From Concept to Stockist: What I Learned Building a Product Range

Studio Notes · Behind the Work · 9 min read

I talk to a lot of founders who have brilliant ideas for products and no clear idea of how to move from concept to something sitting on a shelf. That gap between the object/merch/life changing device you can picture, and what actually exists in the world is where most product ideas quietly die. Not because they were bad ideas, but because the process felt too opaque, too complicated (where do I even start?!), or too risky to begin.

I know that gap from the inside. Before I was advising other founders on their product development, I built my own brand through to stockist level. Granted, I had experience behind me, I had been a fashion designer for the likes of Jack Wills (in its heyday) and Herschel Supply Co., so my bread and butter was coming up with brand direction through products. However when I left employment to teach yoga and start my own brand, I was suddenly the entire department(s) all rolled up into one… a steep learning curve.

I went through the process of developing a range, finding suppliers, navigating minimum order quantities, building the visual identity, figuring out pricing, approaching wholesale accounts, and learning (often the hard way) what I would do differently next time.

This post is about some of what I took from that experience, how you can start your own product based business to complement your current service based business, and how my experience growing global brands and my own yoga wear brand shapes the way I work with clients now.

The beginning is not where you think it is

Most people assume that building a product range starts with the product. A material you love, an asset missing from your life, a category you want to enter. In my experience, that is almost always the wrong place to start, not because those things are not important, but because starting there means you are building the brand to fit the product rather than building the product to fit the brand.

The beginning is brand clarity. What does your brand believe in? What does it reject? Who is your customer and what does their life actually look like? What feeling does your brand create, and how can a physical object carry that feeling into a new context? When you can answer those questions with confidence, the product brief almost writes itself.

For example, every time us designers (of the lifestyle variety, I can’t speak for fast fashion or high street designers) start the process of designing a new collection, we start with the feeling. What feeling do we want Summer 2027 to encapsulate? How does our customer feel when wearing our clothes or using our product? Does this feeling match how we want our brand to be perceived?

Questions, questions, questions. Even if you already have a product in mind, asking yourself how this product reflects your brand and your audience will elevate this already great idea into outer-space, cosmos levels of greatness!

Your community is your currency

You have a great product, you’ve spent a year developing, updating, adjusting and now it’s ready to get out to the world. Hello world…?

My advise (and I realllllly recommend you take this one most of all)… Get your audience involved from the get go. Now, I will leave the marketing to the marketing pros, but if you have a community of interested, on board and excited people ready and willing to see what you have been creating behind the scenes when you launch your product, you are golden.

When designing for Jack Wills back in 2006, we had a cult following that was all on a IYKYK basis. If you traveled to Salcombe for the summer, hung out with the “in” crowd there, then you had something from 22 Fore Street, the Jack Wills Mecca. Sure you could buy our hoodies and super long lounge pants online, but only if you knew they existed.

It was a totally loyal fanbase. Our products were expensive, but made of excellent quality that was built to last (Hands up who still has there hoodie from 2007/2008?!), and they completely encapsulated that feeling of being in Devon as a uni student during the summer, drinking on the beach with the founders. Who didn’t want to be part of that?

So take your audience along with you, ask for their input, get them to trail out the user/wear trails for feedback, listen to them. If you have a service based business then you are already three quarters of the way there (and that’s where I help clients the most), you have your community, so share your dreams of products with them.

Suppliers are not just logistics, they are brand partners

Suppliers make or break a brand. Finding the right ones is absolutely everything, from the initial prototyping to the final production run. If they get your vision, understand your brand and are in this with you every step of the way you are winning. Suppliers know their industry, machines, materials and processes inside out, and working together as a collaborators is the key to success.

The suppliers who produced my best pieces were the ones who understood what I was trying to achieve and really cared about it. They suggested alternatives when something was not working. They took pride in what came out of their process. Finding those people (and the finding does take time) is one of the most valuable things you can do in product development.

It also matters for your brand story. Customers and stockists increasingly want to know where things come from and how they are made. A supplier relationship you are proud of becomes part of the narrative around your product. A supplier you are slightly embarrassed by becomes a liability.

Pricing is where most first-time product founders get it wrong

I am going to be honest here because I see founders make this mistake repeatedly and it causes real damage to their businesses. The temptation, when you are launching your first range, is to price low to drive volume and prove the concept. It feels like the safe bet. It is almost always the wrong one.

Pricing too low does several things that undermine your brand. It signals to stockists that your margins are unworkable for wholesale. It signals to customers that the product is not premium, even if everything else about your brand says otherwise. And it means you need to sell a very large number of units before the exercise is commercially worthwhile, which is much harder than it sounds when you are starting out.

Cost up properly. Include your time. Include packaging. Include the cost of samples and development. Include a realistic view of wastage and returns. Then apply the margin your brand deserves (insider note: industry standard is aiming for a 75% margin in the UK). If the resulting price feels too high for your customer, the answer is usually to rethink the product or the materials, not to compress the margin.

Price for the brand you want to be, not the brand you are nervous about being.

Getting into stockists is a relationship, not a pitch

The wholesale relationships that endured when I started wholesaling my brand, were the ones where there was genuine alignment between my brand and the stockist’s world. Where I had done enough research to understand what they cared about and why my range made sense in their context. Where the conversation felt less like a sales call and more like two people who had both already decided this was a good idea comparing notes.

Getting there required knowing my brand inside out; its story, its values, its customer, its competitive positioning. It required having beautiful, thoughtful materials. And it required patience, because the right relationships take time to build and trying to rush them rarely works.

What I would tell a founder starting this process today

Start with your brand, not your product. Be rigorous about who you are making things for, and get them involved. Choose your suppliers the way you would choose collaborators: for alignment and craft, not just convenience. Price honestly. And when you approach stockists, bring a genuine point of view and the confidence that comes from having built something worth believing in.

Most importantly: do not try to do all of it at once. Product development has a rhythm, and the founders who stay closest to that rhythm, moving deliberately through each stage, learning as they go, almost always produce better ranges than those who sprint and then stall.

I built my consultancy precisely because I wanted to help founders navigate this process as smoothly as possible, especially when they are already running the service side of their business. If you are thinking about bringing a product to your community, or somewhere in the middle where you have the merch and are feeling uncertain about the next step, I would be glad to talk through where you are. The contact form on this site is the easiest place to start, get in touch – let’s chat!