Fashion Week for Founders: A Working Guide

Fashion week is not a marketing channel. It is a 96-hour density experiment in which the publishing, retail, talent, and finance ecosystems of an industry all stand within walking distance of one another for the only time each season.

If you are a founder, your job during fashion week is not to be photographed at the most shows. It is to take six private meetings the rest of the year would require six flights to schedule — and to do so in clothing that makes you legible from twenty feet away on a step-and-repeat.

We routinely book founders into five strategic appointments and zero parties. They invariably do more business in a week than they could in a quarter. The signal that they are doing it right is that the press finds them anyway.