Fashion Week Store Tours to Launch at New York Fashion Week In September ‘18
NEW YORK, July 12, 2018 — Launching in New York City on September 5, 2018, Fashion Week Store Tours (FWST) are curated experiences designed to provide fashion professionals, enthusiasts and shoppers with a behind-the-scenes look at how innovative fashion designers leverage their creativity and how they use the latest technologies to drive demand for their brands. The tours take place during New York City’s Fashion Week, the bi-annual fashion event that generates economic activity and draws visitors for New York City. Barney’s, Rebecca Minkoff, Everlane, Stuart Weitzman, Stella McCartney, Prada and Kate Spade are some of the many stores selected for Fashion Week Store Tours.
Fashion Week Store Tours (http://fashionweekstoretours.com) highlights the ways in which savvy designers use their understanding of changing tastes, trends and technologies to enhance brand engagement. Today’s path to purchase includes social media, shopping apps, chat bots and artificial intelligence, and fashion professionals are increasingly called upon to stay on top of these innovative trends. To that end, Fashion Week Store Tours explores how top designers are utilizing new ways to provide fashion shoppers a consistently positive experience. FWST’s pioneering fashion “briefing” also provides real-time instructions in best practices and will broaden participants’ understanding of the latest trends driving the worldwide fashion industry. “We love Fashion Week Store Tours, which will allow our shoppers to ‘see now, buy now’ our latest creations featured during Fashion Week,” says early technology adopter Rebecca Minkoff, founder of Rebecca Minkoff.
“We created the active-learning approach to help fashion executives absorb and process information critical to their businesses in short, digestible time periods,” Daniel Hodges, FWST’s founder and CEO, explains. The creation and development of this unique platform was informed by conversations with fashion designers and fashion media experts as well as retailers inside and outside the fashion industry. Its approach is comparable to Retail Store Tours (http://retailstoretours.com), launched in January at Retail’s Big Show, the event staged annually in New York City by the National Retail Federation. Ralph Lauren, L’Oreal, John Lewis, MAC Cosmetics and many leading companies participated in Retail Store Tours. Please see the video overview link for Retail Store Tours.
(https://youtu.be/-arMKdekEd4)
“We understood from the very beginning the importance of building the world’s largest fashion experience platform,” adds Myung Choi, FWST’s executive vice president of brand strategy. “That’s why we actively sought input from throughout fashion’s business and creative communities.”
The need for closer engagement with rapidly changing fashion industry trends has never been greater, according to Anindya Ghose, Heinz Riehl Professor of Business at NYU’s Stern School. “The rapid pace of change over the next decade will require new and innovative ways to understand marketplace dynamics and decision-making in the fashion industry,” Ghose has observed.
New York City was selected for the launch of Fashion Week Store Tours because of the city’s concentration of fashion experiences and innovation and its easy-to-walk streets. Although currently offered only in New York City, the program will be expanded in 2019 to offer tours in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Las Vegas, Miami, London, Paris, Milan, Barcelona, Dubai and thirteen other cities.
Fashion Week Store Tours’ core brand DNA is fun with purpose. Our mission is to inspire fashion students, enthusiasts and shoppers through interaction with leading fashion designers. We connect designers with other creative innovators outside of the industry and support scholarships for students in the fashion industry through the FWST Foundation. Fashion Week Store Tours is a Consumers in Motion Group company and a strategic partner of Fashion Mingle (https://fashionmingle.net) which is the first nationwide network exclusively for fashion industry professionals.
