The 'team' is basically me, one person; Roz. I designed the website, research the live streams, put the schedules together and deal with the social media.
Before the season begins, I have to go through the fashion week schedules. There's around 100 shows at each fashion week. I check around 500 websites and 150 Facebook pages in the run up to fashion week to try and work out whether designers are live streaming or not.
Then I put the schedules together, both an overview of the whole week, and the daily live stream schedules you're probably familiar with. Every morning I check the website of every designer streaming that day, and every evening the website of every designer streaming the next day. So that's about 2000 web pages I visit.
A typical day is this:
I will review the runway schedules and make sure all shows are present and correct.
I will visit the website and Facebook page of every designer that day to establish whether they're live streaming - that's normally around 30-40 websites.
I trawl through Twitter, Google and Email to double-check there's nothing I overlooked.
Every schedule update has to be done on the website, the mobile site and on the CatwalkLive.TV widget - I don't use fancy coding, I do this manually.
I update the video archive so that people can re-watch shows they've missed - normally around 5-10 shows are added every day.
I schedule the 'live streaming today' digest tweets, tweets about what shows we've added to the website and the #CatwalkLiveTVClashFinder warnings.
I respond to followers on Twitter - I try and reply to every tweet I receive.
If I'm not working, I will enjoy the live streams. If I am working, I'll catch up when I get home.
Throughout the day I am looking for problems - some live streams are added even throughout the day, if a live stream doesn't work I am scouring the internet for alternative links and making sure you are all informed.
In the evening I will make a record of problems, such as a live stream that was dropped from the schedule, so that schedules are even more accurate the season after.
I also do any website updates - this is almost a never-ending task and I'm constantly trying to add or enhance features.
I also look ahead to the next fashion week - we're in the middle of New York Fashion Week and I'm working on Milan schedules too.
In the evening, I go through every website and Facebook page for the next day to check for live streams (30-40 websites again).
I write and schedule the #CatwalkLiveTVReminder tweets - around150280 already this season. I have to make sure the link is correct, the time the tweet is scheduled is correct (bear in mind I have to allow for a time difference as I live in Dubai) and have to jump through various hoops to have the tenacity to schedule two tweets at the same time. This alone normally takes 30-45 minutes.
All of this takes about 3-4 hours every day. I wake up at about 7am and the first thing I do is to work on CatwalkLive. I am currently going to bed at around 3am, and the last thing I do is to work on the site, too. I also work full time and obviously the site was born out of my enthusiasm for fashion, so I want to catch up with the live streams and stills.
Working on the site is a lot of pressure for me. Trust me when I say that every time I get a link wrong, or a show doesn't live stream, I feel awful.
I believe so far this season I have made one mistake, which was to say Tory Burch was live streaming on CatwalkLive, when it was actually her website.
I misread the MB Fashion Week schedule as saying the venue was 'Theatre' (from where it would have live streamed) when it was actually the David H. Koch Theatre. So, sorry about that. As soon as I realised (10 minutes before the show started) I corrected the listings, tweeted a correction and made my apologies to those who complained.
I take things like this quite personally as I spend hours and hours every day working on the schedules and feel a personal responsibility when things go wrong, even when they're out of my control (for example, the Diane von Furstenberg live stream), and then to receive criticism is just the final insult.
So, the basic purpose of this post is to explain how the site works, why sometimes it doesn't, and to basically say I try my best. Hopefully you'll agree when I say my best is better than any other live streaming schedule site. If it isn't, I'll gladly leave it to the professionals and save myself the stress.
I make life difficult for myself to make life easier for the users.
I could just list the live streams, but I feel if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing properly, so I present them in the clashfinder format so you can see at a glance what shows clash, when there are gaps in the schedules etc. Likewise, I remind users twice before each live stream - once before it starts, and once as the show starts. It would be a lot easier to do just the one, but I know I'd like to be nudged a couple of times before each show, and when I polled users when I originally came up with the concept, they agreed.
I'll finish off by saying a huge thank you to so many people who have helped. If you have ever retweeted a reminder, pointed people towards the site or even written an article on it, you are too kind and I really appreciate it.
CatwalkLive.TV is both the bane of my life and the love of my life. When someone says they find it 'so useful' it makes me smile because the site is born out of frustration at the lack of any other site like it. But when people complain, I have to admit I wonder whether they realise how much work goes into it, and how much they take the site for granted.
I hope in future if anyone spots a mistake, they'd tweet me or email me - it's a lot more helpful to me and the users of the site than just complaining about it elsewhere.
And if you read all the way down to here; well done! Here's a free air guitar.
