Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia 2012 might be over, but now is the time to go global. Janine Garner and Kirsten Basford present part one of a four part strategy series.
With careers spanning 35 years, Script Marketing founders Janine Garner and Kirsten Basford have executed local and global marketing strategies for the likes of Oroton and Jurlique.
We love this time of year. It’s May and fashion is centre stage.
It’s also the time of the year when thoughts and discussions around international expansion start to bubble away for many designers.
Australia is no longer an island, the global community is so much closer than it ever was and it seems natural to want to get a piece of that international action.
You may know where you want to expand your business to and have a topline plan of how to get there but how do you do it with success, without disappointing, without losing money and without destroying the brand you have already built.
You may also have seen others try and fail and at the end of the day you don’t want that to happen to you.
You may ultimately be gripped by fear.
Taking your brand overseas does cost money, time, lots of sweat equity and more resilience and determination than most humans posses.
There is no such thing as an overnight success or being lucky.
Ask any Australian designer who has made it on the international stage and they will all tell you it was quite simply lots of effort, determination and old-fashioned hard work.
What they will also tell you is that they did their homework on the country that they launched in.
Stay tuned for the next chapter, where Garner and Basford reveal the nuts and bolts of where to start.