To be able to do great works, you need to have the best tools. As for me, I tested many different tools before settling with these ones.
If you are a fashion designer or a fashion entrepreneur getting started, here are my recommendations for you.
Best tools for your fashion website
My recommendation if you are starting a fashion brand and you don’t have a lot of products (that’s usually the case at first) is to go with WordPress + Woocommerce.
Why ? Because WordPress and Woocommerce are free and open-source softwares. All you will have to pay are the domain name, the hosting plan, a few plugins. If you don’t know anything, you might need to hire a developper at first and to develop some knowledge on how to maintain and add your products but in the long run, it’s the solution that will cost you the least. Therefore, you can afford to make mistakes and change things if you need to. It’s beginner-friendly and you can use drag and drop templates like elementor to make your life easier.
On top of that, it’s a great platform for SEO, ie, what makes your website rank and seen on the first pages of search engines.
Going with Worpress + Woocommerce ? Totally use Elementor. It’s a freemium drag and drop page builder that will turn creating a website a lot more easier, even if you are a beginner.
If you go with WordPress + Woocommerce, I would recommend O2Switch for the hosting.
They have a unique plan that costs only 5€ + taxes/ month. The Cpanel is very user-friendly and they have a reactive client service.
They also do backups for you and you have the ability to add SSL easily to your website.
If you have no time, if you have a lot of products (100+) or if you are extremely bad with anything related to web, use shopify.
Shopify is made for e-commerce. It’s user-friendly. You don’t need to bother about hosting because they take care of it for you. There are a lot of useful plugins to make your website better performs. There is a learning curve but it’s slightly easier
Just a few things you need to consider : there are recurring fees and the more you do business, the more they increase. There are also additional transactional fees if you are using an external payment gateway.
Best tools to handle your social media when you work in Fashion
Later is my life-saver. With Later, you can schedule all your media posts on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and twitter (I wish we could add Linkedin but well…).
It really helped me get my life back and not be 24/7 plugged on my social media. I’m still spending time on social media but because I don’t need to worry about what’s going to be post, I can take time to reply to comment, send messages and really connect with people.
If you want to try it, there is a free plan that allows you to schedule 30 posts/month. And if you use my affiliate link, you can get 10 more posts even if you are using the free plan !
Canva makes creating pictures for your social media and your website very easy.
It has a lot of templates you can use. You pick a template and you just adapt it to your brand or your message. In addition to that, it’s connected to most royalty-free, creative commons image banks. Therefore, you don’t even need to spend hours finding the perfect image for your social media post, or banners, or poster to then upload it on Canva. It’s directly there.
And there are many great fonts you can use. They have a free plan and an awesome paid plan that include cool features like a background remover or automatic picture resizing.