The fashion cluster’s super networker

Dressed in a tailor-made black suit and high heels and with her kind being she is the essence of the atmosphere around the small round table on the balcony of Café Sommersko in the heart of Copenhagen. She puts her mobile phone down and she is on. She speaks passionately and with lots of energy of her work with building the Danish fashion cluster and of some of the many other projects she has sent down the catwalk.

On the top of Eva Kruse’s business card it says ”Manager of the Danish Fashion Institute”, the network organisation of the Danish fashion industry, which she has helped design from day one. Among other things, she is the chairman of the Nordic Fashion Association and a member of REG X’s steering committee and she is responsible for an entire collection of projects, among others NICE, Modezonen (fashion zone) and Fashion Forum.

She has a busy schedule.

Publically, she is known as the fashion queen of the mega-event Copenhagen Fashion Week, which attracts media and public from the entire world. But, fashion week is but one chapter in the story of 39-year-old Eva Kruse’s success as a networker, and according to her, the secret is simple as a summer dress: The ability to make people understand what you are saying.

”I don’t have a long, academic education, but I’m good at communicating. And communication is by far the most important thing when working with clusters. As a cluster facilitator you have to see your industry eye to eye. I must understand what the fashion companies are saying, and I have to be able to translate it into a language that the politicians can understand when I’m facing them. It’s actually a kind of ”translator’s role”, she says and adds that if a project fails, it’s usually because of poor communication.

Success requires clear contracts, Eva Kruse believes:

”I can be at a meeting where everybody is saying the same thing. But if we leave the meeting with different pictures in our minds, things will not work out, because we are not in the same place. You need to be 100 % sure that everybody understands.”

Untapped potential
At present, the café balcony hosts a large part of the meetings in Eva Kruse’s diary, because the apple of her eye, the Danish Fashion Institute (DAFI) has so many employees that there is no longer room for a meeting table at their address a few metres down Kronprinsensgade.

This was not the case in 2006 when Eva Kruse quit her job at Kopenhagen Fur as head of international communication in order to dedicate herself to the idea of gathering the fashion industry in a cluster. At that point, she was the only employee and finances were a size extra small.

”The story of the Danish Fashion Institute actually started out in the minds of Thomas Hargreave – who is my boyfriend, by the way – and Frederik Bjerregaard, a while before I joined in. All three of us worked in the media and communication part of the fashion industry – for several years I was the editor in chief of the magazine Eurowoman. We had a great network and insight in the industry, which at that point was characterized by a lot of unique, strong actors, but a very small network, very little communication and very little competency utilisation and knowledge sharing. But we saw that there was a major untapped potential in gathering the Danish fashion industry in a cluster”, says Eva Kruse, who together with the two other initiators used almost all of their spare time forming and developing the idea.

At the beginning, the trio’s idea was only based on intuition, but they began gathering the fashion people and informed them of their vision of how to strengthen the industry with a joint network.

Fashion on the political agenda
”Even if the fashion industry was one of the country’s largest export industries at that time, it was not ’hot stuff’ politically speaking. But when a report from FORA – the analysis unit of the Ministry of Economic Affairs – compared the Danish fashion industry to fashion clusters in the rest of the world and concluded that something was missing in Denmark, it was just what we needed. It was approximately one year after we had begun working on the idea of gathering a fashion cluster, and the report justified what we were doing”, says Eva Kruse.

”At a point in time we gathered a number of players from the industry and said: ’Listen, we are not able to work as volunteers in this project any more. It has to turn into a regular industry initiative, so you will have to step up.’ 14 of the trend-setters in the industry said: ’We would love to’, and when the steering committee was appointed, things took off.”

When the Danish Fashion Institute was founded on the 1st of November 2005, 60 companies were behind it, and Eva Kruse emphasises that the motivation and determination of the industry was of vital importance for the success of the project.

”The 60 members committed themselves to paying each DKK 10,000 in membership fees, but as we had spent DKK 300,000 over the previous years to kick start the initiative with meetings, speakers, flyers etc., only DKK 300,000 was left. It was nothing, but we were standing”, Eva Kruse smiles, still a little proud thinking of the day that the project finally took its first steps into the spotlight.

At the beginning she was the only employee in the organisation, and the pay was almost symbolic.

Copenhagen Fashion Week became the first visible branding platform of the new organisation, and it paved the way for the Danish Fashion Institute having the financial ability to invite the fashion people to conferences and network meetings.

”At the beginning it was really difficult to get the fashion companies to come to our events. Continuing education and knowledge sharing were not tradition, and people were not used to sitting side by side with their competitors, so we had to make a lot of calls to get people to participate”, Eva Kruse smiles, because it is no longer like that.

Eventually, we succeeded in making the industry understand that together we are stronger. The philosophy is that in the long run it pays to be partners rather than competitors, because one company’s export success tends to have an influence on another – especially if there is a common reference.

Fireballs make the difference
Eva Kruse talks about the Modezonen (fashion zone) project, which is to arm the Danish fashion cluster for the global competition. About the news site FashionForum.dk which forms a network platform and increases knowledge sharing and supply of new knowledge internally in the industry. About Copenhagen Fashion Summit and the NICE project – about how important sustainability and corporate social responsibility are in one of the world’s most polluting industries.

The sentences are queuing up to get out, because Eva Kruse is really passionate about her projects. And ”fireballing”, as she has named it, is also part of the explanation for her success.

”If we are to succeed, there has to be fireballs that bother to give a little extra. The essence of our success with the Danish Fashion Institute is that it has grown from within – that we were passionate about it and had visions. Success depends on how high you aim and when fireballing drives you, you aim higher than if somebody had handed you a bag of money and an assignment”, she thinks.

Sometimes she can get tired of hearing her own voice. And apparently, her boyfriend can get tired of competing with the many projects, because one day she had to promise him that she wouldn’t initiate more projects right away. But even if he just managed to record the promise on his mobile phone, Eva Kruse still stakes on him bearing with her, when a new idea comes into her mind and demands her attention.

KaosPilot by dispensation
”I’ve was always my own motivator, and I was always a leader – both at home to my siblings and at my school. For example, at my school I quickly established a good relationship with the principal. In the 5th or 6th grade I could walk into his office and discuss directly with him, if there was something the class wanted. He listened to me, which made it easier for us to get through with our ideas – e.g. have a free period”, she says and rushes on to talk about her college days in Århus, where she in Projekthuset Frontløberne (Project house Front-runners) helped start up the Sunday discotheque Kronstadt and fell totally in love with project-making.

As one day she accidentally received a folder on the project manager education KaosPilots, she was not in doubt.

”The age limit was 21, and I was only 19. But I didn’t care – I applied anyway.”

She got in by dispensation and learned as a KaosPilot that you can do anything if you put your mind to it.

”When I left, I was an idealist with a naïve or blind faith that things succeed if you try hard”, she puts on a nostalgic smile, thinking about the time when she began her carrier as an outstanding networker.

Eva Kruse:

Manager of the Danish Fashion Institute, the network organisation of the fashion industry, and organiser of Copenhagen Fashion Week. Trained KaosPilot. Previously worked as head of communications at Kopenhagen Fur, campaign manager for Red Cross, editor in chief of Eurowoman and host of the TV3 talk show 'Uden Adam' (Without Adam).

On the personal level, she is a mother of two – Mads, aged 13 and Emile, aged 9 – and Thomas Hargreave is her boyfriend.

Modezonen (fashion zone), a consortium of: Dansk Design Center (Danish design centre), Designskolen Kolding (Kolding School of Design), the Danish Trade Council, Copenhagen Business School, KEA (Copenhagen School of Design and Technology), Wonderful Copenhagen, Danmarks Designskole (The Danish Design School), Modekonsortiet (the fashion consortium), TEKO, The Danish Chamber of Commerce – and the Danish Fashion Institute as a project responsible.

FashionForum.dk is an independent news service for the Danish fashion industry.

Copenhagen Fashion Summit – international conference on CSR and sustainability in the fashion industry. Next conference is on the 3rd of May 2012.

NICE – Nordic Initiative, Clean and Ethical - is a Nordic collaboration with the purpose of leading the Nordic fashion industry towards a stronger focus on responsible, ethnical and sustainable production.

Nordic Fashion Association is a cluster organisation behind NICE.

FORA is the unit of business economic research and analysis under the Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority.