The Evolving Art of Brand Collaborations
The Business of Fashion Podcast
The Business of Fashion
4.6 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brand collaborations were once rare, highly anticipated events that generated significant buzz. But as they have become more frequent, the challenge lies in creating partnerships that genuinely resonate with consumers and cut through the noise.
This week, executive editor Brian Baskin and senior correspondent Sheena Butler-Young sit down with BoF correspondent Lei Takanashi and editorial fellow Julia Lebossé to explore the state of brand collaborations, what makes them succeed or fail, and where they’re headed next.
To work, collaborations need to feel authentic. For brands, “letting their collaborators take the wheel and just do what they want to do is really key,” says Takanashi. “When brands collaborate successfully, it’s often because they give creative freedom to the collaborator, allowing them to use the materials they want and tell a story that feels true to their audience,” adds Lebossé.
Key Insights:
- Poorly thought-out collaborations often fail to connect with audiences and just won’t cut it anymore. “When it's done lazily, consumers can tell”, explains Lebossé. “We're becoming much smarter, really looking into brands and what they're doing and what makes sense. … That's why brands really have to step up in terms of what they're doing.”
- It’s not just big brands that can make waves with collaborations. Lebossé pointed to a sneaker collaboration between Bimma Williams and Saucony as an example where a smaller brand excelled. “They’re showing that, hey, we can do innovation,” explains Lebossé.
- Brands are finding even greater value in creating physical experiences around collaborations. Takanashi points to the Corteiz x Nike collaboration, where prospective buyers participated in scavenger hunts to buy the shoes. “If someone told me that kids would be lining up to buy Huaraches in 2025, I would not believe them at all,” he says. “But that’s the thing. This brand got kids waiting for hours in the freezing cold to buy their sneakers. It’s really that IRL experience that consumers are looking for when it comes to releases these days.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the debrief from the Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular B-O-F professional stories with the correspondents who created them. |
| 0:17.0 | I'm executive editor Brian Vaskin. And I'm senior correspondent, Sheena Butler Young. |
| 0:21.5 | And today we are talking collaborations. |
| 0:24.3 | It used to be a major event when two brands teamed up to release a collection. |
| 0:28.3 | Now it's barely an exaggeration to say we're getting something on the scale of H&M and Carl Lagerfeld |
| 0:33.4 | or Fendi and Versace once a week or even more often. |
| 0:37.1 | And there's seemingly no longer any limits on who would release a collaboration and who |
| 0:41.3 | they'd collaborate with. |
| 0:42.8 | I got a press release for a collaboration between a luxury slipper brand and Eggo |
| 0:47.0 | Waffles the other day. |
| 0:48.3 | But why do a few of these tie-ups seem to really work, and so many vanish without a trace? |
| 0:56.0 | Today we have two guests, |
| 1:00.8 | one who wrote a story about collaborations gone wrong, and one who wrote about some really special ones. Le Takanashi and Julia Laboss, welcome to the Debrief podcast. Thank you so much for having me, |
| 1:07.1 | Brian. Thanks so much for having me, guys. Thanks for being here. Julia, I want to start with you because you recently published an article with the very |
| 1:14.9 | memorable headline, Why Are Sneaker Collaborations So Boring? |
| 1:19.9 | And I thought that was a great question. |
| 1:21.3 | Why are they so boring? |
| 1:23.1 | I think, yeah, a lot of them in the last year have been just very stale. I think that's not to say that all of them are boring, but I think in the last year it's just because a lot of sneaker giants, |
| 1:35.3 | and particularly Nike, have just become so reliant on retros and that retro strategy. |
| 1:41.3 | And mostly just because it's worked for them in the past, it's been something |
| 1:44.7 | that they can always go back to, like the Nike Air Force one, the Jordan one and the Dunk. It's just |
| 1:50.4 | an easy thing for them to go to, especially in terms of how it's easy to produce. They've already |
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