How To Find A Showroom & Representation for Your Fashion Line

Last week, in discussing how to project financial profitability, we briefly touched on finding sales representation to help sell product lines to boutiques, now it’s time to go further explore that subject. Finding a show room or representation can be daunting, but it’s not an impossible task.Los Angeles & New YorkIn Los Angeles, to find a sales rep or showroom, start by identifying the brands you’d like to share a showroom space with. Once you’ve established who those brands are, look them up in the LA Fashion District website directory. The LFD directory contains a complete list of all the brands being shown in “The Intersection”, which includes The LA Mart, The New Mart and the Gerry and Cooper Buildings. Many of these showrooms work the entire country, having a New York location and/or a sister showrooms they work with in other markets.When you search the directory, look for brands you may be compatible with but not competitive with. You want to find a showroom that doesn’t house direct competitors. You also want to ensure your product line is conducive to the other brands and lines that stores purchase from the showroom.Once you find a few leads, physically walk to the showroom (the marts are public places), take a peek inside and see if the showroom resembles a store where you would want to sell your products. If it does, ask if they are accepting new lines and ask if they will meet with you.In New York, we recommend starting with the Garment Industry Development Corporation. GIDC is a multi-tiered service organization providing marketing, buyer referrals, and training and technical assistance to New York apparel manufacturers and workers. GIDC has launched “Showroom New York” in conjunction with its Designer Development program. The goal of the program is to develop the business and marketing skills of emerging designers, to increase profitable sales of their products to retail buyers, and to find local factory partners for production. Designers pay a $250/month Rack Fee for inclusion into the program and, additionally, a 5% commission on all sales. You can also visit Fashion NYC for a complete list of showrooms; they also have a comprehensive list of resources for emerging designers.Meeting With Showrooms and Sales RepresentativesWhen you get to the meeting stage, it’s time to put your best foot forward. You must sell yourself as well as your line to them. Start by showing the rep completed sales samples, marketing materials and share the long term vision of your company. Reps love to see that you have a long term vision and have taken the time to develop a strategic plan on how to achieve your goals.Highlights to share with showrooms or sales representatives:1. Highlight stores you’ve gotten into without a showroom. You should be trying to get your product line in at least a few brand building stores – online or brick and mortar – before taking on a showroom.2. Press coverage you may have received. Fashion blog coverage and local media coverage counts, so by all means show who’s talking about you. It only entices the showroom because they see that you’re actively marketing your line.3. Make sure to mention investors. That way, showroom or reps understand your business is secure and they feel more comfortable investing their sales efforts into your line.4. Don’t forget to bring up your past work experience. Providing background information provides insight into your competency as a business person.Once you have them where you want them, it’s time to start negotiating!Once you’ve established a relationship and the showroom or sales representative wants to represent your line, it’s time to negotiate commission percentage (typically 10-18%), rent fees and the term of your agreement. The better you present yourself, the more flexible the showroom will become. You want to give potential reps many reasons to believe they have much more to gain…than to lose by taking you under their sales umbrella.Just a warning…fashion showrooms can at times appear a little unapproachable to the budding entrepreneur. I know you’d think sales people would be a lot friendlier, but for some reason fashion reps seem a little less open than expected. But don’t let that intimidate you. Remember at the end of the day they are in the sales business, and the right one needs you as much as you need them.Digital & OnlineMadisonBuyer – One of our favorites, Madison Buyer™ (MB), is a digital apparel directory based on social sharing and networking concepts. Still in beta, MB is a business to business (B2B) directory built for fashion designers to visually showcase and define their line by category, price point, tags and tradeshows. MB offers a simple, yet detailed approach to identifying a brand that allows retailers to search more effectively for emerging and seasoned designers. Madison Buyer also offers a closet full of business tools – an easily-accessible platform and robust website – for both retailers and brands that includes:* Appealing online visual guides* Highly detailed, efficient search engines* Extensive tradeshow calendars* Lookbooks, videos, press clips and Twitter embedment* An awesome user-friendly platform that is resource–specific to the apparel industryBelle Espirit - Bel Esprit is the virtual showroom open around the clock that makes designers’ collections accessible to worldwide fashion industry professionals. Bel Esprit is committed to promoting new and emerging designers and helping retailers discover new collections as well as established brands not shown in their regional market. Bel Esprit provides practical assistance to designers in the business of fashion – marketing, sales, distribution – so designers can pursue their creativity while building a commercially successful business.Bel Esprit’s mission is to promote “fashion with a conscience.” The showroom welcomes companies who observe ethical principles, fair trade and fair labor practices, ecological and/or fair trade materials, or support social and environmental causes through donations of profits from their businesses. Bel Esprit members are dynamic, creative and fashion forward and seek to produce collections that contribute to a beautiful world. The showroom participates in events promoting ethical and fair trade/non-sweatshop practices, and helps designers source suppliers of ethical and fair trade materials and labor to encourage designers to further expand this practice.Z Global Mart – ZGlobalMart is the new kid on the block, having launched October 1, 2009. Z Global’s site states that it is a B2B site for apparel, apparel accessories and sourcing companies. ZGlobalMart is essentially an international fashion trade show taking place on the Internet, bringing together fashion designers, manufacturers, distributors, importers, exporters, wholesalers from all over the world to showcase collections for anyone who operates fashion related business. ZGlobal offers site members video conferencing capabilities, social media features, high resolution photography (including “zoom” technology so that buyers can see materials up close without having the garment present) and prescreening for all site members for quality control measures.To learn more about fashion merchandising and marketing, visit the FMM Blog!