3 questions for . . . Priscilla Jokhoo Business Division Director, Fédération Française du Prêt à Porter Féminin

The Fédération Française du Prêt à Porter Féminin provides services involving a range of financing. As well as helping businesses individually, a new program of breakfast meetings to teach participants about financial products will debut in 2015.

‘Our goal is to be an intermediary between financial services and fashion businesses’.

For 2015, you’ve announced a restructuring of the Fédération’s Business Division, with a greater focus on banking products. Why?

Because money makes the world go round! And our experience confirms that obvious truth. Over the course of a year, we help around 150 fashion businesses, either through small seminars for groups, or one-on-one meetings for personalized assistance. When business managers contact us, there are always three major, reoccurring themes: optimizing business models, retail strategy, and financing. For that last category, we know that a number of financial organizations have prejudices about fashion businesses; they believe the fashion sector is undergoing hard times. But that’s not true. Over the last 10 years, the profile of the businesses the Fédération helps have changed significantly. Today’s businesses are energetic and creative with healthy growth.

Now it’s critical to facilitate dialogue with financial organizations. In fact, during recent years, many banks have changed the way they deal with entrepreneurs and followed the HSBC example by creating Business Centres; a new set of professionals is in place. As for entrepreneurs, they often take a ‘consumer’ approach to banking products and go without certain services because they lack time or information.

How will this stronger emphasis on fashion business financing take place?

This is not a new area of expertise for us. The Fédération has provided this service for several years by helping businesses on an individual basis. Currently, we help businesses prepare their loan applications, we put them in touch with different organizations, we work with them to determine their credit needs, and more. We also intervene as a mediator with banks when there are communication breakdowns. These personalised Fédération services will continue and expand. However, through conversations with business managers, we realized that we needed to put more energy into teaching businesses about financial tools.

Banking products are numerous and sometimes complex. They should be chosen according to a business’s evolution, order books, and target markets in France or internationally. It’s difficult for business managers who are concentrated on their collections to stay organized between cash flow, overdrafts, seasonal credits, letters of credit, banks, the BPI (Public Investment Bank), regional assistance programs, etc. That’s why in 2015 we’ll present a series of breakfast meetings dedicated to financial management for fashion businesses.

How exactly will these Fédération breakfast meetings cover financial management for businesses?

Our goal is to act as intermediaries, or ‘interpreters’ between the diversity of financial tools and fashion businesses. Because we’ve helped so many individual businesses, we now enjoy close relationships with several organizations. These key contacts will attend the breakfast meetings and explain the wide choice of financial tools. We’ll start by focusing on a specific banking product, and then fashion entrepreneurs can ask the financial representatives questions, all within the comfortable ‘cocoon’ of the Fédération.

We’ll use the same format for major banking firms as for other entities such as the Banque de la Mode, the BPI, factors, etc. A financial professional familiar with day-to-day concerns will explain and describe his role, and then the entrepreneurs can ask any and every question. The meeting will be a networking event with the Fédération as liaison. We’re also considering many other projects to further help fashion businesses and to strengthen our services according to their needs.