How co-working is disrupting the fashion industry

When you think co-working, you probably think of tech startups. But as Chloé Watts explains in her first column for Tech City News, fashion is the latest industry to turn to collaborative working. 

Co-working spaces across London are full of creative minds working on exciting projects in the hope of disrupting an industry.

Fashion is now the latest industry turning to collaborative working by using the power of the fashion blogger.

These bloggers play a part in distributing content about brands and their products. Up until now brands have worked with bloggers through paid product placements. These methods are effective, but tend to be short lived as they don’t engage with the blogger and their community in the long term.

Now there’s an emerging trend in brands using co-working to connect with the fashion blogger, in the hope to create deeper lasting connections.

Beautiful bloggers lounge

The Cambridge Satchel Company is one brand doing just that. They launched their first store in Covent Garden this February and inside is a beautiful bloggers lounge where they can come, mingle and blog. Julia Deane the founder had said she wanted to offer this space as a thank you to the blogger community for showing her satchels love and contributing massively to their success.

With a closer look we can see that having a community of digital content creators under a brand’s own roof is a great route to the bloggers own community.

Even if the bloggers are not creating content about the brand they are working in, the brand have the opportunity to nurture relationships on their own turf. Cambridge Satchel company can be seen to be advancing their own agenda while helping the co-working movement of collaboration and community.

Pop-up lounge at fashion week

The Apartment, created by fashion blogger Abi Marvel, is another example of this emerging trend.

After attending fashion shows without a decent place to write up content afterwards, Abi decided to house the fashion bloggers in an Apartment near the fashion shows in order for them to have a safe haven to write content.

The Apartment soon attracted brands who were interested in being around fashion bloggers in the hope of having content written about them.

Unlike the Cambridge Satchel company this setup was temporary, but it shows how bloggers wanted to be together, to mingle and work, inspiring great content whilst brands wanted to use this setup in order to connect with them on an intimate level.

For fashion brands and retailers this is an exciting way to turn fashion bloggers into ambassadors.

Brands can then leverage this relationship, to help influence important stages in the product making process. Topped with traditional trend forecasting, the brand can use their blogger ambassador relations as a portal to gage what their target audience may want in the future.

Fashion has adapted to technology in a big way over the past few years, and co-working is the latest trend to disrupt the industry.