If it's Wednesday it must be London, except when it's Goodwood?

If it's Wednesday it must be London, except when it's Goodwood?

So, Harrogate Lingerie Show, done, Paris Mode City, done, London Fashion Week, Goodwood, still to go. Time to breathe then, in between deciphering scrawled email addresses and updating the trade section of the website.

Trade shows usually have patches where you can’t move for people on the stand interspersed with periods where you get very bored – no-one ever turns up at 9am, but you have to! Usually for us this results in getting increasingly surreal and eating all the chocolate we were supposed to give to visitors. This year, I had a new camera phone thing so for once we actually remembered to take a few quick snaps; hampered by my total rubbishness at this sort of thing and the way trade shows always seem to have strangest light colours.

 
 
 
 
 
 
The top picture is Ayten Gassons items at Harrogate – we shared a stand with her and Playful Promises, and the deal was, we set up her stuff, and she packed up ours, which I totally recommend for both sanity and finances (three days of hotels and conference food can test your reserves of both). As you can see the walls were inexplicably margarine colour, which was unexpected. We ended up putting our wallpaper right at the edge of the stand to catch peoples eyes, which looked odd but still . . . its from Paper Voyeur by the way. Other than that Harrogate was actually fantastic. We had a super busy show and met some lovely new retailers, mostly based in the North of England which is nice for me and my ineradicable traces of a Northern accent. Oh, and Topshop blogged that they loved us!

 

We were opposite Ayten at Paris, which meant she kept coming over to tidy us – you can see she makes her stands much prettier than we manage. But we took our pic after she had helped us with ours, so its quite neat in the picture – and you can see her and “Ginger Deadly”, who helps me out at shows. On the mannequins you can see the next new styles to come out! One is the peach Alouette, the other is the longline Jezebel knicker. We kept the bra on all the way back through customs, because on the way in we discovered that some of the staff will get overexcited about your mannequins chest. Very strange. Then again, we had just brought a collection of body parts through security.

We had the Cervin hosiery collection with us as always, but added their new luxury knitwear (silk knit tap panties – yum!) and these hand painted, Swarovski embellished stockings. Gorgeous, unique, and expensive!

While we were there Dita Von Teese was performing at the Gentry De Paris Revue, which we totally failed to see due to exhaustion, but there were other signs that the burlesque scene is taking off in France. We picked up quite a few new retailers in that area, and met Mon Boudoir, who have been running for a little while, but have their official opening this month. The last picture is their fabulous flyer for the event.

Last but not least, when I got back I found that Chesterfield Soft Wear (yep, the owner is a geek, and I do love a bad pun) are having a KMD promotion. I have to say, you can see the most detail of our knickers before buying them in person if you look at their site.

Right . . . this weekend I’m at London Fashion Week with exciting new samples, while our current stock is with Lulu and Lush at the Goodwood Revival. At the same time we’re making final arrangements for November events, and I think a staff outing to the Ginger Deadly organised Narcissus night in Sheffield is a must!