How To Target Brands For Partnerships

Securing a partnership with a fashion brand is often exactly what your business needs to get to the next level. However, marketing to these brands is a big task. You’ll need to determine what brands will mesh best with your company’s marketing vision and which brands will offer you the level of visibility you’re looking for.

Everyone has different methods, but there are a few universal rules that will help you target brands for partnerships. Read on below for some general tips that will help you get your feet wet when you seek out fashion marketing opportunities. 

Do your homework

Like any good business proposition, you’ll want to do your research before reaching out to the brand you’re interested in targeting. Not only should you be researching the brand in question, but you should also be looking for the key stakeholders that you want to reach out to.

Cultivate relationships

When you find the stakeholder you’d like to reach out to, prioritize developing a real relationship with them first. Grab coffee, get to know them and get to know how the company operates better. You want to develop an internal champion for you within the brand and what better way to do that than by getting to know someone firsthand?

Don’t pitch first

To go along with the previous tip, don’t pitch your partnership first, even within the first email or reach out you send to someone. Brands are used to getting thousands of these emails a day - you want to stand out and be extremely personalized with your reach out. Again, do your research, pick out what you really love about the brand and connect about that. Save your pitch for later.

Think big for fashion marketing

You might want to downplay yourself when thinking about what kinds of brands you want to partner with. Don’t sell yourself short! You’ll never know if a brand wants to partner with you unless you put yourself out there. Put the same amount of work and research into propositioning a big brand as you would a small brand, but don’t rule out massive brands entirely. You’d be surprised how many people thought that brands wouldn’t partner with them, but reached out anyways - and ended up securing those partnerships.

Stay persistent

Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get a response right away - this is where the follow ups come in. Even when crafting your first reach out, draft two follow up emails as well. There is plenty of great, free email software out there that can help you schedule these follow up emails in case you don’t get a response within a certain amount of time. Be careful though, don’t spam! Space out your emails - follow up after 5 days and then if no response to that email, it’s recommended to follow up again after 7 days. Similarly, if you get a response saying to reach out in a future time frame, mark it on your calendar so you don’t forget to follow up! Since brands get so many of these emails, you need to be the person on top of your pitch.

Be patient

Partnerships will take a long time to cultivate. Especially with larger brands, there are more hoops to jump through. If it’s been a few months and the deal is still being worked through, don’t fear. Often, the best partnerships come after a long wait.

Work for free

Often, in order to build trust and show how committed you are, it might help to do some work for the brand for free (if it’s a short project). We’re not saying to take on a six-month long project for free, but if there’s something you can do for free to help build the relationship with the brand, it will help to knock it out and show them your level of commitment.

Landing a brand partnership can do big things for your company. Though there are a lot of little steps and work to put in to get the partnership that is best for you and your company, a brand partnership can be just what you need to grab new customers and gain big amounts of visibility within your industry.