Fashion Business networking
Air By Hobbes has the unique step of being built around the networking of like minded people. We have done social media and think that things like foursquare, gowalla, twitter, msn live, reddit, facebook and perhaps google buzz. We tried it and we find that the networks just don't understand elite and cutting edge fashion the way we do. We don't want any old chav wearing our design label or trying to reclaim it as their own. Have you ever seen what happened to fantastic design houses like Evisu and Voi? They got claimed by people that we don't think should be our target audience at all. Those people probably don't hang out on most of the social networks we care about anyway. We did enjoy a successful fair though when we managed to stage our own event for business networking that enabled us to expand our horizons of who would come to our stores and collection launches.
We also had a positive effect on our brand that we were trying to get other like minded people together and give them a platform to speak and share ideas about the community. It helped that with people you consider your peers were able to get their creative minds together and make new labels, show off new collections of garments and merge together to create solutions to existing problems.
Hobbes will be coming up with a new Ladies only collection called Paramira, which will be Spanish-inspired casual wear. The other designer involved with this will be Spanish designer Hermano Pique.