Successful Medium And Small Brands Can Also Find The Secret Of Red.

Fashion PR is no longer what it used to be. Think of the experience of Amy Smilovic, the designer of Tibi. In 1997, she founded her brand in New York, three years earlier than the Lucky magazine founded by Nash group in Kangtai. Lucky is different from the previous high-end fashion magazines. The latter, through careful planning of fashion blockbusters and lengthy designer interviews, is making a big hit around the fact of selling clothes. But Lucky only cares about one thing: buying and buying. It is not elegant enough, but its clever copywriting provides readers with trustworthy advice, telling them where and what to buy.

For Smilovic, Lucky has become an important public relations tool. A single product photo in the magazine can help her sell a product. She said, "we advertise occasionally in magazines like Vogue, but we have never been very sure about it because you couldn't link them up at that time. Lucky is the paper version of Instagram, once a month. It looks very ordinary, but it really promotes sales. "

Nowadays, Lucky has ceased publication, and the advertising position in other magazines has not helped Smilovic much. In 2011, she succeeded in transforming Tibi from a mid class brand that was over commercialized and devoted to paper media to a more advanced, design oriented and reflective brand. Its sales doubled and eventually realized its profits.

In the early days of transformation, Smilovic relied heavily on like-minded net red to help promote publicity, but recently she began to take Instagram seriously. She almost mixed up her favorite brands (such as Loewe and Balenciaga) with her own design almost every day to provide modeling and business advice for entrepreneurs. On Sunday morning, she will call on people to ask questions, and she will answer them later.

"No one asked me how to cut the beef," she said. "No one wrote to ask," what is your constellation? But they asked me how to calculate gross margin. Her fans on Instagram are still few, but they have doubled since April, with 18000 fans. Smilovic also reintroduced her "unsewn" (Unstitched) series speech at Tibi's flagship store in Manhattan and a podcast, focusing on the internal operation of the industry. Activities in the shop often attract more than 200 fans.

"The more honest you are, the more communication you have, the more resonates you have," she said.

This is far from the day when Lucky is still alive. Now, visibility can be measured, just like sales transformation, which is more transparent in terms of public relations and transparency. Smilovic is still doing a lot of things she has done. She pays attention to the relationship between maintenance and editing. She shows on fashion week, but the way she does these things has changed.

Not every brand or public relations company can adapt to the present environment. A designer's personal interview rarely attracts people's attention as before, unless the designer himself is already a celebrity. On the contrary, designers are best able to establish their own online settings and interact directly with customers. More importantly, embedded ads in print magazines rarely drive sales. (except for important newspapers in the US, their readers are older.) Today, the brand's goal is to get some praise on specific shopping websites, a red account or social media. Tibi President Elaine Chang describes Instagram Shopping as a "powerful" tool.

Even if you believe that traditional media can still bring glory to the brand, it is harder than ever to get those exquisite implants. Veteran fashion magazines pay more and more attention to online and offline advertisers. The rest of their resources are concentrated on stories that can spread and attract attention. In the past, magazines often published small news reports, which didn't help, just because of good intentions, or just because of enthusiasm, or just commercial feedback. Now, fewer people are involved and more and more measurable results make it more difficult to prove that such stories are the right means of public relations.

Here, when traditional PR does not work, you should master and try.

Promoting stories, not products

In the past, the brand would bring the products that they need to promote (maybe new designs or new series) to public relations propaganda personnel, and the public relations would then be commissioned to make a publicity draft, a fashion editor who listed the product as a news and handed it to reporters. Today, consumers are exposed to new things several times a day. In order to make products durable, brand and publicity staff need to work together to find reasonable reasons to attract consumers' attention.

"You have to have persuasive narration and a strong story," says Lisa Frank, partner of Derris. The company has Everlane, Reformation and Warby Parker to face the brand of consumers directly. "If you need to sell a product, it may be useful in your own channels. But for the media, you need to find the time to tell stories. The introduction of a new color is not news. No one cares.

The brand Everlane, headquartered in San Francisco, is the main foundation, but there are several public relations movements every year. For example, the company plans to eliminate pure plastic products from the supply chain before 2021, and launch the sports shoes brand Tread, whose product promotion is only focused on its email marketing.

In the high fashion world, the successful story teller includes Kerby Jean-Raymond, the designer of Pyer Moss. His contribution to cultural dialogue attracted many media and consumers, and brought him a long-term contract of Reebok (Reebok). Simon Porte Jacquemus is attracting attention through innovation: his super hat and mini bag may not be the profit driver of the brand, but it is the perfect expression bag material.

　 Find different stars and net red cooperation.

Just a few years ago, a new super model such as Olivia Palermo such as net red or Jenner and Hadid can go through your product, and it will almost certainly take delivery, almost guaranteed that your product will be sold out. But now the world's stars and net red are changing harder than anyone else, and your products are hard to see.

Brian Phillips, founder and President of Black Frame, a communications company, said that a more effective approach is to adopt a broader implant strategy, not only to focus on celebrities and Internet users who have a large number of fans and traffic, but also to focus on a series of names that help build brand image in the eyes of consumers. Black Frame and Eckhaus Latta, Nike and other brands and creative agency Framework cooperation.

Phillips cites its customer Rodarte as an example. Although the brand based in Losangeles is famous for its hand-made clothing rather than commercial money, its revenue has been stable since its launch in 2008. Friends of designers such as Kristen Dunst (Kirsten Dunst), Dakota Fanning (Dakota Fanning), Jay Z, Rihanna (Rihanna) and comedian Will Farrell (Will Ferrell) have been wearing Rodarte clothes in public. "This is an unexpected surprise," he said.

From designer interviews to designer social media accounts

For brands, designer is often not worth taking an exclusive interview. Like actors, designers skip magazines and communicate directly with fans through social media, so that they can better control narrative and interaction. Although some top magazines still have some designers' recognition, they are very limited to the brand.

"The more personal your brand is, the more successful your brand is," says Chang of Tibi. "Amy's Instagram is very strong, because direct communication is really important."

From Rihanna to Marc Jacobs, designers insist on displaying their personal world with their own platform. This does not always lead to direct sales switching, but it does keep designers and consumers in constant dialogue. Fashion and cultural media The Cut did not report Gucci's latest advertising blockbuster, but published a Instagram post from the creative director Alessandro Michele, whose main role is his friend and co star Gerard Leto (Jared Leto).

Don't worry about brand marking.

If you visit an office of any brand chief marketing officer, you will see a magazine full of labels indicating the brand's exposure in this magazine. These exposes a promise that has once shown a magazine's cooperation with them - a usually self-evident but effective "hidden rule of using money to speak". Unfortunately, this is not as meaningful as it used to be. If you are not an advertiser, you will not be able to put your own high profit fist products like T-shirts, jeans, classic handbags and so on.

This means that brands must come up with new ways to marketing their truly profitable products, which are not usually achieved through traditional editing. What is effective? Provide links through shopping websites, influential social media size (such as Instagram or WeChat applet), and those who can prove that they really like what they sell.

Build your own community

"For smaller brands that are seeking to develop their own tunability, the first thing we discuss is the community," Phillips said. "It must be real and unique."

From Supreme to Glossier, the community is an important part of the direct consumer oriented narrative. For many small fashion brands, "club sense" has always been a part of its appeal. But cultivating such a group from bottom to top can be a challenge. Telfar Clemens founded its own brand in 2004. He made use of the more inclusive mission of fashion to make the brand business viable and brought a group of enthusiastic supporters. He often uses such a line: "not for you, but for everyone."

Clemens did not win the American fashion designers' annual Accessories Designer Award for his exploding shopping bag, but he did get strong support from the media and community. In August 2019, long after the CFDA awards ceremony, after the first release of the explosive bag, Dazed Digital's Emma Hope Allwood wrote a carol for this product: "why is Telfar shopping bag the most important accessory in the last ten years?"

Create a never-ending media channel

Creating content is nothing new, but to make it work, it's more challenging than ever. To build your own media, you need not only budget but also good ideas. There are many ways to do this. In March 2018, Scott Sternberg, founder of Band of Outsiders, set up a Losangeles based brand Overall World, which had only a small budget. However, he and his team were inspired by the 1980s Instagram video advertising. He regularly invited net red, including Busy Phillips, Jason Schwartzman and Amandla Stenberg. At this stage of growth, brand can hardly afford to pay for marketing, but through personal relationship and mutual recognition of creativity, it is possible to create content and brand perspective.

Nowadays, using social media as a public relations tool is critical. Entireworld is the first celebrity oriented video campaign to work with a popular female fashion magazine. The media has exclusive rights and embed videos on the YouTube page in an article on its website. A few days later, the number of videos watched was only about 100 times. On Entireworld's own Instagram, the clicks of these videos ranged from 1500 to 15000, when fans of the account were less than 10000 (currently close to 45 thousand).

"It turns out that social media algorithms that label friends with enthusiastic comments are a more effective public relations machine," Sternberg said. In the past, scoop seemed to be a necessary condition for cooperation with the media, but now the concept of exclusive is contrary to the concept of social networking and digital media. "From our past experience, the media is always the most powerful, because it can create a collective effect around a particular brand." But these collective effects are getting less and less in these days.

Think about real life.

Brand should also regard entity space as a form of media. Losangeles based brand Co rarely adopts traditional PR methods. The founders Stephanie Danan and Justin Kern have never held a T show or any formal exhibition, nor have they done anything to attract the media, netted or celebrities. "Artificial promotion does not work," Danan said. "I have never seen our sales rise because stars wear or publish magazine articles."

Instead, the profit is expected to create nearly $20 million in revenue in 2019, renting a Fitzpatrick-Leland house designed by the famous architect R.M. Schindler in 1936. There, they host orders with buyers, private meetings with customers, and informal gatherings and dinner parties throughout the year, all of which take place of traditional shops and press conferences. They are still filming their catalogues there.

"A few times a month, I will be introduced to someone, who will say," ah, this is the brand of the house, "Kern said. "This person may not know this brand very well. They may not have bought our stuff yet, but they know us."

Stakeholder: Lauren Sherman, the author of this paper, worked in the Journal Lucky from 2011 to 2012.