Competition Gets Sloppy
When you are in a worthy industry, there will be several competitors looking to undercut you and take your business. That’s when ethics get skewed, and when you have to reconsider how you are managing your business.
It’s definitely easy to be a clone, but for any business, it’s much better to innovate and actually, genuinely be the better business out there. That’s how you can overtake your competition, capture more market share, and have customers that are ever so loyal to you and only you, rather than fleeting customers who would be ready to jump to your next competitor by some slight of hand.
In the world of fashion, there are no copyrights. Designers are free to do as they please and rip off designs as they feel necessary. The big fashion houses get ripped off by fast fashion retailers like H&M all the time. I used to love H&M as a kid because they were affordable and so forward. But what H&M fails at is having the premium quality of the big fashion houses they rip designs off of, and that is why stores like H&M haven’t destroyed the big fashion houses. Then again, H&M wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if the LVs and Pradas of this world went under because they would have to start creating their own unique designs.
In the sector of dress shirts, there’s the off-the-rack dress shirt, the bespoke dress shirt, affordable dress shirts, quality dress shirts, and just plain men’s dress shirts. There are small differentiators between each type of dress shirt and for each type of dress shirt, there are several great retailers that sell that product.
Of course there are different variations under each type of dress shirt too, such as lightweight, light (colored), dark (colored) and dress shirts with pockets.
But when your competition is ripping off the same designs and styling, the same patterns, the same sizing, the same fabrics, what can you do?
You have to be better at customer service, provide better value, have more market coverage, build a more fun shopping experience, and just find ways that your competitor is lacking and really innovate.
Don’t let things get too messy though. Just focus on what you can do for your business to really improve how you are acquiring and retaining customers, and spend more time just focusing on how to improve your other KPIs.