Whether it’s an explosion of negative press or the tripling of sales, a batch of independent online writers and YouTubers from across the country are having a big affect on many apparel businesses. Success story Shoes of Prey, a website where women can design their own fancy footwear, is one of many home-grown businesses that reaped the benefits from linking up with a blogger.
Australian shoe designer and co-founder Jodie Fox says despite tracking to target, the brand needed something to boost it to its next target. After looking online Fox spotted YouTube blogger Michelle Phan and instantly liked her style.
“We’d been researching YouTubers to work with based on fit with our brand, subscriber numbers, engagement and a few other measures,” Fox begins. “Once on Michelle’s channel I watched a few videos and became almost instantly addicted. She is really engaging and her make-up tutorials are so well thought out. First and foremost I wanted to approach her because I loved her style and secondly, all of the metrics that I would use to decide whether to approach were satisfied - so I emailed her agent.”
Phan put together a video on the process of designing a pair of shoes with Shoes of Prey and ran a competition to win a pair. After the video the company’s sales tripled and the 5,000 Facebook fans quickly became 10,000. This has continued to grow at an accelerated rate and is now at 25,000. There was an increase from 800-8,500 YouTube subscribers and a spike in web traffic well into the hundreds of thousands on the first day it was published.
“We were prepared for this kind of traffic increase from a technology point of view and we had social media buttons in place to either capture the traffic or assist to spread the campaign further,” says Fox. “It was incredibly exciting to watch the metrics lift so quickly, but one thing we could have done better was increase resource to our customer service team, to make this a little less lean in such a busy time.”
Fox says she would ‘absolutely’ recommend new businesses work with bloggers, and herself has collaborated with two more . Since the business was licensed in 2009 it has grown to a team of 17 people with five offices globally including China, Russia, Japan, Holland and Australia.
“I think that fashion bloggers like Michelle are incredibly smart businesswomen. They are the ultimate ‘recommendation from a friend’ and that kind of endorsement, so long as it’s authentic, works.”
On the subject of the possibility of receiving bad feedback from a blogger Fox admits it would be very tricky to handle, but not impossible.
“I’d apply the same ethos that I do with negative press in any other channel - respond relevantly, valuably, honestly and quickly - but never ever in anger,” she says. “Besides, you’ve asked for an opinion and you might get a great insight into improving your offer.”
Another Australian brand that has seen sales rocket thanks to blogging is Melbourne-based pop-up shoe store and online retailer Habbot. Shoe designer Annie Abbott, whose career started in the buying office of the famous net-a-porter.com, followed by a business strategy role for Sass & Bide, has had huge success with her fledgling footwear label - particularly after it was mentioned by Lucy Feagins from The Design Files blog and award winning blogger Karen Cheng.
Abbott prepares the design sketches and specification details for her footwear from her St Kilda studio. All pattern making, sampling and final production then occurs in the one small factory outside of Naples, Italy, and all components and materials are sourced from suppliers local to Naples.
“Many of our first season winter styles had enjoyed editorial magazine features, which was great for building brand awareness, but we found it wasn’t really translating into significant wholesale or online sales,” Abbott explains. “So we decided to test out a digital marketing approach by ramping up our social media profile and seeking out potential bloggers to help spread the word.”
With the launch of the pop-up shop, Abbott, who says she had dreamt of featuring on The Design Files, thought this would be the ideal time to approach Feagins. In a bid to keep up with various cyber strategies Abbott enlisted the help of Piper Digital Marketing agency, which then recommended Cheng.
“On back-reading months of Karen’s posts it was obvious hers was a blog I wanted Habbot to be involved with as although she has a large following, the blog is still written on a very personal level which I much prefer to more newsletter style blogs - which might come across as advertorials and therefore lack credibility with readers,” Abbott explains.
While The Design Files focused on the pop-up shop using in-store photos to illustrate her comments, Cheng talked about the collection and which shoes she particularly liked and how she would incorporate them into her wardrobe. After Cheng’s blog traffic to the Habbot website increased by 642 per cent that same day and within a week of the post ‘Habbot studios’ Facebook fans increased five-fold. Online dollar sales had risen by 385 per cent and the first batch of international orders from Hong Kong and Singapore started to flow in.
Two months on Abbott says they are still getting customers placing online orders who reference Cheng’s blog. On the day of The Design Files post, Habbot’s website traffic increased by 16 times the daily average number of visits. Pop-up sales over the weekend following the Thursday post increased by 762 per cent and online sales by a whopping 1,454 per cent. E-newsletter subscriptions also doubled within the first three day period.
“This positive reaction to the blogs came with much excitement and a sense of relief as we now feel there is ‘real’ demand for the product,” Abbott says. “Up until now the distribution through a select bunch of Victorian boutiques had really limited our ability to get a true indication of consumer sentiment towards the label, price point and styling. Our decision to push the brand via digital marketing channels such as these, and of course opening the pop-up store, was really important in terms of whether or not to take the brand to the next level.”
Abbott says she has also shared these statistics with stockists and uses social media tagging/references on both bloggers to ensure they, in return, benefit from the brand building exercise. Abbott will continue to run the business on the same low-overhead model, to allow her to continue to test new strategies and tackle international markets through shoe fairs and partnerships with international bloggers.
It’s not just new brands that are hooking up with bloggers, with luxury goods giant Oroton enlisting fashion blogger Tommy Ton to shoot its spring/summer 2011/12 campaign. Womenswear fashion brand Minkpink is currently working with fashion lovers Annie-Rose Callanan and Celine Kreis. The duo, who feature their own outfit posts, mixed with candid party snaps and general inspiration from editorials and runways, created the Anniieemal blog. Minkpink, which is asking customers to email in their best pouts to be in with a chance of winning $500 worth of clothes, used both bloggers in its promotional photoshoot in the hope this will give the campaign an added boost.
“Blogging is a lot more fast paced than, say, the magazine industry,” Callanan explains. “It is an immediate thing - you don’t need to wait for new issues to come out to have your designs seen. If a designer sends a blogger a look book, or a campaign, it can potentially be up on the internet within hours, therefore reaching an audience quicker.”
Callanan says they often get requests from designers or companies to feature particular products, but they will only ever post about things that reflect their personal style. Anniieemal’s web hits vary, depending on how often they post, but at the moment they get roughly 6,000 hits a day. The duo believe that it is such a hit as it’s a fun blog and they do not take themselves too seriously.
“It makes us feel quite proud to be a part of such an influential industry”, Callanan says. “We know for certain that if we had a brand we would be reaching out to various blogs for their support and if I had a penny for every item of clothing I’ve bought after seeing it worn by another blogger, I would be a very rich woman. Seeing an item in a magazine, or in a campaign is very different to seeing it worn in an everyday situation by a person similar to yourself.”
As well as retailers, many PR and marketing agencies are beginning to seek alliances with the ‘right bloggers’ and more and more product or brand launch events are being held specifically for bloggers. Melbourne-based freelance PR agent, Lucy Cormack, who works with businesses in the apparel industry, says strategy focused on online activity is just as important as all press related PR functions.
“One of the great things about blogs is you can get links back to your site making it easy for the audience to click straight through, as opposed to print press where they have to go to a computer to type in a website or make a phone call to get more information,” Cormack begins. “Information can be passed on to consumers much faster through blogging than through traditional media and the relationship between PR and blogger is more balanced. With the brands I represent we are certainly working towards more online activity through blog sites and social networking as our target markets are spending more and more time online.”
Christopher McLaren works for A Series of Fortunate Events company, which promotes a project injecting contemporary fashion to laneways and quirky nooks around Sydney, known as the Bizarre Bazaar. He says they are in touch with many bloggers, but do not make direct contact with any in regards to obtaining event editorial. He says bloggers are a useful tool in tapping into certain audiences and the company is interested in partnering with more fashion bloggers in order to increase its media reach. Not all brands are that focused on hunting out external bloggers.
Chief executive officer of Australian fashion and footwear enterprise chain Wittners, Michael Wittner, says while the company does use guest bloggers on its site, most of the content is created internally.
“We see blogs as only part of the online social media puzzle and we will continue to experiment with them together with new and different innovations online.”