MUMBAI: With an aim to target the youth, Pepe Jeans India had partnered with the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival. With this partnership, Kala Ghoda renamed the four-day music segment of the festival to the Pepe Jeans Music Festival. This is only the beginning of the company’s association with music as it plans to extend the brand in the music space by partnering with many more music properties.

However, Pepe Jeans India Pvt. Ltd marketing manager Neha Shah made it clear that the brand does not aim to curate its very own festival. “It will not be easy for us, as a brand, to curate a festival. It requires a lot of resources and we do not plan to venture into creating music festivals.” But the company is looking at partnering with music festivals promoted by Percept, OML and others, and has no reservations of sticking to a specific music genre.

Pepe Jeans intends to target festivals that are organised in North-east India as well. Shah explained, "We have a huge base in that region and we would like to connect with existing and potential customers through music gigs and festivals there."

When quizzed about the budget constrains the brand might face for partnering with such events, Shah said that the company has always invested in fashion and music as that is where the target audience lies, and it will continue to do that. "This will happen even if it requires us to increase our budget, which will increase in the next financial year. Our main focus will be music IPs,” stated Shah.

Currently, the brand plans to push its spring collection, which will be out soon, through various partnerships.

Shah also emphasised that getting on board with Kala Ghoda, gave the brand huge coverage. Last year, more than 40,000 people attended the festival, and she stated that this year the festival saw even more attendees. “We are quite happy with the partnership with Kala Ghoda and we are hopeful that we will continue this partnership next year too,” Shah added. There were interactive installations of the brand at the venue. “Flee markets get the highest number of attendees at the festival, so we made sure that we were present there as a brand. This helped us to be present across the venue of the festival,” Shah said. The installation helped the brand reach out to the age group of up to 40 years, even though Pepe Jeans’ target audience is 16-20 years old.

The partnership helped Pepe Jeans create a lot of content to push the brand online through various social media platforms. Shah stated, “We ran a contest on Facebook along with information about the bands and artists that got us traction on social sites.” Pepe Jeans organised a contest on social media offering any band the opportunity to perform at the Kala Ghoda Music Festival 2015. The contest was won by Laxmi Bomb, who performed at the festival on 14th February. Some of the other music acts that performed at the festival were Neha Bhasin, Shibani Kashyap, Ankur & The Ghalat Family, Blackstratblues, Geetu Hinduja, Sidhartha & Suhas and Amit Trivedi along with many others.