A few weeks ago I was invited to check out the first FGI Toronto (Fashion Group International Toronto) event of 2014 “The Convergence of Fashion, eCommerce & Technology” which took place at the Thompson Toronto.
Monica Mei (founder and designer of Aime Luxury + Co-Founder and CEO of The Shop Society) FGI Toronto’s co-regional director moderated the panel discussion along with Jan Ghandi (CEO of The Peacock Parade), FGI Toronto board member.
The panel gave insight on how to build, market and sell fashion in the digital world. Topics included crowd funding, online market places, omni-channel, content marketing and affiliate marketing.
The majority of guests in attendance were members of FGI Toronto who are all professionals actively involved in the fashion industry. While I’m not directly involved in the industry it was very interesting to see it from the designers and brand owners point of view. As a blogger and being on the media side of things it definitely gave me even more of an appreciation of all the work that goes into marketing and branding and also translating that into sales.
The Panelists:
Amy Welsman of Knix Wear spoke about crowd-funding and the strategies taken to launch Knix Wear by pre-selling over $60,000 and becoming the most funded Canadian fashion project of all time.
Arati Sharma, the community development manager of Shopify gave clarification on omni-channel (online and offline multi-channel retailing) and stressed the importance of a seamless user experience.
Randi Bergman (who I finally got to meet in person!), the online editor of Fashion Magazine chatted about content marketing and how curation and authenticity is important when connecting with readers who are ultimately purchasers.
Ian Francis, the managing director of AffiliateTraction spoke about affiliate marketing – something that I’m a little bit familiar with from the blogger side of things but it seemed to be a hot topic from the designers’ point of view.
Megan Vickell is the PR manager for eBay Canada and had amazing insight about partnering with designers on exclusive and limited edition collections.
Speed networking with the panelists took place afterwards which gave members and other guests the opportunity to pick the brains of the experts.
If you’re in the fashion industry as a designer, company owner, brand manager etc. then consider becoming an FGI Toronto member and build a network of like minded professionals internationally as well as in Toronto.