If you’ve ever been to a trade show, you know how exhausting they can be.
A market place is like a maze – an international one – full of thousands of people, thousands of booths, and thousands of products. To describe it in one word : overwhelming!
Buyers, bloggers, designers and more travel to the fabulous Las Vegas twice a year to attend the MAGIC market place. Trends are analyzed, street style shots are snapped, and orders are written. Buyers browse aisle upon aisle of the latest offerings from the world’s favorite brands, selecting what they want to order for their stores, which ultimately determines what we, the beloved consumer, will be seeing at retail in coming seasons. Many of the orders are handwritten and done face to face – this has been the way the fashion industry has done business for years – until now!
SHOP THE FLOOR is a new online marketplace connecting brands and buyers from every fashion segment for discovery, collaboration and commerce. SHOP THE FLOOR extends face-to-face relationships online and provides brands with access to thousands of global buyers before, during and after MAGIC Market Week. Imagine that?! If a buyer sees something great on the floor but wants to continue to shop around but doesn’t have time, he or she can simply log in to SHOP THE FLOOR and have access to the entire trade show right at their finger tips!
With more than 60,000 buyers who attend MAGIC, 6,500 exhibiting brands and 78 years of experience uniting the two, SHOP THE FLOOR already has the greatest depth and breadth of engaged buyers and brands. In other words : it’s genius.
[highlight color=”blue”] HOW IT WORKS : [/highlight]
Each private digital showroom will be highly curated for the brand and optimized for commerce, and will feature the brand’s lookbooks, line sheets, brand campaign artwork, company description, logo, linkable contact information, product images and descriptions.
All buyers on the platform have undergone a rigorous qualification process to ensure and update their retailing status.
SHOP THE FLOOR also empowers buyers to connect with brands through visual directory searchable by show, category, or brand. Buyers enter private virtual showrooms and preview product lines and merchandising ideas.
The site will also enhance the buyers’ on-site experience at MAGIC, allowing them to build lookbooks, pre-set appointments, use maps to navigate the show more efficiently, and build a show list to organize a better experience onsite. SHOP THE FLOOR is exactly what the fashion industry needed.
We had a chance to chat with one of the four fabulous minds behind SHOP THE FLOOR, Allison Lombardo, the VP Director of Marketing, and she let us know that the platform is a combination of brands from all of the shows under the Advanstar Fashion Group‘s umbrella, including the newly acquired ENK. “It’s the largest breath and depth of brands and buyers in one place,” she said, this includes the participants in MAGIC, which was split between two venues, the Las Vegas Convention Center—which housed WWD MAGIC, FN Platform and Sourcing at MAGIC —and the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, which housed PROJECT, Mens/Wear, POOLTRADESHOW and MVMNT, MAGIC’s new street and skate section.
TGIFguide is an avid fan of anything that makes the lives of all the hard-working people in the fashion industry more convenient – and we can’t wait to see what’s in store for SHOP THE FLOOR in seasons to come!