3 Ways to Build a Fashion App (Development Guide 2025)

Modern fashion brands need to have their own mobile app, if they want to stay relevant.

Consumers are gravitating more and more towards mobile. Mobile commerce makes up 38% of all online spending in the US, and 60% of all eCommerce sales worldwide.

An app is the ideal way to engage with mobile shoppers, and get your existing customers coming back and buying over and over again.

There are a few ways to build a fashion app.

You could hire a team of developers, or an agency (if you can afford it).

There are also DIY tools that provide a simpler and cheaper alternative.

Or, you could get the best of both worlds - a custom app experience for a low cost - by converting your website into an app with MobiLoud.

Whatever you do, launching an app for your fashion brand will be the best thing you do for your business in 2025.

Keep reading and we'll lay out everything you need to know about fashion app development, and help you create the perfect shopping app for your brand.

Every Fashion Brand Needs Their Own App

The fashion industry is growing fast, particularly online.

Statista puts the value of the fashion eCommerce market at 883 billion USD worldwide, and projects this number to grow to 1.6 trillion by 2030.

Clothing and apparel brands are everywhere, and many of these brands are making a killing, with a unique brand experience.

But what’s really taking over the fashion industry are social and mobile commerce.

Brands like Shein and Temu blur the lines between social apps and shopping apps, and numerous other brands are going all-in on mobile-first, engaging experiences.

Soon, any fashion brand that doesn’t have their own app will not be able to keep up.

Best Fashion App Examples

Learn from fashion brands who have gone out and created great apps already, with these examples of successful fashion mobile apps:

ASOS

Great vertical brands like ASOS have been building high-quality mobile apps for years.

ASOS is a leading mobile application in the global fashion industry, providing a wide range of clothing, accessories, and beauty products.

The app offers thousands of styles from hundreds of brands globally.

Its key features include an easy checkout process, personalised fashion recommendations, exclusive content, and style match technology that allows users to take or upload a photo of clothing they like and find similar styles available on the platform.

H&M

H&M is another huge, worldwide brand with their own app.

The app allows you to shop from anywhere, get order updates, and even offers innovative ways to find products, by uploading photos or through inspiration from other H&M fans.

The app also helps with in-store shopping, allowing you to scan and find other variations or sizes that are available for any product.

John Varvatos

John Varvatos, a global menswear brand with a “vintage-meets-contemporary aesthetic” also utilizes a mobile app to provide a deeper omnichannel experience for their customers.

The app makes mobile shopping simple, and uses push notifications to keep users engaged and coming back to shop again and again.

How to Build a Shopping App for Your Fashion Brand

A mobile shopping app can set you back hundreds of thousands of dollars, six to nine months of development time, and keep you on the hook for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for maintenance.

It can also be a simple, pain-free process, with a low-four figure cost, minimal effort and upkeep, done in less than a month.

It all depends on the development method you choose. You’re looking at a choice of three unique approaches:

1. Hire developers or a development agency to build a custom native app.
2. Use a DIY app builder and create your app in-house.
3. Convert your website into an app with MobiLoud.

In the upcoming sections, we’ll explain each of these choices in more detail, and present all the reasons why MobiLoud is the best way to build a fashion app for brands in 2025.

Let’s take a closer look at the options now.

Native App Development

Native app development involves creating an application specifically for a particular platform, like iOS or Android, using languages and development tools supported by those platforms. 

For iOS, it's Swift or Objective-C with Xcode, and for Android, it's Java or Kotlin with Android Studio.

If you decide to build a native app, you’ll need to hire experienced developers to create your app, and build an API to connect the apps to the backend of your web store.

All this won’t come cheap, and will come with a lot of overhead as you try to keep your apps well-maintained and up to date.

Good native apps will cost six figures, and take six months to build. That's at an absolute minimum.

This is just too much to spend and too long to wait for an app, especially when you don't know how much it's actually going to add to your bottom line.

Pros

• High Performance: Native apps run smoothly as they are built specifically for a single platform.
• Better Integration: They offer seamless integration with the hardware (like camera, GPS, etc.) and software features of the device.
• UX: Native apps can provide a superior user experience, adhering to the specific UI standards of each platform.

Cons

• High Costs: Building separate apps for each platform doubles development and maintenance costs.
• Lead Time: Each app must be created separately, consuming more resources and time.
• Complexity: Building native apps is a complex and technical project to manage, even with the main work outsourced.

Overall, unless your fashion brand has millions in funding to play with (and even then), native development likely isn’t worth it.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel to build an eCommerce app for your fashion brand, when your website already does 90% of what your app should. 

What you need is a smooth UX, the right features, and a fast and efficient build. This is better achieved through other, less-risky methods.

App Builders

App builders are software platforms that allow users to create mobile applications using drag-and-drop interfaces.

They typically utilize pre-built blocks and themes to allow you to build a fashion app fast, and without knowing anything about coding.

You compile your app via a visual interface, and when you’re done, hit publish and get working iOS and Android apps.

These have become particularly popular in the eCommerce space, as they are designed for the kind of businesses that don’t have the in-house capability (or the budget) for native development.

However, for how easily these tools allow you to launch an app, you sacrifice a lot of power and flexibility, and you won’t be able to make the same kind of incremental improvements you’ve made to your website over the years.

Pros

• No Coding Required: App builders are user-friendly, requiring no coding skills.
• Fast and Affordable: You can quickly create and publish an app on multiple platforms.

Cons

• Limited Customization: App builders have a limited set of templates and features, restricting unique customization.
• Performance Issues: Apps made with builders may not perform as well as native or hybrid apps.

App builders can be a decent choice, if you aren't too concerned with performance or customization. 

But the limitations will be too much for serious fashion brands.

MobiLoud

You can spend $150k+ and six months plus building native fashion eCommerce apps.

Or you can use MobiLoud to build apps that are just as good, easier to maintain, and cost a fraction of the price. 

MobiLoud is a fully managed service to convert websites to apps. 

It lets you keep everything that makes your existing fashion website great, while adding benefits such as increased retention, an app store presence, and push notifications.

Your app will be able to use the same themes, extensions, integrations, third-party plugins or custom features you have on your site.

Everything works the same in your app as on your website, and the platforms are completely synced.

Whenever you update something on your website, your apps update at the same time.

Your fashion site already works. It's already optimized, and you’ve spent countless hours and sunk a lot of investment into making sure it’s as good as it can be. 

MobiLoud lets you reuse all your hard work, and build on it by providing a native experience for your best customers.

How It Works

We handle the whole process for you.

• It starts with a discovery call, where we discuss your goals and make sure MobiLoud is a good fit.
• From there, we onboard you, introducing you to the team who will create your fashion app.
• Our team does all the heavy lifting to turn your mobile website into native apps.
• When ready, we’ll share a working build with you to test and provide feedback.
• Once you’re happy with the app, we submit it to the app stores for approval. We handle the entire process - and guarantee approval.
• Finally, after your app is live, we help take care of your app and ensure it stays up to date and bug-free (saving you tens of thousands per year, minimum).

“My team is thrilled because we have functioning apps that require almost no effort on our part. It is a brilliant solution. For someone that wants to see the impact an app has on a business, MobiLoud is the single best way to make that happen.”

- David Cost, VP of eCommerce & Marketing at Rainbow Shops

Launch Your Own Fashion App Today

There’s no better time to launch your own fashion app than right now. MobiLoud makes it easy.

It’s risk-free. You know your website makes money, so there’s no reason your customers won’t respond as well to your mobile app.

All you’re doing with us is adapting a known, proven asset into a supplemental asset – your own branded fashion app.

At the price you’ll pay, it’s almost a guarantee that you’ll get a positive ROI, simply through incremental revenue from your app and automated push notification campaigns.

“We couldn’t find another company that could offer the same features at the same price point, same time to market, and make it as easy as MobiLoud could.”

- Svend Hansen, Bestseller

We’ve built apps for thousands of businesses, including popular fashion brands Rainbow Shops, SYN.DI.CATE, Bestseller and John Varvatos.

These brands got amazing apps with MobiLoud, saving tens of thousands of dollars and months of effort. You can too.

Let’s create your fashion app today! Book a call today and take the first steps.