TIP: Find your tribe: Maison Garde was started in The New Garde as a passion project to find a way for designers to collaborate and cater to a customer that loves eccentric fashion. Each season Maison Garde showcase collaborative collections from Australia’s best unknown tastemakers under the creative direction of Jodie Hilton – This is a win-win for designers and customers.
Contact their agent, or if it’s an influencer, you can often get in touch directly via Instagram. Be bold like Alexandre Daillance, the teenager behind the NasaSeasons hats. He originally designed slogan hats for him and his friends but started sending DMs to huge celebrity names via Instagram. It worked. Within weeks, Rihanna was photographed wearing one of his hats, and the rest is history. (A fun fact: the slogan on the hat she chose to wear was ‘I came to break hearts’ which was on a hat he originally made to wear to his Prom.)
Inhouse we reached out to musicians performing at Bigsound in 2019. It was a great way to introduce brands to the entertainment industry and gain exposure while elevating the perfomers – LÂLKA is the Brisbane-based producer/vocalist/musician creating gritty yet opulent electro pop. LÂLKA’s music and live performance reflect her personality: plenty of confidence and tongue-in-cheek energy so when we paired Stanger For Skuel Work Apparel knowing that they appeal to uni students and milleniels in their 20’s we deemed The Lazy Eyes to be a great fit in consideration to thier aligning audiences. Becki Whitton from Aphir is the perfect muse for Fred Archer – Influenced by 17th century vocal music, dreamscapes, and the catharsis brought about by screaming words of devotion into a wall of noise, Aphir’s songs are set in a world apart from the one we wake up to. For Astille We teamed up with 1 woman powerehouse Milan Ring A singer, rapper, guitarist, producer, mix and mastering engineer, Milan directs every aspect of her output, from the first guitar chord to the final master.




4 – Get topical
TIP: To get the message out quickly check out Story Chief -it helps you publish your content multichannel and gather leads in your favorite CRM. Instantly cutting your content process in half and has a built-in SEO assistant.
Don’t underestimate the value of your loyal customers and their networks. These are people who click with your brand and its ethos. They’re delighted they were the first of their friends to discover your label, love wearing your designs and are proud to be aligned with what your brand stands for. Help them to shout it from the rooftops!
Setting up a user-friendly referral system is a fantastic way of rewarding fans of your brand. It gives them a sense of ownership of the brand they love so much AND you’re securing new customers in a truly genuine way. It’s the online version of word-of-mouth marketing. Your loyal customer makes a purchase and obtains a unique link or similar to recommend your brand to their friends. Successfully signing up friends earns them points or discounts (the rewards are up to you), an incentive for them to keep coming back and to continue singing your praises.
TIP: The other avenue you could try is Flaunter – it’s like having a digital PR push out your content to key media and influencers where it can be picked up and placed into digital and traditional advertising. Bloggers style files etc. Complement this with user-generated imagery.
When it comes to resources is it really about the money? Your relationship to money will have a huge impact on the effort or create self-imposed limitations that you could unknowingly place on yourself.
Money is a nice thing to have but shouldn’t be seen as an enabling factor. Most people who operate to a budget ask themselves what can we buy with this and then sell? What kind of marketing could we buy or ads with that money? These questions limit the ability to use creatively think and plan, versus seeing an opportunity that can bring your brand the most amount of money.