If you are with a large store, you will be better able to cooperate with your fashion coordinator once you understand her problems in running a show.
If you are in a small store or branch, you may have no fashion coordinator to brief you or lead the way.
In any case, there will be many occasions when you will stage shows on your own to your selling staff, to special groups of customers, or in connection with talks you give outside the store.
Whatever the occasion, no matter how small or informal the show, you naturally want to handle it successfully.
Shows Must Have Purpose
Consider your fashion show, even if it is only an exercise for your sales people in accessorizing a new look, as a major opportunity to communicate.
There should be a clear fashion message, with an element of news for the audience you are addressing.
To an audience of sales people, a fashion show should tell what is new and how to sell it.
Use showmanship to get your fashion message across. Showmanship, for its own sake, becomes meaningless, however. The merchandise itself should be the main substance of your story.
And, of course, present your message in terms of your audience's interests. Whether you are talking to teenagers, or brides, or mature women, or sports devotees, keep that particular audience's interests, ideals and language in mind as you plan.
Quantity vs. Quality
Most stores prefer quality rather than quantity in fashion shows. Unless you have a message worth delivering and audience worth reaching, think twice before embarking on a fashion show.
You will have many occasions to use a fashion show as a promotional event. You will be invited to stage shows for shopping centers, for charity drives, for school groups, and for other purposes.
Weigh each invitation as carefully as you weigh an editorial credit or as carefully as you plan your request for advertising. More so, in fact! The cost of a good show runs high indeed. If the occasion doesn't justify creative, careful preparation, or if you have no real news to present, consider declining the invitation.
Select a Theme
Without a message, a fashion show becomes simply a parade of garments. It should be an illumination of the fashion scene. Select a theme for your show that sums up the news you are reporting. Your theme doesn't have to be brilliant, clever or original, but it must be appropriate to your message and your audience.
Sources of ideas for clever ways to state your theme include:
- your store's ads
- the fashion forecasts of your store or buying office
- consumer magazines - both editorial and advertising pages
- the resources whose garments you will feature
- suggestions from fiber and fabric houses
- the press: trade, general, fashion
- catch phrases currently popular among your audience, current song hits, etc.
Building Sales
You can encourage customers to buy the merchandise they see in the show:
- Give details as to price, size range, colors, locations, right in the program.
- Have duplicate garments on a rack at the back of the auditorium, with someone to take orders after the show.
- Display featured garments conspicuously in your department for a week or more after the show.
- Permit amateur models to purchase the garments they show, at a discount.
- Invite the audience to visit the department and inspect the garments at leisure within a specific number of days. For some occasions, an invitation to a tea, coffee, or Coke party in the department may be appropriate.
- Give sales people a preview, or at the very least, copies of the program. They should know what garments were shown.
- Pass the word about where to buy the show garments. Telephone operators, information clerks, and main floor sales people may be asked by customers who stop in to buy.
Nothing is so good it can't be better. As soon as possible after the show, get together with those who worked on it or observed it to canvass for suggestions and criticisms.
If your attention was occupied in doing the commentary or working behind the scenes, this is especially important. You want to know more about the audience reactions than you could observe personally.
Points to raise: Length of show; confusion or control in dressing room; music; lighting; seating; commentary; audience reaction.
Also: Problems, if any, encountered by individuals who participated in the show. If your instructions were not completely clear, this discussion will help you make them more so next time.
Reaping the Benefits
When you do a good fashion show, you communicate something more than fashion news alone to your customers or your selling staff. That important element, enthusiasm, comes through. Some of it is reflected in customer attitudes toward your merchandise for days and weeks after the show. Much of it is reflected in the attitudes of your sales people and assistants during the preparation and previews, and after the event.
Besides - a fashion show is a medium of expression. In the fashion business, you need to master every important medium for reaching your sales people and your customers.
