Why Fashion’s Biggest PR Firms Keep Getting Bigger

One other day, one other acquisition for The Independents.

The style public relations and manufacturing agency is buying Ctzar, a social media and influencer marketing-focussed company, the client informed BoF.

Ctzar joins The Independents’ quickly rising portfolio that features the whole lot from influencer advertising and marketing to occasion manufacturing. The Paris-based agency, the operator of fashion-focussed PR agency Karla Otto bought influencer marketing company Lefty in April 2021, event production company Bureau Betak in September 2021 and Prodject, the creative agency behind the Met Gala, in March. In June, the company raised $400 million with the acknowledged aim of constant its acquisition spree and doubling in dimension by 2025. The aim is to construct a community that provides shoppers options for his or her vast breadth of press wants.

“With our ecosystem, all people continues to be professional of their area and to develop [their business],” mentioned Isabelle Chouvet, founder and CEO of The Independents. “On the identical time, they’re impressed by the others of the group, they usually push the boundaries with the assist of the others.”

Although The Independents has been probably the most prolific, it’s not the one PR participant on a buying spree. The Lede Firm, the entertainment-focussed company finest recognized for representing figures like Rihanna, has lately been making extra inroads in style. Final month it acquired Olivier Bourgis Communication and Marketing, or OBCM, a Paris-based company with shoppers like Adidas and Browns.

The dealmaking exercise displays an acceleration of modifications within the business that return a decade or extra, when social media first began reshaping the enterprise, and actors, athletes and musicians started taking a extra disciplined method to their style ventures. Because the traces have blurred between celebrities, influencers, designers and entrepreneurs, the character of public relations has additionally developed, with social media clout and influencer relationships supplementing – and more and more, supplanting – conventional press placements. Pharrell Williams’ debut for Louis Vuitton in June — produced partially by Lede and OBCM — is an instance of how carefully intertwined style, social media and leisure have turn out to be.

“We’re in a transition second,” mentioned Alexandre de Betak, the founding father of Bureau Betak and now the artistic chairman of The Independents. “The standard methods of communication by press relations have actually developed … press relations are now not solely press relations. We’re reinventing all features of the job.”

Why are style PR corporations ramping up M&A?

It’s troublesome for a small, impartial company to supply such a variety of companies, even after they have deep connections in style and media. Some well-known names within the business have closed their doorways, together with Black Body and Siren PR, which each shuttered in 2020.

Some corporations are increasing their choices to maintain up, launching new divisions devoted to areas like internet affiliate marketing or sustainability. For corporations which have the money, it may be faster to accumulate an company that already has a presence in a brand new market, whether or not it’s a selected metropolis or nation, or a operate, like influencer advertising and marketing.

For the acquirees, being beneath the umbrella of a bigger company gives higher operational capabilities, logistical assist and extra, comparable to entry to a bigger firm’s authorized and human assets departments. Likewise, it exposes them to a distinct enterprise, the place they’ll lean on an experience they won’t have already got in home.

Olivier Bourgis, for instance, has historically labored with fashion-centric shoppers, whereas The Lede Firm’s historic experience lies in leisure PR. Bringing the 2 collectively, Bourgis mentioned, will assist him additional develop the superstar relations facet of his personal enterprise.

“We work in a really natural means with our celebrities, whereas I believe, working with them may help you to possibly reel that right into a extra strategic method,” he mentioned.

In the meantime, Bourgis, together with his preexisting relationships in luxurious style and specifically, in Paris, affords Lede the chance to create a presence out there in a single day. Thomas Silve, founder at Ctzar, added that working with The Independents offers his smaller company a wider attain, and entry to groups on the bottom in areas the place Ctzar beforehand didn’t have a presence, like Hong Kong.

“The truth that we are able to profit from the expertise of the most effective in school available on the market, it’s wonderful for us, as a result of we get to hurry up our objectives,” mentioned Silve.

What do these offers imply for shoppers?

Consolidation is prone to result in much more consolidation, because it will get tougher for the remaining impartial companies to compete with full-service giants.

For shoppers, this is usually a combined bag: manufacturers could have fewer choices when planning style exhibits, and celebrities might have much less leverage after they solely have a handful of corporations in a position to plan large-scale sponsorship offers, product traces or occasions.

Firms like The Lede and The Independents say they’ll proceed to function their acquisitions as quasi-autonomous corporations; shoppers could have the identical choices, solely better-resourced and with a extra international scope.

“Individuals are simply bringing collectively the most effective company companions potential which have a really related shared imaginative and prescient, so as a substitute of possibly competing in opposition to one another, you’re truly working hand in hand with each other,” mentioned Christine Lu, co-CEO at The Lede Firm.

Chouvet added that it creates a extra constant expertise for shoppers after they can come to 1 bigger holding firm for his or her companies, quite than contract a number of smaller, boutique corporations that haven’t any reference to each other.

“These huge teams in style and luxurious, they should have some consolidation. They can not proceed to temporary 15 companies around the globe to ship one thing constant,” she mentioned. “That’s what we’re bringing to them, to have this agility and experience, having the footprint and the aptitude to be constant, however nonetheless being native in all places.”