Digital Exposed Seminar

We mentioned a few days ago that Premiere at Fashion Exposed was one of our favourite parts of the weekend. The luxurious environment and the amazing brands on show made it the perfect place to sit back and lap up the luxury. Here are some of our favourite pictures from the weekend.

We’ve had a ball at Fashion Exposed. It’s been like a maze filled with all sorts of amazing brands and displays at every turn. Fashion Exposed is unlike anything else out there in Australia, with its variety of exhibitors showing their unique and wonderful collections, mixed in with fashion shows and stimulating business seminars. This 360 degree approach makes it a place to learn and grow your business beyond just a buying/selling experience. We’d like to say a big thank you to all the exhibitors for giving us such a unique fashion experience and of course to everyone who sponsored the event as well as all the visitors. We’ll look forward to seeing you at the Melbourne fair in 2011.

Here are just some of our favourite things:

Retailers obviously rely on customers, but what do you have to do to create a two way conversation with the people who come into your store to buy your products? Mark Davis from the Australian Training Centre spoke to Fashion Exposed Business Seminar attendees on Tuesday about creating a welcoming environment, how to keep the boyfriend happy while he waits and the simple act of asking questions with an open ended response. So instead of asking if the customer needs help (which results in a yes or no answer), strike up a conversation about which celebrity loves that brand/product or ask the customer about themselves – according to Mark, people love to talk about themselves.

We managed to grab some time to chat with Mark before he went on stage and he gave us a quick rundown on his hot tips and tricks.

We may know her best as the judge on Project Runway Australia alongside Jayson Brunsdon and Kristy Hinze, but Sarah Gale is a fashion buyer first and foremost. She has worked for the likes of Sportsgirl, Portmans and Witchery in Australia and certainly knows a thing or two about fashion buying with small and big budgets. We spoke to her after her Fashion Exposed Business Seminar about her three E’s of buying and tips on how young fashion lovers can work their way up into becoming a fashion buyer.

Retail and online go hand in hand in creating that personal shopping experience with customers. People rely on the web almost as much as they with real life experiences, with a large portion of people going online to research items and brands before they spend their hard earned money. Which is why it was so important for Fashion Exposed to have a seminar on the digital space, and who better than online guru Kate Vandermeer of iSpyStyle? She talks to us about why retailers need to be online, who does it well and why Facebook is the best starting point.

If you walked past the Salon Show area at Fashion Exposed yesterday, you would have noticed quite a crowd gathered to hear Jen Sherrin from WGSN talk at our Business Seminars about the womenswear and menswear trends, and then following it up with retail trends. We even heard people gushing about Jen’s ‘retail theatre’ tip as they left. If you missed it, one of Jen’s main retail tips was for fashion brands to create short films to play in store, creating a visual theme the minute someone walks in and to use on your website and as a viral publicity tool. We spoke to Jen before she presented WGSN’s reports for the Spring/Summer 2011 season about the top womenswear trends.

Fashion Exposed: WGSN’s Jen Sherrin on womenswear and retail trends from Fashion Exposed on Vimeo.

If you attended Fashion Exposed this weekend, you would have seen some very beautiful models on our boudoir themed allure Live Look Book set. Staged in our allure area, the Live Look Books featured models who lounged around in stunning lingerie, swimwear and loungewear for every occasion.

While the lingerie was far from demure, this was a luxurious way to showcase the latest collections up close and personal. We have to give a big thanks to KMS California for the chic hair, Gorgeous Cosmetics for the alluring make up (we loved the red lip), Chandeliers To Die For, Decorative Events & Exhibitions and Rax & Dollies for their help in making the set look utterly amazing.

Premiere was one of my favourite places to hang out during Fashion Exposed, it was like popping into a private boutique and browsing through luxury pieces from brands like By Malene Birger, Alex Perry, Patrizia Pepe, Hudson jeans and so many more. We managed to grab some time with Megan who was manning the Arabella Ramsey stand at Premiere who gave us some insight into the how leather sells year round for the Melbourne based brand and gives us a quick peek at the Arabella Ramsey Spring/Summer 2011-12  collection.

Fashion Exposed: A chat with Megan from Arabella Ramsey from Fashion Exposed on Vimeo.

There is something incredibly chic about French women, and it’s often been said that it is because of the array of ways they wear their scarves. So it comes as no surprise that the highlight of the French Pavilion Salon Show yesterday was scarves of every kind – from wool to silk, they were on display with almost every outfit.

Accessories aside, the French sure know how to create chic ready to wear collections that had an effortlessness about them – perhaps that is a French woman’s secret to fashion instead of the scarf. But we must say we loved what we saw from the French group which included: Akela Key, Charlie Joe, Fil de Joie, Freegun, Helena Sorel, IKKS, Kaproral 5 Time, Little Marcel, One Step, Sinequanone, Tahiitian Move, Inoui Paris-Delhi, Pare Gabia and Sans-Arcidet Collection Paris.

On Day 2 we spoke to Arabella Ramsey at Premiere, but it was the denim brands that caught our eye in Premiere on Day 3 of Fashion Exposed. In between Business Seminars, we popped down to Premiere again and were in denim heaven. We spoke to one exhibitor who said  that designer denim was having great sell through at a boutique retail level. And why wouldn’t it be? We all wear jeans in all shapes, sizes and colours – there are even popular fashion blogs dedicated to the topic of denim. Or in MMMC Fashion Distributer’s case, they have the gorgeous Georgia May Jagger, daughter of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall, designing a capsule collection for Hudson Jeans.