Esprit is more than a 50 year fashion house from San Francisco. It is an affordable premium lifestyle brand for high quality and consciously sourced apparel, accessories, bodywear and homewear, with worldwide distribution. Simplifying wardrobe choices through mindfully designed, versatile pieces that can be loved for more than one season is at the heart of the brand. They have a global presence with impressive sales figures reflecting greatly upon the brand success story.
Esprit watches wanted to make its come back in the watches segment and they wanted to create a big splash out of it. The ask was to reboot and rebuild brand Esprit in watches segment in India
Flags was given a huge responsibility of re-establishing the brand through strategic PR exercise as re-launch is always a tricky affair, especially when the brand has been a non-performer in the market for quite some time. Since the stakes were high, there was no scope of making any mistakes.
Esprit was a rage in wearable segment in early 2000’s as a well-established international fashion brand, however they were not able to retain the position and over the years it faded out from the market. In last one decade several attempts were made to grapple the situation, however none of them were able to yield desired results. The brand pulled back several time in last one decade which had shaken up confidence of retail partners and the competitors were expanding at a steadfast rate. Brand expectations were very high as this was a make or break situation for them. Also media had created a perception that Esprit has exited India and there is no potential left for it to make a comeback and hence it was not being take seriously. There was a controversy around the brand ambassador too , because of which media wanted to focus more attention on that viz-a-viz the brand.
We decided to do it differently, unlike a typical fashion brand announcement. We decided to make it a 360 PR exercise, the first step was an exclusive business story angle creation to help the brand re-establish the credibility , then an entertainment/ celebrity story to leverage the glamour quotient and then a typical fashion story highlighting brand USP’s .
Brand wanted a bang, but this was way out of their expectations ! With an exclusive quarter page story in one of the biggest business publications, the brand got around 100 media exposures in the first month itself. The outcome was way more than what the competitors got in the similar kind of announcement. The retail channel partners were thrilled to see this kind of media traction, which greatly motivated them towards the brand. The brand is now fairly doing well in the market and Flags PR is handling their Public Relations just well!
