The Drum Awards for Marketing - Extended Deadline

-d -h -min -sec

Fashion Clothing Women

The Social Tailor takes Spencer to Market

Author

By Colin Gilchrist | Digital Strategy Planner

January 17, 2012 | 4 min read

The Social Tailor is a digital marketing agency that has been appointed to design a women's wear fashion collection and take it to market - Huh?!

I'm writing this as the appointed Creative Director of Spencer but also happen to be the face and voice of The Social Tailor... ok, so the back story is this: at college I studied fashion design in London (as Kate Wooding from tictoc can testify - she bought one of my creations in Camden Market back in the 80's), latterly went into retail and became one of Rose Marie Bravo's team at Burberry - for those of you that maybe don't recall, she's the one that took it from the chav's and put it on the catwalk in Paris. I was latterly tasked with pulling Burberry out of Scotland (there were 4 stores) so jumped from fashion into digital marketing (12 years ago) because I didn't want to return to London... so here I am running a social media strategy and web design business in Edinburgh that was approached to pitch for the design of a women's wear collection.

Quite simply I write a blog, not about social media or web design but about fashion - I needed a distraction from my agency that I could get excited about and also create a great case study to encourage clients to write blog posts; so I regularly interview designers get sent press releases and basically stay in touch with the whole environment - a year ago my blog was getting up to 3000 unique visits a day (considerably less now that I became self hosted and put a lot less effort into it - a story for another time).

So because I was talking to an Agency that was looking for a designer to take on this collection - it was a no brainer to provide a collaborative approach all I had to do was identify a design talent who was on the way up that I could work well with and provide a strategy from the inside out - so having met or spoken to a few fashion designers the Scottish Courtourier Judy R Clark stood out a mile. Having recently been appointed by FORD motors to design a dress for a recent press launch and had worked with Alexander McQueen... duly appointed I put the pitch together. 6 weeks later we found ourselves flying out to meet the investors, we signed the contract the same day (this was last month...). Having just flown back with our sample collection tucked neatly under our arms we put together a photo-shoot by Reuben Paris at Studio 128 in Leith - appointed Gaumina (investors choice but I'm happy) to design the website and we'll be in London next month presenting to Buyers...

An interesting approach going with a marketing agency that has great relationships with designers rather than finding a designer then finding a marketing agency...

Fashion Clothing Women

More from Fashion

View all

Trending

Industry insights

View all
Add your own content +