Our agency has become known as one of the top PR and marketing agencies for swimwear and resortwear brands. Our office in Miami allows us to help our brands break through the clutter during swim week and our New York office is a major source for editors working on swim stories as we open it up day and night for editors seeking samples for photoshoots. We get a lot of inquiries from swim and resortwear brands and a major trend we see is that the PR and marketing timeline and sales cycle is often a mystery for them. When you are dealing with a seasonal product it is incredibly important to understand how the timeline works for sales and PR so that no time is lost. The approach and strategy must be different for each brand, but as a general rule, the sales cycle for Swimwear and Resortwear brands runs from roughly August through April, with most orders coming in from October through March. For PR, the cycle really needs to be year-round to really develop the brand properly.
At our agency, January through April is focused heavily on securing press coverage in print magazines along with online and television editorial coverage. In April, we begin to focus on preparing our brands for swim week and continuing to push for editorial coverage in online media, blogs and television. In the month leading up to Swim Week in July, our team flies down from New York to join our Miami team to prepare for the week of trade shows, fashion shows and press events. Our agency does background research and lays groundwork that no other agency matches. Her are just a few things we do for Swim Week that make help our brands stand out:
We find out exactly what major editors are flying in from New York and around the world and prepare and deliver gift bags to their hotels on the day of check in that include paper invites to trade shows and runway shows for our brands along with the runway show our agency produces, Ready, Set, Swim and lookbooks.
We research EVERY blogger and media outlet that registers with IMG for Mercedes Benz Swim Week by visiting their blogs and social media accounts. We are familiar with most of the media who cover swim, but each year we take the same approach to research as media and bloggers influence ebbs and flows.
We schedule appointments for editors at major magazines like Lucky and Cosmo for Latinas to attend your shows and visit your tradeshow booth. We make sure that someone from our team is on-site at the appointment time to assist our brands with the media appointment.
We create a mobile office onsite at our client's fashion shows complete with all of the necessary equipment to serve our client's last minute needs, including last minute printing of line up changes and a full stylist kit.
Our on-site mobile office is quickly moved to a hotel within a few blocks of the show to prepare post event releases and get them serviced to the media within 6 hours from the show...no other agency does this for swim week and it is a huge advantage to securing more coverage for our brands.
We secure international and domestic trade and consumer press coverage for our clients of their swim week presence. After Swim Week, from August through December we are in prep and foundation mode for the collection that was shown during swim week to ensure maximum coverage. We send lookbooks to stylists and styling agencies and our graphic design team spends several months preparing industry specific lookbooks based on stories we know are covered EVERY year by editors such as figure flattering swimsuits, color stories and more. We also send a lot of samples out during this time to publications that shoot their Swimsuit Issues in the Fall. Examples include Sport's Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue and Surfing Magazine's Swimsuit Issue. In December, we begin to book deskside meetings with swimwear editors and show our clients collections. NY fashion editors who work on swim stories love working with our agency because of our expertise in swim and the fact that we have a lot of tools that make their jobs a lot easier such as our extensive library of lookbooks that we create in-house featuring all of our swim and resort clients, a full database of images and samples in our New York office. We also focus a lot of effort on blogger outreach and have great relationships with bloggers who live in warm weather climates to secure year round coverage for our swimwear clients.
The buying season from a consumer standpoint is short for swim and resortwear, but the behind the scenes work that goes into keeping a swim or resortwear brand relevant in today's marketplace is nonstop. We love the hustle and helping our swimwear and resortwear client with everything from securing press and blogger coverage to assisting with sales. If you have a swimwear or resortwear brand and would like to learn more about how we can help boost your brand, please contact us today!