How do you get someone to pay you money to be associated with something as intangible as your brand?

The first time doing this is always the most difficult, but below are some tricks that you can use to drastically increase your chances of being successful in the endeavor.

Plan your fashion show

The first step is having a plan that’s as concrete as possible. Know exactly how it will be, what your budgets will be, etc. It is unlikely that you’ll have every detail planned, but do a realistic budget which gives you an idea of how much sponsorship you need to raise.

This is as much for your own sake as for the sponsor’s sake. It will give you the confidence to go out and know exactly how much you need to ask for.

Research sponsors

Now that you have a plan for how to proceed it’s time to find the sponsor. This is where many people give up. Where should you start? A great place to start is to look at who is sponsoring your competitors’ shows. In some cases one company will sponsor a number of shows and you can approach them. This is easiest because they already know how it works and realise the benefits since they already done sponsorships.

This is not always possible. For a start, companies only have limited sponsorship budgets and they might well be tied up with your competitors already. A clever trick is to approach the competitors of whoever sponsors other fashion labels. For example, if Champagne house X sponsors shows, approach Champagne house Y with a proposal. Even if you have never worked with a sponsor before, you can point to the benefits enjoyed by X as proof that this really works.

Negotiating with sponsors

This is the point at which you really have to show that you know what you’re doing. Approach them with a clear proposal and make it as easy as possible for them to write you a cheque. Writing sponsorship proposals is an art in itself

Figure out what they want and give it to them. What’s important to them? What type of prominence can you give to their brand? Be careful of giving them too much, you don’t want every single photo of your show to be plastered over with the sponsor’s logo. On the other hand the sponsor has to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth for the sponsorship.

Corporate sponsors love getting free tickets to fashion shows so that their executives can take their partners along to a glamorous evening. They like when there’s going to be a lot of press around. They like it when there are lots of ‘influencers’ who might have a positive impact on their brand. All these things matter. Do a quick breakdown of who will be there.

Getting the sponsor’s money

After focusing on what you have to offer them, move on to what you need from them. If you have done a good job of selling the benefits in the above step, this will be much easier and the sponsor will actually want to give you the money.

To avoid a deadlock it’s a good idea to have a few different scenarios planned. For example, if you pay us £10,000, you’ll get your logo on invitations, logo on a backdrop to the catwalk, etc.

A great trick is to start with presenting a very expensive option. If this proves to be too much for the sponsor’s budget, you can move on to alternative scenarios for less money and less exposure.

Following up with your sponsor

This is a step that fashion labels often neglect after taking sponorship. After the show, you should put together a brief presentation pack with pictures, press coverage of the show and the like. This will allow the person dealing with the sponsorship to justify the expense to his superiors. The better this look the better your chances of getting repeat sponsorship from that sponsor and the easier it becomes to approach new sponsors in the future!

Tell us about your experiences with sponsors and share your tips in the comments.

If you are a young label yourself, you should get your head around the UK based startup WorldOnAHanger. Speeding things up is important for a successful fashion business today, and often this is utterly complicated as you have to manage globally widespread collaborators and resources.

By giving designers and growing labels the kind of structure that they need to grow, WoaH helps them to adapt and to stay flexible even as teams grow across borders and they gain sales agents and supply partners across the world.

It’s been an exciting year for World on a Hanger. The highlights were moving out of beta and launching our sponorship of the British Fashion Council’s NEWGEN designers.

We’re excited that every day more and more designers from around Europe are signing up to try WoaH.

Having more users means that we get more feedback, and we’ve worked hard at quickly responding to your suggestions and making the system better tailored to your needs. Here are some of the major improvements from the last six months.

More powerful sales

Invoicing has become much easier to manage, and you can create multiple invoices and quotes for all your orders. There are also due dates to help you chase up payments and better manage cash flows.

Sales groups mean that you can now invoice from different locations and give your sales agents access to their own orders in WoaH.

Better stock management

Multiple warehouses is a feature that many of you asked for. It’s proving very useful for managing stock as it moves around. It’s also great for managing consignment sales.

The newly introduced stock transfers between warehouses are great for monitoring items in transit and keeping better track of where stock is.

Easier to use

Finally, we’ve made big improvements in making the system easier to use and taking the pain out of entering large amounts of data. The goal is to make all your data accessible in an intuitive way with the minimum number of clicks.

Finally, we’ve made big improvements in making the system easier to use and taking the pain out of entering large amounts of data. The goal is to make all your data accessible in an intuitive way with the minimum number of clicks.

Find out more about these and other improvements in the What’s New section of our website. We look forward to working with you in the New Year and wish you a prosperous 2010!

This means that we’ve been selected from over 1,500 applicants to take part in a one week event where we’ll have access to  “400 mentors from a top-tier network of company builders; including seed investors, serial entrepreneurs, product experts, HR and PR specialists, marketers, lawyers, recruiters, journalists and venture capitalists.”

What does this mean for our users? It means that we’ll be brainstorming how to improve our service to you with some of the most brilliant business people in Europe. We’ll also be learning from the experiences of other promising startups.

All this will help us achieve our main goal: to better solve the problems you face in running your fashion business. We have big plans for the future, and Seedcamp is one of the best stepping stones imaginable to realising those plans.

And, as always, if you have ideas (no matter how far-fetched) for how technology could make your life in fashion easier, let us know!

The first session covered sponsorship and featured speakers from the British Fashion Council and Vauxhall, giving two different perspectives on how designers can successfully seek sponsorships. Advice ranged from the obvious (don’t be shy to pick up the phone) to very interesting inside-tips on how the sponsorship process works (look at who is currently sponsoring fashion and seek out their competitors, remember to follow up with your sponsors, show results).

Yesterday’s session covered PR, including how to get the most out of working with PR agencies and how to do your PR in-house. Here are some of the points raised with comments:

• Make your own news. Actively create newsworthy pieces – these may include a show, a celebrity wearing / talking about your creations, a collaboration with another designer or similar one-off project. Journalists are always looking for news and it’s best to serve them up ready for publication! Look at the sorts of stories that are coming up in your favourite media for inspiration.
• Tell your own story, but don’t go overboard. It’s important to include a paragraph or two about who you are and what you want to get across with your creations. The more compelling the story, the more likely it is to be published. Avoid a long CV-style rehash of everything you’ve done. Rather, start off with where you are now, and move on to discussing your relevant background in relation to that.
• Give a taste of what your collections are about. If you don’t have the resources to put on elaborate shows this is a great avenue to get more of your vision across. Help the reader understand what inspired you. Also consider putting it in the context of your other work.
• Make sure press releases are newsworthy. Your press releases should tell a coherent, specific story. Look over your press releases and make sure they contains an actual story that an outsider would be able to pick up clearly. More importantly, make sure an outsider would be able to retell that story in an interesting way. It’s a good idea to show it to some friends and ask them how they would retell that story in their own words.
• Have a press pack ready. If a media outlet is interested in your story, make sense you have plenty of materials ready for them if they want to do a story on you. Watch this space for more tips on putting together an effective press pack.
• Stay on the radar. Even if you don’t get coverage, getting word out about what you’re up to is vital. Make sure your name is coming to the attention of journalists periodically.
• Find journalists and build relationships with them. Look at the masthead of the publications you want to be featured in and get to know what different journalists are interested in. Pick one or two that you think might be interested in what you’re doing. Find their contact details or telephone their organisation to find out.
• Working with a PR agency is a complement, not a substitute for your own PR. Agencies bring many benefits, most importantly contacts and expertise. However, they can often be more reactive than proactive. Many agencies simply provide space in a showroom and don’t go out of their way to promote you. Make sure you talk to the agency periodically to check what they’re doing for you.
• One off PR for shows. If you’re doing a show, but don’t have a PR agency it makes sense to hire an agency to fill up seats and handle distributing the invitations. Agencies will have a database of people they can invite to your show, and the one-off fee involved is lower than contracting an agency for all your PR.

As you can see it was a very informative and useful session. For more information look at the Vauxhaull Fashion Scout website. It’s free to attend for all emerging designers.

There are two things that technology can have an impact on: revenue and costs.

Boosting revenue through technology

There are two types of customer that fashion labels need to reach: buyers and consumers. If you reach consumers, the buyers will follow. That’s why it’s important to get press exposure. If buyers expect it will sell, they’ll stock it in their shops.

• Social marketing – reaching out to customers online has never been easier. Engage them through interaction on your site, use social networks, twitter, blogs, etc. There are endless possibilities. Use them creatively.
• Selling online - the figures speak for themselves. Despite a small slump in recent months, online retailers continue to outperform the high street.  It’s been predicted (by IMRG in this article) that 20 per cent of all UK retail will be online this year. If your market is young, the percentage is probably much higher.
• Online sample sales - samples sales have long been a way for hard up designers to generate some quick cash. Often, however, they can be more trouble than they’re worth. That’s where selling samples online becomes attractive: simply load up your inventory and wait for the orders to come rolling in. To get noticed you may need to do a bit of promotion – or leave it to one of the sample sale websites out there (eg. Catwalk Genius)
• Online showrooms - rather than going to the same old trade shows and standing around for a few days waiting for buyers to come to you, you can interact with your buyers in online showrooms. More on these later.

Cutting costs through technology

To save time and money while running your business – take a look at our website to see how World on a Hanger can help!

This is a top place for seeing what young designers from all over the world are doing. I’ve been told it’s more vibrant and edgier than London Fashion Week.. It’s billed as a ’stepping stone between graduate shows and the mainstream fashion industry’. It’s my first time going to Alternative Fashion Week so I don’t know what to expect. I’ll keep you updated!

Another reason why I find it interesting is their emphasis on ethical and sustainable fashion. There was no shortage of this at London Fashion Week AW ‘09 (see Esthetica). However, it’s encouraging to see how fast the emphasis is shifting in favour of sustainability.

We’ll be around in Spitalfields over the next few days. Get in touch if you want to meet – or tap us on the shoulder if you recognize one of us from our profiles.

Especially interesting is Phillip Lim’s (of 3.1) comment about carefully safeguarding brand image rather than compromising it with money making schemes. The question faced by designers of whether to diversify or focus on their core collections is even more acute when the economy is in trouble.

Here are some cost cutting tips from young designers interviewed in the article

• Source from home - Thuy Diep (of Thuy) began sourcing through New York agents, rather than making the trip across the Atlantic to Paris
• Source from home - Chris Benz suggests a similar approach – instead of going to Première Vision for fabrics he will source them in New York through agents
• Smart pricing - Thuy suggests introducing more affordable styles alongside more expensive signature pieces
• Cut back on samples - Figure out how you can get by with fewer samples at fashion shows / showrooms; Koi Suwannagate cut down from 24 to 15 looks in her latest show
• Bring sales in-house - Koi Suwannagate suggests bringing sales in-house; this can help to foster more direct links with customers, making you more sensitive to their needs

Funnily enough the Midlands used to be the heartland of the British textile and clothing industry. That’s still true to some extent – there are still a lot of manufacturers based there, although sadly it’s declined quite dramatically in recent years. In the UK alone, the number of VAT registered clothing and footwear manufacturers declined from nearly 8,500 in 1998 to just over 3,200 in 2007.

Apart from the obvious – China and India – where are small fashion companies having their clothes made these days?

The winner of the CFDA / Vogue Fashion Fund Awards was announced by John Galliano and Charlize Theron at the annual gala dinner last night.

Wang joins previous years’ winners Rogan (2007), Doo-Ri Chung (2006) and Trovata (2005) in getting a $200,000 award as well as a year of mentoring from fashion luminaries.

The runners up this year were Vena Cava’s Lisa Mayock and Sophie Buhai and Albertus Q. Swanepoel from Albertus Quartus, who each get $50,000 and a business mentor.

It doesn’t get much more high profile than this: the selection committee includes Vogue’s Anna Wintour and Sally Singer, Barneys New York Julie Gilhart, Patrick Robinson of Gap and Theory’s Andrew Rosen.

So what does it take to win? According to Zac Posen the key to making a choice are “risk, distinction” and to “know how to take a creative voice and build it into a business.” The emphasis here is on being able to grow as a business. Designers take note.

Look at the video highlights at style.com

Thanks to fashionologie & WWD.