When Nicole Giordano and I sat down for lunch on a freezing New York City afternoon back in early March, we realized that we receive a lot of similar emails from new designers looking for advice. As the founder of StartUp Fashion, Nicole works with emerging designers all the time. She recently launched a private community for independent designers that includes a boutique database, forum and exclusive discount. I’m a firm believer in the power of a well-crafted online brand experience and story to build interest, awareness and sales.
We both love to help creative designers with the more business-y, marketing-y side of fashion, and thought it might be fun to combine Nicole’s experience in apparel sourcing, marketing and PR with mine in brand identity, storytelling, e-commerce and yes, marketing and PR, to help a few talented designers get on the fast-track to success. There is so much knowledge and experience between the two-of us, and we are just bursting to help designers stop making the same newbie mistakes we see over and over again in the independent fashion space.
We talked about the most common questions we get from new designers and the missteps they often make (the ones that make us want to rip our hair out and bang our heads against the desk), and came up with three main areas where we felt we could do the most good. The truth is that you can have the most lovely, well-constructed, on-trend gown on the planet, but if no one knows how awesome it is, no one is going to buy it.
Questions? We’re really looking forward to getting down to business! If you have any questions about the program or want to see if it’s the right fit for you, shoot me a note at crosby[at]prcouture.com with BYB in the subject.
Looking forward to it!
