Week in the Life: of a PR Director

Gemma Barfi, the PR Director of Tapestry (aka. The corporation that owns Coach, kate spade and Stuart Weitzman) started her career journey by working in the PR office of shoe brand, Patrick Cox. Since then, she’s worked at Burberry, Myla, Harrods and Coach, where she worked her way up into the role she’s in today. “At Coach, my role has expanded to incorporate influencer and celebrity in addition to editorial,” she explains. “Since 2020, myself and my team have taken on responsibility for our parent company’s other brand, Kate Spade.” Her favourite thing about her job? “My team, it is honestly a pleasure to work with them every day,” she shares. “They are big personalities and a lot of fun, but also very dedicated, hard working and talented. There is a very special culture within the Tapestry EUR PR team which I am proud to say I have helped to nurture.” 

For Gemma, resilience is key for doing well in the PR industry. “When your work is on display in public forums like magazines and on social media, everyone has an opinion and the criticism can be tough. Additionally, you are constantly pitching ideas, stories, product, talent and you are going to hear a lot of nos, which can be demoralising if you don’t have a thick skin.” Gemma goes on to explain that to be successful in PR, you need “the ability to fuse magic and creativity with logic. In PR we create beautiful aspirational moments that ultimately need to positively impact commercials, so you need to be able to use both the left and right side of your brain!” 

To find out more about what a typical week in a PR Director’s life looks like, read on below.

Monday:

The week kicks off working from my flat in Brixton, at 10am I jump on a call with my Senior PR Manager and no.2, Sam. We discuss the upcoming projects and tasks for the week and reflect on the previous week’s press, celebrity and influencer coverage generated on Coach and kate spade. Sam also presents last month’s PR metrics, and I am very happy to see we are up from last year and this year’s goals in terms of quantity and quality. The ability to quantify the impact of the editorial and earned social media that the press office delivers has become increasingly important through the course of my career. Luckily, we have multiple data analytics platforms and dashboards to help us with this!

Between ad hoc calls and emails, I work on contracts with the Tapestry legal team for upcoming Coach projects and celebrity partnerships. I work with my team on a talent longlist for a potential kate spade Spring ’23 cover moment with a UK consumer title, and review RSVPs for an event we are hosting on Wednesday evening.

Tuesday:

I start the day at Tapestry’s office in Paddington. The first thing to do is to work with Marketing to select images of Coach’s 3D advert at Piccadilly Circus, which features a giant Lil Nas X and Coach Pillow Tabby bag. Once the image selects are made, my team pitches the story to our trade press contacts.

After this, over coffee (we are lucky to have Gail’s next door!) the Tapestry EMEAI PR assistants take myself and the team through the weekend’s papers highlighting credits and missed opportunities. The rest of the day is dominated by admin: calls, reports and budget trackers!

Wednesday:

The Tapestry PR and Marketing teams host an influencer preview event of the kate spade Holiday pop-up in central London. As such, me and the PR team are busy finalising the finishing details: guestlist, dressing, gifting and photography. We also received a last-minute request from renowned trade title, WWD, for a quote from the kate spade’s Global CMO on the London pop-up. I hastily draft the quote on her behalf which she approves just in time! In tandem with fun projects like this there is always admin, so I sign off a template for the post-event report and chase my team to send me their Christmas Holiday time-off requests. The event was a success and the influencers didn’t want to leave, so we rounded the night off with drinks in Soho with a couple of the influencer attendees.

Thursday:

While the team collates, evaluates and reports on the social media coverage of yesterday’s kate spade influencer preview event, I work on phase two of the launch; the celebrity photocall. With the help of a freelance VIP consultant, we have secured the incredible Jourdan Dunn to visit the pop-up, create social content in the space and interview exclusively with a UK press outlet. I draft the photocall release and social media brief whilst Senior Manager, Sam gets on the phone to pitch the press opportunity, he secures Stylist.co.uk for Jourdan’s exclusive interview. All this is done with Tapestry’s Q1 earnings call in the background. Tapestry is a New York stock exchange listed company which must report to Wall Street our results four times a year. I always ask my team to listen in because it’s important to know how our brand and the industry are performing.

Friday:

I am up early at the kate spade Holiday pop-up, Sam meets we with a much-needed coffee, Jourdan Dunn arrives to shoot and is an absolute professional and gorgeous inside and out. We blast the release and images to our celebrity press database and are thrilled to see the image in the Evening Standard later that day. Usually, Fridays at Tapestry are half days to help employees minimise stress levels and to support work life balance. However, it’s a busy week for PR and we are straight onto planning our next event, which is hosting influencers at Coach Global Ambassador, Lil Nas X’s World Tour at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith on Saturday night.