Fashion Magazine has added two new premiere sponsors for its one-year-old Toronto Fashion Week Awards event: Skincare brand NeoStrata and jewellery brand Links of London.
Both brands have category exclusivity, and will be prominently featured in this week’s award show, which wraps up Toronto Fashion Week. The awards show honours creative talent and design excellence in the fashion industry.
A relative latecomer to the events space, Fashion has quickly made inroads with both brands and designers. Jacqueline Kendall, marketing and communications manager for Fashion’s parent, St. Joseph Communications, said the event has seen sponsorship sales increase 100% since its October 2014 launch.
Attendance has also soared, growing from 400 guests at the inaugural event last October, to an expected 1,300 people for Friday’s event at Toronto’s Design Exchange. “We had some idea it would have traction when we came up with the concept, but we’ve just been overwhelmed by the response of the fashion community,” said Kendall. “We want to get it even bigger than it is now.”
She said event ownership is “incredibly important,” with the awards show significantly increasing Fashion’s footprint at the week-long Toronto Fashion Week. “I don’t think sponsorship would be the same,” she said.
Brand activations will see NeoStrata host the “NeoStrata Selfie Station,” which invites attendees to pose in front of a six-foot tall mirror while a hidden camera captures their image and sends it to Twitter using the hashtag #NeoStrataSelfie.
The brand also has a homepage takeover on FashionMagazine.com throughout Toronto Fashion Week, and has secured a quarter of the inventory on FashionMagazine.com – including desktop, mobile and tablet versions – through the end of October.
Upscale jewelry brand Links of London, meanwhile, will have what Kendall described as “complete ownership” of the red-carpet event including a dedicated logo wall.
Links of London’s activation extends an existing relationship with Fashion, which is the official Canadian media partner for the jewelry company’s 25th anniversary. Fashion previously co-hosted an event for influencers and tastemakers at upscale retailer Holt Renfrew, and this fall will host private events for its preferred customers – during which a Fashion editor takes them through Links of London’s new “Timeless” anniversary collection.
The publication has also partnered with Toronto based brand consulting and production firm The Collections on its DIScOnnect Fashion Film Festival, adding a “Best Fashion Film” category – the ninth – to the Toronto Fashion Week Awards. Viewers can vote for their favourite film via a dedicated page at Fashion.com.
Fashion is inviting people to vote for their favourite film via social media and e-blasts to approximately 35,000 people who subscribe to its daily e-newsletters as well as The Collections’ own database.
The publication has also brought aboard wine brand Apothic – which launched nationally in 2011 – to sponsor the “Designer Lounge” at the event. The brand is supporting its new wine, Apothic Dark.
All of the programs were developed brand-direct, said Kendall.
