The Insider Advice series offers advice from leading fashion professionals, HR leaders and academics, to answer topical careers questions for today’s fashion employees and help inform and guide you in your career. Discover the latest job opportunities with 2,700+ roles on BoF Careers today.
In the fashion industry, stakeholders and shareholders alike expect newness and innovation at pace to keep up with rapidly evolving consumer demands and expectations. As a result, the industry demands a constant churn of creative ideas from its workforce, whether in design or marketing, PR and media, content creation and product development, to support business needs and output.
Creatives must regularly pitch their ideas within or to businesses and creative teams: fashion designers present a portfolio of sketches or 3D CADs to department leads and creative directors; journalists and PR pitch story ideas to editors and publications; marketing and comms professionals vye for budget spend on new advertising campaigns.
The pitching process can take varying forms: sometimes in-person, over a virtual meeting, on email, sometimes informally, in a lunch break or at a work function. These can be delivered to managers, team colleagues, creative leads, external clients or even investors.
Pitching is a creative skill in itself, but it must be honed in order to stand out in a competitive environment and the speaker should convey confidence when doing so. However, 75 percent of the US population reportedly has a fear of public speaking, according to research by the University of Florida. Meanwhile, 40 percent of employees are not confident in sharing their ideas at work, according to a survey by the University of North Colorado Social Research lab.
Now, BoF Careers collates advice from creative professionals in design and journalism, the leader of a creative agency and the author of “One Perfect Pitch”, to share their insights on how creatives can translate their ideas into an effective pitch.
Align your creative pitch to business needs for enhanced credibility
Before preparing the content of your pitch, you must first understand the fundamentals of why your idea is relevant and useful to your audience. Think about what problems your pitch will aim to solve and its purpose, such as: an ad campaign targeting an underserved cohort; an article or press release covering an unexplored or trending topic area; a product design reflecting consumer feedback.
It is important to fuse the creative with the commercial, to have alignment around the relevance of your pitch within the context of wider business goals — whether that is an organisation you work for directly or one you are seeking to partner with.
As Marie Perruchet, beauty entrepreneur and author of “One Perfect Pitch” notes, “There can be a gap or a misalignment between the organisation’s needs which [might be]: driving the business forward; driving revenue; and gaining more market share — and then the force coming from the creative people who want to change or to bring innovative projects and ideas to an organisation.”
These considerations can help streamline ideas and signpost the purpose of your pitch to specific targets: consider how a brand awareness campaign might deliver towards overarching marketing KPIs, or how a particular design concept fits the business’ interest in appealing to a certain demographic of consumers.
You have to really go for something when it’s in the zeitgeist, when it’s the talking point — but you really can’t linger too long.
“Who’s the customer? What are the end goals of the brand or the company [you work for],” says Nicole Saldaña, a freelance fashion designer with over 17 years of experience at both high street and luxury brands.
“See where there might be white space or opportunities within that to then pitch an idea based on a need or something where maybe your brand could do better,” she says. Saldaña also recommends monitoring what “competitor brands” are doing, if they are branding into new categories and products, even new markets.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about the return for the brand, the magazine, the website, the podcast, whatever it might be,” shares Isabella Silvers, freelance fashion journalist and former editor at Hearst Media. “It’s all about what they’re going to get from it. Is it traffic? […] So always have that end goal in mind.”
Consider the timing of your pitch
Once you have established the business need for and relevance of your pitch, you need to consider timing to ensure that the audience will be receptive and the business has enough time to execute the idea. For example, lead times for product development may mean that a trend-oriented design idea will be delivered too late, or proposing an article idea for an event already passed will miss the moment it would resonate.
Creatives must be attuned to trends as they emerge, keeping their fingers on the pulse of culture both on and offline, and react swiftly because “things move so quickly that it can be tough to keep up,” shares Silvers, who has contributed to publications such as Cosmopolitan, Refinery 29 and Women’s Health. “You have to really go for something when it’s in the zeitgeist, when it’s the talking point — but you really can’t linger too long.”
You might consider key events or “pegs” in the calendar year to lend timely purpose to pitch. Fashion brands, for example, will prepare collections and campaigns for certain times of year, like collections geared towards festive seasons or advertising targeting commercial holidays. Companies looking to enter certain markets should consider key calendar moments and localised activations they can target based on that geography of interest. Major red carpet events, premieres and awards seasons are also ripe opportunities for brands or retailers to align their collections through related emerging trends.
Silvers suggests aligning the timing of a pitch to the metrics it can assist with — “Sometimes I’ll pitch something and say, [for example,] ‘It’s South Asian Heritage Month next month, so it would be great to get this on the site now so you could build up on SEO.’ So always thinking about what the return is for the brand.”
Timing is also important in relation to budgeting – marketing and advertising budgets are often assigned months in advance, which can make the timing — or ask — of a pitch crucial to what is financially available to that team or account.
Have a succinct narrative to maintain audience engagement
The best way to keep your audience engaged when pitching a creative idea is to build a narrative that they can follow — but a brief one that leaves them wanting more. “You have to make sure that you’re very simple in your approach, because they’re only going to remember a few words,” says Perruchet.
She suggests finding a way to tell an engaging story in a few sentences — ask yourself, “how can you weave in information about the market, trends, what you’ve seen, how your idea is unique, why you’re the best person for the assignment, perhaps, in four sentences?”
If condensing your argument proves difficult, consider tools at your disposal — such as generative AI platforms like Chat GPT or Co-Pilot, that can offer some ideas on where to cut out excessive words.
Brevity is also recommended for written pitches like those sent over email, as Justin Moran, editor-in-chief of Paper Magazine, recently shared in a BoF Careers LinkedIn Live: “Sometimes people think you have to go into detail about everything. Realistically, whoever you’re sending [your pitch] to is going to spend maybe five to 10 seconds reading it, to decide if it’s good, because we’re getting hundreds of emails a day.”
Sometimes, storytelling allows for a more emotive and memorable pitch process, particularly if you align it with a company or brand values — and evidence its relevance to the pitch itself.
Francesco Tiribelli, founder and chief creative director of communications agency April Studio, whose client roster includes the likes of Moncler and Prada, argues that a “good story is one that you remember. If you’re able to picture your idea with an anecdote or a little story, that’s the better way of doing it.”
Visual aids are often valuable to support the narrative — “obviously, this market is very visual,” says Saldaña. “I always like to accompany any kind of idea with a deck that really shows what your idea might look like. For a product or a garment or something like that, I would always create a digital portfolio [to show what it] might look like so that the person could really understand and see clearly what that end result might look like.”
Cater to your specific audience
Every pitch should differ depending on who your audience will be. Whether you’re a creative working in-house or a freelancer targeting a brand or publication, you need to consider what will resonate.
“The people you’re pitching to, those individuals, might have been pitched to several times that day already, so having a pitch that speaks to them specifically will make them more interested,” Perruchet says.
Tiribelli, who uses presentation decks when pitching ideas to clients, changes the format of each one depending on its recipient — “I don’t want to offer a kind of industrial, prepackaged solution.”
how can you weave in information about the market, trends, what you’ve seen, how your idea is unique, why you’re the best person for the assignment, perhaps, in four sentences?
He researches his clients thoroughly, considering various factors: “If there’s a bunch of executives, I focus on concrete data, expected results, the return on investment, etc. […] I also calibrate my language — so I offer more technical language, or just try to use the language that is familiar to the client or the audience.”
“Pitching can sometimes be super formal, in a setting where you’re speaking with high-level executives or C-suite, but then also, pitches can be more casual,” adds Saldaña.
Your pitch should mirror the formality of the environment. “For example, if you’re at a dinner or casual cocktail party with, maybe your boss — at a work-related event, you [could] communicate some ideas that you have had had in a casual setting. If you’re able to pitch an idea and then follow through with that later in a more formal way, in my experience, that can be really successful,” she says.
Some businesses will have templates and pre-determined structures in how they expect to receive creative pitch ideas. For instance, one popular framework is ‘Situation Complication Resolution’, or SCR, which requires individuals to lay out their argument in these sub-sections. Following expected templates can increase the receptiveness of audiences to your pitch as a result.
Practise your pitch and be open to feedback
Saldaña suggests sharing ideas with “people that you trust,” which might be work colleagues, fellow freelancers or even those outside of your profession.
“You can practise in front of the mirror, with your friends, with your kids, with whoever — and you can see what piece of the messaging really lands in those people’s minds. That will help you practise your pitch, refine it and make it perfect,” says Perruchet.
Talking through a pitch with people without direct knowledge of the organisation or subject-matter can also help you identify more complicated concepts, topics you might have overlooked or assumed a knowledge-base in.
Tiribelli also encourages experimenting with writing a script, which can help you build confidence in delivery of your message.
Silvers herself receives feedback from a network of freelance journalists she’s connected with on social media. “I”m in a group on Whatsapp — we’ll send each other pictures, ideas etc. […] I have a really good friend who is a journalist and she’ll tell me ‘Ok, I think this is good but you haven’t said why it’s relevant’ or ‘I think this could be stronger’. If you start with people that you trust and people who are in the same industry, you can know that they’re not saying these things because they want to keep you down.”
Prepare for any potential questions around your pitch
When you’re preparing your pitch, research around the subject to ensure you are prepared to answer any questions that may arise. For example, stakeholders will want to know what expected key results, the team resources required for execution, and how much a project might cost.
“Make sure you [look at the idea] from every angle before proposing it. You want to understand what the time investment might be or the financial investment might be and what that return might be,” says Saldaña. “Making sure you’ve researched is going to be your best resource when you don’t have, say, 10 or 15 years of experience to sit back on.”
Silvers recommends “bringing the stats,” to bring validity to your argument and provide reliable information as to its relevance. This grounds your research in data-led evidence, which will help prepare you for any trickier questions demanding it.
“Prepare for the possible questions that might arise or might be asked and also be aware of resistance,” adds Tiribelli. “Resistance is a natural part of our creative process and resistance might come from different sources.”
He even encourages his team to draft a press release or conduct a Q&A roleplay around the idea to make sure any potential holes in the concept have been uncovered and put to rights before the client meeting.
And should you be pitching a client or company you have not worked with before, who may want to know more about your experience and expertise, “include examples of your work, always,” says Silvers.
