Fashion retailers The Fossil Group – best known for brands including Kate Spade, Puma, Armani and Michael Kors – is launching a new, global brand and has tapped We Are Social’s Toronto-based team to get it off the ground.

Katchin is an online marketplace for jewelry and watches. We Are Social, the brand’s integrated social AOR, combined creator partnerships with content and full performance media strategies to launch the brand in the U.K., with plans to launch in additional markets – including North America – through the next 12 to 24 months, says Krisztina Virag, VP and business director at the agency.

“We have been working with the people behind the Katchin brand for quite a while now,” says Virag, who notes that the partnership began more than a year ago during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Launching a brand like this takes quite a bit of planning, especially if it wants to have a global footprint.”

We Are Social earned the assignment through previous work it had done with the Fossil Group, where the agency had earned the trust to work as “an extension of theirs,” even when travel was out of the question. Working with its international teams, the Toronto group at We Are Social was able to get strong insight into how different markets might interact with Katchin’s offering, which focuses specifically on accessories.

The agency, naturally, heavily leveraged social in the brand’s launch – particularly partnerships with influencers. The agency was careful in its selection of influencers, making sure to pick individuals who were “comfortable and confident in themselves and proud of who they are,” while also being diverse enough to appeal to a broad base of consumers across the various markets the brand intends to launch into.

“When a brand chooses to work with an influencer, it chooses a catalyst. Someone who is culturally relevant and provides a platform to enable their community to self-express,” explains Virag. “There is so much authenticity that can happen around the storytelling of establishing the brand and creating a reputation for it.”

Of course, leaning as heavily on creators as it did, the brand needed to have strong control over the message that was being projected to consumers. That’s why We Are Social eschewed the traditional influencer kit for greater integration between creators and its own editorial and creative teams.

“There is really something to be said about the direction that social is headed in, especially when you’re thinking of platforms that lean more into entertainment where creators are really carving out space in peoples’ attention spans,” she says.

“Jewelry and accessories really speak to self-expression,” Virag adds. “There’s so much emotion that can go into those choices. And so, going through creators and influencers, you can work in a lot more of that emotional storytelling, and there’s a relatability factor for consumers.”