Turning Seasonal Trends into Year-Round Campaigns: PR Lessons from the Fashion Industry

Seasonal marketing campaigns have long been a staple in the fashion industry, creating anticipation, urgency, and engagement around cyclical events such as fashion weeks, holidays, and consumer-driven phenomena like Dry January. Yet, the true mastery lies in extending these seasonal bursts into sustainable, year-round campaigns that deliver consistent consumer engagement and media impact. This article investigates how fashion brands, notably through Fenwick and Selected’s partnership, leverage seasonal events to build enduring PR strategies that transcend calendar constraints. Along the way, we illuminate how content creators and PR teams can adapt trend analysis, event-based marketing, and media relations tactics to secure predictable earned coverage.

1. The Seasonal Marketing Landscape in Fashion: More Than Just a Moment in Time

Understanding Seasonal Peaks and Patterns

The fashion industry lives and breathes seasonality—from spring/summer collections to winter wardrobes and everything in-between. Brands like Fenwick tap into these rhythms by aligning marketing efforts with consumer moods and purchasing behaviors. Seasonality offers an anchor for storytelling but often confines campaigns to short bursts. The challenge: How do you translate this time-specific energy into ongoing momentum?

When Events Like Dry January Inspire Fashion Conversations

Dry January, an event encouraging sobriety in January, has uniquely intersected with fashion brands seeking to promote wellness, minimalism, or sustainable lifestyles. Selected, partnering with Fenwick, crafted a campaign linking Dry January's ethos to their clean, mindful designs. Such thematic alignment enables PR teams to hook into social trends while opening dialogue beyond the immediate timeframe. This method exemplifies how seasonal events can seed larger narratives.

The Pitfalls of Seasonal Siloing

Many campaigns fall into the trap of siloed, one-off activations, leading to wasted effort and limited ROI. Without a strategic framework, these bursts show short-term lift but fail to build lasting brand equity or media relations depth. For executives and PR leaders, avoiding this requires a comprehensive checklist-driven workflow that ensures each seasonal activation feeds into year-round content and audience engagement.

2. Case Study Spotlight: Fenwick & Selected’s Partnership — Leveraging Dry January

Campaign Genesis and Alignment to Trend

Fenwick, a leading UK department store, joined forces with Selected, an ethical fashion brand, during Dry January 2026 to spotlight sobriety, health, and sustainable fashion. They crafted narratives around mindful consumption—both in lifestyle and clothing—resonating deeply with conscious consumers. This launched not just a seasonal campaign but a platform for ongoing conversation.

Media Relations Strategy: Layering Seasonal Hook with Expert Voices

By engaging wellness influencers alongside sustainability thought leaders, their PR team anchored media interest across beats—from lifestyle to fashion to health. This diversified media relations approach produced richer coverage and set a template for sustained press engagement beyond the original event window. It’s a prime example of how layering media contacts in a media list can amplify and extend impact.

Content Strategy: From Event Activation to Evergreen Storytelling

The campaign's content didn’t end on January 31. Fenwick and Selected invested in evergreen assets—press kits, editorial interviews, behind-the-scenes visuals—that evolved with emerging trends. This approach aligns perfectly with our insights in content strategy for PR, showing how dynamic assets can sustain consumer engagement all year.

3. Framework for Transforming Seasonal Events into Year-Round Campaigns

Step 1: Identify a Seasonal Trend with Year-Round Resonance

Not every seasonal theme can stretch beyond its moment. Select themes linked to broader cultural or consumer values. The “Dry January” trend succeeded because wellness and sustainability are ongoing conversations. Use robust trend analysis to pick impactful event-based marketing hooks.

Step 2: Align Product Messaging to the Chosen Theme

Adapt your product narrative so it naturally integrates the season’s topic without appearing opportunistic. Fashion brands, for example, weave sustainability messaging into garment production, or Fenwick emphasized mindful fashion choices aligned with Dry January's ethos.

Step 3: Build an Adaptive Media Relations Plan

Create a layered outreach workflow targeting diverse media types—from trade to lifestyle to niche influencers—and prepare for follow-ups. Our PR outreach playbook offers a toolkit on automating this process while personalizing pitches to maintain authenticity.

4. Content Creation and Asset Management for Evergreen Campaigns

Developing Modular Content Pieces

Modularity in content lets PR teams remix assets for various channels over time. For instance, Fenwick used images, interviews, and data snapshots separately and in combination. This tactic prolongs lifecycles and facilitates cross-platform consistency—as we elaborate in our press kit templates guide.

Organizing Your Press Kit Library for On-Demand Reuse

Keep your asset library taggable and searchable to respond quickly to reactive PR hooks or new seasonal opportunities. Combining this with integrated marketing tools means smoother collaboration across teams. We discuss this in depth in the integrations and workflow tutorial.

Leveraging User-Generated Content & Community Stories

Encourage authentic content tied to seasonal themes from your audience to maintain buzz. For example, during Fenwick’s Dry January campaign, customer testimonials and style stories reinforced brand values and fed ongoing content feeds.

5. Measuring PR Impact Across Seasonal & Ongoing Campaign Phases

Key Metrics to Track

Combine traditional metrics like media impressions and placements with engagement rates, sentiment analysis, and content longevity. Fenwick’s analysis included coverage volume during Dry January and continued backlink and social engagement in subsequent months.

Using Dashboards to Visualize Multi-Phase Campaign ROI

Dashboards integrating press coverage, outreach efforts, and conversion data enable transparent reporting to stakeholders. Our PR ROI measurement guide provides step-by-step setup instructions.

Optimizing Future Campaigns Based on Insights

Data-driven learnings help adjust timing, messaging, and media targets for approaching seasonal moments or new content themes that sustain momentum, closing the loop on effective year-round PR.

6. Sample Checklist: Executing a Seasonal-to-Year-Round Fashion PR Campaign

7. Integrating Automation to Scale Personalized Outreach

Maintaining authenticity while scaling PR outreach is a known bottleneck. With automation tools integrated into media workflows, PR teams can send personalized pitches efficiently, ensuring follow-ups and tracking engagement. This is especially critical when campaigns evolve beyond seasonal peaks. Our playbook demonstrates best practices for automation balanced with customization.

Pro Tip: Automate initial outreach but reserve personalized follow-ups for high-priority journalists to deepen relationships.

8. Thought Leadership: Positioning Your Brand in the Year-Round Wellness-Fashion Conversation

The Fenwick-Selected campaign exemplifies how brands can evolve from seasonal promotions into thought leaders on interconnected topics like wellness and sustainability. Developing authoritative content—white papers, podcasts, interviews—extends relevance beyond product promotion. For content creators, this means planning a thought leadership calendar aligned with your seasonal themes but designed to last.

Engaging Experts and Influencers Continuously

Building partnerships with wellness experts or sustainable fashion advocates keeps your brand voice credible and fresh. This also opens new media angles as the conversation broadens through the year.

Maintaining Brand Consistency While Evolving Messaging

As the campaign evolves, balance innovation with your brand’s core identity. Consistency in messaging fosters trust, especially important when linking to public health or ethical fashion narratives.

9. Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Maintaining Momentum After the Seasonal Peak

Many brands lose audience attention after the initial hype. Fenwick avoided this by planning content drip campaigns and responsive media outreach based on ongoing analytics. For more on sustaining momentum, see our content sequencing strategies.

Managing Cross-Team Coordination

Seasonal-to-year-round campaigns require marketing, PR, and product teams in sync. Workflow automation combined with regular coordination meetings, as explained in workflow automation guides, solves fragmentation.

Ensuring Authenticity in Message Extensions

Stretching a seasonal theme risks diluting authenticity. Avoid this by grounding messages in real consumer insights and brand values—a principle shown in case studies like Fenwick’s and covered in our consumer engagement PR tactics.

10. Next Steps: Building Your Own Seasonal-to-Year-Round Campaign Playbook

Audit Your Current Seasonal Campaigns

Start by evaluating what seasonal campaigns you already run and analyze their content lifespan and media traction. Learn more about audit methodologies in annual PR audit strategies.

Develop a Checklist-Driven Workflow

Create step-by-step processes covering theme selection, media targeting, content creation, automation, and measurement. Our comprehensive PR playbooks provide templates specifically designed for product launches and event-driven campaigns.

Leverage Tool Integrations and Analytics

Integrate your media list, outreach automation, content library, and analytics dashboards to streamline execution and improve reporting. Find integration frameworks in the tool integrations and automation tutorials.

Related Reading

• Checklist-Driven PR Workflows - Streamline your PR campaigns with actionable, repeatable checklists.
• PR Outreach Playbook - A comprehensive guide to personalized and scalable media pitching.
• Press Kit Templates for Creators - How to build effective and modular press kits that sustain campaigns.
• Content Strategy for PR Professionals - Develop content that resonates and lasts beyond events.
• Measuring PR ROI Effectively - Tools and techniques to visualize PR’s impact.