Guest Post By Rachel Meis.

Before 2008, if you wanted to schedule a fashion event you did so in an archaic booklet.  There was no sort of digital calendar, which made things inconvenient and sometimes frustrating.  Meredith Garcia and her boss at the time, Scott French, realized this in the midst of putting on a show at Bryant Park.  After the show, Garcia, who oversaw French’s Marketing and Public Relations, parted design ways with French and instead the two ventured into TheFashion List.

Garcia and French started TheFashion List in April of 2008, which if you remember, was not a good time to be starting a business.  “We started working with everyone from IMG, to the London British Council, to the Italian Council, to figure out everything we needed.  There was lots of outreach.  We had lots of interns to help.  There was a lot of forgiveness then.  It was a great rebuilding time,” said Garcia.  With the site’s third birthday only a few months away, the site is now self-sustaining.  “People post on their own or they ask us to post for them if they do not have time,” said Garcia. Currently, TheFashion List e-mail blast goes out to over 23,000 fashion professionals and luminaries.

Recently TheFashion List re-launched a new platform, and since the site’s initial launch the subscriber rate has grown ten fold.  In the next few months TheFashion List will be launching a 2.5 version and hopefully an apps for the iPhone and iPad.

“The fashion community has taken awhile to get used to technology, so we had to start small and easy and then progress.  We could not just throw everything at our target audience at once,” said Garcia.

TheFashion List integrates with Google calendar and outlook, has web site reminders, and allows you to export and import information to create a comprehensive list of events.  There is editorial content, but it is mostly to create a database that will show link based information on what people are searching for.  It is a great teaching tool for editors and stylists.

TheFashion List is actually a really affordable option for any fashion professional.  Subscribers have two options.  One payment of $200 will get you a year subscription on The Fashion List.  You can break that up as 12 monthly payments of $20 each.  In the works is the fashion week subscription that for $75 will start sending you information two weeks prior to fashion week.

So the question is, are you in or are you out?  For me, it looks like my calendar just got a little fuller.  For more information on TheFashion List visit www.thefashionlist.com.”

About The Author: Rachel Meis is the Account Executive at Cate Mowell Communication. She specializes in celebrity stylist and editorial outreach for their accessories clients.