Building a Brand & Taking Chances

What Fashion Week Taught Me About Building a Brand, Taking Chances, and Bringing Ideas to Life.

Philly Fashion Week may be over, but I am still fascinated about watching an idea become a room full of people.  A concept that once existed in someone’s mind became a collection.  A sketch became a garment, and a designer’s vision becomes a runway. And for a few days, the city became a stage for creativity, collaboration, entrepreneurship, and expression.  That was one of my biggest takeaways from attending Philly Fashion Week this year.  I went expecting to experience amazing fashion, which I absolutely did and loved! But I left thinking about brand strategy, business, creativity, courage, and what it really takes to bring an idea to life.

One of the things I couldn’t help but notice throughout Fashion Week was the amount of strategy behind the experience.  When we attend an event, we tend to experience what is immediately in front of us; i.e. the runway, the models, the clothes, the music, the lights, and of course, the overall atmosphere.

But behind every polished moment are dozens, sometimes hundreds, of decisions.  For one, there’s an event space to secure, perhaps permits to obtain, designers to coordinate, models to cast, teams to organize, partners and sponsors to engage, schedules to manage, budgets to consider and communications to execute.  Yet somehow, all of those moving pieces come together to create one cohesive experience.

That is BRAND STRATEGY.

An event isn’t simply something that happens; it is an experience that communicates something.  Every detail contributes to what people see, feel, remember, and ultimately associate with the brand behind it.  This is true whether you’re producing Fashion Week, launching a clothing line, opening a restaurant, creating a conference, building a personal brand, or launching a consulting business.

The experience is part of the brand.

I’m particularly interested in the intersection between creativity and structure, because as we all know, while creativity gets celebrated, structure often doesn’t.  We love the finished collection, but we don’t always see the planning that made it possible.  We don’t see the contracts and conversations behind the event, nor the countless decisions that happened months before, and sometimes mere moments before.

We see the idea once it has become successful, but rarely think about what it took to move that idea from imagination to execution.

Creative people need room to dream. But ideas also need somewhere to go.

Ultimately, ideas need strategy, communication, relationships, and resources.  They need someone to look at the idea and ask, “Okay…so how are we going to make this real?”  That is one of the reasons I’ve become so interested in the business side of creativity. Because I don’t believe creativity and strategy are opposites.  They need one another.

Another part of Fashion Week that stayed with me was seeing emerging designers and creators take up space.  There is something powerful about witnessing people while they are still becoming, before the major recognition or the big collaborations.  That is something to be admired, because let’s face it.  When you’re building something new, there isn’t always evidence that it will work.

You have to develop the idea before you know how people will respond to it and you have to keep going before there is applause.  And most important, and perhaps the scariest of all, you have to be willing to let people see the work before it is perfect.

That’s entrepreneurship. That’s creativity.

And, in many ways, that’s BRANDING.