Leveraging Fashion Week: From the Runway to Your Client

New York Fashion Week Spring 2012 is in full swing. Are you taking advantage of this opportunity to market your salon?

An event that used to focus solely on fashion is today just as much about hair, makeup and nails. Are you the primary resource for your clients on the news from the runways? Or, do you let them learn about all the great new looks from someone else?

I can assure you that all of your competitors—from fashion houses that have their own beauty lines to Ulta, Sephora and CVS—are busy sharing information in real time. Gone are the days of waiting til the 2012 issue of Vogue hits the newsstands to see the details of the new collections.

Today it’s about immediate information sharing. Fashion and beauty brands are blogging and tweeting from their events. Many also hire some of the top beauty bloggers to share their trends and product information as it hits the runways. Consumer and trade magazine editors, like MODERN SALON’s Maggie Mulhern and Alison Shipley, are also blogging, tweeting and posting pictures and reports online daily. (Search Twitter for #NYFW. Or, CLICK HERE to read MODERN’s blogs.)

Many professional brands also have a strong Fashion Week presence. If those are your partner brands, retweet and repost their trends and tips for your clients. Choose your favorite looks, design a service, technique or product to recreate them‑many times your manufacturer partners have already done that for you!— then share via your own social media, look books and newsletters. You can even have a contest to encourage your stylists to help with the research, contribute their favorite looks from a designer or brand and create a new technique with their personal twist on it. Imagine the fun when you bring it all together!

When you become your clients’ No. 1 source for beauty information, you’ll earn a place of greater trust and credibility in their minds. As a result, they’ll be more likely to purchase the services and products your recommend. And what could be more in fashion than that?

Jayne Morehouse is president of Jayne & company, a full-service brand communications/creative agency. Reach her at jayne@jayneandco.com and connect with her on Twitter @JaynePR @BeautyIQ and on facebook.com/jayneandco.