To continue where we left off from yesterday’s post on our highlights of Tempatan Fest 3.0’s “Mind Sharing” session, today we will highlight what was said by Mie Abdullah of Rare Distro as he touches mostly on Online Strategies and how to build a clothing label through an online outlet. Currently Mie and his team runs one of the largest local clothing online Distro (Distribution Outlet) in Malaysia with more than 1000 local products for sale on his website.

Quality > Quantity

Always strive to have and to maintain a culture that stresses on good quality. How does this relate to an online side of things? Simple things like your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram updates must be of quality. Don’t just update a status on social media just because you have to, or because you feel that the page doesn’t have enough updates. No point having multiple status updates but none of it engages your audience, which may annoy your audience and eventually lose them.

Be Professional

Although most of our Malaysian brands are homemade brands, always act like a proper company. Be structured and systematic, by making sure there is a proper filing system of your business records. Once you have a professional mentality, you will tend to treat it more seriously and will eventually work harder to make it work because of the momentum that it gives you. Many brand owners have that ‘cincai’ mentality, which sometimes is due to the fact that they aren’t doing it as a full time job. But because of that, many make it an excuse to ‘Rileks’ and take it easy.

Besides proper filing systems and recordings, simplest way of being professional is printing name cards of your brand  and bringing it with you wherever you go and tell people about it whenever you have the opportunity to.

Your Perception Towards Your Own Brand Will Determine How Your Customers Perceive Your Brand

Generally people in Malaysia perceive Malaysian made goods as inferior compared to overseas goods. It is especially more apparent in our streetwear scene where by we always compare our own local products to the likes of Supreme, Huf, Stussy, Undefeated and many more. If you yourself, the brand owners, keep perceiving that local products are more inferior, your customers will also think the same way. That is why it is important to always strive for that same quality or even better than the international brands.

In relations to the online side of things, good proper lookbooks, or proper product photoshoots are very essential in our new age of technology. Like I mentioned earlier, don’t have that ‘Cincai’ mentality when it comes to things like that.

Don’t Be Overprotective

Although I said to maintain a good standard and quality in everything you do, it does not mean that when a customer comments on your brand’s Facebook page that your product sucks, you get all defensive and go into a comment war with him or her. Not every negative feedback is negative. Some customers really mean well, and they just want to give their feedback so that you can improve. Not everyone is a hater.

Online feedback is always a good thing because it allows you the opportunity to engage your audience and to make them feel valued by telling them you appreciate their feedback. Of course after hearing their feedback, you don’t just do nothing about it. Customers like to know that their feedback online is taken seriously and turned into physical change.

Price It Right

If you are starting a brand and plan to go serious about it, you will definitely want to have some income for you to survive and to further the brand. So the pricing of your product is very important. This point can also be related back to the point of how a customer perceives your brand. Pricing it too cheaply will make your brand look cheap, and pricing it too expensive might scare your customers off. When people are buying through an online portal, they cannot feel and hold the physical product in their hands, so a lot of times it is through the customer’s perception of your product, and one major point is the pricing. The price of the product should match the quality of product so that the customer feels that he is getting what he paid for.

Pricing your products right also helps when it comes to distribution. If you consign your stuff to an online or physical store, most of the time they will take a cut out of the sale, lets say 30% out of the retail price. If let’s say you want to sell caps, and the cost to make those caps is RM30, and you sell your caps for RM60, you would say that the profit margin is good because it is a 100% profit, BUT, if you consign it in a store, and they take 30% which would mean they take RM18 out of the sale, leaving you with only RM12 of profit, you will find that the profit isn’t worth your while.

Starting a Brand First or Building Your Network First?

Many people ask me this question, and normally I would share with them my experience. I started out Rare Distro before starting out my own clothing label which is called Rare Clothing. Because of my available resources that I had with Rare Distro, the already available support through the distro, it made it easier to push my own clothing brand. One of the main challenge of starting out a brand first before getting the connections and networks is that you have to slowly build your buyers and followers. But either way, there isn’t a fix formula to it, but my main point here is that you should not worry so much about selling, and start building relationships instead.