22 years of press, and what I will say about it now

The press started in the early 2000s. A piece about someone selling handmade jewellery on Portobello Road. Then the Drapers feature when the brand hit Harrods, Selfridges, and Harvey Nichols simultaneously. Then QVC Japan. Then trade press across 20 years.

For most of those years the press was about the brand and the jewellery. The design, the celebrities wearing it, the collaborations. Disney. Hello Kitty. The trunk shows.

Press is not quite what people think it is. A page in a magazine does not sell out a collection. It never has. Anybody who has had a good piece run and then watched a flat week go past afterwards knows this, and it is one of the more deflating things to learn in your 20s.

What coverage actually buys you is permission. A buyer who has seen your name somewhere credible will take the meeting. A factory will answer the email. A licensor will consider you a real business rather than somebody working at a kitchen table, even if you are in fact somebody working at a kitchen table.

And it compounds in a way that has very little to do with how good any individual piece was. One feature makes the next one easier to get, because somebody else has already taken the risk of writing about you first.

The awkward part is that none of it arrives when you need it. Coverage lands months after the thing it describes, usually in a week when you are dealing with something entirely different, and the timing is nobody's fault. Press runs on its own calendar and it will never run on yours.

More recently the coverage has shifted. The coaching, the houseboat, the pivot. The question is no longer just how did you build it. It is what did building it cost you, what did you learn, and who are you now.

For 2 decades the questions were about the work. How is it made, where is it made, who wears it, what is next. Those are good questions and they are easy to answer, because the answers are facts about objects. You can give them well on very little sleep.

The newer questions are not about objects, and there is no rehearsed answer to them. That is rather the point of asking.

What I am willing to say now is more than I would have said a few years ago, and it is still not everything. Some of it belongs to other people and is not mine to put in print. That is the line I hold, and I would recommend it to anybody being asked about a hard few years. You can be completely honest about your own experience and still decline to narrate somebody else's.

The other thing I have learned about talking to press is that the useful answer is almost never the dramatic one. The dramatic answer gets used as a pull quote and then becomes the only thing anybody remembers, and 3 years later you are still being introduced with it. The quieter answer is the one that leaves you room to be somebody slightly different next year.

And a journalist is neither your friend nor your enemy. They have a piece to write and a word count to hit. If you make their job easier, with a clear sentence and a photograph that can actually be printed, you will be asked again. If you treat the conversation as free advertising, you will not.

If you are a maker wondering how any of this is done, the answer is duller than you would like. You work out who actually covers your kind of thing, you send 4 sentences about something that is genuinely new, and you do it again next season when nobody replies. There is no trick in it and no agency can skip the part where you are unknown.

Very little of a press trail is strategic in any case. It accumulates, mostly out of saying yes, and then one day you look back at it and find it makes a shape.

What the shape tells you is not what you achieved. It is what you were willing to be asked.

22 years leaves a trail. Here is mine, for the first time, unedited. For press enquiries, write to me at anna@annalouoflondon.com or message me on https://wa.me/447738470156.

22 years of press, and what I am willing to say now.

More Reset Stories