Inside The Industry: How to Build a Brand in Fashion | The Business of Fashion x Topshop

well good evening everybody wow so many of you here thank you so much for coming and welcome to this inside the industry event it's the third one of these that we've done and what we do is we take a look inside the fashion industry and we're extremely grateful to our partners at topshop who've enabled us to put on these events we've taken this show as it were on the road to new york we've done another one in london and and they've been really great and so we're very very grateful to topshop for helping us put this on as i think you all know the theme for this evening is about how to build a fashion brand that breaks through in an extremely competitive space and i couldn't be happier to be hosting this particular one for a few reasons actually one most importantly it's given us an opportunity to put together an amazing panel of very inspiring women so we'll talk a bit more about that in a minute i'll come on to that uh secondly i don't think there's been a more interesting time to be in the fashion industry to be thinking about starting a band brand growing a brand or a band either and um thirdly and this is very personal to me as an ex agency guy the opportunity to spend an hour or so talking about marketing and branding with three amazing experts in that space is uh it's just a wonderful opportunity um the one thing i will say is that i have a few questions lined up as you would expect but my experience tells me that the best questions in these kind of things come from the audience so we will get to without uh too much delay a time for you all to ask questions so if you could start thinking about uh the questions that you have that would be that would be great we have some roving mics i can't really see but we'll um we'll make sure that we get to those questions so please think of those but before that what i wanted to do first is introduce the panel now i'm going to keep these introductions relatively short because before we go too far into this i'm going to ask each of you to talk a bit about your careers but let me just start with some introductions and then we'll progress so to my immediate right we have holly rogers chief executive of the legendary i know that that word gets used a lot but the legendary uh fashion boutique browns uh so holly you've been at browns for two years you've done a lot in that time incredible success and growth in the business um overseeing and establishing a world-class management team overseeing the opening of a new distribution center leading the boutique's first full rebranding in 47 years which i'm going to ask you about shortly collie has also applied her curator's eye to brown's buying expanding the brand portfolio significantly across both menswear and women's wear so welcome holly it's a pleasure to have you here thank you uh next to holly we have katie white uh managing director of id uh the iconic again a word that's used a lot but a definitely iconic fashion and style bible which has grown as i'm sure you all know from a hand stapled zine into a leading digital video and print brand across the globe under katie's tenure specifically lots of expansion into new territories including china and japan exponential growth in video output had some amazing people on the cover of the magazine adele stormzy justin bieber a few talk a bit more about that rolled out into luxury lifestyle and travel as well with the new site muse so that's great um a lot of large scale commercial success so um thank you so much katie for joining us great to have you here and then at the end last but very much not least layla fatah is joining us as well uh she founded her first agency at 26 yep ignorance is bliss um but more recently has just announced a new venture platform 13 i'm sure we'll talk about that very exciting uh and platform 13 leverages uh your unique experience working for adidas originals as global pr and social director and then more recently at diageo as head of culture and entertainment so again a real range of experience across the panel and i'm sure this is going to be a wonderful discussion so as i said we're going to talk a lot about brands and how to build fashion brands but before we get into that one of the things that's been a common theme across the three inside the industry events that we've done is i've just we've just asked people to talk a little bit about their journey their career because what struck us as we've talked to amazing women across three different panels is that the journey to success in fashion takes many different paths so holly i want to start with you can you just give us a bit of an overview of how you've ended up as ceo of browns um yeah i never actually thought i'd be a ceo for all you women in the audience i studied i studied it at school i studied fashion merchandising i actually didn't really know what that meant but it was the program that made the most sense at my university and i grew up in texas and um i just always had an interest in fashion from like day dot at felt like and so every opportunity i could get around to be around product was really important to me so i worked at stores i worked in so many stores in my career i worked on the shop floor full i remember folding sweaters at christmas time was painful or jumpers and then at university i also did a lot of volunteer work there was a museum on campus where i got to learn incredible history about fashion that has actually served me too till this day what i learned there and to have access and understand the different fabrications and all the the different designers at the time and where the inspiration comes from for today even and then from there again worked on the shop floor after university because i wasn't quite sure what i wanted to do and it was there that i realized that buying might be a potential career path for me so that's basically kind of where i navigated through but i think a big part of it also was just being really passionate about what i was doing understanding that you didn't have to be in a rush necessarily that things will happen as they should and you have to trust your gut and a lot of that and you also have to trust the people around you that can support you because i had a lot of really amazing people namely my dad but people that i worked with people at the university different people that supported me and kind of helped push me along and my endeavors and so that was when i went into buying and at that point i realized in the middle of texas i wasn't going to really see a huge amount so i really needed to be in new york city and then moved when i had to move to new york and in that space i moved into a different side i would have moved into the wholesale side so i think it's also really important to see as many elements of this business as you can because you get an understanding of how you can approach people later on because if you understand where they're coming from you know how to talk to them better and in a more empathetic way i think also and then from there i remember i was actually just repeating the story yesterday um to tyler but we there was it was at the time that boo.com started and there were fly postering all over manhattan and i was like what is this online entity like at the time it didn't exist you know this was like 99 or 2 000 and i was so intrigued and that just really like that whole like where was this going where was this fashion journey going and interestingly enough i ended up moving to london for personal reasons and ended up working at netaporte.com and it was there who knew what it was going to be so i would say that definitely taking risks and not knowing what's ahead of you and always thinking you have to be super prepared because you never know how it's going to unfold was probably one of the reasons i have actually been able to be successful and this whole thing of being black and white is not necessarily always a must i think kind of being in the gray area so to speak so you can actually figure out how to navigate what comes your way and then i left nadaporte and jose neves called me up and said so i've got an interesting idea i'd like to pass by you and and so now i'm a ceo fantastic just like that i love that from shop floor to ceo yeah just you know and it strikes me that when you talk about these things and i think this will be true of everyone in reverse there's a sort of logic to it but when you're building or going through your career you know you don't necessarily know what comes next you just take something feels right and you you kind of you kind of take a take a punt on it katie what about you managing director how did it all start well i think you described my uh your career actually as indecisive earlier there was a bit of that for me as well because i so i started i started life in advertising in advertising agencies and um i was a strategist and i helped lots of different types of brands from lots of different sectors to um to launch new products to market existing products and it was fun i described it to my mum and dad once as like a very sophisticated form of manipulation because i was understanding audiences and understanding brands and what they wanted to do and putting the two together um but what happened was a few years into my career um someone started talking to me about this thing called word of mouth marketing um which we now know is social media um love a buzzword in the advertising industry they really do and um we and i thought this sounds interesting and i was working at the time with quite a lot of gaming music um film entertainment clients and what we were finding was that we were doing all of these like big billboards and all of this um sort of traditional marketing work around like launches of new films new games um and what happened you know what was happening was like it wasn't necessarily working so well and we realized that there was a lot of conversation happening in blogs and forums this was like pre facebook pre-youtube lots of like this sort of conversation happening and opinions about this stuff in the entertainment industry was being made or broken in these spaces um and we developed what i now see as a very rudimentary form of an agency that uh that helped brands to interact with their audiences through these channels and then a young man in america mr zuckerberg did something wonderful and launched this thing called the facebook and um i was kind of already in the social media marketing space so i was really really lucky um and i was probably one of the first people that was formally working in social media in london at that time so i was like first off the mark and then obviously in advertising which i know will go on to talk about loads um loads more this evening but the whole industry just was shaken up almost overnight with content and all of these social platforms and all of the ways that like we were all really comfortable and familiar with like ads and you know um like we were still doing leaflets at that time like god i can't um all of that stuff was blown out the water and we were sort of really developing new ways of new ways of communicating with audiences for brands and then i was it was a chance meeting with a person who's now a very good friend that took me into another world which was properly into the world of entertainment and i had a little stint for two or three years at a company who were doing the social media for celebrities and influencers which is a crazy world like it was a company based in hollywood called the audience and uh and did uh um lots of work helping these celebrities manage these crazy um big influence which called it like follower bases millions and millions and and mainly stopping them getting drunk and going on twitter rants actually quite a lot of my job was about that um very important very important very difficult job uh and so that was great and um and really interesting and then i moved to vice actually uh not not long about a couple of years after vice had bought um bought id and i did six months there working with those guys on media strategy and with with brand partners and then uh the ceo said to me we've got this thing we think you'd be quite good at we bought id a few years ago we've really started in earnest the digital transformation because when vice port id id was just a magazine it was an amazing magazine that i read religiously but it was a magazine and um after id joined the vice family this huge digital transformation uh began and it was there was lots of video happening the site was up and running but what it required then was this global expansion and just a little bit of refinement around how we worked in social how we took all of the great stuff that vice was doing and brought it to a fashion space because i think you know the industry um struggles with the change sometimes compared to other other industries and other worlds so um and i was absolutely delighted because i've read id religiously since i was about 12 years old so i was able to join the very welcoming and amazing id family and have been there two years now and i think because holly she had a lot of wisdom of how she was thinking i mean i just kept jumping off cliffs in my career um and i think you said anything like following my gut and that you know that for me was i'm you know i'm so i couldn't have imagined that i would um i'd be working in this position in id but i just you know for me it was and like i've married now my sort of passion um and fashion and culture and all of the things that we do so well i deal with this weird checkered skill set that i've got around digital and social and content but um it like i think a lot of it is following actually it sounds really cheesy in my head so i'm gonna say anyway but like following passions and you know if you have a gut feel about something just going for it like you never know what's around the corner so if it's usually if it feels scary it's good yeah and what strikes me and again this is the theme that's come out is you need a bit of luck which sounds a bit you know that's a bit challenging but actually to some degree and again this is a bit cheesy and a cliche you make your own luck if you if you if you try hard enough and you work at stuff enough luck kind of happens to you so i think that's kind of interesting lily i have the privilege of knowing a bit about your backstory which is incredibly inspiring as well so can you just shine a light on how you've ended up where you are now so all of it's a bonus actually to be completely honest because i come from a place where there wasn't any opportunity at all i came from apartheid south africa where we had no opportunity and actually the only opportunity for us was working in the post office and etc but i think for me i've always had this insane curiosity about stuff that happens in the world so i've always looked at things and my mom always said you should have worked in a stock market because you can spot a trend coming and that's just always been an interest of mine so i'm always looking i'm saying what's happening you know those blogs and forums like i was on that stuff way before only because there was interest not because i was going oh i'm going to use this in my path you know it wasn't like that i have a curiosity about the world that i think has led me to where i am and this opportunistic sort of luck that happened when i came to london um and i was bribed to come to london to finish my university degree my mum was like i'll buy you a ticket just finish your degree please first person in the in the whole you know family to finish a degree and um i had this really opportunistic moment where and i've i've said this before and i think it just set me on this path where i was coming to london because this little island um for me in the third world um was this really influential place you know it had punk it had vivian westwood it had all these things that were just like oh my god like fantasy for me living in south africa and looking at europe and the world in a different way and uh and so i had a shaved head because it was the chenille connor time um so i was like i'm going to shave my head so they shaved head and if you have shaved heads it grows out pretty badly so i came to london first week i had no contacts i had 200 pounds that was it was a lot of money for us in south africa but they sent me on my way and i was walking past a hairdressing salon on my first week and i was like in my head i was like great i can have my head shaved for free for work here that was literally the motivation and um we'll pause this hairdressing salon on my way to see the king's road that's where vivien westwood's from and phone was ringing walk back phone was ringing walk back and i walked into the hairdressing salon at sloan square and i was like your phone's been ringing uh three like three times a walk by backwards and forwards you must be losing business and it was tony of tony and guy hairdressing who gave me a job on the spot um as his receptionist um for his new school which was opening the following week which was awesome because i only had 200 pounds so that was great so i guess it's a bit about opportunistic and it's a bit about i think if i knew who you what who he was i would have had a bit of fear but what that's instilled in me is that for me everyone's the same so i never have a fear about doing anything because actually everything's a bonus so i'm just stoked where i am in my career and i think because i have this concentration of what i'm what i'm doing here and not really thinking about i'm doing this to get this to get this i'm really focused on what i'm doing here and i used to be really surprised even starting my own business when people would like know what i was doing i'd be like wow you heard about that i was really and still today if i think about adidas which is amazing and and stan smith which was my first project um i still get surprised when people go wow i saw that campaign and was you know it was incredible so for me i guess it's just appreciation real appreciation of opportunities and and you guys have all of this stuff in front of you it's incredible just look at the opportunity identify it and just grab it and run as fast as you can and see see where it gets you and uh in a few years you'll be sitting up here with nick blunden asking you the same question so i've got a bit of a crazy career so started the attorney and guy i had a huge interest in um digital because i read a science fiction book called neuromancer by william gibson when i was 15 the one book i brought with me in my suitcase because i wouldn't carry a backpack very uncool on my travels and it was about it was a science fiction book about people having these computers and they jacked it into their head and they traveled through the computer and connected with each other so when the internet came you can imagine i was just like oh my god it's here and it was called um he actually came up with the term cyberspace so it was an actual science fiction which is really interesting so um actually my first business the 26th one was what i call the first online marketing company in in london fashion marketing company after toni and guy um and i wanted to really be within this area that had no case studies no way of knowing how to do anything my first client was acupuncture footwear everyone remembers that thank you too young had a big anarchy sign on was really really cool and we had this website and they were like what are we going to do with it but of course no one had email and no one had computers and there were no websites so actually the first thing i did was call vice because i knew eric lavoie from the magazine and i exchanged articles with vice for the website for shoes and so just started to build this way of marketing that's very much about it's very instinctive and it's really just going this is the product this is the audience how am i going to get these things together i've never had any training in marketing or in anything i've done it's all been learned on the job so opportunities are out there just grab them and run see where you get to and we'll be watching i think the interesting thing about hearing all of that and um you you will put you will join these dances in between the luck in between the opportunity in between um the you know taking a going with your gut is a lot of hard work i suspect that there between these three amazing women is an extraordinary large amount of hard work as well but thank you for sharing those stories very very inspiring um i want to switch gears a little bit now and go back to the sort of main theme of tonight's talk which is to talk about building brands in fashion holly i mentioned this in my intro that you know once you got the call from jose and you you know and you're going to browns and you're coming in as the ceo and i bet you've got a list of things that you're thinking we could do this we could do that we could do the other one of the first things you decide to do is to launch a rebranding i'm going to call it program or project piece of work to rebrand browns for the first time i think in its history why start there why start with the brand so what you don't know is that we actually started with the product a bit before that so while there was a lot of really great product in there we had to shift a little bit the who who we were talking to and because the fashion cycles work in the way that they do we had to do that a few months earlier so we were already doing that on the side because for me brown's has stood and will continue to stand for supporting new talent it is an incubator of fashion and it also at the same time just has incredible fashion and some of the coolest clothes you can find and it had veered a little bit off that path and i just wanted to make sure to get it back on that path and make it relevant again and so that was where the product piece came into me because that's to me fundamentally particularly as a retailer that's what you should be doing you have to have great product people will forgive you your sins on so many other levels if you have that right but it wasn't just enough for me in that regard i mean i think it's not wasn't necessarily about trying to make my mark or anything of that nature at all because that's really not the type of person that i am but it for me it was like how do you shake up something that's existed for it's almost 50 years old and make people take note again and i think that just again it was back to more like intuition it just felt like this is what we needed to do to re-establish ourselves so we worked with an agency and worked on a new logo and it was interesting because that whole process of trying to figure out who's your customer who are you trying to appeal to what's important and taking all these elements and kind of mashing them together to figure out like and and then what do you want it to be because that's the other piece of it it's like where where are we going what do we want from it from this and um so we changed the logo all of the packaging the colors all of it changed and i just felt like it needed to be a little bit more punchy a little bit more relevant to now and i've had really good feedback from a lot of people on it but something that i really liked about the logo in general was that it we we played on the heritage factor for sure because it didn't want to shift away and just go really like plain um but it's a hand-drawn font which i really love that idea of it kind of harkening back to that but it doesn't look too dissimilar from the old one but we purposefully on the packaging for those of you that seen it it sits at the bottom of the bag and part of that was really conscious and that we wanted to say in a really understated way to everybody we are a container for all these really great brands it's not so much about us as a com as a brand it's ourselves we are about all these other brands that we carry so that i really loved that whole idea and everyone's like my legal team was like um have your logo is missing holly i'm like no no it's not it's not we're going to be fine i had so many people say that to me but then also even down to our swing tags we split it apart from men's and women's it's like you know how it kind of can run through all these different aspects of what you're doing day to day but the men's tags if you look at them say bro and we split if you split the word apart it's bro wms wns and it's like so it looks like bro and women's so we put all of the bro tags on the men's clothes and all the women's tags and if you buy it online you get browned because we couldn't really differentiate them but all of that piece of it was just really thoughtful for me because that's a that's to me also how you should be approaching a rebranding effort really interesting um to hear you and and i'm so glad you said that it didn't start with the brand it started with the product because i think sometimes when we think about brand we think about brands in isolation and brands are a reflection of something else right they're a reflection of the business of the culture of the of the product um and like i'd be really interested one of the pieces of work that you worked on you talked about it stan smith's really interesting branding challenge there because you've got a product that's existed for a long long time do you approach that when you think about brand you approach that differently when it's uh um you know a heritage brand in being sort of revived in some way and i was lucky at adidas because i actually worked on both that heritage product which was really in the sale bucket and um i loved it because i love a challenge like that i was just like yes and also because i so i worked on both a heritage product product and a relaunch and a re uh relaunch of that as well as a new product so i can probably give you the the differences between the two but what was great about the heritage product was the knowledge and insight of the culture so i have worn sneakers my whole life actually that's tonight i'm not because i'm i'm trying to be a bit more you know grown up um but um so yeah so i i i knew instinctively coming from sneaky culture from sneaker blogs etc um that the stan smith that shoe in a time where it was so tech heavy sneakers it was you know the bright colors nike the innovation blah blah blah you know it even added us running it's all bright colors it was amazing white clean shoe so i wanted to work on the heritage that actually that that silhouette um was the leveller for all sneaker lovers because actually it's the one shoe that everyone has in there in their back cupboard but just irrelevant what we needed to do was take that heritage and then kind of revive it to make it relevant i was talking about what happens every day so for me brands are relevant if they are relevant in culture people are talking about them and that is a real reflection of the time but i don't think if you've got a heritage brand you should forget about it i think you need to make that relevant today because i think it is different heritage is amazing but i think sometimes people maybe depend on that a bit too much and go down this long heritage story whereas i think you go actually what are the learnings from that what are the insights and how can i switch that up to be relevant today because everything's different the media is different the way people shop is different everything so that was really interesting because um my shoes it was it was brilliant because that was almost like how do you launch this in in a way that the audience now get information so one thing we did was the first part of the launch i did a phase launched over over a few months i called it the the green and white take over and um the first part was the shoe i don't know if everyone knows the stan smith shoe is there's a tongue with stan smith's image on it sort of hand drawn i should have been wearing them on the stage yeah sorry about that but um what was really interesting the first part was i was like i know that there are 100 people around the world who are super amazing lovers of stan smith and i want to gift them with their own face on drawn in the same style and actually i got such a big pushback from the company going but we've never done it like that we always create the shoes and i was like but we own the factory give me the shoes without anything on it and i will draw them on so it's about going what is it that you you that usually has happened and how do you just hack that it's about hacking it that's how you're going to get to innovation that's how you're going to get to newness i think what happens there's such a huge now people are just like fomo you know what are they doing i gotta do that what are they doing they're not thinking about what they should be doing for what's right for the actual brand so that was one and actually that was hugely successful because you can imagine we had it all timed on the same day and this was a nightmare to do because i had to get specific shots of all these 100 people by their friends and their pas secretly so that they sent me all these images that had to be front forward high res you know in a certain way so i could have them hand drawn so they were all dropped on the same day globally on the on the offices of every single person so you can imagine social to swim boom and it just felt like the green and white take over and that was only phase one can i so can i ask that was just a bit of background did you know because the the the wonderful thing about those panels is we've all got hindsight right yeah but i'd be interested to know did you know when you were handed that opportunity that briefly said i didn't work on stan smith did you think this is an amazing opportunity yes because for me i'm all about challenge so for me i was just like okay that's really hard it's in the sales buckets people don't care about this and that for me was awesome because i love to get under the skin of something and really come up with something that's new and fresh and and because i don't have a background or or training in any way i'm totally unblinked in a way so i'm just like well why can't we do that of course we can do that i'm all about possibility so so for me it was amazing and it was great to work with the brand that as you can imagine you know back where i'm from you know you work for this you've always worn this brand and it's always been around this kind of like oh my god i work for that brand that i used to wear and you know covered for so long and to be able to do a project like that was incredible but it was also really interesting getting a new product which was dropped on my desk in october and they were like we want it out in january and knowing you can imagine from fashion that just takes a long time a global brand to be able to do that but again we tried to do it in a really different way and um i think we had i think our target was 30 000 and we sold over a million in the first year so um yeah i've been really lucky to have this amazing amazing project yeah that was zxflux um which i still see all over london which is brilliant so coming back from germany when i went it was so dominated by other brands and then i came back i was like wow everyone's wearing adidas on the tube it was unbelievable because when i left i was like okay no one's wearing anything you know you were checking before you went out and um it was really great to see how stuff hits the ground and people really love it enough to spend their money on it that's really what it's always about it's all great doing a great a great idea but if no one's spending the money to actually grow your business then it doesn't really matter and katie i'm i'm intrigued because there was the doing things differently right and there used to be a playbook to some degree for launching or growing a fashion brand and it involved media and i think in its history ideas played a really important role in helping to establish and grow fashion brands but of course over the last certainly after the last 10 over the last 10 years things have really changed right you know the media landscape has really changed um first the advent of digital and then social media and so brands like media brands like id and indeed amuse have a different role to play in helping fashion brands to emerge and grow how do you think about because with your agency background i mean you've got a very sophisticated understanding of of the the role of branding how do you see id playing a role in in the in the growth of the brands that it works with yeah well i think you set me up beautifully actually because um you know for me like it was all by design yeah you know we didn't practice um but it's so you know so much of uh brand success is about cultural relevance yeah exactly you know what is that close you said and i think the the big challenge that um i think that brands that we come across and and i think just even as a consumer observing the big challenge that brands have is that the the life cycle of what is relevant in culture is just like speeding up like so much because of because of social and digital and technology and how these how all of these um you know the the way that people consume content and consume culture and create culture is just being driven forward by tech and so when when brands come to us like quite often their challenges are twofold even if they don't know it yet so one might be that they're struggling with this technology with these platforms and they're like well my print ads not working on my instagram channel or whatever it is um and then you know the second thing is then that actually their brands have lost like fundamental relevance in culture because either they're trading too heavily off the heritage story or like they've maybe just got it slightly wrong in terms of like where like which you know subculture they're trying to launch into or whatever it is and what you know what we're doing id and this is something that id's done for nearly 40 years now is we're actually like creating culture and working with the young people that create that culture and so what we're able to do with the brands that come to us is actually first of all give them insight so i think it's really challenging for brands today because you know it's it used to be really straightforward even in even when i started it used to be really straightforward you'd have a marketing team a brand team they'd look at you know what the brand stands for the hierarchy of the brand all of that stuff great good still really good valuable stuff and then they think right print ad tv ad and then website like how does this all play out and now you've got these big complicated like multi-faceted teams that are trying to get a brand out there keep it consistent like make it mean something in culture and it's it's really really challenging and so what you know what we find though is that we we have that so we have big multi-faceted teams as well but they're all we've got a much simpler job in the sense that what we're doing is we're engaging people in culture we don't have to sell a product at the end of it so all we need to do is listen and you know look for the stories that really resonate with people and then just tell them kind of better than other media channels which obviously we do um so you know and witness and so what we what we have in doing that is this amazing like base of insight into what's happening in culture quite often a lot of the people that are friends of id either working with us that ideal part of the network um are the ones that are making this stuff so the creatives the you know the guys that are like creating culture that's exactly the point i think one of the biggest struggles at the moment is brands trying to buy their way into culture you cannot do it it's a long term piece you've got to contribute to that culture if you want to be a brand and the only way to do that is to kind of really think about what your values are brand what is your message so yours was is lovely you know we're an incubator like that out of that you can see all the stuff that you can do from a marketing point of view because your message is extremely clear and that needs to run through everything that you do so i think that's really important is really know yourself and know what you stand for and if people if some people don't like that just let them go that's cool but um this idea of creating culture represent shaping it that's the area that you need to look at or else it's just going to feel really transactional around it and that's never going to cut through that's when you if people are not talking about you in a world of social media where algorithms are changing all day long you know the dark social for me is my next really interesting area um 84 of brand conversations happen not on social it happens in your whatsapp groups it happens on messenger and it's immeasurable at the moment by big media companies so you go 84 percent of people are talking about brands i could be doing something really awesome for them to be talking about my brand that's a great challenge actually then you just you move away from the and i don't mean media your media because i think id is in a different unique space i'm talking about the big advertising out of homes etc um and other places and social media where 84 of recommendations are actually not actually seen that's a really interesting place so if i'm going to speak to you on my whatsapp group i'm not going to talk about something really dull am i i'm going to talk about something that's really interesting that a brand is doing so actually the challenge out there now is just do something original and interesting and don't worry about what other people are doing that's the point and that was really interesting katie here you talk about because what struck me in you describing the way that you know the insights is that actually from that perspective the media is no longer the end point it's no longer the last bit in the right way put an ad somewhere it's part of the process of getting to it's part of understanding the culture it's about part of understanding the audience it's much earlier in the piece yeah absolutely and i think that's very much you know where we're seeing success we did a huge project year-long project with chanel that's um only just coming to an end and you know when we we work with chanel the fragrance team really far upstream to like look at actually what you know what as a brand what and as a product is an entire sector to be honest what fragrance stood for for young people and we worked with chanel to help them redefine that and regain that um that uh what's the word like that relevance within you know the the culture of um of our audience of young people and i think a lot of what we're seeing is that brands are coming to us as a way in as an authentic route in to begin that journey so to begin to rebuild that relevance and rebuild the the relationship with with the audience um and so that example i think a lot of what we saw was the the s devlin piece out there which actually wasn't a media buy yeah it was an id created experience which i thought was awesome so it's kind of like you know that's what i see out there that's what we talk about when we talk about this dark social please sorry to listen no no no no no just wanted to try to make sure that yeah it was great yeah and i mean that's you know that's not that's not advertising yes you know we worked with chanel it was events it was video it was we it was actually a channel within id that we launched with chanel and it's um it's a you know it's a completely different landscape to how it was uh you know how it was even three four years ago um and yeah no that's exactly why they're coming to us is and how in and you know it's not always it's interesting actually if you look at it on the flip side we quite often and naming no names but quite often when brands come to us at the other end of that process where they're like you know quite proudly lay out the assets from the campaign on the and you know i watch our creatives and our editorial teams just go like that because it's just you know we know our audience and we know what's going to work well with them and um and it is you know it's really it is interesting when you see like the that brands look so introspectively at what they and and particularly when you know for your holiday i'm sure like when brands have got such an amazing heritage and they're still amazing brands and there's nothing wrong with what they're doing but like how you know looking outside of yourself to think like well how do we now take all of this great stuff these years of heritage and like respin it so that it means something to people today and in social platforms and in you know in technology and you know recognizing that people the role of going in store has a completely different thing to people now because they don't have to so they can buy online and there's plenty of choice and all of this sort of thing so like the fundamentals of how people interact with brands are different and that's definitely what we're trying to help our brand partners navigate and it's it's interesting because to that point about the role of the media or the paid media for one of a better worders has changed there's also you know at the other end of the spectrum and i'm going to come on to you later to talk about this because it's a segue from what you talked about when you were talking about your your career path you know people talk about well now in a world where the kim kardashian and selena gomez have a social following that is bigger than the combined following of most major media brands put together shouldn't we all just be moving into influence and marketing and leila you and i have talked about this in the past but you know there's been this sort of as if influence and marketing is brand new thing that's never happened before and there is a panacea that solves every problem i know you have some interesting perspectives on this so give me your three minutes on is influencer market marketing actually a new thing and is it the answer to every brand building challenge so you know what they're saying around my new venture is rest in peace influencer marketing uh long live influence because for me i think there's a definition issue and i feel like everyone just goes influencer marketing but of course within fashion we've been doing collaboration forever because we didn't have a media budget there was no other way to do it but to partner with people with the same values shared values etc to be able to create something new so for me that is what influencer marketing at his heart should be it's really collaboration uh mutually i think what happens now is we're paying people uh to advertise for us so i'm like call it advertising i'm good with that just don't call it influence because that's a really different thing influence comes from expertise together um not how many fans and followers you have somehow because also there's i think there's i think there's a little bit of education piece to do because if selena gomez has a billion people who follows her that doesn't mean that much because she can only she can't see all that stuff and her billion followers cannot see that one post that she puts out because it feeds really quickly so i don't think there's a direct correlation between a million people whoever has um as an influencer it's really hard for me to say that word um and actually how your product is being seen and especially because the bigger the the followers the more products are on their pages so how are you going to stand out differently and we are really at content saturation stage because honestly if i see another beautifully curated you know image with brand x brand y brand z in it i'm going to kill myself it's total wallpaper so you go what is it you're trying to do what's the message if it's you know you know an incubator what's the content that's needed to actually in service of what you're trying to do not another pretty picture about whatever um i just feel like that's a waste of time and energy for everyone and at some point people switch off that stuff and that's why people are going dark and that's why people are getting off all the social networks because it's an overload the internet minute is insanely busy it's like four million videos are uploaded a minute a minute so all your target audience they can't see everything that's going out there with other brands news friends and family you know i think it's slightly naive to think that that million people are going to see your brand they know and actually you rather have someone within the culture that you're working with to create something you know that's going to get your message out in the right way and there's an engaged audience underneath who are really interested in that culture that's really what influence is about for me so you heard it here first influencer marketing is already dead although it's new it's all about excellence again i just want to before a friend of mine a friend of mine sorry i said a really good thing he was just like influencer marketing remember jesus christ and his disciples that was influencer marketing so i'm going to leave that with you we are on very precarious ground here who said that whatever you are i'm gonna i'm gonna yeah we're gonna go to the audience for questions in just a few minutes i just have one particular question holly i just want to ask you the other thing because i want to tick off all the buzzwords so we've done influencer marketing the thing that everyone talks about again in terms of brand is brand experience it's all about brand experience now and i think that's a really interesting challenge if you're in retail because clearly you've got different experiences um and people talk about omnichannel and they talk about the online and the offline experience my question for you is is it more important for you when you think about the brand experience of browns that it's completely consistent across the in-store experience and the online experience or is it more important that it's optimized to whatever channel you're in well it's interesting one of the reasons why i took this job is because i worked in online for 12 years so this for me was a big challenge to understand this bricks and mortar world and um so i've been grappling a little bit with this to be honest with you but every time i hate that term obny channel as well because i don't think it can actually exist i really don't so we in the business say multi-channel yeah and i think it is about optimizing your different channels actually recognizing their value for what they are and it's like if you we're just going to be opening up a new store soon and it's going to look nothing like the one on south moulton street and that is purely the intention nothing should be cookie cutter there are a few elements i think that definitely need to be present to have that consistency and that is a tone of void for us it's tone of voice and how we're talking to people but yeah your social channels your store environment your website all of it needs to kind of look and feel and on brand but it doesn't have to be replicated i mean also we've really done like i think actually interestingly the bosque out exhibition that's just opened here which i can't wait to see haven't had a chance everyone goes she's got her t-shirt on um we actually have an exclusive collection at browns and this was actually probably the first time we've been able to implement the full like kind of 360 multi-channel piece kind of seamlessly and it's taken us a little while to get to this place but we're finally there and i was super proud because the windows all across south moulton street every single one of them the family came in they were like beside themselves with they they thought we just did such a good service to to the to their son and brother and whatever cousin and um taking it into the website we did video specific content just for the website that was also used in the windows we have the product in the store which is fantastic and then all the social channels that we we use this some of the same content through but again it wasn't the same exact all the way through so i love it we've got multi-channel not omni channel i also really dislike the term on the channel so i'm gonna go with multi-channel now do we have any questions from the audience i think we've got some uh roving mics if you've got a question could i ask you to put your hand up and when you get a microphone if you could just introduce yourself and then uh there's a question down here at the front uh introduce yourself and if i could um just ask you to try and keep your question relatively brief because i'm sure there are quite a few questions so i think there was a question down here at the front to start with hi my name's selena um for each of you you in particular have already indicated what's interesting you next with going dark you're all very ambitious jumping off cliffs taking you know chances what's intriguing you that you're not doing that you haven't explored but that you've seen or got a slight oh that could be the thing what's intriguing each of you next i knew the questions would be better from the floor that's a great question who wants to go first i'm as as i mentioned for me dark social is really interesting because it also happily plays on my old pr skills because it really is about really challenging everything when it comes to brands about how are you going to get people to talk about your brand like that's a really awesome brief actually if you think about and it's something that you all of you can think about whether you're small or big it's like if you had no money um and i'm sure a lot of some of you starting won't have any money that you know there's a there's a dream there um how do you do something awesome that's cultural culturally relevant that people want to talk about i think it's almost old school pr it's really interesting and it feels like there's a we're at a really amazing crossroads of communication with data vr a all this stuff like we really at this moment where it's a switch it's almost like the next industrial revolution for communication i really feel that um but then i'm over excited about stuff so um but yeah i feel like actually this is an opportunity for people of any size and coming from anywhere to be able to really make their mark if they're really true to what what they do and just really focus on what they do so but for me it's about what can people do that are awesome and because now you have social in other places you can share that whether you're a you know a one-man band or not quite widely quite quickly but it has to be good and that's what's exciting me is actually good marketing that would be brilliant what about what about you that was a that's a hard question um can i have two answers yes i'll be quick so one thing well they're kind of like associated answers so one thing that's really really interesting to me worry um is what's uh what's happening and maybe we can talk about this afterwards but what's happening with with commerce um and like how people are buying and how like scarcity marketing and how like you know these things i had to work extremely hard to get and like all of this sort of thing um and i live on brick lane and every saturday morning i walk along brick lane and there's some kind of like sneaker drop with like 300 kids outside getting extremely excited and committing like to queueing up for to get you know and just you know what happened with the viton and supreme launch and all of this stuff i'm really interested to see like particularly for fashion and luxury brands how that's going to play out um and you know i on that i think like i'm the the re you know the retail space experience and all that sort of thing i think is really interesting i think that's going to have resurgence and i want to see how that's going to play out and sort of on that as well like one of the things that's fascinating to me is um is how the old me like the old media is gonna change and uh print for example is one thing we just acquired garage magazine um which if you don't know you should check out because garage has got an app that goes with the magazine that does all this amazing ar and vr stuff and it's just created for me this like new massive excitement for what like our book can mean you know what the id mag you know id print uh product will be um and you know for us people still read our magazine and like you hear all this like these big headlines like print is dead like all of these sorts of things but for me it's not about that it's about how all of these old mediums of communication and the way that brands and um and channels like like idea communicating with their audience how we can and basically the creative platforms that they provide and how we can mix that stuff up and mix technologies and yeah so it's more like i'm really excited about how the old worlds and the new worlds are going to keep keep clashing great and i'm i actually kind of feel the same way about that is the that's also one of the reasons why i came to work at browns was just to understand how we could you start using the technology play in the store environment and how that can merge and actually give you a new shopping experience it's a little more personalized for you as you come in the store and you know what is the store look like how is that going to evolve what is that going to be for you know all what we all want and we can get anything we want at our fingertips basically at you know 2 30 in the morning so why do you want to walk into a store so for me it's about how that's evolving and what that journey means for the customer and maybe just the person who's browsing again it's like that clash of old and new great uh do we have another question there's another question uh there if you could just tell us who you are and ask your question that'd be great hi there um i'm vienna i'm one of business of fashion's future voices so it's great to see you again nick and um thank you so much for coming yeah thank you um thanks for this talk it's been really fascinating hearing your stories and learning from your experience um my question is i don't know probably quite simple but i think it's very practical i feel like i'm looking around this room and i'm seeing a lot of people who you know maybe have dreams to start their own fashion business or media company or whatever it is one day and i think what you said about creating culture is really important and that it has to be relevant i completely agree with that but i think it still kind of doesn't get over the hurdle of the fact that we are so oversaturated with images and content and things like that and you can have an instagram account you can be on a facebook page you can optimize your you know seo or searches or whatever with pinterest but at the end of the day there's so many people doing that what do you think is the best strategy to actually get your relevant content out there so that people can see it i think for me it's about understanding the culture that you want to be part of and then working with the voices so i think there's a little step back that needs to be said that's this is what i was saying we're at saturation point there's just so much out there what is going to be the one thing that's going to make your brand different and stand out and it's got to be the reason for it existing so you go if i love so for me fashion or drinks or whatever is really about culture because there's never just one thing it's not only about the fashion it's about the culture that surrounds it so if you're into you know sneakers and it's hip-hop or whatever it's the culture of hip-hop and sneakers is part of that or if you're into um you know really insane makeup and it's you know it's electronic music that's cool too that's so it's almost like how do you become part of the culture where your product has a role to play i think that's really what it's about or else you're just shooting the dark um it's your reason to exist would you think that would happen through you know collaborations and things like that sure and i think and i think people are open to it that's what i've always found as i said i had no context at all but i found a lot of people who and especially in london um where you're almost embraced for being completely different and and in fact that's what people want to see from a place like london that's why we've all come here that's why you know we're here and i think what happens is because there's this fomo oh i've got to do my shoot like that because these hundred other instagram people are doing it like that means that everything just becomes super generic so you need to decide not you people need to decide what is their point of view what is the culture they're trying to be part of and what is your contribution to that and how are you going to do that that's the only way for me where you're going to get these amazing experiences because they're going to be rooted in who you are and what you're about just fomo guys i'd build on that as well to say and this is this isn't really a strategy per se but i'd say that talent is still really really important yeah and like you know you talked about products like you know the product still has to be amazing and like for us the way that you then kind of communicate your brand and product is still it's really important and you know we talk about it a lot because obviously photography is a really big part of the id brands and it's like everyone's a photographer now we've all got iphones we've all got instagram channels but you know for us looking for the next you know amazing photographer we've you know um worked really early on with harleyware and now she's like a huge name and like it's just people like that that are actually standing out they've got the courage to do something different but they've also just you know they're working really bloody hard on their skills and their ability to kind of make things that um that's that do stand out and i think there's a lot of cynicism around that i think that people think that talent's not important anymore and and there is you know there is a bit of that like crazy influence and marketing stuff and certain influences that have billions of followers and i watch their videos and i'm like what is going on but um we're gonna get a lot of guys please help me but you know i i still and and for longevity as well like you know if brands want to last like commitment to making great stuff is still like as important as ever as it's ever been sure i'm going to take one more question from the floor do we have one more there's definitely one down here i'm sorry we're going to run out of time again blame the host my fault um just introduce yourself please and one question sure hi i'm nanky um so i very recently launched my own brand congratulations you it's exciting what's the brand called it's called galad india um should pick a lot but we're working on seo so god india till then um and it's very exciting and to your cultural point we've tried to keep it very different but everyone seems to come to us and say influencer marketing that's the cheapest way to go that's the way to get your name out but as a brand that wants more substance we need a proper campaign and that's expensive how does a new brand sustain in that kind of an environment so for me it depends on what you define as influencer marketing if that means going here's 10 people i'm going to send them stuff or i'll have to pay them to do pay them a lot so so but for me that's that's not influenced that's called advertising that's expensive what i'm trying to say from my point of view and my experience is your point of view is you've got you've got a reason to exist and you have a point of view how do you even work with one other person and then you create something so brilliant in in in your campaign or in your in your imagery or whatever it is that that gets shared and then you can get the scale do you understand you don't need to have many people to work with you just you could work with one person an amazing photographer or whoever it doesn't have to be many because if you have something that's amazing it will be shared do you understand and that's what well maybe we'll catch up with you i'll catch up with you afterwards because there's something the beauty of social is that people share it and that's how you get scale but for people to share it has to be awesome and if something isn't awesome no one shares it and then you don't get bigger so that's the point you've got to do something awesome but it doesn't have to be with many influences it can be with one group of one someone who can influence because they're doing something different do you mind if i quickly ask one more so do you in your experience have you ever seen a brand have a click that it just goes viral because they put up one post i don't i have never seen that 50 comments and 10 likes personally for me i don't i i've never seen that and i've been around for 20 years so and for me personally and even if i can't sort of cite any examples but even you know like sometimes when that does happen whether that actually would convert to sort of a sale um would be you know i'd question that i think and and to be honest i feel like actually there's a lot of stuff that happens way before so supreme everyone talks about now is 20 years old i don't know if everyone realizes that brand has been around for a long long time my husband wore it the first time around so we see what we see today but that's built on culture and created that comes after time i think it'd be very hard to just do that in that word viral that's another word that's a myth that's not what you've seen in your you know in the in the various roles you've had in retail have you sort of seen that way you feel like something has just exploded from nowhere yeah no i have in fact i was just thinking always get it wrong kate middleton when she wore that blue dress and at the time i was working at netapporte and we had that blue dress what's the brand of that it was issa but east has been around for a long time yeah they've been around but i mean that they already had a following and whatnot but that her wearing that dress i mean it just blew out the door we did a reorder and we could have done like if they had enough fabric we could have sold thousands and thousands of units off the back of her wearing that dress but you know they always say like the kardashians this and the da da da all those ones that we love to hate um that they do have influence we totally get that but it's not necessarily is it is it on brand for you is it who you want to be does it make sense and and a lot of time in a lot of cases it doesn't it actually doesn't but i think it's as long as you're being authentic and genuine to who you are and you and you find the people that want to do that with you i mean it's it's incredible like what you can actually do if you can find the right people to work with or get a princess to wear your dress that's a good strategy i'm gonna ask one final question and i'm looking for a one-word answer from each of you um and uh and what the question is and i don't think i pre-prepped you for this so this is a bit naughty but you definitely didn't mention this one there are a lot of very ambitious people very talented people in the audience and if you had to think of one characteristic and or attribute of somebody who's going to be successful in the fashion industry going forward what would you probably what would you say is the one thing when you you know a lot of people coming to you looking for jobs what's the one thing that you look for in somebody enthusiasm enthusiasm perfect one-word answer that was a really good one yeah thank you yeah i got it enthusiasm enthusiasm curiosity leila final one from you um for me it's literally like the passion of what you do and it includes all these things i think all of these all of these areas are kind of connected together because without passion you're not curious and you won't be enthusiastic and probably the other way around so for me that's really what it's about and i think curiosity is a personal thing for me as well but you stole that one that is a mantra to live life by i think so we have run out of time um but if you will just bear with me i have some thank yous that i want to give and uh three letters yeah and some other stuff that i've been briefed to do but let's start with the thank yous and would you first start in joining me in thanking a wonderful panel it's been absolutely fantastic thank you all so much um i'd also like to thank topshop um it's been such a privilege to partner with topshop on these inside the industry events this is the third one as i say and they've all been absolutely fantastic and we don't get to put on these type of things without a wonderful partner in topshop and a lot of work goes on behind the scenes so i'd like to thank topshop and everybody who at topshop has worked on this and put this together so thank you um i'd also like to thank the barbican this is an amazing space to um have one of these and i feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to host something here it's a great it's a great building so thank you very much to everyone at barbican for putting us up here but i also would like to thank the bof team i have the pleasure of sitting on this stage and having this wonderful conversation but as you can all imagine a lot of work goes on behind the scenes the brf team are absolutely fantastic so thank you so much to all of the bof guys um and i'd like to thank all of you for joining us both the people in the room and on the live stream as i guessed the questions were much better from the floor than the ones i asked so you've made me look good so thank you very much for that but thank you so much for devoting your time to come to come to this um three little things i just wanted to mention one of the attributes of the partnership we have with uh topshop is they have enabled us to provide free student access for bof professionals so any of you in the room who aren't brf professional student members if you make sure you leave us your email address you get free access to that the second thing uh if anybody in the room is interested in uh bof education courses olivia is here somewhere right at the back um we do run some courses we are committed to helping people break into and succeed in the fashion industry so if you're interested in one of our courses please see olivia and last but definitely definitely not least we will be having some drinks after this so uh if you've got time to join us for a drink and do some networking uh we'll be in the conservatory i think i've always wanted to say that that's very quick we'll be doing drinks in the conservatory um and so please do join us but that is all we've got time for so thank you again and thank you for the panel

Channel: The Business of Fashion

Views: 85,221

Keywords: The Business of Fashion, i-D Magazine, Platform13, business, Fashion Education, Topshop, Inside Fashion, Luxury Fashion, fashion, insider, How to build a brand in fashion, Fashion Brand, Fashion, Holli Rogers, Leila Fatar

Id: 2sTTELiNGB0

Length: 64min 57sec (3897 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 01 2017