Adam Gore, Founder and Director, Barberology talks collections, inspiration and staying on brand.
Collections are a great way to play around with fresh new trends, but translating them into styles that are both wearable and appealing to your clientele makes your collections far more commercially viable.
If you want to put together a collection that’s bang on trend, you need to start by identifying the trends that are new and hot right now, the ones most suited to your brand and those that you find most inspiring.
The aim when creating a successfully on-trend collection is to straddle the line between creativity and commercial appeal, so look for trends that have a little longevity – as a good rule of thumb, the more extreme and unique the less likely the trend is to filter down to your clients or last more than a season.
Also look for trends that have good crowd appeal – again, the more polarizing trends may stand out more in images, but think about whether they will appeal to the majority of your clients.
If you’re looking for inspiration, the latest Fashion Week shows are a good place to start. Renowned for pushing the style boundaries and giving us fresh new styles each season London Fashion Week Men (LFWM) is a reliable barometer of the trends that will be all over Instagram in three months, and requested by our clients in six.
However, the golden rule when forecasting trends is this: it’s crucial to translate these Fashion Week trends into unique personal styles, rather than copying them blindly.
When it comes to putting together an on-trend collection, we always start by finding a trend our brand can align with and our clients can identify with. We then pinpoint the precise elements that make this trend so fresh and unique for the new season.
We then use this as our point of reference for inspiration. We always then give the trend our own unique Barberology spin – and we always translate a trend and curate a collection with our clients in mind.
The client is ultimately our guiding force and should be yours – after all they lie at the heart of any salon or barbershop brand and should always be at the forefront of your mind, every time.
