The Digital Dept., the Influencer Marketing subsidiary of Dolphin Entertainment, will stage its BRANDEdit gifting suite as a café-themed streetscape during New York Fashion Week, bringing roughly 150 fashion, beauty, and lifestyle creators through a private Flatiron venue on September 15 and 16.

The event, called “BRANDEdit Café Society,” recreates a neighborhood café district, with sidewalk café displays, a bakery-inspired product showcase, a newsstand, and open-air market stalls standing in for individual brand activations. Creators will move through the space on invite-only, appointment-based time slots rather than browsing a single gifting room, an approach the company is positioning as an alternative to the standard suite format.

Comfrt is the event’s title sponsor and will offer creators custom-embroidered sweatshirts. Zenni Optical will show its eyewear inside a bakery-styled setup, and Shokz will use a newsstand activation to launch the pink colorway of its OpenDots 2 earbuds. FRE Wines will pour its non-alcoholic wine, and Clean & Clear will display skincare products in a market-stand format. Miss Mouth’s and Nippies round out the confirmed brand list with a stain-treater spray and nipple covers, respectively, and The Digital Dept. named Beauty of Joseon, Playa Beauty, and OSEA Malibu among additional gifting partners.

A Recurring Fixture, Not a One-Off

BRANDEdit is not new to Fashion Week. The Digital Dept. brought the showroom to New York for the first time in September 2024, when it featured brands including Crocs, Lulus, and MaryRuth Organics and was pitched by co-CEO Sarah Boyd as a way to “raise brand awareness, create content opportunities, and drive buzz during New York Fashion Week.” That debut followed the 2023 merger of Be Social and Socialyte into The Digital Dept., which now represents more than 200 creators with a combined following of roughly 200 million and has since run BRANDEdit showrooms in Los Angeles and Miami as well as Nashville.

The Café Society edition scales up the format rather than changing its purpose. The Digital Dept. has said the showroom has run to a waitlist of more than 500 creators against roughly 150 available slots, and Boyd has described the selection process as weighted toward past participation rather than follower count, prioritizing creators who produced content from previous activations over those with the largest audiences.

The event fits a broader shift in how Fashion Week functions for brands outside fashion. Companies with no runway presence, including eyewear, audio, and beverage brands in this year’s lineup, are using the week’s creator infrastructure to reach shoppers directly rather than editors or retail buyers, a pattern that has expanded gifting suites like BRANDEdit into a fixture of the week’s calendar alongside the official show schedule.

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