, lace, cotton, microfiber, etc.
• Decide on sizing and fit - the body types and sizes you‘re going to create lingeries for.
• Have perfect stitching - seamless fit and finish are important for perfect lingeries.
• Check on quality - this ensures customer satisfaction and repeat purchases.

For this, you need a designer, raw material supplier, machinery, tailors, and quality assurance team onboard. Only when you have all this figured out, will you be able to manufacture your own lingeries.

The cost factor is going to shoot up by a lot and there needs to be very careful planning and execution to make the overall process hassle-free. Simply said, this is hard work.

Let’s look at the next business model for starting a lingerie business.

2. Buying Lingeries On Wholesale

This is another great way to start a lingerie business - purchasing lingeries in bulk and reselling them. All you need to do is, find a manufacturer that produces great lingeries in the market, choose your liking, order in bulk and start reselling lingeries online.

However, there are three main concerns.

• You need to have a warehouse to store the stock you purchase - costs money.
• Managing your inventory can take a massive time from your schedule. Plus, it’s difficult.
• You have no control over quality because all you’re doing is purchasing and reselling.

When compared to the previous method, this is a more feasible option but not the best choice, especially when you’re new to selling lingerie online.

3. The Dropshipping Business Model

When you’re starting a lingerie line, most experts would suggest you choose this business model.

Here’s how the dropshipping business model works.

You will simply choose from popular lingerie dropshippers and list their available products on your website. When a customer places an order, you simply pass down the order to the dropshipper and they will complete the shipping.

You act as the middlemen between things - no significant investment, no warehouse, no inventory and most importantly, RISK-FREE.

The only downside is, the profit margin is low when compared but it’s all right till you get the hang of selling lingerie online.

So, you probably know which business model you should be choosing - we don’t need to have a debate here, do we?

3. Understanding How to Calculate Profits By Selling Lingerie Online

One of the important sections under how to start a lingerie business is knowing how to calculate the profits. Because if you’re selling 1000 stocks and you’re vault is still going dry, you’re not making any profits.

Here are a couple of factors that’ll be involved when you’re starting a lingerie business.

• Operating expenses
• Marketing and advertising costs
• Website & eCommerce platform fees
• Inventory management & storage costs
• Shipping & fulfillment expenses
• Payment processing fees
• Taxes & duties

In the end, after calculating the total revenue, cost of goods sold and the net profit, you’ll know how much you have made. This will also help you give a clear idea of whether you need to adjust the stock pricing.

Initially, when you set a price for your lingerie stocks, have these expense factors in your mind. But again, since you’re going with the dropshipping model, you can skip most of the expenses above.

These are the three main things you should be known before starting a lingerie business. There are some more - we’ve addressed them below.

That said, let’s see how to start your own lingerie line now.

How to Start a Lingerie Business in 5 Steps?

Cutting to the chase, here is the step-by-step approach to how to start a lingerie business.

Step 1: Develop a Business Plan

The first step is to come up with a business plan for selling lingerie online. And a business plan covers figuring out the following steps.

• Industry Analysis: This is where you’ll understand how huge the targeted industry is and what factors influence/affect it. The analysis can be for a specific geography or global.
• Audience/Customer Analysis: Figuring out who your potential target audience is and developing a business plan accordingly - marketing pitch, product inventory, pricing and more.
• Competitive Analysis: Understanding who your competitors are and finding areas you overpower them. Also, a lot of top competitors out there have made it so far because they know what works. Simply learn and replicate what works for your lingerie line.
• Marketing Plan: This part is mostly product-oriented - the pricing of your product, where you’ll be promoting your lingeries and the promotion methods.
• Financial Planning: Understanding how much would it cost to start a lingerie business, how much can the profits be and getting the initial investment amount ready.

When you have all the above-mentioned things done, you’ll be knowledgeable enough for starting a lingerie business.

Now that you have the business plan, the next step is figuring out what you call your business.

Step 2: Choosing a Name for Your Lingerie Business

What do people call your lingeries business? Now that’s important because, at times, good lingeries and a perfect business name can create wonders for your long-term sales & revenue.

Here are a couple of competitor names we’ve picked out for you.

• Victoria’s Secret
• Playful Promises
• Stipe & Stare
• Agent Provocateur
• Wild Lovers
• Love Stories
• Lemonade Dolls

If you can notice closely, all these mentioned lingerie brand names have a touch of seductiveness and playfulness in them. Coming up with one such name that truly reflects the nature of your business will be useful and make you unique.

So, make sure you choose a name that’s bold, playful and seductive at the same time. Next in our how to start a lingerie line article, we’ll talk about paperwork.

Step 3: Getting Your Lingerie Business Registered

Before you go out and start selling lingerie online, you need to register your business first.

Whilst there are a lot of business structures, the best ones to go forward with would be Sole Proprietorship and Limited Liability Company.

Sole Proprietorship: Most suitable for small business owners - you get to keep whatever you make but you’re also liable for all debts and losses that occur.?

Limited Liability Company (LLC): A better option for your lingerie business. This business structure combines both corporation and sole proprietorship characteristics. And just like the name says, owners are not liable for debts (personally).

You can register your business under one of these two structures. Also, check with your local jurisdiction laws and obtain the necessary licenses & permits for starting a lingerie business.

Step 4: Setting Up Your Marketplace for Selling Lingerie Online

This step is all about setting up the face of your lingerie business.

Your customers need a place to browse and purchase your lingeries. And you need an eCommerce marketplace setup for the same with features like product discovery, built-in payment gateways, multiple revenue streams, discount coupons and more.

Building an eCommerce site like this from scratch will cost you somewhere around $10,000 to $40,000 depending on the size and features of the website. Also, you need to find lingerie dropshippers to list lingeries which will again take time.

The best option here would be to use an adult eCommerce website script with a built-in dropshipping API. You don’t have to create an eCommerce store from scratch plus you don’t have to search for dropshippers. One such script is xMarketplace.

What is xMarketplace?

xMarketplace by Adent.io is a whitelabel script that lets you create your own eCommerce store. The script comes with all the features needed to build an eCommerce store like payment gateways, product discovery, multiple revenue streams and the best part is, it comes with international dropshipping APIs that have over 20,000 products.

Choose relevant products from various dropshippers, add them to your inventory, allow customers to place an order and watch them get shipped automatically.

The script is 100% customizable, SEO-optimized, fully responsive and you get complete access to the code. All you have to do is, purchase the script, install it on your server, make a few customizations and get your lingerie business website live.

Step 5: Launch and Grow Your Lingerie Business

Now that all is in place, it’s time to launch your business. We’re just revealing a few methods you can use to launch and grow your lingerie business.

1. Leverage Social Platforms: Make maximum use of social channels. Create accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and constantly create the hype to the point where your business is launched.

2. Digital Magazines: Partner with PR agencies and push out announcement articles in multiple magazines and publishings. Make sure to choose only relevant magazines and websites - helps drive targeted traffic to your business.

3. Offer Early Offers & Discounts: The best way to create hype and drive traction is to launch early bird offers. Offer a flat 50% off or even go for buy one get one offers. This can help you drive all the initial attention you need.

4. Launch a Referral Program: One of the best ways to increase your customer base is by launching a referral program. Make sure both the referrer and the referral get benefitted to make the program work successfully.

5. Rewards Program: This is a great opportunity to increase repeat purchases on your profile. Every time a customer buys something, reward them with points that can be used on their next purchase. This will drastically increase your sales and revenue.

Those are some of the ways to launch and grow your lingerie business. Now that we’ve covered almost everything you need to know on how to start a lingerie business, let’s cover one more important thing and wind up.

How Much Money Can You Make By Starting a Lingerie Business?

Before we arrive at a figure, you need to understand that your revenue depends on a lot of factors like,

• Geographical location
• Target audience
• The popularity & visibility of your brand
• Frequency of customer purchases and more

These factors highly influence how much money you can make by starting a lingerie business.

On average, by selling lingerie online, you can easily make more than $10,000 and down the lane, with proper marketing and growth measures, you can touch a six-figure income.

With that being said, we’re wrapping up this article.

Conclusion

Like we said earlier, starting a lingerie business, especially via the dropshipping method can be a great entrepreneurial choice - very little investment and a hassle-free method with the potential to make a lot of money.

Now that you know everything about how to start a lingerie line, all that’s left is for you to take the first step to start a lingerie line.

Go on now, start selling some amazing lingeries in the market!

FAQs About How to Start a Lingerie Business

1. Where to sell lingerie online??

Some of the best places to sell lingerie online are Amazon, eBay and other popular eCommerce platforms. But the most recommended place would be your own eCommerce store.

2. Which type of business model is risk-free for selling lingerie online?

There are three types of business models for starting a lingerie line - manufacturing your own lingeries, wholesale purchase & reselling and dropshipping. Out of the three business models, dropshipping is the most risk-free because you’re simply acting as the middleman between the customer and the seller - no investment, no warehouse costs and no inventory management.

3. Is starting a lingerie business profitable?

Yes. Starting a lingerie business is very much profitable since it is an evergreen industry and a daily essential for women. Also, the lingerie industry is predicted to have a strong growth percentage for the next couple of years. So, this is the ideal time for starting a lingerie business.