There are a plenty of reasons why you, a budding entrepreneur, want to know how to start a sunglasses business. Sunglasses are in high demand and the industry on an average is growing more than 7% every year. Overall the revenue in the sunglasses segment is over 4.3 billion USD.
With low startup costs and good returns on investment, sunglasses business is a great business idea to pursue.
Just like in any other business, there are a lot of pros and cons of starting your own sunglasses business. There are a ton of financial and logistical considerations, you'll have to factor in. But if you are ready to prepare and put in hard work, you can very soon start making money out of your business.
But what exactly do you need to do to get your sunglasses business idea off the ground?
To help you prepare, weʼve created this seven step guide on how to start a sunglasses business. Read on to learn everything you need to know.
You have options for what type of sunglasses business you want to start and it's wise to choose it early on so that you can finalize the suppliers, product theme, packaging, branding and other important parameters.
First thing that you will need to do is to perform a detailed research to answer the following questions:
- What product do you want to sell: prescription or zero power fashionable sunglasses?
- Do you plan to sell all ABS% sunglasses ( Category 1 to Category 5) or focus on one specific category?
- What market do you want to focus on: Men, Women, Kids or all?
- Do you want to cover only polarized lenses?
- What price points do you want to have in your store?
As a part of this step, you basically want to nail down all important information by doing an extensive search. It could be something as simple as picking the shape of the sunglasses such as aviator, cat eye, round, square, rectangle.
The more research you do in the beginning, will act as an insurance towards the success of your business. For example, you may decide on choosing an overseas supplier for your store. When you place an order, if you do not perform proper research, you may make a mistake of ordering styles / shapes of sunglasses that are not in trend. All that stock will be difficult to sell, and you may end up with unsold inventory.
But if you do the research well and pick sunglasses as part of a plan, you will have a much better chance of making the business successful.
A solid business plan can help you stay on the path to make your sunglasses business successful. The plan will help you organize your sunglasses business research, project the demand that you can target, outline your growth plans and also be necessary when you reach out to the investors to secure funding to grow your business.
Writing a business plan from scratch can be overwhelming, but with a little planning, you can surely get it done comfortably. If you need help and want to make the process easier, you can also use a business plan template or subscribe to a business plan software.
As a part of the process of writing a business plan, you will need to get the following points taken into consideration:
Choosing a business name
When writing your business plan, you will need to decide on a name for your business. Unfortunately, you can’t choose anything that you like. You will need to make sure that the name is available and isn’t owned by any other person.
To check the same, you can first use internet search engines such as Google and Bing. If the name is already in use, you can try with a variation. Once you get a name that is available, you will need to visit the state website to confirm its availability. Many times the trademark name is different from the legal name and thus you need to double check for the same.
As your business will be known to the world with this name, you need to be creative in choosing one. A great business name can help in marketing and grabbing customer’s attention. There is no one template to choose a name, but following pointers will surely help:
- Catchy and fun
- Is not long
- Easy to remember
- Easy to pronounce
- Is not restricted to a single product type
- Perform a Google and trademark search to make sure that you can use it
- Check with a domain registrar to see if the domain name is available
- Check for availability of social media handles with that name
Choosing a business entity structure
As the entity structure affects tax, compliance and other legal requirements, it is an important step to tick when starting a business. You need to plan ahead and choose from the following options:
- A sole proprietorship
- Limited liability company (LLC)
- General partnership
- Corporation
Generally, if you’re just a sole proprietorship is an obvious choice and a popular legal entity structure. It is the simplest and easiest way to get started. You can transition to another entity structure as your business grows.
Quantitative analysis of the sunglasses products
By now you must have a good idea of what you are going to sell. As a logical step in any for-profit business, you need to perform a quantitative cost analysis and crunch out a few numbers. Start by answering the following basic (but important) questions:
- What will be the cost of the sunglasses from the supplier
- What price will you be able to sell them to your customers
- What other costs will be involved
- What is the average product return rate in the industry
- How much will it cost to acquire a customer
- What profit can you expect from the estimated sales
As such a well done plan is able to communicate the most important outlook of any business: what you will be selling, who you will sell to and how you plan to reach out to them. To make the process easier and make sure that you don’t miss out on any important point, you can use a business plan template or subscribe to a business plan software.
Tip: It is totally worth it to consult a business plan expert or an attorney to complete this step. It will surely take the burden off your shoulders and give you time to focus on your business.
While this step may not be the most exciting, it is crucial and has the potential to make or break your business at any point of time. To run your business, you need to make sure that you have proper licenses, permits and insurance.
Your business location and entity type defines these requirements and you can start off by visiting the SBA website and leveraging the helpful resources they provide. You will need to make sure that you have everything that is required on the local, state and federal level.
A visit to the local chamber of commerce will also be helpful to determine the requirements you must meet. And because you are handling and distributing eyewear, you need to be extra careful. As sunglasses can affect a customers eye, overall health and regular activity such as driving, you need to be covered for any personal liability or lawsuit arising from the products that you sell.
While in the beginning, you may start the business with no employees, you will soon need to hire staff as you grow. As soon as you begin the hiring process, you will need to apply for an employer identification number also known as EIN and federal tax identification number.
Tip: Get an EIN as soon as possible because it will be required for all finance related paperwork and at the time of securing funds to grow and scale.
Once you have decided on the sunglass product range, the next step to finalize is how you want to sell them. There are a multitude of options to choose from:
- Your own ecommerce website
- Online marketplaces
- Social media channels
- Neighborhood stores
- Kiosks and store in store
- Dropshipping
The chances are that you may want to choose all of the above and sell your sunglasses everywhere. But in real life, unless you have millions of dollars sitting around, you should move one step at a time. For example, you may pick a sales channel and optimize the sales on it first before moving on to the next one.
This way your business growth will be organic and the chances of success will be high. You will learn a lot from each of the channels and build a network along.
As you will need to order inventory and invest in the infrastructure, you will need money to start your sunglasses business. You can fund your financial requirements via small business funding in the beginning. As you grow and scale your business and need a larger sum of money, you can reach out for venture capital and other funding options at that point of time.
We’ve outlined a few funding options below for your sunglasses business:
- Friends and family
- Business loans
- Business lines of credit
- Business credit cards
- Bootstrapping
- Debt financing
- Crowdfunding
- Angel investment
It is a very common mistake, especially when you have just started your business, to use personal accounts for business expenses. No matter how much funding you have, you should make sure that you have financial discipline for your business.
You should at all times keep your business and personal finances separate. They are extremely important when filing your taxes and analyzing your business’s financial health.
Start off by applying for a business bank account. You can choose from a business savings and business checking account.
Starting a sunglasses business will need a lot of supplies. You will need to order sunglasses, packaging, branding and shipping supplies on a frequent basis. Because your business profits will be dependent on the input costs, you will need to make sure to keep them as low as possible.
Thus while deciding on a supplier, you will need to make sure that the unit economics gives an overall profit. To make it clear let's consider the following two scenarios:
Scenario 1: You find a supplier (let's call it supplier A), who is based in the US and is ready to sell a certain type of polarized sunglasses for $10. You really like the sunglasses and the fact that the supplier is based locally. The shipping time from the supplier to your warehouse is just a few days.
Let's also assume that based on your research, you will be able to sell the sunglasses for $25. Assuming that the other costs ( shipping, packaging, branding collateral, marketing etc.) comes to $10.
Thus the net profit on the sale of the sunglasses comes to $5 for every sale that you are able to make.
Scenario 2: You find a supplier ( lets call it supplier B), who is based in China and is ready to sell the same (or similar) polarized sunglasses for $5. The fact that the supplier is in China and is from a different timezone and speaks different languages may make you a bit uncomfortable.
You also know for a fact that the shipping time from the supplier to you could be a couple of months. Thus before you can ship the product to your customer, you need to plan ahead if ordering from supplier B as compared to a local supplier A.
Given that the product is the same (or similar), you will be able to sell it for $25 as mentioned before. Assuming that other costs are $10, the net profit for every sale will now be $10.
Thus with a little bit of planning in advance, you can make double the profits by choosing a supplier that makes more sense financially.
You can feel that $5 profit isn’t much, and we completely agree with you. But if you look at the bigger picture, say you are able to sell 25 sunglasses daily ( 9125 annually), the gain in profit will be a whopping $45625. Which in a period of 5-10 years will be half a million dollars.
All these small financial numbers add up to big numbers in no time, and you need to give utmost importance when it can impact your balance sheet and profits.
Tip: There are a lot of freelance consultants you can find on Fiverr and Upwork, who can help you find the right supplier for your sunglasses business.
At this step, you have finished through our checklist for starting a sunglasses business. You now know what your business will look like, which products you will be selling and basic outline for the growth of your business.
But all that wont matter, unless you can put your business in front of customers. It seriously won't matter how much you like your business and are proud of the hard work you have put in, if it doesn’t bring any sales.
Yes, you guessed it right. Now is a good time to start drafting a marketing plan for your business. All the hard work you put into the marketing, along with the meticulous planning you have done in setting up your business, will do wonders and you will surely be a proud owner of a thriving sunglasses business.
When you are building marketing plan for your business, consider the following:
- Who is your target audience?
- Where can you reach them?
- What is the maximum cost per acquisition that you can afford?
- Is there a friends and family network that you can leverage?
- How can you bake in word of mouth marketing in your product?
- What will be your USP ( unique selling proposition)?
- How will you measure if the marketing is not working for you?
- What metrics should you track to gauge the success of your marketing strategy?
Tip: When deciding on a marketing plan, do look at the case study of successful eyewear companies such as Warby Parker, Luxottica, RayBan, Oakley and other local brands that you can.
You can research more about marketing on the following marketing mediums. Do remember that you do not need to do it on all of them. You can start small, pick one medium at a time and take it from there.
- Email marketing
- PPC marketing such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads
- Instagram marketing
- Tiktok marketing
- SEO
- Local guides
- Online review platforms
The work certainly doesn’t stop once you have finished the launch of your sunglasses business. Being an entrepreneur is a 24/7 learning experience. Make some time to learn from other successful entrepreneurs, How do they market their products? How do they talk to the customers? How do they present their business on social media? What is so special about their brand?
Once you know how your competition is doing, you will be able to answer one magic question for your business: Why will a customer give you his business and not buy from your competitor?
Don't get overwhelmed by the business. With meticulous planning, you can very soon make your business successful. Keep looking for external help at whichever stage you get stuck. Try attending as many exhibitions and local events as you can. The network and the connections that you will build will be extremely helpful towards success for your business.
Learning how to start a toy business using the above steps will surely make it easy to get started. Given the growth forecast for the toy industry in general, it is a great opportunity to start your own toy business. The barrier for entry is low and the number of resources and product options to choose from is in plenty.
We hope that the steps above can help you pair your passion for entrepreneurship with a solid plan for growth and wish you the best of luck and can’t wait to hear the stories of what you’ll build.
Meh Studios, London
This small eyewear brand designs sunglasses which you can flaunt over your social feeds or if you love those nonstop compliments.
