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For fashion lovers looking for a side hustle, you’re in the right place! Your side hustle is so much more likely to be a success when you are passionate about it, so focusing on what you love will make you happier and it will probably make you more money.
Of course, making and selling your own clothes is one option, but we have gone a bit more outside the box to offer something different here. No matter your starting budget or the area of fashion you are interested in, we have options to suit you and your lifestyle!
Become A Personal Shopper
The first thing you can do as a fashion based side hustle is to become a personal shopper. Whether you have one day a week free, just the weekends or evenings, you could use your fashionable eye to find the perfect outfits for people.
In order to become a personal shopper, you can take courses online alongside your current job. This may take a few months or even up to a year, but it will help you to make a serious amount of money with the right customers in the long run! There are so many different ways to get into personal shopping, such as word of mouth, advertising your business on social media or offering your services to a shop directly.
The best tip we can give you is to have a niche within personal shopping. It is actually quite a concentrated market with a lot of people doing the same thing, so your best chance of success is to offer something unique. This might be luxury clothing, evening wear, handbags, vintage jewellery, vintage clothing or plus size clothing. When you find your niche, you have a good chance of being successful, and it all begins by exploring the best clothing shop name ideas.
Thrifting
When you have a good eye for vintage clothing, thrifting is a great choice as a side hustle. Going into vintage stores, flea markets, charity shops and looking online are some of the ways that you can find pre-loved clothes to sell on and make a profit. When you choose the locations you are shopping at, consider the types of clothes you are looking for. If you want to find high-end items to resell, then you need to do some research and look in higher-end thrift stores. It is also worth looking into whether particular thrift stores do discount days, as inventory needs to be rotated and so big discounts might be applied when space needs to be made for the new pieces. Timing is key when it comes to thrifting.
When you are trying to find these pieces, the best thing to do is to look online before making any purchases. You can quickly search on eBay, Depop or other thrifting sites to see how much that item is being sold for elsewhere. Then, you can look at the price of the item and see whether you think you will make much money off it. Taking into account how heavy the item is and potential shipping costs is also important at this point as this could have quite an impact on the profit margin. Buying items blindly without knowing their resale worth will likely cost you a lot of money in the long run!
The next tip is to check for any markings or anything broken. Even if a piece of clothing you find is by a really famous designer, if the item is covered in marks or it has a broken zip, it will be worth so much less than the examples you have seen online. So, looking at the condition of the item is such an important step! Overall, thrifting can be very profitable when you know how to do it right.
Make Your Own Jewellery
For those of you with a love for accessories, making your own jewellery is a really affordable side hustle! Like with the thrifting, the most important thing to establish early on is your niche. You might make your jewellery using polymer clay, stick with more simple assembly jewellery in a particular style or metal jewellery. You might also want to go even further and focus on necklaces, earrings, nose rings, bracelets or rings to specialise in one particular area!
You should be able to access all the materials you need online and make sure that you shop around to get the best price. From here, price up each item depending on the material costs and also the time taken, ensuring your profit margins are enough! Shipping costs will be very low with handmade jewellery, so this is another thing that will help make this one of the most profitable options, although it is a time consuming one.
Customising Clothing
If you are creative, customising clothing is a great direction to go in for your fashion-based side hustle. This is such a huge area with so much potential and with such a saturated fashion market, consumers like to know that what they have is one of a kind. We’re not talking so much about simply adding initials to something (although this is another niche that could have potential). When we say customised clothing, we are talking more about taking a classic and reinventing it with your own creative twist.
An example might be buying original Nike Air Force, then painting sections of the trainers with pastel colours or neutral tones. You could buy classic Levi’s then embroider them with a pattern chosen by the customer. Perhaps you purchase classic socks and tye-dye them. The great thing about this is that you could have examples on your website or social media and then only buy and customise the item after the customer has placed the order. This means you won’t be sitting on lots of stock and you should always be in profit!
Try Influencing
Another fashion based side hustle to try is influencing! If you don’t necessarily have the time or resources to be making clothes, thrifting for them or customising them, you could simply make use of what you already have and give people inspiration for their own clothing. Plus, you can easily fit this into your schedule around your other work. Instagram is the most effective channel for this, so that should be the priority.
As you gradually begin to build up a following, it is likely that brands will want to work with you and you’ll either get gifted free items or be paid! Now, it is not easy to become an influencer as there is so much competition out there, but it is something you can work on as potentially a 2nd side hustle! It might also lead to other opportunities that you didn’t think of, like someone approaching you wanting you to be their personal shopper. Having a social media presence as a fashion lover is important anyway as many fashion based jobs might look for that!
If you have a love for fashion and you have some experience in social media, then running the Instagram accounts of small fashion companies is a great option. You can make money from it, gain experience and utilise your creative flair. This is another really good option if you need something you can fit around another job! You can do it from anywhere, anytime. Even if you don’t necessarily have experience, there are so many free online courses that will teach you so much. You might not be ready to run accounts for big businesses, but you can begin with smaller businesses and gradually build up over time if you decide this is something you want to do long term.
One way to get into this is to approach small businesses with some ideas for their social media channels. You might suggest that they engage more closely with users through Instagram stories, they focus more on recreating trends on their reels or you think that their imagery isn’t as effective as it could be. The worst that can happen is they don’t read your message or they don’t like the ideas, but if they do like your ideas, they might hire you as a consultant or pay you hourly for creating a social media strategy and content. All in all, this is a really cost effective choice for people who have social media knowledge!
Final Thoughts
Side hustles don’t have to be something boring. You can definitely align it with your passions so it is something you enjoy. After all, if it’s something you spend a lot of your spare time doing, it should be linked to something you love!
If you don’t want to spend much money upfront and don’t mind spending some time studying, then personal shopping, influencing and managing social media accounts would be a good choice. If you want to get more creative, thrifting, making jewellery and customising clothing would be the better options. No matter what you choose, these fashion based side hustles can all be very profitable once you get the hang of things!
The main piece of advice when it comes to any side hustle is to try and offer something that is not currently available on the market that you think people will love. This gives you the best chance of success!
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