By Bob Meyer

Barter plays a role in a series of events called FashionWeekLive (FWL) which are being held in various U.S. cities ( New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco) Attendees are laying out from $500 to $1,500 for a unique fashion show that’s taking on the aura of a rock concert.

The event, staged by the International Management Group (IMG), also has plans to launch in Berlin and Hong Kong this year…with an ultimate objective of 20 cities worldwide by 2009.

FWL is analogous to IMG’s successful “Stars On Ice” tour which features Olympic figure skaters, now performing in 70 cities around the world.

IMG was acquired by Forstmann Little & Co in 2004 after IMG’s entrepreneurial founder Mark McCormack passed away. It’s was McCormack’s handshake deal, at age 25, with a similar-aged Arnold Palmer that jump-started the company.

McCormack was a noted advocate of barter. In his best-selling book, “What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School” McCormack stated, “In Business you never get something for nothing, but with barter arrangements you come close enough.”

In McCormack’s last book authored, “The 110% Solution” he devoted nearly twenty pages to barter and Corporate America, explaining why executives should give more attention to (and use) this versatile business tool.

Today the privately-held IMG earns an estimated $1 billion from producing TV sports programming, managing athletes like Tiger Woods, and staging various events.

And the company continues to follow McCormack’s dictates, valuing barter and embracing it whenever possible. For example, with FashionWeekLive, top designers like Bill Blass, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Peter Som and others provide new designs (new looks for the attendees) in exchange for the publicity.

Sephora (beauty products) barter beauty products (for gift bags) as well as providing celebrity makeup artists for free makeovers to attendees.

And Moet & Chandon exchange champagne for valuable exposure at the pre-show cocktail party.

In short, the best and the brightest barter and you should too!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 11:33 am and is filed under Best & Brightest Barter, Marketing, Purchasing & Financing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.