Top luxury and fashion brands traditionally present their new collections through organized shows for industry insiders, celebrities and high-profile clients. Back in the day, these events were the size of a large living room, if you think back to the original Dior presentations. But in recent decades, they’ve become blockbusters, more about brand marketing than debut collections.
However, this method of generating marketing buzz is a lot of work because each time you have to create a new collection of looks to put on the runway, and then you have to brainstorm and develop a complex seating plan for the show. several personalities — in addition to journalists, buyers and others — who attend. What’s more, the approach only scales so far.
In recent years, we’ve seen breakthrough innovations from Italian skiwear brand Moncler, which has replaced its seasonal runway partnerships with designers Thom Browne and Giambattista Valli with capsule collections created in conjunction with a roster of collaborators, an initiative dubbed ‘Genius ‘.
But the key innovation wasn’t just the idea of making multiple capsule collections per season. After all, capsules have been around for a while. The breakthrough was as much about the way the new collections were presented.
Instead of using a traditional catwalk format, with one or two thousand people in attendance, Moncler hosted parties in much larger venues, over one or more nights, for tens of thousands of people – not just insiders and high-spending customers, but fans. of brand.
And since many more people can attend the event and see the products live, many more people post photos, multiplying the magnitude of the buzz on social media.
That’s what happened on Monday night, when more than 10,000 people visited London’s Olympia exhibition center to see the brand’s new collaborations with the likes of Alicia Keys, Pharrell Williams, Hiroshi Fujiwara’s Frgmt, the German car brand Mercedes-Benz and much more.
It’s not rocket science, but simple math. The key point is the relationship between the number of people who attend Genius events and the number of people who attend traditional fashion shows: this is a powerful social media multiplier, never mind that every Genius participant is not an influencer.
The approach is a good example of how Moncler is able to play in the same league as brands with significantly higher revenues and therefore much larger advertising and communication budgets, generating equally high retail space productivity. Moncler, a dwarf in the land of giants, has no choice but to do things differently to get more bang for his buck.
Luca Solca is head of luxury goods research at Bernstein.