Maternity Clothing Online Business Plan

ExpectingU.com is a new online business providing fun, comfortable and easily accessible collegiate maternity wear via our own site and an eBay store.

The owner, Mary Lenton, has over 10 years of experience in business management, channel marketing, and high-level sales. She will fund the business herself with personal capital as she believes strongly in the product idea. In fact, she searched for this product herself while pregnant and could not find collegiate maternity wear to purchase, thus ExpectingU.com was founded. Market research among over 500 expecting mothers shows that there is a demand for such products. ExpectingU.com has ad space commitments from several online expecting sites, and dozens of leads for direct sales and public relations.

Our targeted market includes both the many pregnant women who are sports fans (or married to sports fans), and friends and family members of expecting women who will buy the shirts as gifts.

In the first year, sales projections for ExpectingU.com are estimated at $1,094,635 for the first year and net profit is projected at $343,517. 

We anticipate a gross margin of roughly 71.5% on products sold directly from our website, and 67.2% on items sold through our eBay store. This is substantially higher than the Industry standard gross margin in maternity wear, since our product’s simple design allows easy (and inexpensive) outsourced manufacturing, while the innovative concept allows us to charge a price premium.

Although we will pay an estimated $48,000 in eBay fees in the first year (roughly $1.30 per item sold), we will more than make up for this amount in savings, both in marketing costs and in expenses for website development and maintenance for our own site in the first year. The popularity and brand success of eBay, combined with its built-in tools for new merchants, will help us to build a solid customer base for our new product.

1.1 Objectives

1. Create a unique maternity wear product and offer them in 75% of Division 1 football schools’ collegiate logos by the end of year one.
2. Generate retail sales of over $1,000,000 in year one, both on our site and on our eBay store.
3. Maintain a gross margin of over 65%.
4. To achieve 100 eBay customer positive feedback comments in one year.

1.2 Mission

To offer fun, comfortable and readily available maternity collegiate wear for women who want to show their support for their favorite college team, even while pregnant.

1.3 Keys to Success

1. ExpectingU.com will offer a unique line of maternity shirts that will carry the logo and/or mascot of NCAA Division I football teams. These products are currently in demand today but do not exist in mainstream commerce.
2. ExpectingU.com will satisfy the demand of maternity collegiate shirts by maintaining inventory levels that will allow for immediate shipping to customers.
3. ExpectingU.com will execute a targeted marketing campaign to generate awareness of the website and products.