A gifted designer or just a daughter of one of the major shareholders of the Wimm-Bill-Dann holding? Many people adore her sense of style and colorful clothes, others believe that her models are vulgar and tasteless. Anyway, Kira Plastinina, a young designer, who was able to take over a certain market segment almost overnight, is one of the most discussed people now. A 14-year old girl creates clothes and accessories for younger teenagers. Although the company was established just in 2006, Kira Plastinina is a well-recognized brand making rather huge profits now.
The first idea of starting this business belongs to Kira's father Sergej Plastinin, one of the major shareholders of the Wimm-Bill-Dann holding, who also was the first and main investor. Daddy saw that his little daughter likes to draw clothes and sew for her dollies and decided to please his kid and at the same time start a successful family business. In 2006 a team of managers set in building the sales network, consisting of several fashionable stores in Moscow and regions. The first boutique was opened in last February and now they are planning to expand and open 15-40 more stores. Price policy, according to Sergej Plastinin, is simple: "We should be cheaper than Zara and more expensive than Jennifer".
As for Kira, she mentioned in her interview that she is only a designer and her father deals with all the financial matters. She comes up with some idea of new models and a team of professional designers start working on them while continuing consultation with Kira, the chief designer. The final product is produced in outsourced factories in China. How did the brand Kira Plastinina become so successful? I believe that the major reason is a great work done by the management team and serious marketing. Other reasons include the young age of the designer, absence of tough competition in this market niche and unique style of the clothes.But let's come back to the key of success of this brand - management and promotion.
The integrated advertising campaign started in March. I believe all of you have seen posters in subway trains, shopping centers and so on. But it's not only street advertising that makes promotion work. Every now and then they hand out gifts in Kira's boutiques. Kira also advertises her clothes by visiting parties, different MTV shows or ceremonies, her picture was on the cover of a magazine for teenagers "Yes"; she also accepted the offer to be the stylist of Star Factory-7 where she can show her creativity in work.The PR agency where the idea of the advertising campaign was created is called Mojo.
Ann Firainer said in an interview that they their objective was to promote Kira Plastinina as a brand for young energetic people. Brand slogan is "Create it with your heart!" So the first thing to do was to design an eye-stopper - a picture that will attract attention. Finally they came out with a picture of the mango-stylised girl sending energy of love and youth to people.Placing the advertisements was the job of the media agency called MAXUS Global. The main promotion channel they chose was fashion and teenager magazines like Cosmo, Cosmo shopping, Glamour, Elle, Yes, Oops and some others. As for experts, they say that the scale of advertising doesn't match the potential of the brand, they believe that Kira Plastinina will be known only until huge resources are put into this project.
The other factor or success of the brand is the unique idea of services that are offered in Kira Plstinina boutiques. Instead of regular shop assistants there are stylists who graduated from the School of stylists "Persona". These people are to help customers to create their own style and recommend certain clothes that is suitable was them buyers. The design of the boutiques was created by MDM, who had to do every square meter of the shops in a very short period of time. The whole sales network was launched in just half of a year, though it usually takes 1 or 2 years to finish all the work.
I have been to the office of the company and I really enjoyed those visits. The atmosphere there is really creative. Every boutique is assessed by several emploees of the company, who give mark from 1 to 5 for the work of stylists, their politeness and wiliness to do their job, for inner design of the shop, range of products sold there and many other points. I also liked that the office didn't look like a regular open plan office. The employees there are allowed to tape posters on the walls of the office and tape their suggestions about further promotion or diversification just in the corridor so that everyone can see it and write his or her opinion right there. To sum up I want to say that though many people are skeptical about Kira's talent and believe that she is so successful because of her father's money, there are exceptions from the rule.
Not all rich daughters are famous for nothing, take Stella McCartney for example.
