Packaging the business model for a womenswear company before fundraising

Context

The company is strong in womenswear on digital platforms, and owns several brands, a sewing workshop and a fashion-business training arm. Its leadership aims to become a leading player in Vietnam’s fashion market, expand abroad, and is working with investors to add resources.

To raise capital, the company first needed to standardize its strategy and business model. Weraki proposed a three-phase partnership: feasibility assessment, designing and packaging the business model and business plan, then implementation support.

What Weraki did

1. Assessed the market opportunityAnalyzed the size, competitive intensity and growth of five categories: womenswear, menswear, childrenswear, accessories and hosiery. Womenswear is the largest and highly fragmented: even the leading brands hold only a small share.
2. Identified critical success factorsCompared the three dominant models in the market: the flagship brand (such as Uniqlo, Zara, H&M, Canifa), the distributor of international brands, and the niche-category brand. Each was examined along the value chain: materials, research and development, design, manufacturing, marketing and sales.
3. Assessed internal capabilityInterviewed the leadership and compared the company against these models to identify capability gaps.
4. Proposed an approachChose a target model and a roadmap for building the capabilities to get there.

What we found

Design

A strength: good at catching trends and already using AI. But the company focused on complex, mid-to-high-priced items such as office dresses, áo dài and made-to-measure, while officewear is getting more relaxed and customers take longer to decide.

Manufacturing

The in-house workshop covered only a small part of output. The rest was split across several contract manufacturers; low volumes meant unoptimized prices and unreliable delivery at peak season.

Marketing

Strong multichannel online marketing, an in-house content team and a large customer database. But no integrated communications capability, and several brands at once with none standing out spread resources thin.

Sales

Online channels drove most revenue. The company had used online profits to open a store chain, but the stores underperformed and the network was cut back.

Costs

Margins below industry peers, mainly because of high cost of goods from low volumes of complex products, and high marketing spend.

Recommendation

Rather than taking on the big brands head-on right away, Weraki proposed a two-phase transition: a transition phase to concentrate resources and optimize costs, then the move to the target model.

2025–2027Transition phase

• A hybrid model: one flagship brand, plus distribution of selected international brands in niche categories that don’t compete head-on.
• Consolidate the brands under one master name, with suffixes for each product line.
• Add simpler product lines at more accessible prices.
• Exit the in-house sewing workshop and move fully to contract manufacturing.
• Focus on online and upgrade the company’s own website; reopen stores only once the brand is unified.

From 2028End state

• Grow as a flagship-brand model.
• Set aside about 1% of budget for research and development.
• Launch regular collaborations with designers, artists and licensed intellectual property.
• Expand stores selectively in major cities.
• Invest in technology for customer data and sales management.

What to take away

More brands aren’t necessarily stronger than one brand with real scale. Owning a factory isn’t an advantage while volumes are low. And before raising money to accelerate, a company needs to know which model it is accelerating.

Weraki discussion document, August 2024. The company and its brands are anonymized.