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Company: The Spain-U.S. Chamber of Commerce Inc.
Event: The Spanish Mile: The Fashion Line
Objective: Generate sales and awareness for Spanish fashion designers.
Strategy: Create a SoHo “happening” that drives consumers to individual boutiques.
Tactics: Use a passport system and subway theme to unite a series of stores into a cohesive awareness-generating event.
Results: Generated a 20-percent increase in sales for participating stores the day of the event and during the following week. Scored mentions in 150 media outlets, triple the coverage garnered the previous year.
Creative/Production Agency: Global Events Group, www.global-events.com; SGN Group, www.sgn-group.com
Budget: $250,500
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hen it comes to fashion, a host of one-word names — Valentino, Gaultier, Lagerfeld, Sui, Galliano, Versace — are not only immediately recognized by most U.S. consumers, they’re practically institutions of style for anyone even semi fashion conscious. But mention names such as Paco Rabanne, Amaya Arzuaga, and Elena Benarroch, and even New York’s fashion fabulous elicit little more than blank stares.
Back in Spain, these aforementioned Spanish fashion designers could go shoe boot to shoe boot with the likes of Katie Holmes and David Beckham in terms of fame. But in the United States in general, and within the cutthroat New York fashion scene in particular, they’re virtual unknowns to U.S. consumers. And only a few of Gotham City’s fashion femme fatales, who have no doubt sashayed by Spanish-designers’ boutiques en route to yet another Manolo Blahnik binge, have ever stilettoed in to their stores, much less made an actual purchase.
So for the Spain-U.S. Chamber of Commerce Inc., a New York-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting Spanish-owned businesses in the United States, generating sales and raising awareness for Spanish designers was directive numero uno for 2008. The Chamber along with two members of its fashion committee — the SGN Group, a New York management and consulting company that assists Spanish companies doing business in the United States, and Tous, a Spanish jewelry and handbag brand — had launched an annual SoHo event for that purpose two years ago. In 2006 and 2007, the events featured a few Spanish designers offering discounted merchandise for a single day. But in 2008, the Chamber decided to up the ante and create an event that was less about unrelated sales in individual stores and more about a cohesive effort to increase awareness of Spanish fashion designers.
THE FASHION LINE
“While various types of Spanish-owned businesses are members of the Chamber and we do other events and promotions for them, we wanted to do a special event to raise awareness and consumer sales for our Spanish fashion designers,” says Bisila Bokoko, executive director of the Spain-U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And while our past events were successful, in 2008, we wanted the event to feel like a cohesive experience — a sort of SoHo ‘happening’ — that would get people talking and generate awareness for the Spanish-design community not only on the day of the event, but throughout the following week as well.”
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Connecting the Dots
Working with event-production firm Global Events Group and consulting firm SGN Group, the Spain-U.S. Chamber of Commerce Inc. used the following six tactics to turn a series of sales events scattered over a 1-square-mile area into a cohesive experience.
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 Pedicabs
Fifteen fashionably fierce drivers spun lime-green pedicabs around SoHo the day of the event. |
 Subway Theme
Renaming the event The Spanish Mile: The Fashion Line, the creative team added a subway theme and corresponding logo to unite all aspects of the one-day event. |
 Store Experiences
Each store participating in the event offered a similar, yet slightly different experience, each featuring a different type of tapas, Spanish wine, and Spanish music for attendees to enjoy during their visit. |
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 Passports
Attendees purchased event passports for $5 each, and participating stores stamped them as attendees shopped. Passports offered bearers 20-percent discounts during and after the event. |
 Sandwich Boards
Roaming the streets of SoHo, 10 friendly Spanish-looking models wore sandwich boards promoting the event, and handed out fliers including event information and a map. |
 The After Party
Skylight LLC, an event space in SoHo, was the final stop on The Fashion Line; where a fully stamped passport granted admission. |
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A seemingly obvious solution to the challenge would have been to move the event to Bryant Park during New York Fashion Week and to host a Spanish-designer fashion show. After all, that’s how a host of individual Italian, French, and U.S. designers generate awareness for their brands. But this competitive arena brimming with the fashion elite was exactly the type of hemmed-in scenario Bokoko and her team hoped to avoid.
“If Spanish designers tried to compete with this crowd, even as a cohesive unit, a ‘tent event’ wouldn’t generate the kind of notoriety and awareness we hoped to achieve with a separate event,” Bokoko says.
 Plus, the Chamber was going for an entirely different audience. The majority of people who attend fashion shows are wealthy socialites, celebrities, and the press. “Instead of selling to that crowd,” Bokoko says, “we wanted to drive New York consumers to the Spanish designers’ stores so they’d not only make a purchase the day of the event, but they could find the stores in the future. Plus, after their green-with-envy friends asked about their hot new fashion finds, they’d be able to tell them where they got the goods, and able to point out each store’s local cross streets, landmarks, and subway stops as well.”
Hoping to transform its tapas-style mini events into a full-fledged fashion buffet that would generate awareness for Spanish designers while putting mucho dinero in their pockets to boot, the Chamber enlisted the help of its ongoing partner SGN Group, along with Global Events Group, a New York-based event-production company. While the Chamber hoped to maintain the event’s premise — it wanted a single-day event during which consumers would visit several shops owned by Spanish fashion designers selling everything from clothes to shoes and handbags — it pretty much handed over the reins to SGN and Global Events and told the newly formed team to accessorize at will.
The resulting event was created using the same basic pattern as its predecessors, as consumers were invited to visit several SoHo boutiques owned or operated by various Spanish fashion designers. However, with the addition of a unifying theme, a handful of pre- and at-event promotional elements, and a passport system that culminated in an after-hours party, this little one-day experience was transformed into a high-profit sales event for individual stores, and an awareness generator for the Spanish-design industry.
LAYING THE TRACKS
Several months before the launch of the event, SGN and Global Events completed their first event alterations, which included changing the event’s name and adding a unifying theme. The Chamber had aptly named its first two festivals The Spanish Mile, a name that played off Chicago’s shopping Mecca, the Magnificent Mile. However, the creative agencies felt that an additional theme, played out in advertising and in-store messaging, could help unify the seemingly individual events, and add a memorable New York twist as well.
Thus, the team christened the new event The Spanish Mile: The Fashion Line, and added a subway theme (apropos for a New York event) and corresponding logo featuring five circles (two in red and yellow, the colors of the Spanish flag, and the last three in Old Glory’s red, white, and blue) that represented train stops on a typical subway map.
Meanwhile, the Chamber finalized logistics, including the event’s date and location — June 12, 2008, from 6 to 10 p.m. and within a roughly 1-square-mile area in SoHo that was brimming with Spanish fashion designers. It then informed its members about the event, specifically inviting Spanish fashion designers to participate.
 Within three months of the event, the Chamber had secured five stores to act as “subway stops” on the “Fashion Line” (plus another pop-up store that would play host to eight Spanish footwear designers). Eight additional Spanish designers agreed to display their wares during a planned after-hours event. Plus, the Chamber had set the wheels in motion for several SoHo or Spanish-owned businesses to donate their services and materials to supplement the meager $250,500 set aside for the cost of the event.
For the average New Yorker, however, word of The Fashion Line came roughly three weeks before the event, when ads announcing The Spanish Mile appeared in local dining and entertainment publications such as Time Out and New York Magazine. The ads, which featured the “subway stop” logo and a brief description of the event and its discounts, were part of several pre- and at-event promotional activities the team hoped would generate city-wide buzz. At the same time, the Chamber began promoting the event to members via its newsletter, and individual designers and stores participating in The Spanish Mile handed out their own flyers and distributed self-made posters advertising the event.
The creative team ratcheted up the promotional efforts in and around SoHo three days before the event, employing a tried-and-true tactic with a clever twist. “Everybody has seen people wearing sandwich boards,” says Howard Givner, Global Events’ CEO of North America. “Most of the time, the stores or events using the sandwich
boards are on a very low
budget, and not only do the
boards look cheap, but the
people wearing them are often a bit disheveled and
probably downright grumpy.
We turned this idea on its head to generate attention.
We created high-quality boards featuring the same colors found on the subway-stop logo, along with text that indicated the time and location of the event. Then we hired 10 Spanish-looking models to wear the signs. But these people weren’t only attractive and stylish; they also were extremely friendly and approachable.”
 The easy-on-the-eyes models handed out 3-by-6-inch flyers to passersby that listed the date and participating locations, along with a handy map of The Spanish Mile on the back.
ALL ABOARD
The day of The Spanish Mile, the sandwich-board hotties were still on the streets in full fashion force, but they were joined by another ingenious promotional tactic: a colorful armada of 15 pedicabs sponsored by Valencia, Spain-based Iberdrola Renovables S.A., a renewable-energy company.
Painted a couldn’t-miss lime green and pedaled by young, hot, and fashionable drivers, the free cabs featured text that read “Jump on board for The Spanish Mile” along with the Chamber’s Web site and tagline, and a logo promoting Iberdrola. With a back seat built for two, the pod-like pedicabs roamed the streets at the ready to pedal weary Fashion Line shoppers to their next destination. Plus, even when they were empty, their Jetson-mobile-like presence raised eyebrows and spread the word about the event.
“While they’re not rocket science, the pedicab bikes were a big part of the promotion,” Givner says. “No two stores were located more than seven blocks from one another, so people didn’t need the cabs to get around. However, as people saw the bikes, they had to wonder what was happening in the area. A glance at the side of the cab — or a quick question to the driver — provided an immediate explanation, and lured people into participating in the event.”
Whether attracted to the event by the pre-event ads, the yummy sandwich-board models, or the ever-present pedicabs, New York fashionistas quickly located a participating store, i.e. a stop on The Fashion Line, by one of the subway-themed five-circle logos posted in each store’s window. Positioned just above eye level for easy cross-street viewing, the roughly 12-by-24-inch signs featured the words “Fashion Line” across the top and the five-circle logo across the bottom. Text between the header and footer identified the individual designer that owned or was displaying his or her work in the store.
 Once visitors entered one of the stores, friendly staff — often including one of the designers — welcomed them to a sort of Spanish-retail fiesta. “At every store on the line there was a slightly different experience,” Givner says. “Each store offered a different type of tapas and Spanish wine, some of which was donated by other Spanish businesses or purchased by the Chamber, and all of the stores offered a different style of Spanish music. One store — Camper — even had a live DJ, while other stores offered their own special goodie bags to visitors.”
“It was like a small party at each store,” Bokoko adds. “But unlike Fashion Week events, everyone was invited. Visitors could experience something slightly different at each store, but with the pedicabs, signage, etc., the overall experience of the multiple stores was similar, creating a more cohesive feel to the event. With each store people entered, they experienced something similar yet different at the same time — and the curiosity of what each store would offer urged them forward to see what was different at the next stop on the line.”
While visitors nibbled, mingled, and sipped, they perused the merchandise, often having their questions answered directly by the designers. Plus, at some point during their experience, most visitors purchased an event passport or had their existing passport stamped.
Cleverly designed to resemble a real Spanish passport, the 4-by-6-inch event passports featured the words “Passport to Fashion” on the rust-colored cover. Inside, passport holders found maps to guide them to each stop along the line as well as information about each store and Spanish designer participating in the event. And of course, there was also space for stores to stamp the passports, which ultimately provided holders admittance into an after-hours event.
At a cost of $5 each, the passports entitled bearers to four significant benefits: 1) Attendees showing their passports the day of the event received 20-percent discounts at participating stores, 2) those who had their passports stamped by all of the participating stores were admitted to a swanky after party featuring even more cocktails, conversations, and Spanish-designers’ fashion, 3) participants could show their passports at seven of Manhattan’s best Spanish restaurants for a 20-percent discount through the end of July 2008, and 4) passport-bearing attendees who returned to the participating retail stores during the week after the event were still eligible for a 20-percent store discount.
The passports’ multi-pronged benefits weren’t lost on the Corporate EVENT Awards judges. “In a sense, passports are a been-there done-that strategy,” judges said. “But in this case, they added another Spanish touch to the event, and they had legs both during and after the event. Not only did they allow the Chamber to measure how many people participated in the event, and to force people into all of the stores before they could participate in the after party, but they were also valuable the entire week following the event, generating awareness as well as sales for the Spanish designers — and a few Spanish restaurants as well.”
FINAL STOP: SALES AND AWARENESS AVENUE
After an evening of shopping, New Yorkers like nothing more than to hightail it to a swanky club and toss back a cosmo or two. So to top off the night — and to spotlight Spanish designers with boutiques outside of SoHo — The Fashion Line’s final stop was an after party, held from 8 to 10 p.m. at Skylight, an 18,000-square-foot gallery-like event space in SoHo.
 As passport-bearing attendees approached the gallery turned nightclub, they were met by additional subway-themed signage surrounding Skylight’s door along with well-dressed “bouncers” who checked to make sure their passports had all of the necessary stamps before admitting them to the private fashion show inside. But rather than a dark club-like atmosphere, the venue’s interior featured five vignettes displaying more fashions by Spanish designers. In all, the Chamber introduced eight additional Spanish designers at the after party via displays of their work and gobos bearing their names projected onto the walls. As attendees perused the fashion and talked with designers, a well-known New York DJ spun Spanish music to complete the theme.
At the end of the day, more than 1,000 participants had purchased passports and trekked at least part of The Spanish Mile, 40 percent more than the Chamber had anticipated. Plus, store owners estimated that a total of 2,000 people actually visited some or all of the stores during the event, but didn’t actually buy passports. In addition, 60 percent of passport purchasers, i.e. 600 people, visited all of the stores and attended the after party, a figure almost 30 percent above the Chamber’s goal.
As expected, the pre- and at-event promotion, not to mention the cohesive feel of the fashion-driven event, drew a fair amount of media attention as well. All told, Global Events estimates that more than 150 media outlets — a figure three times higher than the previous year’s results and including outlets from Spain, Italy, and France — attended the event and featured coverage in the months thereafter.
But most importantly to both the Chamber and Spanish designers, participating stores saw a significant increase in sales. Every stop on the line reported a 20-percent increase in sales on the day of the event; plus, they reported an average 20-percent sales increase during the entire week following the event. So with some meticulous alterations and thoughtful accessorizing, the Chamber turned a series of ready-to-wear events into a cohesive, haute-couture experience. Churning out well-needed awareness as well as cold hard sales, The Spanish Mile: The Fashion Line proved that with carefully tailored marketing, even a one-day event can become a fierce, stylish success. E
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