Guessing the market: targeting for your business plan
Posted by on May 26, 2011 at 4:38 pm / Newbies, Small Business / Trackback
N writes:
I am working on a business plan for my women’s contemporary clothing line. I’m stuck at the market analysis portion of my business plan as I cannot seem to get my hands on the information required to complete it. I just need to find the current market share for womens contemporary wear, industry sales revenue, demographic data showing spending patterns within these categories, market trends, etc. Where can I find such market analysis without paying a data research company hundreds on dollars?
I did a search for “total apparel sales 2010″, “apparel sales 2010″ and got several promising returns so I wonder what kind of search terms people are using. In using the year “2010″, I intended to find all news related to apparel sales published in 2010 as opposed to data that applied to 2010 because it is too recent to be widely free (as in, US Government data). It’s one of those things you watch, courtesy of a subscription to WWD or the WSJ. By the way, this article with data from NPD Group has most of what you’re looking for.
If you’re on a budget and can’t afford a subscription, you can get their respective daily headlines via email for free. If you see something that looks interesting such as “Luxury sales increase x%” (keep in mind they usually include comparative data of related sales to include contemporary etc) search the web over the next few days and I’ll bet a blogger somewhere will have cited the article in question and dropped a few key points. That’s what I have done. It works for nearly everything but the priciest news like Just Style and The Birnbaum Report. Those are too pricey for most bloggers to pay for. The other option is to set a google alert for search terms or even “NPD Group” since they frequently send out press releases.
It is at this point I intended to turn the tables to explain why much of this information is useless for a business plan so you may as well crib from someone else or make it up but as time grows short today, I’ll have to delay annoying anyone until tomorrow. Then I will follow up with why forecasts based on market size are essentially useless with a round up of past entries published here on the almighty revered and hallowed business plan. Hopefully one can glean something useful twixt the two.
5 Responses to “Guessing the market: targeting for your business plan”
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May 26th, 2011
5:19 PM
Market research is tough. Forester publishes good stuff if you can find it for free, but if not its like $800 dollars for a study
May 27th, 2011
11:36 AM
In my opinion only everyone should make sure they have a budget for WWD at the very least.
May 27th, 2011
12:16 PM
A couple of items I would suggest is visiting your local library and seeing what kind of databases they subscribe to. There can be a wealth of information gathered from them. Standards & Poor has data information, but you do need to keep in mind that retail is such a broad category that it can be difficult to pinpoint information. Another valuable source is OTEXTA (Office of Textiles and Apparel). Sometimes you need to combine different sources of information to get a clearer picture. USA Trade Online has statistics on both the import and export of goods that are updated regularly.
I would suggest working with your local Small Business Development Center, which is funded through the Small Business Administration. They can help point you in the right direction for some of the data, and may have direct access to data at their center. If you have any questions, I would be more than happy to help you out. My email address is mayorga@cod.edu.
May 27th, 2011
2:05 PM
Kathleen,
Thanks so much for responding. I’ll try your search strategy and see what I come up with.
I am curious to find out why most of this market analysis is unnecessary for a business plan. I can’t wait to read your write-up!
Regardless this works in my favor as I want to get the business plan writting project over and done with and concentrate on actually executing the plan.
Luanne,
Great pointers! I will try your strategies out as well.
Thanks All,
Naa
May 27th, 2011
3:07 PM
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