By the time the dry ice mists off the runway at The Warehouse nightclub in Toronto tonight, willowy models, student designers and the style-reporting press will be in their places. The creations of 10 fashion-design students culled from 22 different schools across Canada -- from Holland College in Prince Edward Island to the Helen Lefeaux School of Fashion Design in Vancouver -- will criss-cross the runway in front of them.
It's the Smirnoff Fashion Awards, one of the year's hippest events. Ivana Santilli will sing, comedy world personalities Albert Howell and Andrew Currie will emcee, and the bright young crowd will sip the evening's standard-issue Vogue Martinis (Smirnoff, sweet vermouth, fresh orange and lemon juice, stirred not shaken).
For 10 years Smirnoff has been sponsoring the Smirnoff Fashion Awards in Canada and across the globe. It's a savvy and successful marketing move that has transformed a once staid and unfashionable brand into a favourite drink of the young -- and which has translated into impressive sales. The company may not be the first to inject glamour and the veneer of youth into its image via the runway, but it's been a hugely successful undertaking.
The 19-to-24-year-old age bracket is where the money is, confirms Shirley Roberts, president of Mississauga, Ont.-based Market-Driven Solutions and author of Harness the Future, a book on consumer trends. Grabbing the consumer while they're young is crucial.
"My experience is that volume consumption goes down with age. The young have more occasion to drink, more propensity to drink and the volume that they drink is greater," says Roberts. "After age 35, volume starts to decline. After 45, it drops off a lot. If these companies don't make [their business]there, they won't make it with the older folks."
Back in 1990 when Smirnoff initiated the student-design awards, it was selling 700,000 cases of vodka annually in Canada. Currently, it unloads close to 1 million -- amounting to 35 per cent of the domestic market share, way above its closest rivals, Absolut and Alberta Vodka.
"From what I gather, [Smirnoff]became involved because of the whole excitement, energy and glamour of fashion," says Canadian designer Joeffer Caoc, who was runner-up at the 1993 Canadian finals and is now one of this country's leading fashion lights. "Smirnoff is a sexy label and so having fashion connected with it is a good thing."
Sweden's Absolut vodka set the pace when it came to boosting sales with hip advertising and by tapping into the fashion world. Andy Warhol was the first big-league artist to lend his name to Absolut advertising. In projects since, the company has partnered with creative types as far ranging as chefs and makeup artists. A new print campaign slated to launch this summer has celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz snapping personalities in portraits inspired by archival Absolut ads. Gucci's Tom Ford will appear, as well as designer Philippe Starck, painter Julian Schnabel, novelists Salman Rushdie and Susan Sontag, and architect Philip Johnson.
Even when the Swedish distiller aligned itself with Canadian fashion -- in the early 1990s, various ads appeared combining the brand's signature bottle with creations by women's wear designers such as Lida Baday and accessory designer Karen Palmer -- the unifying element was the product's clean, minimalist packaging originally inspired by a Swedish medicine bottle. By contrast, Smirnoff plays up a vintage, czarist-era look. (The brand has actually been made by a U.S. company since 1934, after a Smirnoff heir fled Bolshevik Russia.)
Students and other design-savvy, street-smart youth have rewarded Smirnoff with their party-going loyalty. Smirnoff's vodka sales have inched up by approximately five per cent each year in Canada since 1990, and although Michele D'Angelo, the company's director of channel marketing, responsible for marketing at retail, special events and licensed bars, won't cite specifics, she says that in the legal-drinking-age to 24-year-old category, growth has been "statistically significant."
That's not the case with the older crowd. Recent survey results from the Print Measurement Bureau, an independent researcher, reports that Canadian vodka consumption for the age-35-plus audience has plateaued around the 20-per-cent mark for the four years from 1996 to 1999. The percentage of individuals, aged 20 to 24 on the other hand, who'd quaffed some of the clear stuff in the last six months, has risen five per cent annually on average in the same period. In 1999, a full 41 per cent of young Canadian adults in this age bracket had consumed vodka.
Smirnoff has taken a broad approach to the fashion community. In distinctly fashionspeak prose, D'Angelo explains the attraction. "The fashion entity goes along with our premium positioning and core values of originality, versatility and liberation or creativity."
Aside from its multinational fashion awards event, Smirnoff targets hip parties across Canada. This season alone it has provided cocktails at events for up-and-coming fashion designers in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver.
In addition to providing product, Smirnoff reaches young fashion types on their own turf. It's splicing some of its TV ads with footage of its banner fashion event; the 60-second "vignettes" have been running this month all over English-speaking Can.
Tonight's winner will jet to New York to compete with students from 130 other countries at the international finals of the distiller-sponsored fashion fete. The purse there, valued at £50,000 ($109,240 Canadian), includes a masters of arts placement and tuition at London's highly regarded St. Martins College of Art and Design.
"[The Smirnoff contest]influenced my career tremendously," says Quebec City-native Frédéric Tremblay, a former international grand-prize winner who is currently a senior designer at Marc Jacobs in New York. "It was really one of the reasons I went to St. Martins, so it was taking me a step beyond a Canadian college. From the school perspective, it was one of the few well-renowned contests; and one of the few international contests out there."
For Caoc, the Smirnoff experience translated to priceless connections and exposure. "At that time Lida [Baday]was one of the judges so that is how I got that job [as her assistant]" he says.
After tonight, exposure at the Smirnoff event will have even greater reach. To help build the buzz, the distiller has sold 300 tickets for the soiree at a very accessible $15 -- $5 of which is earmarked for the AIDS Committee of Toronto.