CEO and Designer of the Merger NYC, Samantha Telfair shares her experience preparing for her first New York Fashion Week event.

The red carpet, the fashion, the beauty, the glamour…it’s what comes to mind when I talk about New York Fashion Week (NYFW). If well prepared for, this is certainly what things look like at the culmination of many months of not only working to design and create a collection, but to present it at one of the world’s greatest fashion platforms, NYFW. So much energy goes into casting the right models, creating the backdrop, selecting the music, imagery, accessories, deciding the right make-up and hairstyle to enhance the clothing, etc. The glamour of this one brief moment in the spotlight, sometimes only 5 to 10 minutes, often overshadows what the event really means for designers and their companies. It’s not just a show of beautiful clothing down a runway for people to oooh and aaah over. The New York fashion shows, which typically happen in both September (to showcase the upcoming spring looks) and February (to showcase the upcoming fall looks) are the primary platform where designers show their seasonal collections to buyers, the press, and the general public to generate business. It is the machine that starts the process of order placements and production of goods for these designers and their companies.

Just a couple of weeks before NYFW, I had a chance to speak with Samantha Telfair, CEO and Designer of The Merger NYC. She was preparing for her first ever show at NYFW and I was curious to hear how preparations were going.

From the pressures of coming up with a creative vision during the height of the Covid pandemic when most businesses were still in some type of lockdown and there was very little motivation to wear anything fashionable, to working with factories to produce initial design prototypes, to the final moments of nervousness hoping that an audience would show up to her NYFW event, the fear and insecurities were real.

Join me in our casual conversation in August before the glamour of September’s NYFW.

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