Jed Wexler. Eight-Eighteen Strategies.
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twitter.com/JedWexler
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FMG: 30,000 Members. As of Today. Thanks.
We’re happy to say that our ‘other’ project, The Fashion Marketing Group (FMG) - a community of professionals in Fashion + Digital, has now reached 30,000 members!
Many thanks to the FMG Community! We look forward to your continued contributions, discussions, and creative insight. We still have a long way to go, but thanks to you it seems like we’re off to a pretty good start.
You can find FMG on: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin.
Thanks.
Jed
CCO (“Chief Content Officer”)
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“To the Fashion World, Technology is Suddenly Very Cool.”
One of our favorite quotes from the NY Times recently;
“The intersection between Fashion and Technology is generating increased interest and investors are hurrying to keep up.”
Our thoughts exactly.
JW.
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Content, Community, & Commerce: An NYU talk on the New Content Revolution
On November 28th I was thrilled to give a talk on Content, Community, & Commerce at NYU – great experience, and incredibly engaging students. As is always the case, I think I learned a lot more from them than they did from me.
Some key takeaways (with a Fashion/Tech slant of course);
- · Every brand (and everyone) is a content provider (or needs to be).
- · Create a valuable, curated editorial environment and enforce the highest possible editorial standards that you can, regardless of medium (video, blog, art, etc).
- · Engage, don’t sell.
- · Build a powerful niche community around your content.
By approaching content and community the right way, brands can (and will) eventually break through the deluge of information, content, and data we are all buried in every day.
Feel free to contact me directly or via Twitter @JedWexler for a complete copy of the class presentation. It includes tactics, approach, and lots of recommended reading. I look forward to sharing it and hearing your thoughts.
And, if you read nothing else, check out one of my favorite posts on the topic written by Shane Snow, co-founder of Contently.com. A must read.
How 3 Companies Took Content Marketing to the Next Level
http://mashable.com/2011/05/01/content-marketing-tips
Special thanks again to Professor John Ovrutsky, former SVP HBO for the opportunity to have a session with his class. We had a blast!
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Fast Company: Styleowner.com - A New Take on Fashion-Meets-Social Commerce
By Lydia Dishman @LydiaBreakfast for Fast Company
Anna Wintour’s influence over the fashion universe is a snip less formidable today. StyleOwner, an e-commerce site that heavily features social selling, just launched in open beta.
Like Google’s Boutiques.com, StyleOwner gives bloggers, fashionistas and Rachel Zoe-wannabes the ability to create their own virtual storefront (for free) and stock it with items from over 2,000 brands carried by retail partners such as Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue. As incentive to the seller to leverage their social network, anything purchased in their virtual marketplace earns them a 10 percent commission.
Only 10 percent of the $275 billion of apparel and accessories sold in 2010 were purchased online, according to Sucharita Mulpuru at Forrester Research. However, StyleOwner’s founder and CEO Joel Weingarten tells Fast Company that e-commerce is growing by about 20+ percent annually. “We are helping accelerate that growth,” says Weingarten, by creating a personalized, social and collaborative shopping experience.
Personal curation may just be one of the most over-used term in fashion industry parlance, but one of StyleOwner’s investors, Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, still sees it as a huge selling point in the evolution of retail. Specifically, Green says, “StyleOwner leverages this trend by empowering a whole new constituency to act as a sales force for both retailers and brands. A salesperson’s effectiveness is vastly enhanced as credibility is established and access to consumers is increased, these two powerful components are at the heart of peer-to-peer selling and the crux of the StyleOwner model.”
To establish its fashion cred right from the start, StyleOwner has partnered with such fashion heavyweights as Style.com and more than 30 well-known fashion bloggers including Leandra Medine of Man Repeller, Karen Blanchard of Where Did U Get That, and Keiko Groves who blogs at Keiko Lynn. Weingarten says these early storefronts will draw on the bloggers’ legions of loyal fans who already click to buy the bloggers’ featured looks via affiliate programs.
This is where StyleOwner’s secret sauce, ie: its backend architecture comes in. Weingarten maintains that affiliate programs always take the customer away from the site. “Affiliate programs are cumbersome and unrealistic, [they are] an anathema for a media platform,” that strives to keep the user on its site he says. At StyleOwner, the customer stays within the same shop and checks out once, even if they are buying multiple brands from a variety of retailers.
But Weingarten emphasizes that StyleOwner isn’t just relying on established tastemakers to sell apparel and accessories. By letting average fashionistas become advocates, “They can live their dream of fashion and become full-fledged entrepreneurs,” he says.
Weingarten says that in addition to creating a built-in revenue model for StyleOwner (unlike some other startup social networks), it creates a way for users to “monetize their sphere of influence.”
Andy Dunn, CEO and founder of Bonobos, an e-commerce retailer of men’s apparel (and original menswear brand) says that’s why he invested in StyleOwner. “It puts power in the hands of tastemakers and individuals and gives brands an authentic audience in the process. Bloggers and individuals add a lot to brands already but rarely get compensated for it in transparent and authentic ways.”
Jed Wexler, managing director of Eight-Eighteen Strategies agency and founder of the Fashion Marketing Group, notes that fashion platforms such as Polyvore and Fashism put revenue second, after fun, games and inspiration. “Social commerce or anything successfully social is supposed to revolve around authentic sharing and engagement —things we truly like and want to share with our social graph. If we know our friends are getting paid for their recommendations, our trust may go way down over time.”
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Forbes: The Genius of Target’s Missoni Madness
Two full hours before Target threw open doors across the country to offer rabid fashionistas a lower priced collection of haute Italian label Missoni, the Minneapolis-based discount chain allowed shoppers to buy the limited edition goods online. Frenetic (yet mostly friendly) shopping ensued. Before noon, shelves and racks were sadly empty and Target.com was down. For any other retailer, running out of stock and having its e-commerce site crash should signal an epic fail. Not so for Target.
Jed Wexler, managing director of Eight-Eighteen Strategies, a fashion consulting agency based in NYC, told me:
Target unintentionally (or was it intentionally?) accomplished the “digital velvet rope” thing – a huge run on a product with limited access and supply, which inevitably generates buzz. It actually really worked in their favor. On the one hand they hate the fact that their site crashed for so long, but on the other hand, giddy that everyone is talking about it and that demand was so high that it produced a crash. After all, the collection did sell out. Amazingly, this ‘underestimation’ allowed Target to come out ahead here from a PR, marketing, and sales.
Wexler cautions other brands not to try this at home. “Target was able to accomplish exclusivity on a mass scale – very difficult to do. I think this episode will only benefit Target.”
