Karen Millen trebles marketing spend for A/W season

Designer womenswear brand Karen Millen is trebling its marketing spend for this years Autumn/Winter campaign as it hopes to make consumers re-evaluate the brand and spark attention on an international scale.

Karen Millen Autumn Winter
One of the David Bailey campaign shots for Karen Millen’s Autumn/Winter campaign.

The brand has collaborated with photographer David Bailey to shoot the global advertising campaign, which features four new models who are “on the brink of global success” – representative of Karen Millen’s growing international ambitions.

This year’s campaign will have increased visibility in all Karen Millen’s international markets, including on London, Paris and New York buses and taxis – which the brand has not used as a platform before – around the forthcoming fashion weeks in each of the cities. Digital display advertising is also being utilised on a wider scale.

The campaign will carry Karen Millen’s new logo, which it says reflects the more “pared-down, contemporary aesthetic of the brand today”.

A spokeswoman told Marketing Week the campaign was created to “challenge perceptions of the brand and make people who already know it take another look, which will spark attention on an international scale”.

She adds: “Creative collaboration is at the heart of our brand as is the nurturing and supporting of new talent; this campaign really was a collaborative process with Bailey and Katy [England, stylist] to create powerful images that focus on the quality of the clothes and the diverse personalities of the girls to give international appeal.”

Karen Millen currently has 372 stores in 55 countries, but it plans to increase its retail footprint to 400 stories by the end of next year by pushing further into existing and new markets such as Russia, China, Central America and the US. About 60 per cent of Karen Millen’s sales come from international markets.

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