We’re back at it again- giving you a behind the scenes look at our SS’16 buying season in New York city! Now if you follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat you would’ve seen tons of #BTS action from our trip- if you didn’t, well that’s what this blog post is for. To add context to some of those moments and to help illustrate the realities behind buying collections for a season. To most people that aren’t in the industry buying season sounds like an incredibly fun thing. Traveling from city to city, meeting reps from some of your favourite brands and who can forget being wined and dined at some great restaurants along the way. Though on the surface this all maybe true (as you may have seen on our social media) there is definitely a lot more to the experience. Here’s your behind the scenes access to how we navigated 5 trade shows and several buying appointments in just 30 hrs.

Day 1: While Melissa arrived a few days earlier, the rest of us arrived in NYC bright and early on Tuesday July 21st. Wake up time was 5am, departure from Toronto’s downtown Island airport was 7:30am. Upon arriving we headed straight to The Dream hotel to drop our bags and to connect with Melissa and Phil. After grabbing a quick bite and a desperate cup of coffee we headed straight to Capsule Show where we zipped through over 200 brands in just 2hrs. Note we ended up picking up some great Australian and Brit brands to add to our roster, so look out for those. From there, we dashed across town (literally to the other end) where we arrived at Liberty Fairs. Another hectic show, where we connected with some usual suspects like Zanerobe, made in Canada brand Outclass, and PRPS just to name a few. The highlight of this stretch was definitely our one-on-one interview with Luke Scott, head designer for Zanerobe and getting his insights on the brands heritage and future ambitions- stay tuned for that video coming soon. From Liberty we jumped to Projects, MRkt and Agenda which were all fortunately under one roof at the Jacob Javits Centre.

Now imagine, there are on average 200 vendors at each show, we did 5 shows, which means we went through about 1000 brands in the span of 6hrs. Talk about making hard decisions. Fortunately, with Melissa at the helm we usually have a pretty clear idea about what brands we want to connect with which as you can imagine really helps manage our time most efficiently. The great thing about Melissa is that though she has a preferred list she’s always on the prowl to find new brands to cater to our customers and help grow the Gotstyle brand. Suffice it to say, we definitely found a few of those at the Project Show this year. Once we finished our appointment with brands like Haspel, Hardy Amies, Todd Snyder et al, we headed back to our hotel to freshen up so we’d be ready for the Elevnty cocktail preview and Zanerobe after party in Soho. You can image how crazy that got!

Day 2: Started sharp at 9am which when we had our first appointment with one of our favourite brands Eidos Napoli at the gorgeous New York Palace Hotel. Skim through the pics below to see snaps of their incredible SS’16 collection. The colours, patterns, textures and textiles will definitely have you drooling next season. Following Eidos preview we headed to check a few unusual suspects- without giving away too many trade secrets Gotstyle is definitely exploring some new brands that offer a completely different aesthetic to what we normally carry. We strongly feel that the Gotstyle man is evolving and we want to do our part to nurture that exploration. Hint: the brands are subtly visible in the photo album below.

Alas, at 4pm our day finally came to a close but not really because now we have to head back to the hotel, grab our bags and head straight to the airport. And there you have it, 5 tradeshows, over 1000 brands in just 30hrs. That was easy!