Here's how you can use AI tools to help start your clothing brand...
Artificial Intelligence or ‘AI’ is being used by most companies (including fashion brands) to speed up their processes, get more done and stay ahead of the curve. If you're a fashion brand owner, or you're thinking of starting a clothing line, there are several ways that you too can leverage AI tools to help you grow your brand.
In this article I’m going to give you my top tips on the best ways that a clothing brands can use AI for the win.
WARNING: Before we start, I want you to heed my advice. PLEASE DON'T SOLELY RELY ON AI! Artifical Intelligence tools can be really useful, but (at the moment, at least), they can make mistakes, and still need human oversight. So please don't copy and paste large blocks of text straight from AI into your website or your product descriptions, and don't think that AI can do everything for you.
Starting a successful fashion brand is a rewarding, but challenging journey, so you're still going to need to put in some work yourself!
1. Use AI for Customer Research & Target Audience Mapping
One of the key things you'll need to think of when starting a clothing brand is 'who am I trying to target?'. You'll need to have a clear idea of who your ideal customers are, so that you can attract them with your brand and your designs. The more clarity you have around who you're trying to target, the more likely you are to really resonate with your chosen audience. Customer research can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming though...so step up AI!
Using a tool like Chat GPT or Google Gemini, you can give them a prompt like "Act as a market research and branding expert. I'm looking to start a streetwear clothing brand, and need help defining my target audience. Can you help me with that?".
The AI will then run you through steps and questions that you need to get total clarity on your target market. You can ask them questions and get them to clarify, refine and tweak their responses so that they suit you and your brand's goals perfectly. In essence, using these tools as AI-powered market researchers can help you identify a unique space in the booming leisurewear market and understand who your ideal customers are.
2. Use AI for Design Ideas & Clothing Visuals
Stuck for design ideas? AI image generators, such as Adobe Firefly and Midjourney can create moodboards for your clothing line based on keywords or styles you provide.
You can also get them to generate draft ideas for your clothing designs. For example, below, we asked Midjourney to imagine a ' a hoody design for a leisurewear that takes cues from space and astronomy'
Whilst the designs are far from perfect, these AI tools can give you a really quick and easy way to explore different visual styles, explore different concepts and refine your vision for how you want your clothing designs to look.
You could, for example bring along some of the AI generated images to your Tech Pack & Design session to help clarify the style that you're looking for.
3. Use AI to help write product descriptions
A lot of our customers find writing product descriptions pretty difficult, it can be a struggle to keep a balance of key product details and exciting your customers for new products.
We have a brilliant blog post for Fashion Copywriting (just click here) that tells you exactly how to find the right info from your tech packs to write product descriptions. If you take the information and tips from that blog post and then use an AI tool to help you write descriptions it's super quick & easy to create great product descriptions. Simply type ‘xxx product description’ and use as a guide while inputing the correct details from your own tech packs.
4. Use AI to speed up blog post writing
Before we start on this point, PLEASE DO NOT just copy and paste huge blocks of text straight from AI into your website. Not only can the text sometimes be inaccurate, but Google knows when content has been AI generated and can be pretty brutal with lowering your website's ‘authority’ or ranking of your site. There have been some major AI-focused updates from Google in recent times that have been nicknamed the ‘blood bath’ updates, where websites that relied solely on AI generated content ‘got murked’ as Chris our wonderful SEO manager put it.
Where AI is best used for blog writing is to stop writers block and give general ideas. So here are a few tips:
Idea Generation And Writing Structure
AI is great at brainstorming ideas. You can plonk any topic into OpenAI's ChatGPT and it will come back with loads of super interesting points for you to use as a base. This cuts writing time down dramatically and ensures a steady flow of ideas that will be on point for your target audience. If you type in ‘write a blog post on xxx idea’ it will also come up with a writing structure which is super helpful (I’m using it for writing structure right now).
Blog Images
While Google can automatically tell if your text is AI generated, it’s not so great at spotting AI created images (yet). Sometimes all you need is an image that conveys the general vibe of what you’re talking about, I used Adobe Firefly for most of the images generated in this blog by typing in prompts such as "clothing design creative workspace" and "fashion brand brainstorm".
A note on Brand Authenticity
When using AI tools for your clothing brand, it's important to your authenticity in mind. It’s fine to use AI as a ‘leaning post’ but not all imagery/text that you use for your clothing brand should be AI generated. Having human input and oversight of the content that AI produces is super important, not only to make sure that the information is accurate and relevant, but also to make sure that keep a sense of authenticity behind your brand. At the end of the day, great clothing brands are ones that feel unique and authentic.
Conclusion
For new clothing brand owners, leveraging AI technology can be a game-changer as long as you're using it as a guide. This is just a quick overview of some of the main ways that we've found AI can help fashion brands. It can also be super helpful with other things like social media (for hashtags), creating marketing strategies, creating customer personas, and much more...i'll be expanding on these points in future blog posts so keep your eyes peeled!
Hope this post helps you on your journey of using AI for your clothing brand!
Joss H&E :) xx
If you're looking to get started with your clothing brand, we can help with your designs and tech packs: click here to book a tech pack and design session with one of our experts.
P.s We're here for you of you have questions drop us a WhatsApp on +447939591255