The Simple Guide to Design Gymwear, Sportswear or Activewear Apparel
So you’re interested in starting your own special brand for sportswear clothing. You have a great idea, an attractive name and a business plan ready to execute.
But you haven’t decided on how you want your products to look. Or worse yet, you don’t know how to design attractive sportswear or where to begin.
Whether you’re a designer or not, today we’ve prepared a quick and easy guide to help you out in designing your sportswear apparel. This simple guide will hopefully make it easier in terms of making design choices and bring out your creativity without much stress.
If you’ve never started a sportswear business before, do check out our Eurofitness Resources center, where we provide you with educational tips and guides to help you on your journey.
We also manufacture all kinds of sports and fitness wear apparel so if you have a design you’d like to prototype or would like to produce for your brand, then do get in touch with us. Learn more about us in our brochure below:
Start With a Design Brief
The Brief is a document which outlines your ideas of function, form and aesthetic for a clothing item. Often enough, a simple one-page design brief can be incredibly useful to help you create relevant and attractive products.
Unlike a Design Specification, the Brief doesn’t have to be technical, or show any drawings! Here are some questions to consider when coming up with a design brief.
- Who is going to wear this clothing item?
- What activity is this item suitable for?
- Does this item already exist? If so, what can you change to make it more unique to your brand?
- Does this item have any unique functions? (Like storage pockets for example?)
- Which age group is most likely to wear this item?
These are just SOME questions to help you start thinking about your product. Try to keep it simple at first – don’t try to ask too many questions. Just basic ones to help you establish what your product is and who it’s for.
Create a Reference Board (Moodboard)
Our visual mind can be a powerful tool to help us create awesome products. But unfortunately, not all of us can create new and exciting designs out of thin air.
That’s why we can use what’s called a moodboard. It’s probably one of the most powerful techniques that can inspire us to create fresh sportswear design. And it’s really fun to make one!
A moodboard is a collection of pictures, visuals, graphics, patterns – a set of Inspiring images – that best capture or narrow down your idea. Think of it as taking bits and pieces from loads of different things you like and putting it all in one place.
Pinterest is a great place to find inspiring images and create moodboards. This is how a lot of designers actually come up with their ideas!
How to Use Moodboards Effectively
Don’t just throw random pictures or visuals onto your moodboard for the sake of it. These are your reference images – they will ultimately help you visualise your own product.
If you’re having a hard time understanding how to use moodboards – check out this great resource.
To make it simple, here’s some questions you should ask yourself when gathering material for your moodboard:
- What do I like about this image/graphic/pattern/material etc?
- Does this image have a model or figure that represents the target audience for my product?
- Is this the kind of fashion that I’m aiming for?
- Are there certain material in the clothes that i like?
- Is there a certain color in this image that i like?
- Does the product in this image look similar to my own?
Did you know that we all tend to ask ourselves these questions without even realising it? Like when you’re friend sends you a picture of shoes that they really liked for example.
To design your own sportswear brand, you need to actively translate your ideas into visuals. So moodboards can make that all the more easier.
Start Sketching Designs or Find Someone to Do It for You
Now that you have your design brief and your moodboard – you are ready to start sketching down ideas!
Now, you don’t need to be gifted with the ability to draw to be able to come up with beautiful designs. There are many online clothing design tools that can automatically generate ideas for you.
If you would like something truly unique, you could alternatively hire a freelance visual designer to do it for you. Simply provide them with your design brief and moodboard – they will surely be able to take care of the rest!
We recommend using Fiverr to source artists that can create stunning designs for you. It’ll save you a lot of time over having to do it yourself – especially if you aren’t able to create visuals yourself.
Use Templates to Sketch Sportswear Designs Yourself
If you’re item is not very complicated and you’re only looking to design hoodies or t-shirts for example – you can try sketching out your own ideas.
Start with downloading and printing a template of your clothing item (like the one below). Then, using pencils or paints – start sketching your design within the templates. Be sure to indicate where you want your logos, buttons etc.
You can print out as many templates as you like and sketch out as many times as you want!
Always reference your design brief and moodboard to keep you on track with your ideas. If there was a particular collar that you liked, draw it on the template. Or perhaps there is a colour you thought was nice, colour it in on the page. If there was a stripe you found attractive – draw it out!
Evaluate Your Designs
If you’re still following our guide, by now you’ll have several dozen sketches down for your one product. It’s so important you get out all of your ideas during the sketching phase because it’ll be quite expensive to later during production.
Now comes the difficult part – how to choose your ‘final’ design.
There’s several different ways to evaluate your designs. The easiest, most effective and most straightforward way is to get someone else’s opinion on it! We will always recommend showing your friends, family or better yet – you’re own target audience – what they think about your design.
Because ultimately, they’ll be wearing your product. If you can get a ‘wow’ or a ‘i’d definitely wear that’ you’ll know your almost there.
The Evaluation Matrix
But lets say you recieved lots of varying opinions on your sportswear design or you have lots of designs that you think could all do well – how can you still choose the winner?
Well, now you can use what’s called an ‘Evaluation Matrix’. Don’t worry, it’s really not as complicated as it sounds.
An evaluation matrix is basically a list of different criteria that you can use to ‘score’ your product. The design with the highest score in an all of it’s criteria, you guessed it, is the winner! Let’s go through an example below.
| Relevance | Criteria | Design A | Design B | Design C |
| 1 | Complexity | 3 | 4 | 1 |
| 2 | Style | 5 | 5 | 4 |
| 3 | Colours | 5 | 3 | 2 |
| 4 | Uniqueness | 2 | 1 | 5 |
| 5 | Survey Score (Based on Feedback) | 3 | 4 | 3 |
| 6 | Variations (How many variations can you create) | 4 | 2 | 5 |
| Total Score | 22 | 19 | 20 | |
| 1 = Lowest Score = Not Good | ||||
| 5 = Highest Score = Excellent |
Always sort your criteria in order of relevance i.e. what do you believe is the most important criteria to judge your sportswear design(s) on? The lower its relevance – the less you need to consider it in the design.
In the example above, A had the highest score. But perhaps your weren’t happy with how unique it was. So you might go back and try to improve it or choose another idea altogether!
By using an Evaluation Matrix, you can really thin out your choices and select the best possible options for your product.
Prepare a Design Spec
Congratulations! You now have a sportswear design(s) your happy with! Now you can create a design specification.
The design spec is another single page document. Although this time, you really polish up on the details of your design. That is, the size of your item, the sleeve length, the exact colour codes. materials (and composition), features and logo positioning.
The design spec doesn’t need to be overly detailed. It should ideally highlight the main specifications of your item.
You can always edit the design spec every time you change a part of the design. This will really help manufacturers precisely replicate your item either with a prototype or in production.
Ask Us
With 12 years in the manufacturing industry for sportswear and gymwear apparel, we welcome your queries. Eurofitness may be able to point you in the right direction as well as cater to your manufacturing needs.
We are able to prototype your designs, provide you with simple design solutions, samples and anything you need to help you get started on production. Simply contact us for free consultation!
