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.

Before you go

1. Research trade shows to find the one that’s right for you. Look at the online exhibitors list from previous seasons. There are plenty of fashion showrooms out to choose from and you are most likely to do well in a show with similar labels to your own. This also gives you a great opportunity to scope out your competitors. Don’t be shy to ask the organisers for concrete figures on which buyers attend, better positioning, etc. You’re investing in your booth, and you want to make sure you at least make your investment back!

2. Know what your goal is. It helps with preparation if you know what you want to achieve. Are you there to meet existing stockists? Are you trying to develop new relationships? Who are you targeting, buyers or press? Depending on how important each goal is to you, prepare accordingly.

3. Make sure you have a good team with you. More importantly, have a detailed schedule set up for when everyone is manning the booth.

At the trade show

1. Smile, make eye contact, engage people! I’m always surprised to see people hiding at the back of their booth hunched over a laptop. While it quickly gets very boring to be there, you’ll miss opportunities if you hide away. To avoid getting bored, have a good rotation going so that you can take plenty of breaks.

2. Have freebies at your booth. Giving out free sweets or even just very well produced look books can have a powerful impact.

3. Show, then sell. If someone shows interest in your products be there to help them explore and probe them about what they’re looking for, what else they stock, what their customers are like. If you listen carefully you’ll have all the information you need to make an effective sales pitch tailored to their interests.

After the show

Follow up! Everyone you have met will have met tens, if not hundreds of people. Some of them will barely remember you.

Be ready to follow up with people you meet to initiate a business relationship. Don’t leave them guessing and be clear about what you’re proposing. It’s often tough to get buyers to commit at the show itself. This means that it’s even more important to follow up.

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!

We’re all really excited to be a part of this. The NEWGEN alumni list reads like a who’s who of London fashion, and we’re happy to be able to contribute something to the ongoing success of these labels!

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!

I came across this article in the New York Times; here’s a related article from the Herald Tribune. It’s great news for that they are ‘cutting out the middle man’ in terms of cutting costs, this won’t really impact very much on smaller labels.

If you’ve got money to burn, you might as well get Condé Nast to put together your multimillion dollar advertising campaign. But why pay for coverage when there are a hundred other ways to get noticed?

If your PR budget is tight you’re best off with the DIY approach and getting noticed through social media – PRcouture.com has an excellent guide to how to do this.

Twitter rules the roost when it comes to microblogging . In a couple of years it has gone from a bunch of techies chattering to a mainstream phenomenon, with plenty of fashion types on there. Engage with other twitterers and above all have fun. Here are a few tips to get you started.

Other people have done a much better job at guiding would-be PR moguls through the process. The only points I have to add are: be friendly and not spamming. It might take a while, but it’s well worth the effort. Best of all, it’s free!

When you do get on there, make sure you follow us @WorldOnAHanger

]]> http://blog.worldonahanger.com/fashion-advertising-and-pr-on-the-cheap/feed/ 0 http://blog.worldonahanger.com/welcome-to-the-world-on-a-hanger-blog-2/ http://blog.worldonahanger.com/welcome-to-the-world-on-a-hanger-blog-2/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:07:36 +0000 ari http://blog.worldonahanger.com/?p=19 The last months have been very exciting for us here at World on a Hanger. In the course of  building a web-application that promises to help fashion designers and small labels with the business side of things we come across all sorts of wonderful things.  That’s why we’ve decided to set up a blog where we will share our thoughts and allow you to follow our race towards finishing our software and getting it to the masses.

Expect lots of musings about

1. The fashion business
2. Reflections on the technology that is revolutionizing the industry
3. Features on designers who are using tech in exciting new ways
4. Updates how we are progressing with development
5. Anything else that springs to mind!

… Enjoy!