Create a customer avatar for your fashion store (Step-by-step guide)

CREATING A CUSTOMER AVATAR FOR YOUR FASHION STORE: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE (WITH WORKBOOK).

Running a fashion retail business is so exciting. All the beautiful styles and the amazing people. With all of that, it’s sometimes easy to forget the most important part of your business: your customer.

By creating one or more Customer Avatars, you will be setting yourself up for success in buying the right wholesale clothing, accessories and footwear.

CONTENTS

WHAT IS A CUSTOMER AVATAR FOR FASHION RETAILERS?

WHY DO YOU NEED A CUSTOMER AVATAR?

CREATE YOUR AVATAR IN 7 STEPS

STEP 1 – BACKGROUND RESEARCH

STEP 2 – CREATE A TEMPLATE FOR YOUR AVATAR (OR STEAL OURS)

STEP 3 – FILL IN YOUR AVATAR’S DETAILS

STEP 4: YOUR AVATAR’S GOALS AND VALUES

STEP 5: YOUR AVATAR’S CHALLENGES & PAIN POINTS

STEP 6: YOUR AVATAR’S INSPIRATION & STYLE

STEP 7: YOUR AVATAR’S QUOTE

EXAMPLE WHOLESALE STOCK FOR YOUR AVATAR

PRICING CLOTHING FOR YOUR AVATAR

CONCLUSION

WHAT IS A CUSTOMER AVATAR FOR FASHION RETAILERS?

A customer avatar or buying persona is a description of the ideal customer for your fashion business. This avatar is made up of everything you know about them – where they live, their motivations, interests, aspirations, income, expenditure – everything!

It’s about building up a detailed picture of who your ideal customer is. And then by understanding them fully, you’ll be able to give them the exact styles that they want.

WHY DO YOU NEED A CUSTOMER AVATAR FOR YOUR FASHION BUSINESS?

By creating a customer avatar, you can simplify your business decisions as a retailer. Let’s take the example of buying a wholesale pack of dresses. It’s very hard to ask yourself “will the market like these dresses? Are they on-trend? Are the colours right? The sizing? Is this really what people want??”

But if you have a customer avatar you already know all about their preferences and what drives them. So all you need to do is ask – “is this what my customer avatar wants?”

What does she want? A customer avatar can help you source the right products

It’s super important to have a customer avatar at any stage of your fashion business, but especially critical when you are starting out. 

Your fashion business might have 2 or 3 customer avatars – and that’s fine. But when you create them try to be as specific as possible. Which brings us to…

CREATING A CUSTOMER AVATAR IN 7 EASY STEPS

So let’s go through the process of creating your very own customer avatar, so you can use it for guiding what wholesale stock to buy for your store.

STEP 1 – BACKGROUND RESEARCH

Time to get to work – it takes effort to create a customer avatar but it’s 100% worth it.

This is the first and possibly most important part of the process and the more detail you go into here, the better. We need to really dig into what your customer’s lifestyle is like. So ask yourself:

• What age are they?
• Where do they live?
• What size are they?
• What is their income?
• How much would they spend on clothing?
• What are their hobbies?
• What is their overall lifestyle?
• What do they wear to work?
• What do they wear when they go out?
• Do they have kids?
• Are they single?
• Do they go out much? And where?
• And more! Ask everything you think is relevant to their fashion preferences.

This is a messy, creative process but just get everything down that you can think of. Look at social profiles of people you know like this, speak to people you know like this, read forums and FB groups of people like this. Really start to get a picture of who this customer is.

Don’t worry if you’ve got loads written down – later we’ll start to refine it down to a single profile you can refer back to using the worksheet (download below)

STEP 2 – CREATE A TEMPLATE FOR YOUR AVATAR (OR STEAL OURS)

So now we’ve gotten lots of rough notes written down, let’s get into the process of making an avatar.

Here at Whola, we’ve created a CUSTOMER AVATAR WORKSHEET you can download and use yourself (but it doesn’t need to be this exact format – you do you!). The idea is to take all of the background questions you’ve asked and distill them down to a single page. It’s a good idea to keep this somewhere you can see it.

This is a low-res image of the worksheet. Download the editable PDF HERE.

STEP 3 – FILL IN YOUR AVATAR’S DETAILS

Let’s work through an example together, using the worksheet.

Let’s say one of your major customer types is young mums. It helps to give your avatar a sticky name, so let’s call her the Yummy Mummy.

First let’s find an image that will remind us of who the customer is we’re serving, and fill in her topline details. Our Yummy Mummy is coming to life!

We leave the quote until last – think of this as the summation of everything she’s thinking and a reminder of how you can stock your store with clothes to fit her lifestyle.

STEP 4: YOUR AVATAR’S GOALS AND VALUES

Here we’re going to do a thought exercise and get into her head. Why does she do what she does? What is driving her? This might sound weird, but so much of what your customer buys is about how they think and feel.

It’s clear our Yummy Mummy’s is BUSY. But she isn’t willing to sacrifice her own aspirations to still look and feel desirable. Her values definitely put her family first, but she is her own person and wants to continue enjoying her life and career.

STEP 5: YOUR AVATAR’S CHALLENGES & PAIN POINTS

This is when we’re getting down to brass tacks. How is her life? What are the challenges and pain points when it comes to clothing, accessories and footwear? This is our chance to find an opportunity to help her.

Our Yummy Mummy has a hectic life and this means she’s looking for clothes that are versatile and fit within her budget. But on an emotional level she still wants to be attractive and current.

STEP 6: YOUR AVATAR’S INSPIRATION & STYLE

Now it’s time to ask yourself what is she looking at? Who is she inspired by? Does she read blogs? Magazines? Who does she follow on social media? What brands does she like? (even if they might be out of her price range).

Later this will give you inspiration for the kinds of styles that are trending in her world.

STEP 7: YOUR AVATAR’S QUOTE

This is the final piece of the puzzle. It should be the shortest summary of what your customer wants from your fashion retail business. Here’s what we think our Yummy Mummy says.

THE AVATAR IS READY!

So we’ve built up a really detailed picture of our perfect retail customer and refined it down to one page. Already you might be able to see the kinds of clothes that you would buy wholesale to provide for her…

EXAMPLE WHOLESALE STOCK FOR YOUR AVATAR

We know our Yummy Mummy pretty well now. So what does she want?

Some first ideas that come straight from the avatar would be:

• A good black activewear legging
• Tops that might cover the bum to make her feel comfortable.
• A good trainer option
• Heels for her work
• Great shirt (can be worn out dinner and or professionally)
• Puffer jacket – warm, practical and on-trend
• A good blazer – works for formal occasions and at her work

And this is just the beginning. The more you put yourself in her shoes, the more successful your wholesale buying will be. And on a practical level, when you meet a customer like this you can easily recommend styles that slot into her lifestyle.

PRICING CLOTHING FOR YOUR AVATAR

So we’ve created our customer avatar and we’ve drilled into the specifics of her lifestyle. Now there is one super important question still to answer: how much is she willing to spend on a specific kind of item? Well, from doing the exercise we know a fair bit about this

• She wants to look and feel current.
• She treats herself regularly
• But she likes to do it for less than the cost of a grocery shop
• This is because she feels guilty spending too much on herself

So we can see that designer heels and bags aren’t going to fly with our Yummy Mummy. But there are LOADS of brands who create beautiful styles with an affordable pricepoint that work with her goals, values, challenges, and pain points. 

CONCLUSION

Customer avatars are a super important tool for any fashion retailer, especially if you’re starting out. When you create your customer avatars, remember to be as specific as possible in all areas. Where will they be wearing these styles? What do they want to feel when they’re wearing them? How much are they willing to spend to get that feeling?

By doing the work now, you will be making your life 100x easier in the future by simplifying decisions like what wholesale stock to buy.

And if you’re ready to buy stock for your customer avatar, from over 90+ unique Australian brands, JOIN WHOLA. We’d be happy to help you find exactly what they’re looking for!