Whether you’re a wedding dress designer or a retailer advertising your stock, designing a catalogue for your clothing products is an essential part of marketing them. A catalogue is a physical (or digital) document that details your range of products and most importantly shows how they will look.
There are a number of critical steps involved in creating an effective clothing catalogue and the process is not a simple as it may sound. Everything from deciding the font to organising the wedding photography in Sydney is crucial to the success of your catalogue.
Keep reading to find out how to create a clothing catalogue that will make customers excited to buy your products.
Determine where the catalogue will be seen
It’s important to make sure you know if your catalogue will be available in a physical copy, digital or both. Unless you are a large business with a lot of marketing capital, then physical printing can be very expensive to do on a commercial scale.
This means that for many people it’s better to opt for a catalogue format that potential customers can access digitally. This is not only cheaper since the catalogue does not need to be recreated thousands of times but has the opportunity to reach more people.
A digital catalogue stays in one place, can be updated easily and can be distributed widely with a URL link. It also means you are not limited by the number of pages you can print as an online catalogue can be as big or small as you want.
Design the catalogue
This is one of the most important aspects of creating a good catalogue. A catalogue is, like any piece of written marketing material, a reading experience that needs to engage the audience.
This means having a catalogue that is well-formatted and is consistent in its design elements. This includes things like border, colouring, text font and the spacing of images that all need to follow a regimented structure.
Having a catalogue with inconsistent design elements will take the audience out of the experience and it will be hard to get them focused again. The design of the catalogue should also be consistent with the overall look and feel of your other marketing material.
The clothing products you are trying to sell should have already been reflected in your other marketing material through the themes inherent to whatever style of clothing you have. For example, if you are selling hippie or alternative clothing then the design of the catalogue should communicate the vibe those subcultures suggest.
Clothing is a part of the fashion statement people make about their identities. Good marketing taps into the fact that customers want to express emotions, opinions and attitudes through their clothing.
Photograph the clothing
It’s possible to design a catalogue with images of the clothing on mannequins or on hangers but this is not ideal. People like to see how the clothes look when worn and are more likely to connect with a human model than with an emotionless mannequin.
Unless you have a bunch of model friends who will work for free, you are going to need to budget for the payment of models. You also need to organise the payment of a fashion photographer, which is quite simular as the payment of a wedding photographer in Sydney so that your clothes are captured in the best possible way.
The models you hire need to be consistent with your brand’s target audience. Models are stand-ins for the type of person you are targeting the clothes to.
Models are not meant to be realistic depictions but idealistic depictions. When they wear your product they are showing the target audience how stunning they could look if they bought those clothes for themselves.
Your clothing is not only selling something to wear, it is selling an image, a personality and a lifestyle to the customer. Working from this point you are sure to design a catalogue that will effectively generate interest in your products.
All of your choices from design to hiring a fashion photographer in Sydney need to be done from the perspective of an overall marketing strategy that both understand the product and the audience in great detail.