The Collection
Cohesion Playbook
We do this
every day.
We design print collections for fashion brands. Brands pay us to plan the drop, not just to draw the prints. Your choice of prints changes how much the drop sells.
We wrote this because we kept seeing the same 3 things.
Brand founders struggling to make ends meet, and looking at every part of the business except their print strategy.
Brands that delay their timelines because they decide to switch a print in the middle of production.
Brand founders spending weeks planning a drop, without a framework to define what a good print selection looks like.
A framework to help you define if the prints in your drop are helping or fighting each other. Then you will know which prints to keep, which to adjust, and which to take out.
What usually happens.
You look at each print by itself. Each one looks good, so you put each one in the drop.
Then the drop starts selling. People say they love one print, but nobody buys it. 2 other prints look the same, so people buy one and not the other. One print sells out, and you are out of stock because you did not prepare for it.
You chose every print because it looked nice. But every print also needs a job to do: one clear reason it is in the drop.
The best approach is to plan your drop carefully, so you will not have to remove any prints later on. But when a print has to change, the earlier you catch it, the less it costs you.
| Exclusive artwork1 | $500 to $750 |
| Printed fabric, first 10 yards3, 4 | $170 to $375 |
| Sewn garment samples2 | $800 to $1,500 |
| Studio photos, 4 per garment5 | $100 to $280 |
| On-model photos, 2 per garment6 | $300 to $1,000 |
| All of it together | $1,870 to $3,905 |
*The production run is not included.
The 3 jobs
in a drop.
Every print in a drop should have one of these 3 jobs. Use these 3 words for the rest of this playbook, and keep them in mind when planning your collections.
It makes new people stop and look. You would pay for an ad with this print. They may then buy a different print from you, but a concept print is what attracts the customer.
It might not be as flashy as the concept print, but it is easy to wear. It keeps selling all season. This is the print that makes you the most money.
It uses the same colors as your concept print, but not as many, and the motifs are smaller. You can also build it around one motif taken from the concept or core seller print, so the prints share a motif and not just a color. This connects one print to the other, and the story you are telling continues. People buy this print to complement the concept or core seller print, not instead of it.
The 4 questions.
You now know the 3 jobs. In the next pages we walk you through 4 questions to check your drop. The goal is for you to be objective, and say yes or no to the same 4 things about every print you are planning.
Write yes when the print passes. Every yes is worth 1 point, so each print ends with a score out of 4.
Does this print
have a clear job?
Your core sellers make most of your money. Your support prints add a second piece to the order. Your concept prints are the reason a new person stops to look. You need all 3.
Keep a ratio of about 1 concept print to 5 core seller or support prints.
- Would you pay to put this print in an ad, even if the people who see it buy something else? Then it is a concept print.
- Do you anticipate you will have to produce more of it in the middle of the season? Then it is a core seller.
- Would your customer buy this print to go with a concept or core seller print, not instead of it? Then it is a support print.
Is this print different
from your others?
A drop with a few strategically planned prints sells better than a drop with many similar ones. When 2 prints do the same thing for your customer, she buys one and not the other.
When making a purchase decision, customers typically judge many prints at the same time: a row of small pictures on a phone, a page of a line sheet, a rack at a trade show, a shelf in a shop. Online, people judge a page in about 50 milliseconds, less than a tenth of a second.7 In a store, shoppers pick from a shelf and decide in about 12 seconds.8 If 2 prints look roughly the same in that moment, your customer cannot see the difference, and you paid for both.
A simple way to keep prints different: vary the print type, the number of colors, and the size. An example drop of 6 prints:
- 1 concept print: big and rich in color, covering most of the fabric (crowded).
- 3 core seller prints: a border print that uses motifs from the theme and tells its story (mid-size motifs, 4 colors plus neutrals or tonals), a colorful floral (mid-size or big), and a big geometric placed in one spot of the piece (2 colors plus neutrals).
- 2 support prints: a small geometric that uses 1 or 2 motifs from the concept print or from one of the core seller prints. Give it a background color the main prints do not use, but one that still looks good next to them, and keep its other colors matching the drop. It can use fewer colors than the main prints. The second is a stripe, a polka dot, or a plaid with few colors that looks good next to almost every print in the collection.
Would it be hard to buy
this look for less
somewhere else?
Your customer always compares your piece with other brands' pieces. If she can buy the same look for less from another brand, she may not want to pay for yours.
Before the pandemic, shops sold about 70% of their clothes at full price. Now it is about 50%.9 So half of all clothes get their price cut. If your garment looks like a more expensive version of a fast fashion piece, you might have to cut your price too. Here is how you price check.
Does this print show
your identity?
Any brand can buy the same trend print from the same website. Bring your own identity into your prints, and nobody else will be selling what you are selling.
Some websites sell the same ready-made trend prints to every brand. The season you use one, other brands sell almost the same print, and some sell it cheaper. Prints only you have give your customer a reason to come back, and that is worth real money: in fashion, a repeat customer spends more than twice as much after 2 years with a brand as she did in her first 6 months.10 So you want people to recognize your prints on sight and relate to your identity.
*Buying ready-made prints is not wrong. If you do not have time to create every print from scratch, you can start from one you bought. Just rework it until it carries your identity and fits perfectly into your collection and drop, so it becomes yours, and not a print that could work for any other brand.
Now you have
a framework.
You can look at your next drop and say whether the prints are helping each other or fighting each other. Every print has a job, every print gets the same 4 questions, and you know which ones to keep, which to adjust, and which to take out.
Run this as early as you can when you plan a collection. As we have seen, it can save you a few thousand dollars.
Would you like this done for you, by a team with more than 10 years of experience in print design?
Where the numbers
come from.
The small red numbers in this playbook point here. Every price is a published range. Check them against your own bills; the idea holds at any budget.