Design Influencers Leadership Conference In Napa Valley
Concluding a deliberate phase of transformative planning following last year’s successful 2022 Design Influencers Conference (DIC), the organizers at Esteem Media are pleased to announce its highly anticipated new event format. Launched as the Design Bloggers Conference (DBC) in 2011, the conference eventually evolved into the Design Influencers Conference and now take its next logical next step as the Design Influencers Leadership Conference (DILC) in Napa Valley on February 10 – 12, 2025 at The Meritage Resort and Spa | Napa, CA.
The new format maintains the event’s traditional design influencer marketing education and brand/influencer connection programs, while also tackling new opportunities and challenges in operations and marketing that have become crucial for leaders of influential design businesses to master. In addition, the special benefits of its new host destination, Napa Valley, will be incorporated into the event experience.
Looking back to 2011 when the conference began, the design industry was just beginning to shake itself free of a repressive recessionary period simultaneous with social media and blogging emerging as the next great tool for creating meaningful business results through personal brand creation, influence building, and network expansion. Careers were launched and web rankings grew; helping highly successful and wannabe designers get even more than their fair share of the design business pie. DBC existed to help interested smart design professionals navigate all this.
As time passed, powerful digital platforms beyond blogs, Facebook, and Twitter emerged and more design professionals embraced the world of content creation and social networking as an accepted strategy for enhancing business returns. Design brands showed more interest and jumped on the bandwagon. Collaborative designers with online influence became brands’ paths for more authentic user content and actionable referrals. Design Influencer Marketing officially took a unique form and DBC eventually became DIC to play its role in helping brands and designers connect and understand the potential for collaborative influencer partnerships.
While building influence on and offline continues to be a centerpiece discipline for successful design professionals, the past three years have unearthed new complex internal and external speed bumps for operating successful design businesses. Just like influencer and content marketing did, a shifting landscape is presenting new operating mandates, outside of comfort zones, that are imperative for successful design pros to tackle now for long term sustainability. From changing client bases, reimagined workforces, human resource management, environmental challenges, emergent digital strategies, and morphing business leadership requirements, etc., DIC was compelled to incorporate these new competencies that suddenly paralleled building influence for getting more than anyone’s fair share of the marketplace.
These current day operating mandates, just like influencer marketing eight years ago, require skills and strategies that design pros and brands have generally learned on the fly; never before imagining they would be required for long term business success. Every Design Blogger or Influencers Conference was designed to help forward thinking design professionals capture confidence, skills, and contacts that kept them relevant as the world around them changed, the conference organizers are recreating DILC by focusing on its mainstay Influencer Marketing programming while developing practical vision and competency around internal and external developments demanding awareness.
Look for registration and travel details in late fall of 2023. And bookmark February 10-12, 2025 on your calendar now so you will be present at the Design Influencers Leadership Conference in Napa Valley; designed to help influential Design Professionals learn about critically emergent social and technology shifts…all tailored to a comfortable setting with other design pros that are equally determined to lead their businesses for the long term and grab more than just their fair shares of markets.
Please contact Luba at luba@esteemmedia.com for questions about the event. Hope to see you in Napa!