HFDA is building an online business community

One of the key strategic pillars of the Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency is production development, which has been initiated to achieve many goals, including to promote cooperation between manufacturers and designers. In this process, the digital platform entitled HFDA Spot, launched by the Agency, plays an important role. The platform encourages collaboration between manufacturers and designers by facilitating networking within the sector. The online interface acts as a bridge to support the online meeting of customers and manufacturers, and also contributes to the effectiveness of recruitment.

One of the key strategic pillars within the operation of the Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency is production development, the focus of it is on facilitating sales processes, reducing labour shortages, and promoting collaborations between manufacturers and designers. The need for support in these areas was also pointed out by the Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency’s survey conducted in 2019, which assessed the difficulties experienced by the Hungarian fashion and design industry with in-depth interviews and market research.

Research showed, that apart from highlighting this issue of the lack of orders and workforce, the industry players emphasized a professional database and interface where they could find partners and employees who are best suited to their business ideas and would be beneficial to them. According to this, and based on the feedback from industry players, the Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency has developed the HFDA Spot platform which can provide a solution to one of the biggest problems industry players are facing through its wide usability. The platform aims to create a meeting point for fashion and design players, opening new avenues for building professional relationships and by doing so, initiating collaborations between manufacturers and designers. The HFDA Spot platform is also proving to be a pioneer in the sense that this is the first time that representatives from both the fashion and design side are connected on one platform.

In the economic situation caused by the pandemic, the importance of digitalisation has increased: businesses that operate with an intensive online presence are proving to be more resilient to the crisis. The HFDA Spot digital platform will help industry players to improve both domestic and international sales, and will even support the expansion of export processes in the long run. At the same time, the interface can also be an excellent tool for companies to develop their value chains even more effectively within the country, closely linked to each other, and to facilitate knowledge sharing within the profession, through joint discussions and the sharing of individual solution proposals due to the global challenges that occurred during the changed economic environment.

HFDA Spot provides a number of tools for the professional introduction of industry players: Users can present their activities on the interface through photos, videos, and media appearances, and provide an even wider picture of their company by displaying TEÁOR and MOQ numbers. The Hungarian Fashion & Design Agency is working on further developments with the involvement of industry representatives, who will take the platform to an even higher level thanks to their proposals.

“Based on our research, it has become clear that the capabilities of Hungarian fashion and design companies allow for significantly higher capacity utilization and the placing of unique, individual orders. With the creation of HFDA Spot, our goal was to help industry players optimize their production capacities. With the interface, we’re also contributing to the development of dialogues and collaborations between domestic designers and manufacturers, which may also take place in the form of competitive products in the future. We have received various positive feedback from the industry players involved in testing the interface, and we are also excited to receive feedback from the first registered users too!” Stated Zsófia Bata-Jakab, CEO of the HFDA.