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Toronto Fashion Events

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Toronto is one of the fastest growing cities in North America, and has gained a reputation for being one of the most liveable cities in the world. Aside from the high real estate prices, Torontonians enjoy their city’s arts & cultural scene, including an emerging fashion movement.

Toronto has an official “fashion week” twice a year, sponsored by World MasterCard and it is part of the IMG conglomerate, but more importantly the city holds events throughout the year supported by different local organizations, that in return support local talent. I couldn’t find an official fashion calendar for Toronto, so I put together what I thought were the important upcoming fashion events this Spring/Summer, and if you know of any others, let us know!

Fashion Art Toronto is an annual event that each year focuses on a different theme and celebrates the expression of art through fashion, photography, fashion film and art installations. This year the 5 day event is once again held at Daniels Spectrum (585 Dundas St East) and $40 gets you a full day of events.

This year, from April 21st to 25th, 100 artists will explore the #MADEINCANADA theme in one of the 5 sub-themes, with a different theme being presented each night: Great Wild, Cold North, Group of Seven, Northern Lights and Global Village.

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Keeping in line of the made in Canada theme, Inland takes place May 2nd to May 3rd at  the hip 99 Sudbury location in Liberty Village. The 2 day event takes place twice a year and it is basically a pop-up event for Canadian emerging fashion talent. The location offers a very fun, relaxed shopping experience, and with 80 designers showcasing from clothes to jewellery and shoes, there is something for everyone!

Inland is the perfect platform for local designers. It is much more affordable and inclusive than a traditional fashion week and it allows for a personal interaction between designers, consumers and retail buyers.  Tickets are sold at the door for $5, see you there!

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In Toronto there are also many fashion design schools, one of them is part of George Brown College where I have the honour to teach Social Media for Fashion Marketing. This end of year’s fashion show is held at the schools’ waterfront campus (can’t wait to see it – wonderful architecture!) on April 21st. I’ll probably meet a lot of my previous students and I look forward seeing our local aspiring fashion talent showcase. Tickets are free and you can get them on Eventbrite.

If you are in the mood for an elegant evening spent with everyone’s who’s someone in the Toronto Fashion industry, then you must attend this year’s #FajoSocial Spring event held in the heart of the city on May 12th. There will be local vendors, music, cocktails, crazy outfits, swag bags, an auction and so much more!

The list couldn’t have been complete without the New Labels Show organized by the Toronto Fashion Incubator. While the general admission tickets are all sold out, if you have deep pockets you can indulge in the VIP experience with a premier ticket for $175. Year after year, this Spring event has showcased some of the country’s best talent, and on May 4th you are invited at the prestigious One King West location for cocktails and fashion.

Finally, I’d love to mention an event that we are supporting, the MSH District‘s first hackathon. The MSH District is a space dedicated to the development and launch of new ideas and products made of fabric. The hackathon is a three day event from April 16th to the 19th and I look forward mentoring the next generation of fashion entrepreneurs through this much needed new venture.

This article was written by our co-founder Ana Caracaleanu.

 

 

 

Fashion Crowdfunding – The Challenges

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Over the last year we’ve seen hundreds of applications from eager independent fashion designers who want to take their brand to the next level, with a little help from crowdfunding. So,what is crowdfunding? Simply put, today, crowdfunding means raising money from different individuals through an online portal.

There are three types of crowdfunding: donation based crowdfunding, when the project owner gets “donations” for his or her cause; reward based crowdfunding, when the project owner provides different rewards to backers for their monetary support; and there is equity based crowdfunding, when the project owner gives away equity in return for money.

Luevo’s crowdfunding platform is product-based,  very similar to the reward based crowdfunding model. On our platform, fashion designers use their product as a reward, so those interested in supporting a  brand they can do it by pre-purchasing a product. It is the basis of pretail and the future of fashion.

With so many choices and success stories, crowdfunding is an easy way of raising money, right? Wrong. Crowdfunding like any other type of fund raising has its challenges. More so, studies show that fashion based projects have a lower than average success rate (for example, on Kickstarter – the largest crowdfunding platform the average success rate is about 40%, however fashion projects have  success rate of approximately 25%)

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I feel it is my duty to give you some insights into the challenges of creating a successful fashion crowdfunding campaign, and in a future article I’ll go over best practices and hacks you can use as a fashion project owner.

1. Time.

Project owners underestimate the amount of time they need to put into building a successful campaign. I sometimes get the very eager fashion designer asking me “I want to use your platform, how soon can I login and use it?” Well, like with any other platform, designers can use our system any time. However, my answer always includes a reminder that they should spend at least 2 months preparing for the campaign.

And this is the first challenge: taking time away from your day-to-day business in order to plan, create and monitor your crowdfunding campaign. And once the campaign is over, you are not done yet! Hopefully you’ve been successful and now it’s time to prepare those rewards for your backers.

2. Money.

Funny enough, you need money to make more money. You will need money for marketing, PR, and even for creating the rewards, packaging and shipping. Most often, packaging seems to be an overlooked expense that you will encounter. You will also need to set aside a budget for the campaign itself: you will need good photography (especially if  you are using your products as rewards), a video and you even might need help from a copy writer. All of these cost money.

3. Rewards

Creating the actual rewards can be a challenge, especially for fashion designers. The most successful campaigns on Kickstarter are those that have”affordable” reward levels, like gaming projects. Gaming project owners can ask for small amounts in return for early access to the game or other features. This is easily achievable for digital projects but not as much for physical product companies, like fashion brands.

So the challenge to overcome here is to find the right suppliers and manufacturers, lower your production costs, and give discounts to your initial buyers in a crowdfunding campaigns.

I know this last point will not sit well with most designers. But you have to think of a crowdfunding campaign like any other marketing campaign. The highest cost to pay is to gain a new customer, but once you do gain them, your goal is to sell them again, and again (cheaper to retain than acquire customers).

With a crowdfunding campaign, you not only gain new customers, but you gain PR, advocacy, word of mouth marketing and support and so much more. You will gain brand ambassadors that will advocate for you and support you in your venture’s future. So yes, while there are challenges, the rewards are much greater, and  a crowdfunding campaign should be seen as only a part of your ongoing branding and marketing efforts.

If you enjoyed this article, check out our crowdfunding e-book, 77 pages full of templates, workbooks and step by step instructions on how to build a successful crowdfunding campaign on any platform.

This article was written by our co-founder Ana Caracaleanu.

Fashion Branding – the case of Patagonia (part 1)

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What is branding?

Branding is creating a unique name and image for a product or range of products in the consumers’ mind. Branding focuses on influencing the perception of customers as an image or impression is built in the mind of customers. The idea of branding came up when the product itself was not enough in the midst of many competitors. Branding gave more options for the customers to choose from: the brand was an added value to the product. Customers could recognize their set of values through the brand. (Read our Intro to Branding here)

Your logo and identity have more impact than you think, they tell the customers what you stand for, who you are, and who you are talking to. Branding also has a lot of impact on your sales. A great design without good branding will not get noticed in the crowd of up-and-coming fashion designers.

And being noticed is what you are looking for in order to achieve your sales.

Your brand has to be built around your own unique vision, but at the same time make sure to set it up in terms of meaning, values and visual aspect. These 3 points also have to be respected all along the brand life to remain coherent and meaningful to your customers. Poor branding or poorly managed branding communication can go against the purpose of branding and can lead to failure.

In order to better understand how branding can drive the success or the failure of a fashion company we’ll go through a case study and discuss the main concepts of brand visuals, coherence and recognition.

Patagonia

A bit of history

Late 50’s, Yvon Chouinard, ardent rock climber, does not find satisfying climbing gear to his level and technique. From there, he decides to produce himself tools and equipment under the name of Chouinard Equipments. The idea is simple, he needs reliable gear in order to follow his passion, but he also needs money to sustain it. Chouinard Equipments becomes the solution, 6 months working and producing for 6 months of climbing.

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In 1964, his first mail ordering catalog is out. The foreword of all the offers is quality. Why quality? For security. Faulty climbing gear is dangerous. As Yvon Chouinard was himself a customer, his own life was on the line. Second focus was: perfection, taking his motto from Antoine de Saint Exupéry : ” In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness”.

The business started to grow, little by little more of Chouinard friends came on board. Because they lacked  competition (the market was not very profitable at that moment), Chouinard Equipments became the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the US by 1970. Next step for him was to go into clothing.

So the clothing line Patagonia was born in 1973.

The challenge was to maintain the same focus of quality and perfection. Another concern was raised: environment.  Chouinard started to worry about the damage climbers did to the rocks as rock climbing became increasingly popular. That’s when  he came up with the idea of producing  products that would have the least impact on the rocks and on the environment was born.

From the get-go the brand had 3 values to stand by: quality, perfection and environmental. And with that in mind we will evaluate their branding in the second part of this article. Stay tuned!

 

This article was written by Alexandra, fashion consultant. Follow her on Twitter @Stylindublin

Instagram – Lessons from 2014 for emerging fashion designers

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Simply Measured recently released their 2014 Q4 Instagram Study. The study included over 6,000 posts from 82 brands active on Instagram (from Interbrand 2014 top 100 brands),  and over 129,000,000 likes. Basically – think of it as a study of the most successful brands on Instagram. In this post I will summarize their key findings  and how they relate to you, the emerging fashion designer.

If you are a fashion brand, should you care about yet another social media platform?

YES, and here is why Instagram is important:

  • Over 300,000,000 monthly active users
  • Over 2.5 Billion likes per day
  • 86% of brands are already on Instagram
  • Brands have a very high engagement rate on Instagram
Instagram statistics Simply Measured

From SimplyMeasured.com

 

Some of the most interesting findings of this study:

  • The brands in this study are posting more and more on a regular basis
  • Post engagements are steadily growing for these brands
  • The average caption length is 141 characters long – including hashtags
  • But they couldn’t find any direct correlation between caption length and engagement rates
  • Posts that mention another user in the caption get 37% more engagement
  • Top brands have on average 3 hashtags per post
  • Geo-located posts see 50% more engagement

 What should you do?

  1. Post consistently (Experiment and find the right balance for you: maybe it is once a day, maybe it is once a week, but be consistent)
  2. @Mention other users in your posts ( you can do this to show appreciation to partners such  as MUA or to your clients)
  3. Tag the location of your posts (for example if you are at a fashion event)
  4. Focus on content not length of the caption
  5. Filters don’t have a correlation with engagement rates, in fact most brands post with no filters
  6. Don’t go overboard with hashtags; stick to 2-3 per post

Instagram is a very powerful social media platform, remember an image is more than a thousand words! This is why you should use good quality images, use the right hashtags, engage with your fans  and just be creative and have fun with it! If you have any questions about Instagram or your social media strategy, let us help you!

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This article was written by our co-founder Ana Cara, marketing consultant and social media professor.