J Barbour & Sons PR Student Placement
Blog 4- October
October was a quiet month compared to the beginning of my Placement. The month consisted of planning and preparing for the Christmas event which is due to be held in London at the start of November. The event is going to premiere the Barbour Christmas television advert to Press at Selfridges cinema. The PR Team have been working closely with PR agency Exposure to create a carefully selected guest list for the event. Each guest is set to receive a goody bag which myself and Rachael have been creating. In doing so I have been ordering classic Barbour jackets for each of the launch event attendees and sending the Jackets to the company ‘logo bear’ in Newcastle to get their initials embroidered on them. The goody bags also included an embroidered Barbour Wax Jacket, Various Accessories, a tin of Christmas wax, Biscuiteers Paddington biscuits and a re-waxing guide. We packaged each good bag into a Barbour branded gifting box and bag and sent all 30 via dpd to the London Exposure office, so Exposure could store them in their showroom ready for the event.
I was also told that I will be able to attend the Christmas launch event in London which I am really excited to be a part of. I found preparing for the event quite stressful and fast-paced making sure everything we needed got sent to London ahead of the event.
During October I did various research tasks. I created brief biographies for Kate Osborne, MP and Lieutenant for my supervisor Sue, ahead of their visits. This is so that Sue had awareness of any current press or recent visits/events of the MP and Lieutenant ahead of meeting them and giving them the tour of the Barbour Factory and showrooms. I gathered research in the form of a PowerPoint, with screengrabs of press links as well as important information. I then presented it back to my supervisor within the deadline.
On the 18th Oct, I created drop boxes for the Barbour x NOAH and Barbour x BAPE collections for the UK and Global press contacts. This included renaming and compiling flat shots and lifestyle imagery as well as the press release and creating a dropbox. The link was then sent to the relevant press. I find it really interesting how many collaborations Barbour is currently launching and how well they are being received. I really liked the Barbour x BAPE imagery and collection as a whole and thought the location and imagery worked really well to show off the collection.
In October Barbour launched a collection called ‘Rooted in the Great Outdoors with John Lewis which had Presenter Anita Rani and the Gill family as the faces of the campaign. Although the campaign didn’t have as much hype as others such as BAPE It still received some good press. I created a coverage deck for Rooted in the great outdoors collection compiling cuttings from each media outlet.