FashionPR.com Interview : Polina Raygorodskaya - Polina Fashion

I am the President of Polina Fashion LLC, a full service fashion PR and Marketing Firm specializing in helping emerging brands establish themselves in today's market place. I was born in St. Peterburg Russia and started my career in the fashion industry as a model with one of the top modeling agencies in NYC. Upon attending college for Marketing and Entrepreneurship I founded Polina Fashion LLC and was named one of BusinessWeek Magazines Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under 25 when I was only a sophomore in college.

I worked as a professional model.

I have always been involved in the fashion industry and established strong relationships with some of the top media, photographers, stylists, etc. I love marketing and PR and get a satisfaction of helping designers create a name for themselves in the industry.

With its beginnings in our Boston office of early 2006, Polina Fashion LLC has always specialized in the fashion industry. The company's founder, Polina Raygorodskaya, has enjoyed long-standing experience as a highly-acclaimed fashion model; her industry contacts and business acumen were certainly valuable assetts when inspiration came to form a fashion production company. Our services began with fashion coordination and production services, including photo shoots, fashion shows, casting, and event management. Company philosophy has always encouraged creative thinking and flexibility; by 2007 Polina Fashion branched out into fashion marketing and public relations.

From its inception, the driving vision behind Polina Fashion has always been to become the best in the world for our fashion-centric production and PR services. Innovation, a shrewd understanding of our industry, and an utter demand for perfection have driven the company's success and will always act as the foundation for our future.

As of 2008, Polina Fashion established a presence in New York and Phoenix to be better equipped in pursuing matters within the world's fashion hub and the west coast respectively. Peering into the future, we see progress for our company and a positive social impact internationally.

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Serves as the middleman between the designer and the public and helps establish a positive association with the brand through the use of media, celebrities, events, among others

Being able to see the results in generating buzz around a brand and watching an increase of sales knowing that it was something that came out of the campaign

relationships 100%. PR is all about relationships with media, stylists, opinion leaders, etc.

Keep establishing and maintaining relationships with key people

Being outgoing, a people person, social, good writer, honest, reliable, hard working, self-motivated

The key is to not over-expect. For new designers there is a forumula to getting publicity. If you are brand new to the market publicity does not happen over night. It consists of hard work and pushing to the right people through a series of steps generally starting out small and making a snowball effect to the big stuff.

look for companies that have existing relationships and key contacts at outlets that you would like to be placed in. Further, make sure that they will be able to devote themselves to your needs. Many times a designer will go with a big PR firm and not understand why they are not getting as much time devoted to them as they want to. Do your homework- research the firm, ask them for press clippings and make sure you go with a firm that is a good fit for you.

We are very selective with the clients we work with as we are a boutique firm and it is important that all of our clients are unique and we as a team believe will be a success and are worth pitching. Our relationships with the media are very important to us and they rely on the trust that what we have to say is meaningful. The first step in selection is speaking with the designer and allowing our firm to get to know them and their needs and them to get to know us. From there we decide if we would be a right fit for each other. As a boutique firm we ensure that our clients complement, not compete with each other.

We welcome change and we think the online world has made it even better to reach out to the international market place. All of our PR campaigns now include a blog and social networking campaign and we try to ensure that our clients have ecommerce on their websites so that people all over the world who may not have had access to shops that carry their stuff are now able to buy from them online.

I set goals with my clients at the beginning of every month to understand what needs to be achieved and what their expectations are and then we review at the end of the month to ensure that we stay on track.

Continual upkeep, networking, lunches/dinners/drinks and continually offering meaningful information that is useful to them

Research on what they currently have in their pages, many times editors and stylists reach out to us asking for specific things as well

Generally things tend to quiet down after fashion weeks and market weeks- November/December tends to be slower and June/July tends to be slow

Having something that no one else has, being unique

Enjoy and be very skilled in writing, go out and network and begin building relationships early

For more information about Polina Fashion, clients we have worked with and scope of our services please visit our website, http://www.polinafashion.com