- Michelle Ramsay - The Fashion Expert®
- Mar 24, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: May 19
Starting a fashion brand feels super exciting but sometimes a lack of design skills can worry first-time fashion founders. But here's the good news...you can hire a designer to bring your ideas to life.
However, if you’re not a designer yourself, you might be wondering how can you find the right fashion designer for your clothing brand and what to look for.
Whether you need someone to sketch your initial ideas, create technical drawings, or guide you through the manufacturing process, finding the right expert is crucial. In this guide, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know to find a fashion designer for your startup.
1. Understand What Type of Fashion Designer You Need & The Help You Need.
Before you start your search, be clear about what kind of support you need. There are different types of fashion designers, and not all of them will be right for where you are in your journey.
Concept Designers – ideal if you need help refining your ideas, building mood boards, and getting your initial sketches onto (digital) paper.
Technical Designers – who specialise in turning ideas into professional tech packs that manufacturers can understand and work from.
Full package Designers - like me, who can take you from a raw idea all the way through to factory-ready designs and tech packs, and support you through sampling and production too.
Understanding which of these you need will help you narrow your search and make sure you're not paying for things you don't need or missing the support you do!
2.What Makes a Great Fashion Startup Designer?
Something nobody tells you when you're starting out is producing a pretty picture is one thing. Knowing that it's going to work in the real world (production) is a completely different skill set.
A great fashion startup designer isn't just someone who can draw well, they're someone who understands fabrics, construction, manufacturing processes, and what's going to happen to your design when it reaches the factory floor. Like me they've worked with manufacturers, know what a production-ready tech pack actually looks like, and seen enough samples come back wrong to know exactly why and how to prevent it.
This is especially important if you're a first-time founder with no industry background. If you don't yet know the difference between a woven and a knit, which stitch selection to use or why your seam placement matters, then you need a designer who can fill in those blanks for you. Not one who's going to blind you with jargon, but one who will sit down with you, explain your options, lay out the pros and cons, and help you make confident decisions - even when you feel like you're asking "silly" questions.
I'm a big believer in lifting the velvet rope on the fashion industry which feels like a closed door world, full of industry shorthand and unspoken rules. My whole approach is about making it accessible and helping founders understand not just what to do, but why, so they can move forward with confidence rather than just taking someone's word for it.
A good designer should make you feel at ease and you should be able to ask the questions that feel obvious or embarrassing to you. You should feel like you're working with someone who genuinely wants your brand to succeed, not someone who's talking over your head or over-promising things that aren't realistic. I get a lot of comments, particularly from female founders, that they appreciate that my approach is welcoming, professional and friendly and that there's no hustle culture hype or bro marketing. No unrealistic promises of going viral overnight, just honest, grounded support from someone who knows the industry inside out.
Looking for a freelance fashion designer who understands startups?
I work with first-time founders and established brands on everything from initial CADs to factory-ready tech packs, and I'll fill in the blanks so you don't have to.
3. Why Cheap Isn't Always Cheaper
There are plenty of cheap designers out there - often recent graduates, graphic designers, or freelancers from platforms where the priority is price rather than experience. And yes, they might be able to produce something that looks "pretty" but there's a saying - buy cheap, buy twice.
Poor designs and incomplete tech packs lead to costly sampling mistakes, and trust me when I say, (re)sampling is significantly more expensive than getting your designs right in the first place. If your tech pack is missing critical information, the factory will fill in the gaps themselves, usually in a way you didn't intend. You'll often end up paying for correction samples, extra rounds of revision, and delays that push your launch back further than you planned.
A cheap designer who can't anticipate these issues, who hasn't spent years working with manufacturers, and who doesn't understand real garment construction will cost you far more in the long run than investing properly at the initial design stage.
It's also worth being clear about what a fashion designer actually is. A fashion designer is not a graphic designer, nor someone producing CAD-style flat drawings on Canva or a platform like Fiverr without real industry knowledge behind them. A true fashion designer understands construction, fabrication, manufacturing tolerances and production realities. When you're investing in design for your brand, make sure you're working with someone who can take your product all the way from idea to production-ready not just someone who can make it look nice on screen to the untrained eye. Choose wisely.
4.You Don't Need to Have It All Figured Out
One of the things I hear most from founders is worrying they're not ready yet - and almost every time, they are. They just don't have the professional sketches or technical knowledge they think they need to get started and that's what's holding them back.
So here's how I actually work with clients: you don't need to arrive with anything polished. You can come with inspiration images from Pinterest, photographs of garments you love, rough sketches done on the back of a napkin, written notes, or even just a voice note rambling through your ideas. I'm used to working with a brain dump and turning it into a proper design brief and a real collection.
What I do in our design meeting is sit down with you and unpick all of that - figure out what you're actually building, how to piece the collection together, what's commercially viable, and what the right next steps are. You bring the vision and I bring the industry knowledge to shape it into something your manufacturer can actually work with.
The right designer will meet you where you are, so if you have design skills gaps, they should be able to fill them, if you don't speak the technical language of fashion yet, they should explain things in plain terms and if you're not sure what you need they should help you figure that out too.
5.What to Ask When Hiring a Fashion Designer
Once you’ve found a potential designer, ask the right questions to ensure they’re the right fit for you and align with what help you need. Here's what I'd be asking:
Do you have experience in my product category?
Can you share examples of previous work?
Can I see your client reviews?
What’s your process from idea to tech pack?
Do you have experience with manufacturers?
Which brands have you worked with previously?
Do you have experience working with first-time startup brands?
Can you help me with follow on services like sampling support, manufacturer communication and production?
That last one matters more than most people think, which brings me to the next point.
6.Find Someone Who Won't Leave You Hanging
Getting your designs created is one thing, but what happens when your samples come back and you're not sure if the fit is right? Or the factory has questions about your tech pack and you don't know how to respond? Or you need someone to cast an expert eye over a manufacturer's quote before deciding who to work with?
Working with a freelance fashion designer who can be a sounding board beyond the initial design stage and can support you through sampling, production and the inevitable questions that come up is often worth far more than just the designs themselves. That kind of ongoing access to someone who knows the industry, knows your product, and can give you a straight answer is genuinely hard to put a price on.
It's the difference between getting a set of files handed over and moving on, versus building a working relationship with someone who's invested in your brand succeeding. When you're a first-time founder navigating an industry you're still learning so having that person in your corner matters.
7. Budgeting for a Fashion Designer
Fashion design services vary in cost depending on experience, location, and the scope of work. Design and product development typically accounts for around 10-20% of a fashion startup's total launch budget, which sounds modest until you realise it's the foundation everything else is built on. Get it wrong and you'll spend far more correcting it in sampling and production.
As a rough guide for first-time founders budgeting their first collection:
Tech packs in the fashion industry typically run £200–£500 per style for a professionally produced document depending on your designer
Full design services from concept to production-ready tech pack vary based on the number of styles and complexity of the collection - book a discovery call for a tailored quote for your idea.
Sampling costs vary in the industry £100–£500 per prototype, and most collections require 2-3 rounds, which is exactly why getting the design and tech pack right first time saves you significantly more money than it costs
The most expensive thing in fashion product development isn't a good designer - it's a bad one.
8. Working Successfully with Your Fashion Designer
Once you’ve hired a designer, here’s how to ensure smooth collaboration:
Be clear on your vision – Provide references, sketches, and mood boards.
Agree on timelines – Set realistic deadlines for sketches, revisions, and final tech packs.
Keep communication open – Regular check-ins help avoid misunderstandings.
Ready to Find Your Perfect Fashion Designer?
Finding the right fashion designer for your startup isn't just about who can produce the best-looking drawings. It's about finding someone with the real-world industry experience to make sure those designs actually work — in the factory, in production, and ultimately in the hands of your customers.
If you're ready to bring your brand to life, I'd love to help. Book a free discovery call and let's work out the best way forward for you.
Want to work with me? Book a free discovery call here.
See you in the front row,
Michelle
Ready to Find Your Perfect Fashion Designer?
I work with first-time founders and established brands on everything from initial CADs and tech packs to branding, print design and manufacturing support. With 20+ years of industry experience and clients including Gymshark - let's chat about your brand.
About Michelle Ramsay – The Fashion Expert®
Michelle Ramsay is a fashion designer, startup mentor and fashion consultant with over 20 years of industry experience helping founders bring their fashion brand ideas to life.
Through The Fashion Expert®, she works with first-time and emerging founders on everything from design development and tech packs to manufacturing guidance, launch planning and one-to-one mentoring, helping turn messy ideas and Pinterest boards into real collections ready for production.
After working with more than 400 fashion founders, Michelle has become known for helping people without fashion industry backgrounds navigate the process with clarity, confidence and expert support.
