How to find a showroom in Paris during Fashion Week

A good showroom is one of the fastest ways into European wholesale. It puts your collection in front of a buyer who already trusts the showroom's eye, with a sales team that knows the accounts. But finding the right one in Paris during Fashion Week, and getting in, is its own skill. Here's how it actually works.

First, what a showroom actually is

A showroom is a curated space with its own sales force, carrying a coherent set of complementary brands. Each one has its own client book and its own point of view. You don't just rent a rail, you join a selection, and the showroom sells your collection to its buyers on your behalf. We cover where it sits in the wider picture in our guide to wholesale in Europe.

Where to actually find them

You won't find the good ones with a generic search. The industry uses a directory.

Modem. The reference tool is Modem (modemonline.com), the professional directory for fashion. It lists multi-label showrooms, trade shows and fashion weeks, press offices and stores, and for each Paris Fashion Week season it maps the designer showrooms with their venues and contacts. Start there: filter by Paris, by the season you're targeting, and by the kind of showroom that fits your category.

Fashop. Once you know which showrooms to chase, you'll also want to understand the stores they sell to. Fashop is a B2B prospecting tool built on a qualified, regularly updated database of multi-brand ready-to-wear and footwear stores. It's now part of the WSN group, the people behind Who's Next and Première Classe, so it plugs into the same wholesale ecosystem. Use it to see which retailers carry brands like yours, and to sanity-check whether a showroom's client book actually overlaps with your target stores.

The one rule that decides everything: match their curation

This is where most brands waste their season. A showroom isn't a neutral space for hire. It's a selection, and its buyers come because they trust that selection. If your brand doesn't belong next to the others, the showroom won't take you, and even if it did, its buyers wouldn't bite.

So before you pitch anyone, do the homework. Look at the brands a showroom already carries. Look at the stores that buy from it. Look at the price level, the aesthetic, the market. If your collection sits naturally in that group, you have a case. If it doesn't, you're pitching the wrong room, and a polished pitch won't fix a bad fit.

Be honest with yourself here. A showroom that's slightly above where you are today is worth chasing. One that's a clear mismatch is a waste of both your time and theirs.

How to approach a showroom

Showrooms run on trust and tend to think in seasons, not one-offs. They mostly take brands that already have some wholesale activity and decent sell-through, because their own buyers expect a safe bet. So come prepared.

• A clear line on your brand DNA, and who already stocks you.
• A clean linesheet with wholesale prices, minimums and delivery dates.
• Real sell-through numbers if you have them, and any press.
• A reason this showroom specifically, not a mass email to forty of them.

And mind the calendar. Wholesale runs roughly a year ahead, and showrooms book their line-up early. If you want a spot for a season, start the conversation months before, not the week of the shows.

How to negotiate: the fixed fee and the commission

A showroom usually charges you two ways, and you can move both.

The fixed fee. A seasonal or annual participation cost (the “showroom fees”) for your space and the sales service. You pay it whether you sell or not.

The commission. A cut of the sales the showroom writes for you, usually around 15 to 20%. You only pay it on what sells.

The trick is to trade one against the other based on your volume. If you expect strong sales, the commission will cost you more than the fee over a season, so push the commission down and accept the fixed fee. If you're testing the market with modest volume, the fixed fee is your bigger risk, so push that down and concede on the commission. A common, sensible move is to accept their standard commission and negotiate the fixed fee.

Then get the hidden costs in writing before you sign: the extra sample set the showroom needs, sample shipping, any partner or activation fees. Those quietly erode the margin you went in to protect. We break down the full wholesale margin maths in our wholesale guide.

RUN x ANDAM: a Paris showroom built differently

If you want the cleanest version of all this, look at RUN, the WSN platform for emerging designers during Paris Fashion Week. Its showroom-and-runway edition, RUN x ANDAM, runs 2 to 5 October 2026 in the Jardin des Tuileries, right next to Première Classe, in collaboration with the ANDAM Fashion Awards.

Two things make it stand out against a classic showroom, and they are the whole point.

No commission on sales. RUN charges a flat participation fee and takes no cut of your orders. The showroom package is 5,000 euros all-in, ready-to-wear or accessories, with furniture and the buyers service included. There's a separate runway-presentation package at 15,000 euros for brands that want a show. One clean number, and every euro of the order is yours, no 15 to 20% disappearing off the top.

Appointments pre-booked, by a dedicated buyers service. This is the part that changes your four days. You don't set up a rail and hope for footfall. A team prospects the top buyers before the show, books the appointments, welcomes and guides each buyer through the selection during the four days, and follows up on the orders after, with a report to each brand. Last October's edition, run with Likewise Agency, booked more than 200 buyer meetings. The buyers come to your rail, by appointment.

And the buyers are the real ones: 10 Corso Como, Dover Street Market, Selfridges, Isetan Mitsukoshi, Le Printemps, Galeries Lafayette, La Samaritaine, Harvey Nichols, Luisa Via Roma, SKP, Mytheresa and Beams have all come through. The brands it has carried, names like Pressiat, Valette Studio, Germanier, Weinsanto and Benmoyal, tell a buyer exactly what kind of room this is.

ANDAM and its award

The other half of the name is worth knowing. ANDAM, the Association Nationale pour le Développement des Arts de la Mode, is France's leading fashion prize. Founded in 1989, its annual award hands emerging designers a substantial grant and a year of mentoring from an industry leader, and it has launched some of the most important names in fashion.

Its very first laureate, back in 1989, was Martin Margiela; later winners include Anthony Vaccarello, Koché and Marine Serre. Backed by major houses and the French Ministry of Culture, and judged by a jury of industry leaders, an ANDAM association is one of the strongest signals of creative credibility in Paris. That's the room RUN x ANDAM puts you in, at exactly the moment buyers are deciding what to back next.

How to take part

RUN sits inside the WSN family of shows we represent, alongside Première Classe in the Tuileries during Paris Fashion Week. We look at your collection, tell you honestly whether it fits the curation, and handle the application end to end (see all our shows). For a craft-led or design-forward Indian label aiming at serious buyers, it's one of the cleanest first rooms in Paris.

Finding a showroom in Paris comes down to three things: use the right directory, match the curation honestly, and negotiate the fee and commission to fit your volume. Or skip the cold search and take a stand in a showroom built for emerging brands, with no commission and a buyers team doing the chasing.

Tell us about your brand and we'll point you to the right room. Apply here, or book a 30-minute call.