How does Fashion Week decide the season’s trends, must finds, and “it” designers?

In an ideal world, fashion trends would present themselves via an organic process through which buyers and editors attend shows at Fashion Weeks and determine what they do and don’t like by what they see strutting down the catwalk. Yet, the fact remains that marketing is as much a part of in which designers buyers are interested as it is what pieces they decide to stock.

London Fashion Week, like its cousins in New York, Milan, and Paris, is historically a B2B industry event. Even while publications like British Vogue seek to bypass this tradition in favor of Online Fashion Weeks to target consumers directly, hordes of editors and buyers still frequent the main Fashion Weeks to see the latest design collections.

Editors and buyers are simply too busy to remember everything they see, even if they are excellent note-takers. While their educated opinion on what is innovative and what will sell in part is determined by how they view a collection when they first see it, even the most seasoned editor cannot remember everything.

Within the month-long circus that is New York/London/Milan/Paris, editors and buyers must rely upon designer look-books and line-sheets to study collections, gauge trends, and determine marketability and the sell factor before they promote one piece over another or one trend over another.

However, much of what we all covet for a particular season is determined at Fashion Week. The presence of bloggers at Fashion Weeks, for instance, in addition to live-streaming, establishes an unprecedented immediacy and depth of response among a wider population just as soon as a piece walks down the runway. That is, with so many people watching runway shows live via the internet, consumers are immediately making up their minds about what they find impressive and what they would potentially purchase. This is why bloggers are situated front row at Fashion Week–because they function as research for editors and buyers to determine what impassions consumers before they even get to the point of sale.

The decision on “the” trends for a particular season, on the other hand, is inherently much more random. Designers obviously don’t consult each other before sending a collection down the runway, even if he or she is an established designer who wants to consider what his or her competitors are doing. The fact remains that trends are at best an agglomeration of a season’s collections with a massive dose of marketing to make everything seem fresh and interesting.

Marketing is a matter of taking what’s in front of you and revealing its inner desirability to represent a brand or designer appropriately and, in turn, to encourage sales.

This is why the logistics of Fashion Week doesn’t always mesh well with what a buyer ultimately decides to purchase. Running from show to show makes watching collections often marvelous in person but forgettable in the long run simply by the number of shows that one attends.

In the end, for designers, assembling a collection must be part-art and part-marketing in order to influence buyers and editors.

During Fashion Week, the challenge then becomes a matter of balancing the creative with the sales pitch in a runway show or collection presentation. This is not always an easy game, particularly for emerging designers who may lack proper support or funding to promote their work in the right way.

The beauty industry as we know it has evolved into a multi-billion dollar industry. Documented as far back as Ancient Egypt, cosmetics continue to thrive even though they do little more than appeal to our vanity. Today, it takes more than knowledge of plants and minerals for beauty brands to rise to the top. The competitive nature of the beauty industry demands smart marketing from brands that want to prosper.

For an industry that markets primarily to women, it’s imperative for beauty brands to be tuned into the health and beauty desires of modern women.  This is easier than ever in the age of e-commerce and social media.  However, it takes more than simply listening to and reaching out to beauty consumers online.  Similar to the fashion industry, the beauty industry must find ways to reinvent the wheel to keep women coming back for more.

Luckily for the beauty industry, many modern societies push the idea that makeup enhances the beauty of women.  So, we see everyone–from little toddler girls playing with tinted lip balm to elderly women spritzing on their trusted perfumes–indulging in beauty products. Beauty products maintain a strong presence on TV, in the movies, and in print and digital ad campaigns–just to name a few places.  Indeed, our society is still doing a great deal of work for the beauty industry:  keeping beauty products visible, relevant, and high on the list of women’s wants.

With thousands of brands to choose from, modern women are increasingly savvy about their beauty product purchases.  In the Digital Age, they can see what their friends like on Facebook, read the beauty buzz on Twitter, and consider the reviews found on their favorite beauty blogs and e-commerce sites.  So, it takes more than simply being a beauty brand today;  brands must find ways to smartly market to these beauty conscious women.

Beauty Brands Primping with Smart Marketing

We’ve pulled together a few examples of smart marketing within the beauty industry. These are a few of the industry leaders that seem to have what it takes to remain at the top of a competitive market.

MAC Cosmetics: MAC has one of the best e-commerce sites in the industry, but doesn’t stop there.  Easy to navigate, MAC’s website also commands attention due to its beautiful images and ad campaigns.  Mapped out efficiently, MAC offers several features on its e-commerce site, including professional virtual assistance, product reviews, and its social “Shop Together” feature.  With nearly 3 million fans on Facebook, MAC also has an active Facebook brand page.  Proving that it is tapped into what women love, MAC is also known for its pop culture celebrity collaborations.  Recent successful limited edition MAC collections include Hello Kitty, Tarina Tarantino, and Lady Gaga. MAC’s favorable status is reinforced by the photos snapped of MAC makeup artists, who are permanent fixtures backstage at many fashion weeks.

Benefit Cosmetics:  When a woman familiar with Benefit Cosmetics hears the brand’s name, the first thing that likely pops into her mind is its pretty packaging and delightful in-store displays.  While the brand’s logo remains consistent throughout, each of its products has a personality of its own, sporting anything from a crystal-encrusted case to a retro-illustrated box.  Using popular catch phrases and girlie-girl packaging, Benefit knows that design is an important component of its brand.  It has a lot of fun with product names; from “Hello flawless” to “BADgal,” the brand possesses a definite cool girl vibe.  This creative approach carries over into Benefit’s social media channels, particularly its blog and Facebook page.

Sephora:  Sephora is essentially a makeup-filled candy store for women.  With a variety of brands that modern women crave, Sephora is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to beauty retailers.  Its e-commerce site is as well laid out and inviting as its brick and mortar stores.  Regardless of which way you shop, you are greeted with expert tips, a great selection, and pleasing presentation.  Sephora carries a brand of its own alongside its competitors, and while it tends to be more budget-friendly, it seems to fly off the shelves just as quickly as the bigger names.  Sephora maintains a powerful presence online, with a popular e-commerce site which boasts several facets, including expert tips, a YouTube channel with visual how-tos, iPhone and iPad apps, a loyalty program, and more.

Marketing Products That Sell Themselves

In the Digital Age, even beauty brands that offer the most popular, quality products, cannot get lazy about branding and marketing strategies. These three beauty brand profiles illustrate the fact that there are several components that work together to create a successful brand.

Is the digitalization of fashion a good thing for young designers? Does it provide them with more resources in a relatively cost-free environment? Or does the world of digital make things more difficult for emerging design talent, particularly since so many designers are now able to market their collections to consumers straight off the runway, whether via online fashion weeks or other direct sales initiatives?

To make their designs known, emerging designers these days need more than beautiful design and perfect craftsmanship. They need to be savvy about business management, PR, marketing, and social media in order to understand how to get their creations noticed by busy editors, buyers, and ultimately consumers. It is for this reason that emerging designers need support mechanisms from all corners, including business formation advice, financial management, brand coaching, and marketing and social media strategy.

This is not to say that a designer cannot be a success if he or she is not on Twitter. But, social media can make things easier for designers and businesses in general to connect with fashion lovers everywhere to find out what strikes their imagination and inspires them in the world of fashion. Social media is obviously also a great connector. Like LinkedIn, Twitter has an inherently open vibe when it comes to networking because those who participate in the Twitterverse are generally there by choice and so thus are implicitly open and interested in dialogue.

Yet, the communicatory nature of social media is not always good for an independent designer wanting to be taken seriously. Twitter, like other forms of social media, has no rules of etiquette, so many brands in fashion and luxury ignore it, fearing quality control issues. But, the demographics of social media continue to shift away from simply teenagers into working professionals and an older population.

Further, the shift of Fashion Weeks into a digital concept, particularly one purposefully B2C, means that young designers may lose a chance to demonstrate their talents to their industry peers, editors, and buyers. While the concept of Online Fashion Week seems fun for consumers and big business for well-known brands, emerging designers face issues of resource constraints, lack of recognition, and the inability to compete with brands and designers who are much more well-established.

On the other hand, young and emerging designers may stand to earn the greatest gain from the digital world simply due to its low-cost, all-access nature. It’s just a matter of approaching it in the right way, perhaps. The success of the UK-based Young British Designers demonstrates that consumers are hungry for authentic, original design from emerging talent. It’s not that consumers, editors, and buyers aren’t interested, it’s just that they need to have things presented in a compelling and consistent way in order to make a young designer’s creations stand out from the crowd.

In this way, it is clear that young and emerging designers fundamentally lack support from all sectors. The efforts of programs like Project Runway perhaps have gone some way to show the public the ins and outs of the struggles of young designers. Yet, it is obviously not enough.

In the UK, Vauxhall Fashion Scout and British Fashion Council do an excellent job of sponsoring and supporting selected young designers, particularly through schemes such as NEWGEN. Yet, they are limited to a handful of five or so designers and thus do not provide support for the larger group of emerging designers out there. In the US, the situation is perhaps more dire. While the CFDA has funding schemes, these are not on the same level as those of the British Fashion Council. Even with excellent organizations like StartUp FASHION that provide marketing and business support for young designers, the US is shockingly thin in terms of organizations designed to provide business or resource support for emerging fashion talent.

The digitalization of fashion can only be good for young designers—or any designer for that matter—if they are given the training, capital, and resource support to utilize these tools to their best advantage.

On the eve of London Fashion Week, Atelier 36 is very excited to see catwalk presentations of designers from every experience level, particularly at Vauxhall Fashion Scout. Young designers have the passion, innovation, and creativity that many more well-established designers lack. The industry must simply start providing more support mechanisms for them to continue to achieve the recognition and attention they deserve.