Kate Moss and Sir Philip Green are the most high-profile celebrity designer-retail couple — but they are not the only ones. Collaborations between the high street and designers are a retail game of immense sophistication.
The collaborations raise the profile of the retailer, attracting new customers, the designer gets exposure to a mass audience and the shopper gets designer wares at a price that doesn’t make them faint.
The most sophisticated example of this is at Topshop. Through its NewGen London Fashion Week sponsorship programme, Topshop gets young designers into the fold. Chosen designers get £100,000, which helps to pay for show and sample collection production. Topshop is repaid with spin-off collections for its shop rails. Christopher Kane — given as much retailing space as Kate Moss this season— is the most high-profile post-sponsorship relationship to date.
“It isn’t a money making exercise,” Andrew Leahy, Topshop’s head of publicity, argues. “We are doing it as a favour to the designers and at the same time supporting the British Fashion industry, which eventually makes us a lot of money.”
The drive is less fashion-led at Debenhams, but no less thought out. This year its Designer ranges recorded an 11 per cent increase in sales. “We have reduced the number of bought-in concessions as a financial move, but also to retain more control through these in-house collaborations,” says Suzanne Harlow, the group trading director, who has worked for the company since its first designer partnership – with the milliner Philip Treacy – in 1993.
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Today their designer harem includes Betty Jackson, Matthew Williamson, John Rocha and Jasper Conran. Here it is about using specific designers to target shoppers. Henry Holland T-shirts were seen as a way of appealing to teenagers. Holland, who has worked with Coca-Cola, Kickers, Levi’s, O2 and Wrigley, says: “As a young designer, it is a necessary step. The corporate infrastructure, manufacturing and publicity capacities that we can utilise during these collaborations can never be underestimated.”