[This is a guest post by Adela Chioveanu. Adela is a Romanian marketing student currently studying in Barcelona. Passionate about fashion and marketing, Adela can be reached on Twitter @adela_chioveanu and on her personal blog.]
Most young girls dream about being a princess, and Romanian clothing brand Chotronnette is extending this dream for those of us who are all grown up with wearable make-believe. While their trademark piece is the tutu, they’ve proven that they can create innovative pieces that go beyond this pattern. All photos are from the latest collection, Ballet Noir.
How did it all begin? How was the Chotronnette brand launched?
Our story begins from our early days when we used to play with scissors and make customized clothes for our dolls. What was originally just a hobby has managed to become the engine that guides our careers, and we’ve transformed it into a blooming business. We realized that we could transform our lifestyle into a successful business and we started working to achieve that. This is how we decided to launch Chotronnette, and time has proved us that we were right to believe in our intuition.
Who is behind Chotronnette?
Silvia Chiteala and Laura Cazacu are the two designers behind the brand. We are two girls trying to dress the world in colors and stories by using creativity and ambition. The Chotronnette brand was launched at a themed fair with an accessory collection, and ever since our activity continued. We have recently launched out third collection, and we are happy to say that we have received very positive responses.
How would you define the Chotronnette brand?
Our brand views clothing as a way to express one’s personality and we invites our clients to make a statement instead of floating along with popular trends. We aim to promote each individual character through color and extravagance. We are also conscientious that the market of self employed designers in Romania is still young, but with our products we aim to offer a viable option from the mass market products available in the other retail chains. Chotronnette is available in stores from different cities from the country, and we are hoping to expand soon on the international market.
How do you promote your brand?
We invest a lot in fashion photography to promote our collections. And even though there is nothing new about using photography to promote a brand, we have generated impressive results by using them. Our collections get featured in profilic magazines and we have also received multiple collaboration proposals from bloggers after releasing our photos. We also try to offer our products as prizes for different contests in order to raise the awareness and popularity of our brand. We are a constant presence at specialized fairs where young designers sell their pieces, and we try to take advantage of every single opportunity of establishing a contact between our customers and our brand.
We admit that what we’ve built so far demanded a great deal of effort from ourselves at the beginning, but things prove to simply come along if you do them with pleasure and joy.
How has social media helped you to promote your brand?
We try to use social networks as well as we could in order to promote the Chotronnette brand. We’ve established Facebook and Twitter accounts that we manage ourselves and update as often as we can. These are mainly designed as a way to interact with our target audience. We’ve also uploaded our collection on websites like Lookbook.nu and also other websites of fashion photography. Through blogger outreach we have offered products for online contests. With social media we are able to communicate with our customers, promote our products, and establish friendships by simply being there every time someone needed us. We invest time in social media we would definitely recommend it as a communication channel to every young designer who is trying to make a name in the fashion industry.
Where will Chotronnette be in 10 years?
Our biggest dream would be to dress Helena Bonham Carter for one of Tim Burton’s movies.
