White-label products have taken the realms of fast retail and online selling by storm, becoming a core vein in the circulatory system of consumer goods and generic products. In today’s fast-paced economy, many a budding entrepreneur will try their first hand at launching a brand by working with white-label suppliers.
Working with a white-label manufacturer offers access to reduced production costs, faster times to market, and more time to consider brand strategy, presenting an enticing access point to industry newbies. However, while it is an attractive avenue for businesspeople to work on, it’s still important to carefully establish a brand launch plan. We’ve put together this blog to elaborate on some techniques for launching a brand successfully with white-label products, so you can feel confident getting your online selling business off the ground.
Step 1: Research and Product Selection
Before selling generic products online, do plenty of market research. This means getting a handle on the trending products of the day, digging into wider lifestyle tendencies, and determining a suitable target audience. It’s also important to properly establish your overarching business goals, as this will help to guide your decision-making process going forward.
If looking to crack the fitness market, consider products like reusable water bottles. If you’re focused on wellness, look into working with a CBD manufacturer or a producer of electric massage tools. Those looking to sell at high-speed and high-volume rates might find success with simple phone accessories. Soon-to-be sellers can better determine where their business might fit into the market by researching different markets, products, and manufacturers.
We’ve also listed some key tips for competitor analysis:
Identify Key Competitors: Find your direct competitors who sell the same or similar products to your target market, considering both established brands and emerging businesses.
Evaluate Product Offerings: Check out the variety of products offered by competitors, noting features, pricing, or positioning, and identifying any gaps in the market.
Assess Branding and Packaging: Branding and packaging are the core things you can control in this industry, so diligently analyze successful visual messaging and brand identity in competitors.
Study Marketing Strategies: Marketing is similarly controllable with white-label selling, so research competitor marketing materials across online platforms, social media, and offline advertising.
Analyze Customer Feedback: Read customer reviews, ratings, and feedback on competitor products to gather strengths and weaknesses, paying attention to common pain points and areas for improvement.
Examine Distribution Channels: Check out the different distribution methods used by competitors, looking for any opportunities to leverage alternative or niche channels.
Monitor Pricing Strategies: Take note of competitor pricing strategies, including general prices, subscription options, discounts, promotions, and more, to determine your competitive positioning.
Keep Up with The Trades: Stay on top of broader industry trends and dynamics using publications, industry reports, and research studies – this will help to anticipate future opportunities and challenges.
By following these steps for competitor analysis and market research, you can set your brand strategy up effectively, before you even start reaching out to white-label product manufacturers.
Step 2: Supplier Sourcing
Once you’ve got a solid idea of what launching a brand might look like for your goals, it’s time to reach out to white-label suppliers and manufacturers. Finding the right facility or supplier can start in a variety of places. With access to the Internet, a simple Google search could be all it takes to find a manufacturer in the lane you’re looking to enter. For a more engaging, hands-on experience, attending a dedicated trade show is a great way to meet manufacturers and get some time with their products in a physical space.
It’s also important to adhere to strict criteria when evaluating suppliers:
Quality Control Standards: Make sure that any supplier you plan on working with adheres to strict quality control standards, making note of any certifications or accreditations they display.
Production Capacity and Scalability: Consider whether the supplier can scale up production as your business grows and expands in the context of your goals.
Reliability and Consistency: Do a deep dive into the supplier’s reputation within the industry, prioritizing collaborations with those known for reliability, consistency, and timeliness.
Communication and Responsiveness: This supplier should be a long-term collaborator, so determine their responsiveness, transparency, and reactions to concerns and feedback early on.
Flexibility and Customization: Figure out if the supplier is flexible to accommodate product modifications, specific order requirements, and other collaborative prospects.
Cost and Pricing Structure: Compare pricing structures and terms from different suppliers, considering unit costs, minimum orders, payment, terms, and any additional fees to find the perfect partner.
Location and Logistics: Consider the supplier’s location, whether they can complete white-label dropshipping, and their general logistics capabilities to ensure reliable delivery and transportation.
Ethical and Environmental Practices: Assess how ethical, environmentally sustainable, and socially responsible the supplier is, comparing their answers to your priorities.
By conducting due diligence within these parameters, you can get a better idea of whether a supplier is the right choice for your business goals. If you find a manufacturer you’re eager to work with, it’s important to keep some negotiation tactics in mind. Remember, you don’t have to take the first deal you’re offered, with most businesspeople willing to make some compromise to reach a more mutually beneficial arrangement.
Step 3: Branding and Packaging
Launching a business off the back of white-label products comes with the innate disadvantage that your goods will be at least somewhat generic – it’s not as easy to build a unique brand identity without a unique value proposition. However, by alleviating the burden of development and manufacturing, white-labeling offers you more time to focus on branding and packaging without distraction.
Important elements of branding and packaging include:
Determining Brand Identity and Values: Clarify your brand’s personality, values, and overarching personality – this will inform any brand messaging packaging decisions.
Product Differentiation: Figure out what the USP of your product is, then make an effort to communicate this seamlessly with branding materials and packaging design.
Visual Elements: Create visually appealing branding and packaging, aligned with market research, brand storytelling, and the principles of emotive evocation using colors, typography, and imagery.
Brand Consistency: Branding elements and visuals should be consistent across every touchpoint, with packaging, digital designs, and marketing materials feeling coherent and cohesive.
Practicality and Functionality: Packaging should be user-friendly, accounting for factors like ease of opening, easy storage, transportability, and product protection – along with reusability.
Other elements that must be considered include the environmental impact of the packaging, along with the compliance with legal regulations and rulings, however, these factors will differ depending on the product and target market. Regardless of your direction, packaging and branding are essential facets of product visibility, perceived volume, and shelf(website) appeal, with good branding being the easiest way to build recognition with a target audience.
Step 4: Marketing Strategies
Once you’ve determined your brand identity and messaging strategy, it’s time to start marketing the product and overall brand. It’s important to remember that there are multiple avenues for marketing in the modern economy, with both digital and traditional methods each remaining relevant.
Digital Marketing Methods
Building a Website: Whether you’re selling one product or a range of goods, design and upload an attractive, brand-consistent website. Fill the website with original content, stunning imagery, details about your business, information about the product, and elements of the brand story, making sure to follow the principles of strong SEO.
Social Media Content & Advertising: Social media is rising in commerce, with platforms offering at least three ways to market to scrolling consumers. For one, you can create original content to organically market goods. Secondly, you can sponsor promotional materials to reach people’s feeds. Thirdly, you can actively sell on the dedicated selling platforms included on some platforms.
Influencer Partnerships: To expand upon the potential of social media selling, you can also reach out to influencers and social media sensations as mouthpieces for your product. Remember to research influencers in general, considering the ones that seem most applicable to your business, reaching your target market most effectively.
Traditional Marketing Methods
Building Retail Partnerships: If you can find a retail distributor for your product, then you can access their audience. Suppose you’ve brought a quality product to a distributor. In that case, you can get some physical shelf presence, along with the potential for some independent marketing materials to be made on their behalf.
Classic Advertising Channels: There are a range of different channels that retailers and sellers can leverage in terms of traditional advertising, such as within print media, on the radio, with television advertisements, or even on billboards. Again, consider the audience you’re trying to connect with and why before taking out paid spots.
Attending Trade Shows: In the same way that these places can be great for sourcing new products, they can also be massively beneficial in terms of finding buyers for your products. Whether seeking new customers, wider distributors, or even building retail partnerships, attending trade shows can be an excellent way to get your foot in a multitude of doors.
It’s important to create a full-scale marketing plan encompassing both digital and traditional marketing methods, using data points, along with classic trial and error methodology to optimize every campaign impact.
Step 5: Quality Control and Testing
Quality control and testing measures are essential to successful selling, ensuring you don’t damage your reputation for consistency and reliability. If taking the path of white-label suppliers, it’s important to know that anyone manufacturing your products is completing a high standard of quality control checks and tests.
Third-Party/Personal Testing: It’s equally important to do your own quality checks before you start distributing the goods to customers. Spend plenty of time analyzing the product in small orders before you commission a full order, ensuring the product feels worth buying and selling. Similarly, you can also send products to third-party testing companies, making sure that they’re up to scruff.
Product Compliance and Certifications: Beyond simple checks of quality, many products should reach certain industry standards or certifications for compliance. In particular, products like supplements, microwaveable plastics, and sustainable goods all need to reach specific standards to be sellable and marketable to consumers.
Alongside these primary quality control methods, it’s also important to implement a consistent mechanism of feedback and continuous improvement, ensuring that product quality is maintained and even improved over time.
Step 6: Launch and Scale-Up
Once you’ve put all your ducks in a row, it’s time to launch the brand. This means staying loyal to your promotional strategy, any distribution methods discussed with the supplier, and order sizes. With launches, there are plenty of exciting opportunities to make an impact on consumers.
Certain pre/launch activities include:
Early Discounts/Promotions: Businesses can drum up excitement in the early days of a product launch by offering some sort of discount or promotional scheme. This might come into play in the form of limited promo codes, some sort of BOGO scheme, or other special offers that get the ball rolling and the product sent out early.
Launch Events: Launch events can take place online or in physical spaces, organized to generate hype, get more eyes on a product, and likely give a few physical items away for free. Whether these events are late-night parties or live-streamed webinars, they should drum up some hype for the product and reach a diverse audience.
When it comes to scaling up, it’s all about monitoring the performance of your product sales, gathering plenty of feedback from your customers, and then acting in response to the collected metrics to ensure things improve or grow.
Two methods for scaling up include:
Expanding Your Product Line: After making an impact with one product or product line, you can grow your business by expanding what it has on offer. You can choose to stay close to the original product that built your brand or go in a new direction, depending on the brand identity you have forged with your audience’s participation.
Entering New Markets & Distribution Methods: White-label products can be distributed through a range of different methods, such as subscription boxes, in-store pop-ups, dropshipping, and DTC consumer sales. The more distribution channels you enter, the more likely you can be to enter new geographic areas and reach new demographics.
Whether in the early days of launching a brand or seeking to grow as a name in the industry, it’s always essential to focus on performance and potential areas of improvement. In the early days, being diligent with your approach to progress is essential for building momentum. When trying to scale a business up, you might have a little bit more space to experiment, but it’s still important to roll changes out slowly, ensuring things don’t get away from you too quickly.
Conclusion
When trying to launch a brand using white-label products, it’s important to stay loyal to the roadmap we’ve laid out in this blog. From selecting your product to developing a final brand launch plan, every stage requires a similar degree of diligence. Remember, working with a white-label company offers you a lot of freedom to experiment with branding and marketing, but it increases the need for proper quality control and a degree of management control, without having the same hands-on access to the goods.
If you’re looking for the finest place to meet manufacturers and source the finest white and private-label goods in the world, White Label World Expo is coming to New York on May 30th and 31st. This event is packed full of leading sellers, expert speakers from within eCommerce, and thousands of professionals ready to network with one another.
Don’t miss out and register for your tickets today!