The business of fashion in the 21st century has gone beyond creating designs and making outfits. Thanks to digitalisation, fashion creatives are experiencing a fast digital transition. Creator platforms like Selar are helping fashion experts with more revenue streams to monetise their fashion knowledge.
Digital products such as ebooks, courses, training and coaching packages can be used to equip the next generation of fashion entrepreneurs with the best practices in the fashion and beauty industry. Thereby maintaining the industry’s continuous growth while creating revenue for the expert. Notable Nigerian fashion figures such as Mai Atafo, Adebayo Oke-Lawal, Daniel Obasi and lots of other top designers and beauty experts monetize their expertise and diversify their revenue streams through digitalization.
If you take one thing from this piece, it should be that people overestimate how much others know. There’s an information bias where you think everyone knows what you know, but when you actually take a look, a lot of people do not know much or anything, and this is where you come in. Here are five ways to earn from your knowledge or skill.
E-books
Writing e-books is a great strategy to make passive income from your skills and knowledge as a fashion creative. It allows you to position yourself as an authority in the industry and earn more money when potential clients read your book. Putting an e-book together is pretty much easy once you have your core content, which in this case, is your knowledge about the fashion and beauty industry. Nonye Udeogu for instance sells her ebook on how to edit videos as creatively as she does on her Instagram.
Training/Masterclasses
Training has proven to be one of the top income-generating activities for experts. Though it can be tedious because it means you have to be there in the moment to teach people, it’s still a great way to connect with an audience and create value for others and yourself. The best part is, with COVID more people are willing to take classes online, so your training can be either online or offline.
In 2019, MakeupByMario, a celebrity makeup artist in collaboration with Kim Kardashian hosted a masterclass that sold a cumulative of over $400,000 in tickets. Nigerian fashion designer Adebayo Oke-Lawal also hosts his paid masterclass and mentorship program for young fashion entrepreneurs in Nigeria. So you can do this too!
Courses
Unlike training and Masterclasses, courses are a lot more hands-off. You just have to take the time to create them, edit them, upload them to your host platform and start selling. You don’t have to be physically in any location, or be there to train anyone. They just watch and learn at their own pace. The good thing is, unlike before, courses are not as stressful or capital intensive to create as they used to be. A smartphone and good lighting are all you need these days. A Nigerian hairstylist Efe Kiki made over ₦500,000 in a month by creating a course on the hair business using just her phone and a tripod.
Coaching
Coaching is very similar to training, except when you offer the training you get to provide after-sale support. When you train people you can offer them more guidance and handholding for a fee as their coach. Coaching is great because it can be at your pace, you can opt for a group coaching session where you bring all your students together for an interactive session or you offer one-on-one coaching. Totally up to you. If you love the experience of guiding people and interacting with them personally, you should definitely consider coaching as a new source of income.
Templates/Workbooks
This is just like ebooks, but they’re digital products and they can be in any format, they can be templates for how to price, workbooks on how to take customer information, or design assets for design clothes, the type of product you can create here is endless, just think of something that works for your audience. SiaInStyle sells photoshop filter presets that anyone can use to better edit their pictures.
If it’s useful to you, it’s probably useful to someone and they’re willing to pay for it. It’s easy for you to read all this and think “But google is free, why will people pay”, yes, there are countless YouTube channels teaching makeup for free, yet people still pay for classes so don’t overthink it. All you need to do now is figure out what works for you, develop it and sell it to your audience. If you don’t have an audience, use ads to find the audience for you, you don’t need to be popular at the beginning. So roll up your sleeves, get to work and silence that voice in your head that’s holding you back. You’ve got this!
Written by Selar.co
Selar.co is an online store builder that lets anyone monetize their knowledge or skill through digital products. Creators on Selar sell products like ebooks, courses, training, memberships, event tickets and so much more. As of June 2022, Selar boasts over 50,000 African creators.