You’ve covered collaborations extensively in your magazine and have engaged in them yourself…
Yes. Since I first started in independent press, collaboration has always been part of the DNA. At its core, it’s about using your address book intelligently, bringing together people with different skills so everyone benefits.
For us, collaborators gain access to our platform, endorsement, connections, and community, and in return we benefit from their expertise, creativity, and reach. When it’s done well, it should be genuinely beneficial to all parties.

Why do you think collaborations are so important right now?
Collaborations or collaborative projects should be a major pillar of a brand’s annual marketing strategy.

What I think needs to shift, especially for independent brands, is how we think about collaborations. Too often, the default model is partnering with another brand to produce a new product. That can be beautiful, but it’s also time-consuming and expensive. At the end of the day, you’re still producing another product that then needs its own marketing budget and sales strategy.

I believe the future of collaborations lies more in events and communications-led partnerships. This doesn’t mean brands should stop creating products, but rather ask: why not take the products you already have and collaborate to promote and move them?
 That could be through online events, physical activations, or shared storytelling. Working together to amplify visibility rather than add complexity.

What’s happening in the market that makes this strategy so effective  and why do you think it’s underused?
Personally, I think the independent kids’ fashion industry is somewhat behind when it comes to marketing technology and strategy.

Between the global pandemic, tariffs, inflation, and rising manufacturing costs, most small brands have been focused purely on surviving, getting production finished and delivering to retailers. That’s understandable, but it’s come at the cost of falling behind on modern marketing approaches.

The good news is it’s not too late. Getting up to speed doesn’t actually take that long, but it does require intention. Brands need to carve out time and budget for collaboration and treat it as essential, not optional. Even when inboxes are overwhelming.

How do collabs help brands cut through the noise?

I’ll explain this with a personal analogy. At university, I was consistently getting a B+ on written exams. When we had a group essay, I deliberately chose a team with the best analyst, the “Mr Knowledge” guy, and the person who never missed a detail. The result? We got an A+. I kept the same team after that.
The point is: I’m not A+ at everything, even if I am at a lot….;) but collaborating with people who are A+ in areas where you’re not is how you level up, succeed and ultimately remain focused on the task at hand.

What role do rising costs and the shift to first-party data play here?
Rising costs mean brands have to be smarter and more efficient. Collaborations allow brands to share audiences, resources, though I’m not sure to what point they will share their first party data.

Katie, you’ve not only written about collabs, but as press, you’ve entered into some yourself. Can you share examples that worked well?
We’ve recently collaborated with Sticky Lemon on a limited-edition bag for Pirouette events. The quality and design are honestly insane we practically have to nail them down.

What’s fascinating is how organically it works: a few people walk around with the bags, and suddenly there’s an influx of people trying to find us to get one. They repost, tag us, and share I get DMs asking about them. It’s a perfect example of a product doing the marketing for you.

During Covid, I launched a large-scale collaborative project called Kids Digital Fashion Week, partnering with multiple kids’ fashion press platforms. Pirouette produced the event, created the schedule, and everyone shared brands’ collections and content across their platforms. It was actually a huge success at the time. Interestingly Instagram later introduced the collaborative posting features that mirrored what we were doing manually at KDFW. We could have really done with those tools! In many ways, we were ahead of our time :)

Any collabs that didn’t work as well as you’d hoped? Any learnings?

One collaboration that didn’t fully work was a creative shoot I invested in. Shoots are always challenging, and ironically, it’s one of the most beautiful shoots I’ve ever produced, but the photographer and I weren’t aligned post-production, and the content was never properly used. It was a valuable lesson: when you’re investing money into a collaboration, you need to know your collaborator really well, take the time ahead of the project to learn about them, be crystal clear on expectations in order to minimise any nasty surprises.