The Fashion&Business Saturday Club from Manchester Metropolitan University travelled to London for a Masterclass with the Manolo Blahnik Marketing, Press and Communications team. In the session, they explored various aspects of communications which provided insights into career opportunities in the wider fashion sector.
Club members were welcomed into the meeting room space at Manolo Blahnik’s new offices, where the team shared the brand’s history and the role of communications within a luxury fashion house. Club members were then encouraged to consider words related to communications such as ‘persuasion’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘messaging’. These words were laid out on the table and they had to identify which ones they thought were most important to marketing and brand communications.
The group were then split into three smaller groups to rotate around the planned activities. For the marketing and events task, Club members were given an advertising budget and asked to consider the magazine profile, readership and aesthetics of many titles to decide where to allocate their advertising spend for a Manolo campaign. With the press team, Club members were shown emails sent by PR representatives for celebrities such as Millie Bobbie Brown and Beyonce asking them to select shoes that could be sent for upcoming films and tours. They had to consider the event, wearers’ size and their style. Then, with the content media team, Club members created content for social media posts, using props and backdrops to style and photograph Manolo Blahnik shoes.
The group came back together at the end of the Masterclass and revisited the words laid out on the table to see if their perspective had changed on the most important elements of brand communications. This was followed by a Q&A and words of wisdom from the Manolo team, sharing advice for the industry and general career opportunities within the sector and beyond.