Growing Your Business Through Community with Pattern

Polina Osherov, Editor of Pattern Magazine and Principal of Polina Osherov Photography, and Janneane Blevins, Senior Editor of Pattern Magazine and Community Manager at KA+A, talk about growing the Pattern Meetup and Magazine and how the where able to accomplish it by reaching out through their community. Listen to the conversation or read it below. If you haven’t joined Smartups sign up at SmartupsIndy.com and come out every third Thursday to the Speak Easy to grow your marketing knowledge and connections.

Smartups Pattern Indy With Polina Osherov & Janneane Blevins by Smartups on Mixcloud

 

Full transcript after the jump.
Moderator:     

I’m excited to introduce Polina and Janneane today. Janneane is the senior editor of Pattern Magazine and the community manager of KA+A in which she is focused on building relationships between her teams, clients, city, and community at large. Polina  is the editor of Pattern and principal of Polina Osherov Photography in which she is a commercial editor, photographer specializing in fashion and portraiture, and you’ve likely seen your work when you’re driving around town or in other places as well.

So let’s hear it for Pattern. [Applause]

Polina:            

Hey, guys. Thanks for being here. That was some pretty good advice there. I think – how many of these – maybe three or four. I think that’s the most intense that we’ve gotten with answering questions about marketing. So that’s kind of exciting. I think everybody could wrap their brain around the whole sweater idea too which helps.

Janneane:        

I want a Pattern sweater.

Polina:            

Yeah. Can we work on that? That would be great.

Janneane:        

Thanks for having us out. We are super excited to talk about Pattern and how we came to be, how we’ve grown, and some of the marketing techniques that we’ve used to grow the Pattern Community. I’m Janneane. Thanks, Tim, for the introduction. Obviously this is Polina to my right, and just wanted to start out with introducing Pattern to those who may not know.

Pattern was launched in 2010 as a community for fashion. We saw a lot of disjointed groups, each in their own areas focusing on fashion, developing businesses, getting together, but it was inconsistent. So Pattern was born out of the idea of let’s show the city and let’s try to measure a critical mass see how many people are interested in fashion and do that in a little bit more organized, repetitive pattern.

So let’s have monthly meetups that are free and get people together.

Polina:

That was when we got really organized.

Janneane:

Polina is going to tell you about the old days of Indianapolis fashion –

Polina:

The sad days when our fashion collective failed. We started as an Indianapolis fashion collective and really had no business running a nonprofit or a community group because none of us had any background in that. We just knew that there was a lot of energy around fashion in Indianapolis all of the sudden, and we wanted to tap into that. So we started meeting, and we had all these really lofty goals like we’re going to have a fashion district, and we’re going to have seminars, and we’re going to do this and that.

Janneane:

Incubator.

Polina:

Yeah. All kinds of things, and that ended up with us not really doing anything. We were just chasing our tails all of the time, and the effort kind of started to die down, and people started losing interest, and at that point thankfully I met Janneane and Ben and was introduced to KA+A who liked what they saw. They kind of saw through all the messiness of it and realized that we were onto something, that we just needed some help figuring out how to make it go forward instead of around and around in circles.

So they came up with a very really great, simple strategy based on the Verge model which is forget about everything else. Just get people in the same room once a month and get them talking to one another. So that’s what we started doing.

Janneane:

We literally just slashed everything. We had just got done – KA+A is a branding organization that works with a lot of tech startups and B2B software companies here in town. So we live, breathe branding and developing products and experiences. Definitely saw the value of Pattern in having fashion and developing a culture in Indianapolis. It’s something that’s very attractive to the talent that most of these companies want to recruit.

So there’s more than one reason that we wanted to get involved, and what we really saw with Pattern is that there could be a Verge type model where there’s just those regular meetups. It was something consistent. It was something free that people knew that they could come to and start talking to one another. We really focused on the education and the business side of fashion.

A lot of the fashion businesses in Indianapolis are very young and hungry and thirsty for how do I open up my boutique? How do I get a pattern made after I have this designed? How should I photograph? Is there different things I can do on social media? What are the trends? What should I be designing for spring 2015?

So just, again, really developed a consistent, regular bottle for Pattern to start bringing this community together and also building businesses within it.

Polina:

And then the magazine came around, and that was a totally complete fluke. So many things that end up great it just sort of started out as a very simple thing. Kathy Davis, who is the design director, approached me and said, “Hey, I’m looking to expand my portfolio. Why don’t you shoot some pictures and I’ll design this brochure and it will be fun.” And I said, “That sounds good, but how about I ask a couple of other people to participate?”

So about six months later and 120 pages we had this pretty cool-looking digital publication. Obviously we hadn’t planned on publishing it or printing it so there was no money raised or anything like that. We launched it as a digital publication and then had a lot of people come up to us and say, “Why isn’t this in print? How do we get the hard copy?” And we were a little flabbergasted by the response.

Honestly it was very unexpected but gratifying and ended up printing 100 copies on demand. People paid $30 apiece to get a hard copy, and immediately after that everybody was saying, “So when’s the next one coming out?” And we just looked at each other and it was kind of a big decision time because doing a magazine was not part of our main objective which was simply to meet, and it seemed like we were going to be deviating significantly from our core purpose.

But we continued in spite of ourselves and found that the magazine created – it was the best kind of marketing we could have created for ourselves. We hadn’t anticipated turning it into a marketing piece, but that’s what it ended up being, and when people saw the second issue in print, and we did a Kickstarter to raise some of the money towards the printing cost, the feedback was better than ever. Our format, we changed it. It was a bigger size and it was cool paper and everybody was like, “Holy crap. What’s going on here? This is awesome. Wait. There’s fashion in Indy?”

We’re like, “Well, yeah. There actually is.”

Janneane:        

And we put it in their hands with the magazine. It’s become a very useful marketing piece especially even for the city. We found a lot of the different civic organizations in Indianapolis are now using this magazine to promote Indianapolis. We’ll get into it a little bit later, but we’ve been able to include content outside of fashion that has been really attractive. So we decided we could have two parts to our model.

We would have the very inclusive part of free monthly meetups where you’re building community and bringing people together, and then we’d have a little bit more exclusive aspirational part where we’re showcasing the talent and you have to work to get into the magazine. You have to contribute to the community. You have to contribute to the blog.

Polina:

Well your stuff has to be good, too.

Janneane:

Yes.

Polina:

There’s that.

Janneane:

And it all boils down to that we want to affect the culture in Indianapolis. It’s aesthetics. It’s subjective.

Polina:

Yeah. It’s very subjective. [Inaudible] says I think a lot of it comes – well there’s curation. That’s what that’s for. You work with people that have proven themselves in the industry to uphold a certain standard. Obviously we have access through the Internet and being in the 21st century and all we know what’s going on around the world in the fashion industry. We know what’s happening in New York. We see what’s being printed that we would consider high-quality product.

And it’s not very hard to hold up the two next to each other and say how will this compare side by side with a W or a Vogue or a Hypebeast or whatever? So I think if you immerse yourself in it it’s really not that hard to tell the difference. Fortunately we find that not enough people do that locally and we’re trying to encourage that.

Janneane:

In kind of what I had alluded to earlier is we’re really trying to connect Pattern to other industries. So part of how we’re going to grow, part of how we’re going to take that model of the inclusive community and the exclusive showcase is we’re now going to connect it to other industries. Fashion is still a little – people are still a little wary of it. When you say that word they instantly think you’re going to critique what they’re wearing that day, or ask you for style advice, or anything like that. Fashion is a legitimate business.

You think of blogs like The Business of Fashion. You think of all the valuations that companies like Moda Operandi and Gilte Group have commanded. It’s a very legit tech business as well as it is a fashion business and exceedingly so as we get into wearable tech. So we’ve really made an effort to start attaching Pattern to other industries that people are a little bit more comfortable with. Last summer we had a meetup with Verge that was amazing, one of my favorite events.

We invited two women from New York to come in. One was a Thiel Fellow. The other one had a lot of experience with 3-d printing and asked them to just share their experience with the audience and really explore this space in between fashion and tech and the overlap and the similarities. We got really great feedback from that. With our magazines, we’re doing similar things.

This upcoming issue that launches on Friday is all about design. We tapped industrial designers, architects, interior designers, and graphic designers, UX designers, jewelry designers, and asked them all to participate in this. We had various illustrators and designers lay out the pages of the magazine. So we’re really able to grow the fingerprint of Pattern by getting so many different people involved in it, and we’re excited to continue that with music and sports and many other things to come.

Polina:

It has been really helpful to growth for us to partner with other organizations, to cross-pollinate and to reach out across divides that you think there’s nothing in common here, but actually there is. And that’s the beauty of fashion I think is that it really crosses all borders. And we love educating people about that. Indianapolis is still by and large is a city that doesn’t consider itself stylish and doesn’t even think of itself in terms of fashion. And we have a lot of people that live in the city who kind of just don’t think about fashion at all or if you mention it to them they just shrug or makes some kind of a degrading comment. So part of our objective as well is to change those perceptions.

Janneane:

So, in addition to all of those grassroots collaborations that we just talked about, we’re also looking seriously at the city saying, “Hey, we put together this really great marketing piece for the city. How can you help? How can you sponsor us?”

Polina:

Give us some money.

Janneane:

Polina likes to say that a lot.

Polina:

I’ve been saying that a lot lately, yeah.

Janneane:

So we’ve established a lot of community partners ranging from businesses and services to more civic involved and Indy Chamber and CICF and also the really wonderful Harrison Center who’s been a fiscal sponsor for us and also helping us figure out how to revitalize spaces and neighborhoods and build community as well.

Polina:

We kind of have our fingers in a lot of pies, and most of that comes through community and that’s really crucial is that I don’t know if it comes from being in Indianapolis and our honest to goodness loveliness and Hoosier hospitality, but the whole all the ships rise with the tide and helping each other, there’s just this great, great momentum and feeling of camaraderie in the city overall for its evolution. So we love participating in that.

Janneane:

Now that we have such strong participation locally we’re looking regionally, nationally, globally, intergalactically. That’s serious. I’ll let Polina share some of the countries that we’re in and our next big aspirational goal.

Polina:

The magazine has been a joy and a challenge. It’s 100 percent volunteer run. And so twice a year we get a bunch of people to contribute and then there’s the very, very arduous task of putting it together, and getting it ready for printing, and making sure that everything is just right. So certainly there have been moments where I’ve questioned continuing, if you will, and that moment usually comes about 24 to 48 hours before the files are due to the printer where all of us are just like, “Oh my god. Will this never end? We’re done.”

So somewhere between last spring and last fall a distributor reached out to us and said, “We’re interested in placing you guys in some bookstores. Can you send us a number of magazines?” Which I did. I didn’t hear from them for a while and right as the magazine, the fall 2013, was heading to the printer I got this email, very innocuous, with a spreadsheet attached. And I opened it, and after looking at it for a few seconds realized that they were sending us to Hong Kong and Austria and Netherlands and Brazil and a few other places.

So at that point you’re like, “I can’t quit now. We’re international.” So it’s been gratifying, but again we still haven’t solved our dilemma of making this pay because our business model for the magazine is not really a traditional print publication business model. We’re very picky about what we feature. We don’t want to be beholden to advertisers, and so that definitely affects what happens on that end.

The intergalactic part is we have an event with NASA in April, and, yes, that would be the NASA. And they actually reached out to us. They’re bringing a show, Destination Station, to Indianapolis next month and they contacted us and wanted to partner on a wearable technology event. And I said, “Okay. That sounds good. Do you guys have any money?” And they’re like, “No.” I’m like, “What? You’re lying.”

So I said, “How about can you guys get our magazine onto the international space station? That would be a worthwhile tradeoff.” And they’re like, “That’s not really going to happen. There’s a little bit too much red tape involved.” But I’m bound and determined. We have to go intergalactic. There’s no stopping Pattern. So we’ll see what happens.

Janneane:

Moving forward, I think we get a lot of opportunities now to collaborate with people. Since we’ve been so intentional about reaching out and trying to find new ways to grow through organizations that are building communities as well, we’ve realized that we also have to be very deliberate about our focus. And running on a volunteer basis with no employees, we’re kind of at the mercy of people donating hours.

So we’ve really learned to filter each extension of Pattern through a pretty serious vetting process to decide what we’re going to do and then the noise comes back to our two main projects, those that help the meetups, those that help the magazine, and are we connecting people and building businesses.

Polina:

Focus is really important for any product development. If you try to scale up and expand too quickly, most likely your original idea is going to suffer and possibly die. So we’ve been pretty diligent about that although there are a few things on the horizon that might change that soon. So as this is specifically about marketing for startups, one thing that we did benefit from is that both Janneane and I have some pretty good experience with social media and marketing in general from our other careers if you will.

So we were able to utilize social media effectively and also with what small marketing efforts we made. So that helped. So you’ve got to come to events like this so that you really figure out what the gold standard is for all those things.

Janneane:

Can you remind me what our read rates are on the website and things like that? We get a lot of hits on our website, like 100,000? Is that right?

Polina:

A day?

Janneane:

I’m making stuff up.

Polina:

She’s making stuff up.

Janneane:

We have a valuable online presence is what I’m trying to get at. We have a lot of visitors to our website. So Polina’s done –

Polina:

Not 100,000 a day, though.

Janneane:

Not a day, maybe a month. We’ve done a lot to nurture those efforts through being present on Twitter, and Facebook, and in social media and all of that and really tapping into our volunteer basis as well.

Polina:

Absolutely. Do you guys have any specific questions because I feel like a lot of this stuff you probably already know. I don’t know if we’re revealing anything revolutionary or exciting, but if there are specific questions that we can help answer. Uh-oh. Mathew in the back.

[Question]

Polina:

That’s really funny.

Janneane:

Let me intercept, though, because there was –

Polina:

Thanks for putting me on the spot. I appreciate that.

Janneane:

There wasn’t a business plan per se. If you know Christian, he talks about prototypes are just as good as business plans, but there was a document where we outlined and kind of stripped away some of the extra stuff that [IFC] was trying to do. So we have had some governing docs, not traditional business plans and board docs and articles of organization and all that, but we’ve certainly through KA+A and we also went through a really great branding exercise with SmallBox where we talked about our values and all of that.

So we’ve certainly gone through those things because you have to remind yourself of the focus and what you’re working on. There’s lots of shiny opportunities that we would love to follow, but it all comes down to can you fulfill on your main obligations and really take care of that community and keep the magazine alive.

[Question]

Janneane:        

I did that preparing for this presentation.

Polina:

Two days ago.

Janneane:

Yeah. We’re remarkably on track. We’ve done a really great job sticking to that vision, and in the document it talked about focus on building a great community where you get people together and all the other things will come. You’ll get your relationships with the city. You’ll get your relationships with sponsors. You’ll get all of these other relationships as long as you first focus on attracting that membership and really engaging and making something valuable for them.

And it’s wild to think we have had a lot of really wonderful partnerships, sponsorships, mentors, and access to the city that we never would have dreamed of on that day one.

Polina:

But still no money.

Janneane:

It’s coming.

Polina:

I’m hoping. I’ve been told that year five is when all the financial magic happens. So I’m counting on that. All our capital has been in our volunteers and in the talented people that surround us and help us do what we’re doing.

[Question]

Polina:

Not specifically, no. I’ve been trying to raise money to keep the magazine going. I feel like what we’ve been able to do with it and it’s become like a de facto marketing tool for the city that they love to use to recruit talent. We’d love to keep that going because we feel like there’s a lot of value to that, especially now that it’s international. So a lot of my focus has been on trying to figure out how to not just scrape together printing costs, which are approximately $18,000 for 3,000 copies, but how to hire a staff, how to create jobs in a fashion magazine in Indianapolis.

There’s a lot of people that I’ve talked to who would love nothing more than to work in a publication that specializes in fashion ,and they don’t want to go to New York. They would love nothing more than to stay here in Indy and do what they love which is work in fashion. So we’re not really into retail. We don’t have that background. So the whole product development we’re kind of weak on.

Obviously it’s something that we should ponder because that might be a good way to make money, but it’s just with this being volunteer positions for us there’s only so many hours in a day.

Janneane:

I think a lot of the value that potential partners might see in us is event, the community. Can they leverage our community to drive awareness to another certain cause? So most of our value perceived by these partners would be the grassroots ability to spread a message, and there’s a certain cache or value.

Polina:

We’re cool people.

Janneane:

That’s what we hear, that fashion equals cool, but there’s some exciting things happening in Indianapolis as you probably all know through different things like the Velocity Initiative, and IDI, and bids for the Super Bowl, and transit, and all of that. So we’re certainly keeping plugged in on those, and if there’s opportunities to collaborate, we would love to do that and have a few things that we’ve been thinking about that would maintain and remain in the spirit of events and building that community. This next slide feels a little bit out of place, but we’re going to roll with it and I was going to ask Polina to speak a little bit more about the imagery and our continued approach to marketing and just the need to use.

Polina:

One of the challenges that I face as a photographer is looking at some really bad imagery and just feeling for the vendors that I know are trying to do their very best to launch their products, especially in the fashion market, and just knowing how short the images fall of the actual product. So I feel like we’ve kind of avoided that in a lot of ways because we have some really talented photographers who are part of our community.

And so I feel like we’ve presented a really, really strong front visually which I believe helps with credibility. We can’t really bill ourselves as fashion experts I suppose. I don’t know that we’ve ever done that, but if we were talking about fashion and then people went to our website and the images were terrible, it’d be a really hard sell. So that worked in our favor too, I think.

Janneane:

I’m going to skip through a few of these because I feel like we’ve already hit on them. Part of what we’ve really been focusing also on expanding and growing in marketing is to build up our volunteer basis, and how do we make a volunteer base that is engaged and excited, and how can we leverage their talents and their networks to continue growing? So we have a group of probably 20 I think that we’ve divided amongst different areas of focus whether it’s working the events, or working on community development, or sponsorships, just really trying to develop a straight team if you will of specialized workers who are just as excited about our mission as we are.

Polina:

More questions?

Janneane:

That’s the end of the official presentation. So we’re definitely open for questions.

[Question]

Polina:

They, for example, when they have groups come to town on diplomatic missions if you will, they will hand out the magazine there. They I think just show it around to people like it’s a point of pride. You can spend about 30 minutes trying to pitch Indianapolis as this really cool place to live or you can just pull out the magazine and let people flip through it and right away a lot of the people’s perception of what Indianapolis is and isn’t changes, right?

It’s just such a powerful tool. It kind of summarizes everything that we want to say that people have a really hard time believing when they come here say from New York and they see our skyline and they’re like, “Uh, there’s three high rises.”

Janneane:

And another one on the way.

Polina:

“What do I do here?”

Janneane:

And the content, it’s a little bit different. If you haven’t flipped through one, it’s different than your average normal fashion magazine. We’ve tapped a lot of experts to do op-eds, to talk about urbanism and the design of a city, to talk about transit and smart options to designing those, to talk about – we had three or four different tech startups profiled in feature talking about their businesses. So there’s really a lot of rich content in there that supplements the editorials and the eye candy if you will, the actual showcasing of our talent that I think a lot of these organizations gravitate towards because they start to feel kind of the rhythm and the heartbeat of the city when we talk about these super relevant topics that are hanging in the air and being discussed in coffee shops.

Polina:

So it’s like Visit Indy and the Chamber and the IDI. They all get copies that they distribute to various VIPs and we see a lot of that.

[Question]

Polina:

Certainly. That’s a great idea, amongst many, many other such ideas. I think it comes down to money and manpower, to be able to do that would be fantastic, and as the community grows hopefully we’ll have the resources to do that because you’re right. When I met with you, and I was like, “Hey, do you know about Verge?” You were like, “No. I don’t know about any of these things.” I’m like, “What do you mean? You have to –.” It seems so accessible now, doesn’t it? Now that you’re kind of plugged in everything is all of the sudden shrinking as far as the people that you know in the community.

So we’d love to do that. If anybody here wants to sponsor that initiative, see me after this please.

[Question]

Polina:

Excellent question. Part of the problem with that is maintaining the database. You want to make sure it’s accurate. So that and creating it so that you can search it in the right ways, it’s kind of outside of my area of expertise. I’m not entirely sure. I can kind of see it in my mind’s eye. I would assume it would somehow be connected to our website, but somebody just has to mastermind it and plug it in.

Janneane:

Thank you for that. I was actually thinking Indy Made, Indy Made, Indy Made in my head as you said that. Indy Made, if you haven’t heard of that is measuring and tracking all the startups in Indianapolis. So it’s a site where you can sign up. You can share who’s in your company kind of like a Facebookish or a local angel list is probably more accurate where you can track your funding and you can start to see all the connections. So KA+A and Sticksnleaves have been working on growing that database, and I think that there’s a lot of valuable opportunities for the data.

It would be divided investors, meetup groups, resources, entrepreneurs, startup companies. So there’s a lot of categories, but I think that the valuable part of Indy Made will be measuring how many startups there are per year and how much money they’re raising because those are two really big metrics to measuring the health of a startup community. So there’s a possibility that something like that could translate over to the fashion sphere.

It certainly takes a lot of work. Our intern right now is contacting companies one by one asking them to sign up or update their profiles. So even if it’s software, it doesn’t necessary happen overnight.

Polina:

We kind of tried to address that issue by having the event in January that we had the expo was designed for just that. We brought together resources with the creative community in that we had videographers, and graphic designers, and social media experts, and the like. And so that was kind of our way of addressing that very real problem of connecting resources to the people with the small businesses that need the help.

[Question]

Polina:

How did you track us down? Did you Google Indianapolis fashion at any point?

[Question]

Janneane:        

I think that’s kind of a characteristic of Indianapolis though as well. Compared to some of these other startup communities that might be a little bit larger and on the coasts, since it’s smaller and very connected and integrated, serendipity happens way more often. I think we will see the need to institutionalize a little bit, and it’s better to start preparing for that now. We do have Meetup.com. I know that’s certainly not a perfect system because I don’t think you can e-mail anybody or access them that way, but at least it’s a start at quantifying how many members are in our community and starting to see some of the faces and the names.

Any other questions? I saw a few hands, but I can’t remember where they were.

[Question]

Janneane:        

We have a lot of discussions about that, and I think at the heart of it it will always be a magazine made in Indiana and made in Indianapolis. There is a chance that you will start to see talent from other places, or clothing from other places, or models from other places start to come into the magazine, but I think it will always be through the filter of being made in Indianapolis.

Polina:

She’s absolutely right. It will always be an Indianapolis-based publication, and I think there’s a lot that goes into it was made here in terms of just showing people what we’re capable of. I don’t know that we necessarily need to stick with the local folks, but we certainly will give them preference. They will always have a one-up over anybody else.

Janneane:

And I think that comes from the dynamic of a community. Local, and being connected to one another, and supporting one another is great, but if you’re going to advance a community then you need to constantly be connecting it to things outside of it so that it can grow and so that it can find new influence. So one of the really cool programs here in town is We Are City, and they have an import where they bring in a talented artist or author or somebody like that into to community to live for a couple of months, work on a special project, set up a lot of conversations and dinners with people.

So I think the magazine could be similar. Like how can we keep going out and showing our Indy story, and how can we also collect that influence, and bring it back into our community, and keep growing it? You right there with the glasses. I’ve seen your hand raised a couple of times.

[Question]

Janneane:        

So how did we get volunteers to contribute and not dilute the brand?

[Question]

Janneane:        

I’m not sure if I know the answer to that because it feels kind of innate almost in how we train and the types of people that we attract. As far as volunteer commitments go, it’s pretty steep for Pattern. We expect a lot out of ourselves and out of the people who participate and volunteer with us. So I think that’s one hurdle where you get to really quality people who love the mission. We’re getting a little bit more formalized with our new volunteer recruits on trying to onboard them and help them find ownership.

We haven’t done anything as far as special packets per se, but we’ve had a lot of discussions and round table meetings where there’s probably a series of three introductory meetings where we just each time introduce Pattern, talked about what it was, talked about what we were doing, gave them opportunities to own a little piece of it. And that repetition I think has gotten us to where we are today where they feel a lot more comfortable and can own a lot more.

Polina:

I think you summarized it pretty well. It’s very hands on and it is very commitment heavy. So the people that have stuck around have really understood from the get-go what we’re trying to do, and that’s what made it easy for them to remain a part of it in spite of the fact that personally I’m not a very good people manager, and so you have to make the effort to reach out and to stay connected. We’re not going to be chasing you down.

That’s just not possible with our time commitments. So it’s just worked out organically that the people that get it and want to be a part of it and understand stick around and the ones that don’t, they don’t. No special sauce there. It just kind of happened, I guess.

Janneane:

Matt.

[Question]

Janneane:        

We are, and that’s what one of our volunteer groups is focusing on is specifically college outreach. So this Friday our magazine launch will be at the Herron School of Arts which is great. They don’t have a fashion school, curiously enough, but they have a lot of designers and people interested in fashion. So we’re excited about building a partnership with them and with this event kind of leading that off. We’re participating in events on campuses.

Purdue is having a fashion show. So we’ll send people out there. We got to the Art Institute fashion show and participate there whether as a judge or just somebody in the audience. One of our features in the magazine we asked students to submit their designs. So they got to submit a sketch and then also the final photo of their design as well, and we got a really great response.

I think we had people from IU, Purdue, Ball State, Art Institute, maybe a couple of others, but it’s certainly an area that we want to grow because if anything you want that next generation of talent to stay here, and know that there could be a job, and that there’s a future, and that there’s a community for them here before they head off to LA, or New York, or Chicago, or one of the more established fashion scenes. I think we’re also very honest with them that Indianapolis will never be one of those fashion scenes.

We’re creating something entirely original. We realize that we’re not going to have Lincoln Park fashion shows, or Paris Fashion Week, or anything like that just because that’s not part of Indiana’s DNA, but what we might have may actually attach onto our tech industry. We have a lot of smart people building software, focusing on e-commerce. We have a lot of really talented photographers and makeup artists.

I think we have a lot of the hard workers that produce fashion right here in our city, and so we are very keen to promote those within our meetups and let them know that you don’t have to just be a fashion designer to have a career in fashion. [Applause]