Branding With Una Burke

A few days ago we had a guest speaker Una Burke who is a multi-award winning luxury leather and accessory designer/artist. She spoke about her journey into the industry, her struggles and how she came about her own brand and business, which was all very encouraging and really quite interesting. One of the key things Una Burke spoke about was the importance of making sure you target your customer and know what they want and need as this helps to build a solid reputation for you and your brand which is one of the most if not the most important aspects of creating a brand. One of the key things I learnt through listening to Ms. Burke was pricing, how to price items is something I have always been curious about. 

Pricing:

To price your items you add up all material costs, the time you put in to creating each piece (£15 or more an hour), calculate your overheads (packaging, logos etc.) The total amount will equal the total costs of how much you have spent, if you multiply this by two you get the wholesale price, then if you multiply by two again you get the actual price not including Vat which is an extra 20%. Finding out how to price items was is useful because it means that when Amanda and I are focusing on the branding aspect of our niche business we can research into prices of fabrics and finishing’s. This will give us a good understanding of what fabrics will end up making our bags too expensive which intern would price us way out of the market and which fabrics would actually be beneficial to our brand and our consumer.

After her talk we filled out a Niche opportunity sheet as a group. The idea was that it would help us develop our brand and product more, and help us to pin point our strengths and weaknesses. Our group struggled with this because we ended up disagreeing on what our brand was and should be an what makes it niche after half the group went away and changed the idea we had all agreed upon. As a group we ended up deciding that we want our niche brand to still focus on sports bags but in particular winter sports bags as these sports are normally more specialised and need stronger more robust bags to carry all the equipment in. We are still trying to think of ways to make our brand more niche and desirable but after alot of changes we are now set on our brand idea and hopefully this won't change again.