For those who are following us since the beginning this statement won't be a surprise. We built French Wink through collaborations.
First we started creating retail operations and events from shopping parties to pop-up stores between New York and Miami. Our business model? We are taking care of everything from logistics to PR, from sales staff to retail design and we create the feeling of a real store from scratch in just 24hours. The brands for which we were working shared the budget and reversed us a commission on sales.
Our goal is to help French brands using shared economy principles to be more visible. We help them to understand that if they collaborate under the same tagline of ''French Lifestyle and savoir faire'' they will empower themselves, share their network and clients and boost sales and awareness of each others.
Collaborations is a win/win process based on positive vibes to help each other bright a little bit more. That's exactly that we love: sharing the light.
This is how we built our French Wink identity. We are more than just a random collective of French brands as we are building a brand on its own - thanks to our curation, our universe, our way of life and thinking that we share with you everyday. We're always looking for collaborations to step up and move forward. We stay alert to find the right ones all the time, especially these days when support and cross businesses are precious.
We are partnering with companies or projects that share our values and that are willing to offer to their communities a little bit of our French attitude. Following this purpose, we invested and developed technical tools allowing to insert a ''buy button'' on a website with whom we have connections and interests. We now host livestream shopping sessions and never stop to think forward to prepare the next step. Our traditional retail experiences evolved and we adapted ourselves.
Can you believe that now behind French Wink, there is a team of 5 persons (from ecommerce, to SEO and social media masters) managing daily 50ish brands, multivendor platform and its logistics and our social medias. And believe us, there is random issues every single day that we need to solve and discuss;)
The past few months, we missed the feeling of " physically making", event planning, meeting our clients, transport them to France for one night of pure magic and surprises. But for sure we managed to adapt and reinvent ourselves and we don't get bored!!!! We're 100% focus on satisfying our clients online, on improving his journey following our adventure digitally, until we can meet again...
Some examples of our past and upcoming collaborations:
Everyday Parisian: the papesse of Francophiles in the US
Rebecca Plotnick is the founder and creator of Every Day Parisian. Living in Chicago, she shares her love of France and parisian way of life everyday on her blog with her community of francophiles that she built since 2013. We're talking about 2 to 3 millions followers on Pinterest, 21.8k on instagram, a newsletter going to more than 85 thousand people every Sunday. What Rebecca saw in us? A dream-one-stop-shop that will please her community who is in love with Paris. We will keep you posted in the coming weeks on what we're up to realise together. We're so happy :)
Fiaf Bastille Day 2017-2020 : from the street fair to the limited capsule collection
We've been partnering with FIAF (French Institute - Alliance Francaise) based in New York for several years now. We started by having few booths at their street fair on 60th street for Bastille Day, gathering around 45,000 people for 5 hours. Then, we helped them upgrade and design a dedicated zone for French lifestyle brands called ''The French Garden'' where Ladurée or Nespresso shared the space with us. This year, the street fair was canceled but we kept our collaboration and brainstormed with the event team to find something fun to share with their clients. As a reminder, FIAF's clientele is mostly Americans francophiles looking to learn or improve their French. So we teamed up and launched a capsule collection to celebrate our National day: une Bastille Day gift set ''C'est la Fête'' available until July 31st by the way ;)
French platform based in the US.... name to be revealed soon
We partnered with this French platform based in Florida at the beginning of the year. We can tell that their referral is efficient as we can follow our customers journey thanks to analytics. American francophiles are our main target but the French expatriates are also customers that we value a lot. We miss our French products and can recall to same habits, traditions, and references. We were so happy and glad when we receive a message of gratitude from a dad who made his kids taste his childhood memories such as chocapic, Teisseire syrups or tagada! or from single French living in the city, craving from comfort food from back home.
Rencontre des Auteurs Francophones
Sandrine Kukurudz is a French author living in the US for 14 years. From the event planning, she reinvented herself in auto-edition. She realized then how difficult it was to be visible in the book industry. Finding great authors in auto-edition, and bad ones edited was a non sense so she decided to create Rencontre des Auteurs Francophones, a way to highlight our beautiful literature and meet all these Francophone authors over the globe. We teamed up with Sandrine to spread the word and give her tools to sell and promote her selection. You can find a wide selection of novels from biography to thriller to poems to cookbooks! And you can meet live bimonthtly on Wednesdays all these authors that Sandrine interviews and benefit from special discount on the collection. Check out regularly our Facebook page events to know the guests and times of our booksigning/ shopping live session. These events are in French.
Thinking about a collaboration that we should think about? That would help us to achieve the next step? Tell us about it contact@frenchwink.com
