If we made a tool that will design clothing automatically through artificial intelligence, how can you identify the target market and pricing structure?

Question: If we made a tool, which will design clothing automatically through artificial intelligence, how can you identify the target market and pricing structure?

Answer:

1. Clarifying Questions

• Can the design of our tool be repetitive? => No

• Do we ensure the copyright of products designed by the tools? => No

• How does it work? => Users can input some information about the clothes they want to design, such as age ranges, gender, style (modern, tradition, …), categories (coat, shirt, …), slogan, text, ... . They also can integrate some icons or branding stuff into the product or customize them in several ways.

• What is the goal of the product? => The goal is to personalize clothes.

2. Users & Target Market

• From my point of views, three main groups of people will use our product are:

  • Organization

    • People in this group are from companies, organizations, communities, and other groups. They want to design their uniforms, but they don’t have specific employees to do this stuff. Their requirements and acceptance criterias are not too high so they can use our product to design their own clothes instead of outsourcing them.

• • • Market: Nowadays, there are more and more companies and groups that are established and growth really fast because of the trend of community and startup. Therefore, this market is very potential.

• • • Competitors: Companies and organizations often outsource their clothing design to freelance designers, design companies, or uniform companies with some branding requirements like color, logo, slogan, … But the design, communication, and negotiation process takes them a long time to get the sufficient design. Our tool can help them get the design faster than ever. On the other hand, competitors’ ecosystems are the thing we should consider. Because they often connect with other companies in the supply chain to produce end-to-end products.

• • • Company fit: Organization wants to have a unique design for their uniforms because it’s some kind of branding, which suits our product's goals, “personalize clothes”.

• • Mid-class people

    • People in this group don’t want to use mass-produced clothes, but also don’t want to spend too much money to buy unique or limited-edition clothes from high-end brands. Therefore, the tool helping them design by themselves is the best choice for them to meet their demands.

• • • Market: Nowadays, the life standard has been higher than ever. The number of mid-class people has increased significantly time by time. In developed countries, most people belong to the middle class. Therefore, this is a large potential market we should dig into. 

• • • Competitor: Our competitors in this customer segment are limited-edition clothes, freelance designers, hand-made clothes. But the price people have to pay for our competitors to personalize or buy limit-edition is not cheap. And people have to hunt or wait to get their clothes. We can beat them by the speed and price. However, our disadvantages are understanding each type of customer. Because each person has a different mindset and style and our designs are not tangible, it is very hard to provide them a design suiting their style. To do that, we should collect input from them enough to predict nearly precisely customers’ style.

• • • Company fit: The USP (user selling point) of our product is using AI to design, so our creativity is unlimited. The more products we produce, the better our models are.

• • Freelance designer/ small clothing brand

    • People in this group are different from the two above groups. They not only need unique designs but also want to customize them according to their ideas.

• • • Market: Nowadays, I think there are more and more designers, especially young designers, using technology to create and modify their design, which helps them a lot to save their time. Because the fashion and clothes requirements from people around the world have gone up remarkably, the number of freelance designers and design companies/startups have also increased to meet customers’ demands. 

• • • Competitor: Design software companies like Adobe are our competitors in this market. Their financial, ecosystem and engineers are strong enough to catch on. We can beat them by focusing on our blue ocean, personalizing clothes, instead of other design fields.

• • • Company fit: The more designs designers create, the less creativity they have. Because the creativity of an individual has a limit and time for thinking about new products is not short. For this reason, instead of thinking about new concepts, they can use our product to generate some ideas and customize them in several ways to fit their needs. 

3. Pricing

Clarifying questions:

• Currently, do we have some way to monetize the product? => No

• How much for the COGS (Cost of goods sold)? => Cannot disclosure

I think instead of providing a specific price number, I will focus on the structure of monetization. After thinking and doing research about potential groups of our customers, we can provide different kinds of price for each group. According to the target markets, we can divided the price structure into 3 categories:

• Price for uniform

• Price for person

• Price for professional designer

Besides the core value of our products, we can offer more add-on features to meet the demands of each group.

• For organization: We can collaborate with other uniform companies to deliver end-to-end products for our customers with a sufficient price. So our customers don’t need to do anything except stay at the office and choose the suitable design before making a final decision. Then other processes would be handled by us and our partners. The price in this option should include the cost for producing clothes based on our design and the delivery ships. By using our product, the customers could save a lot of time and effort by minimizing the complication of the process and contract. The price should be based on the number of products because the retention time is very high in this customer segment.

• For individuals: We should gather more information to make sure we can understand them enough to make a good design. We can also offer the optional features like producing and delivering like the package for organization. But instead of choosing mass-produce companies, we can partner with some startups who are willing to do small batch production. The price should be based on the number of products.

• For designer: We can offer more professional features to help them be able to customize our design in the ways they prefer. Besides monetizing based on the number of products, we can offer them the price packages in month, quarter, and year. Because designers have to design a lot within a period of time so this offer would help them save their cost.

• We can offer our customers a 2-product free trial to make sure they understand how awesome our product is.