[The following is a guest post by Shannon Estrada of Pitch! Press, a press service for fashion industry clients seeking on-going editorial and media placement at an affordable monthly rate.]
As fashion media as well as designers are impacted by current economic pressures, it is important that your PR strategy think not only outside the box but also beyond the box. Whether you are a publicist, a fashion designer working with a PR agency, or doing your own PR DIY style, how you keep your line in front of key editors, journalist and bloggers is, well, key. For fashion PR’s, getting out of a pitching rut can do wonders for improving editor response.
Creatively packaging your pitch can draw attention to your brand and set you apart. Pitch! Press has found tremendous success in forgoing the traditional press release format. Instead, we focus less on verbiage and more on the product. We then embed these “editor picks” style pitches into email blasts and send them out to the editors.
Bundle Up
Ready to take product pitches a step further? With client approval, bundle several clients into a single pitch and create a look representative of the relevant season or focus on a trend. From head to toe and everything in between, style a look that references something a fashion editor has seen going down the runway or explore a particular look under a newsworthy theme. Recreate the look with your client’s products and make your agency a one-stop shop for busy, overworked editors.
Re-use, Re-think, Re-cycle
As an added bonus, after you’ve pitched the books, you can recycle these trend pitches for your blogs and newspapers. In most cases, a pitch can be pitched three times – first to the fashion books working 4 to 5 months ahead, second to bloggers who work anywhere from a week to a few months out, and third and finally to the dailies which work on an immediate deadline.
Create a Look
Consider the following as inspiration for your next fashion PR pitch:
- pop culture (celebrity babies, Britney’s circus looks, The Hills etc.)
- a movie/television trends (grab inspirations from influential shows like Gossip Girl, Slumdog Millionaire)
- runway look alike (match what’s on the catwalk with styles, silhouettes and colors similar from your clients)
- celebrity trend (hello, Katie Holmes and the boyfriend jean)
Fashion a Trend
Think color, or texture, or heel height, skirt length, or even weather-related pitches (think: umbrellas, galoshes etc). The ability to pitch multiple clients at once has added value for clients without increasing budgets. Being apart of a look adds opportunities for your brand to be in front of the editors.
Sexy Success Story
One of our biggest successes came when we created a look ‘Carrie’ might wear from ‘Sex and the City’ on it’s premiere weekend. Newspapers across the nation went nuts for it. It made their job easier by being able to cut and paste the look on their end, add in their two-cents of verbiage, and this bundled approach secured media credits for multiple clients on our end at one time.
Stay Positive
While not every pitch is a cover story, expanding on your current pitching strategy and creating new pitches on a daily and weekly basis keeps clients consistently in front of the editors and a bundled approach can go a long way in securing multiple hits to several of your clients at once. And just because someone isn’t working on a stiletto story or chandelier earring story this week or this month, doesn’t mean it won’t come into play next week or next month, so be patient and keep up the great work.
About Shannon
Shannon Estrada has been a publicist for too many years to count. She is a lover of all things fashion and a partner/co-owner of Pitch! Press. To get more information on Shannon, check out www.pitchpress.com
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