Learn how we helped up-and-coming clothing entrepreneur, Imran Ibrahim to increase revenue at his design and retail business.
Iflight Clothing Limited is an independent clothing brand created by Imran Ibrahim (pictured right). Imran is both the designer and company director. Since founding the company in 2012, Imran has built a small but loyal customer base, which he is keen to grow:
When I look at other independent labels there are some that are growing faster than me. There was one label in particular that has really taken off in the last year. I checked out their clothes and the quality was poor, and the designs weren’t great either. So it felt to me like there was a lot of potential for Iflight to grow.
The fashion industry is challenging – constantly evolving with complex consumer behaviour. We used our Small Business Growth Strategy service to help Imran pinpoint what he needed to achieve, built a plan for growth, and then helped him to deliver it.
Pinpoint
We began by running our Free Growth Health Check. We concluded that like many other small businesses, Imran manages his costs fairly well, but that marketing and sales activities could probably benefit from some focus.
We jointly brainstormed ways to help Iflight better market its products, generate more sales and start to build some material top line growth.
We then prioritised the ideas using a Weighted Prioritisation Matrix, taking into account the resources and constraints that Imran had.
We picked four ideas to pursue, including:
- Seeking celebrity endorsement (via some personal connections)
- Developing a pop-up store
- Branding re-fresh
- Enhancing the existing online stores
Plan
The next step was to rapidly build a plan to help Imran deliver the new growth ideas, as well as meeting his existing commitments.
Our preferred style of business planning is waterfall, or Gantt chart (click here for more details). We find that this tends to be the most user-friendly way to plan growth and then monitor progress, when working with busy small business owners.
We used Work Breakdown Structure techniques to identify all the activities that would be necessary to deliver each of our ideas. We then placed the activities onto the plan in the correct order, estimated durations, identified risks and issues, and calculated costs. The completed plans gave Imran a simple roadmap to follow to grow his business.
Perform
Imran is now executing his plans and starting to enjoy some early successes.
A picture from the photo shoot with our first celebrity endorsement – Kelvin Mellor of Plymouth Argyle Football Club – is shown on the right.
Imran exhibited at a fashion show at the Manchester235 Casino and trialled the pop-up shop concept at the same event (also pictured right).
Conclusion
With a relatively small amount of work we helped Imran to identify and implement a series of actions to grow his revenue. Imran comments:
Working with Hooke & Co. Business Strategy has been great. Francis explained things in a really logical way. I’m confident that I’m focusing on the right things now that will make the difference.
