- design the company’s visual identity ;
- design a website to showcase and sell the collections ;
- provide consultancy and web / graphic tools along for special events.
Valery Demure is the only PR agency in the world specialized in fashion and luxury garment accessories and jewelry. She represents, promotes and sells the creations of her own roster of cutting-edge designers for fashion stores, magazines and buyers from all around the world. Launched in 2006 only, her agency has quickly gained a reputation for itself as a force to be reckoned with for its unconventional pieces and trend-setting status.
Building on its experience, contacts and knowledge in the worlds of fashion and media, GetConfused has assisted Valery closely with her business right from the onset, helping her with the right targets and connections to establish in the industry, setting up her website to allow her gain rapid visibility over the web, and designing her graphic identity as well as coming up with specific designs and taylor-made communication tools for sales and special events.
We designed the complete graphic identity of the company : logo, letterheads, business cards, invitations and press releases all bear the mark of Valery’s distinctive aesthetics.
Given the activity of the agency, lookbooks were naturally given a particular attention and several communication solutions were found to match the specific needs of the company. On top of designing unique invitations for all showrooms in London, Paris and NYC and one-off advertisements for LeBook and Modem, GetConfused has been in charge of the agency’s communication towards its different professional audiences. For buyers, we design pdf listings with all items and respective pricing for each designer. For the press, we conceive pdf press releases with a description of each designer’s collection along with a description of their personal profile. Since March 2007, for each collection, we have also come up with an illustrated poster displaying in one document the highlights of each season’s collection, along with the agents in charge of their representation at ValeryDemure.
Along with lookbooks, we also design the agency’s frequent newsletter, each taylored for the occasion in one file, always paired with strong images, specially produced or taken from famous publications, sometimes alongside illustrations, so as to provide a vivid embodiment of the designer’s work and incite people to discover new talents and new trends and come to the showrooms. Each newsletter is in line with the well defined colour code and graphic elements which identify Valery’s communication.
This aesthetics, of which proceed all the agency’s communication tools, derives of course from the particularly strong visual references which is at the heart of its activity. Known for her cutting-edge and diverse selection of designers, all atypical and directed towards an audience in search of highly distinctive fashion and luxury items, almost hyper-accesories in a sense, with some experimental showroom pieces designed only for the press or museums and private collections, Valery needed a graphic identity which matched and sustained the strength and specificity of her universe. Made of hard edges, strong colours and vivid contrasts that stand apart from fashion’s usual ground, this aesthetics is in Valery’s own words, " an escape from the traditional, the conventional and the predictable."
Setting up a website was critical to Valery’s activity in order to achieve two essential objectives both revolving around the inherent need for high visibility which comes attached with fashion and P.R. activities. We then set up her website almost at the same time as she started her activities so as to help her gain maximum exposure right from the beginning for her business and the designers it represents.
The initial brief was tight and demanding, combining the commitment to a very strong and already well-defined visual universe with a specific graphic signature and colour code along with a need for a simple and easy interface which would suit both clients and the press in their search for information. We opted as a result for a highly personalized html design with simple functionalities which would keep the site both easy to access and dynamic in terms of image, on top of displaying the same distinctive look throughout all pages. While all texts come with a simple and discrete scroll-down and the general menu is a classic case of click-and-go, we installed a roll-over submenu in the designers’ section by which visitors simply roll over a name to have the image appear, keeping the visual flow of images highly fluid. Another click then brings the visitor onto each designer’s personal profile.
In the designers’ section, we chose to illustrate the first page showcasing highlights of the collections as a series of montages combining accessories, models, fashion icons and various graphic and visual elements designed to transcribe each designer’s peculiar universe for each season in a simple glance. These montages are renewed every six months with each new collection. On each designers’ personal page comes a specific page and set of images for their profile, collection and press publications. Each set of press images comes in turn as a simple roll-over thumbnail where a glide over any mini image makes it appear it larger on the left in its dedicated space. In the area dedicated to showcasing the services offered by the company, a slideshow of photographs accompanies each text while the reader can familiarize themselves with the activities of the agency, thereby immediately providing a high-impact and instantaneous illustration of these activities. An additional functionality is a taylor-made personal blog for Valerie, "Le Carnet", embedded directly within the body of the website and made to look as if it were the pages of a real notebook (carnet) with entries and images.
Two special professional functionalities are also especially worth mentioning. In "Log-in", a section reserved only to professionals, these can log-in with a special code delivered to them by the agency. Yet, instead of building an altogether separate section, this functionality was preferably inserted as an additional facility within the display of collections in the designers’ section so as to keep the website stable and simple in its structure and to avoid redundancies. Once logged in, buyers and the press can access in each designer’s section the whole of each collection which simply extends itself down the screen instead of the single image that is normally displayed. This way, looks and specific designs are known only to those who need to be in the know. In addition, we set up a special appointment online booking facility which allows clients, buyers and the press to arrange visits up to one month in advance before the fashion week.
Alongside a more traditional communication consultancy, GetConfused has also assisted Valery on a series of special events in which she was asked to intervene. A special project with Austrian designer Florian and a number of other partners is treated as a separate case study.
For the Spring / Summer 2008 fashion week, we also collaborated with Valery on "Demure Untamed", a specially curated showroom in partnership with the London Fashion Week, designing an exclusive illustration to be displayed on site along with helping her organize and install the space and manage contacts with the press and visitors. This event is to be repeated for the Autumn / Winter 2009 season with "Valery Demure presents".
==> On top of furthering our insider’s knowledge of fashion and the press, our collaboration with Valery Demure has allowed us to meet exciting challenges in terms of meeting a demanding visual brief with a simple and efficient design while enabling us to develop new tools to market, promote and sell products online and making valuable contacts with both cutting-edge designers and buyers alike.