A few short weeks ago, Door121 held its second ever media showing in Sydney’s Surry Hills district. As journalists, stylists and bloggers perused the racks at Luxe Studios – handling labels including Gorman, Funkis, Sabatini and Shona Joy – the event began as a traditional spring/summer showcase.
Only every time a media member saw a garment that would fit into an upcoming story or fashion editorial, there was no note taking or conversations about when samples would be available to shoot.
Instead, Door121’s founders Elena Antoniou and James McCullagh would simply hand them an iPad. Media would log on to their Door121 account and download high resolution flat lay images, campaign pictures or make a sample request on the spot.
This is what Door 121 is all about. The online communications firm was founded in 2010 after Antoniou and McCullagh, both seasoned PR agents, found themselves fed up with the traditional PR agency model.
“James and I have both had our own PR agencies prior to Door121 so we’re very familiar with how the whole media landscape works and how they need high-resolution images really, really quickly,” Antoniou says.
The problem was certain hiccups kept cropping up in the PR world with mind-numbing regularity. They included things like high-resolution images getting stuck in outboxes, missing media deadlines. Or journalists contacting Antoniou and McCullagh for photo credit information that had already been supplied to them at least once before. Add to that a changing media environment.
“We know that print media budgets are cut. Photographers, they’re diminishing in the media world these days. They rely on designers to provide them with those images they can print with,” Antoniou says. “It’s fast paced requests. People don’t have two day deadlines anymore. It’s always now, now, now…. Media want content on a silver platter – they actually do. High resolution, 300dpi – they demand it.”
The idea of creating one centralised online portal, a one-stop-shop interface between brands and media, seemed like a way to cut through many of these problems. And so Door121 was born. The way Door121 works is this: brands sign up to be part of the service, with a basic subscription starting at $290 a month. Brands gets their own virtual showroom where they can upload photos including lookbooks, campaign images and flat lays, media releases and information including their brand story and contact details. Media, whether it be monthly magazines, weekly bibles like Grazia or daily publishers like blogs and newspapers, register to use Door121.
Instead of chasing brands, PR agencies or marketing managers for high quality images, they can log on to Door121’s website, search for what they need, download it and have that image on their computer within two and half minutes. Alternatively, they can also use Door121’s newest feature, the brief response tool. Upon receiving a brief – that is, information on what fashion product a publication is seeking for inclusion in upcoming spreads and stories – a Door121 staffer will search the company’s image bank, find any products that are suitable and send those suggestions to the publication.
“What happens is they receive a link in their email account and they open it up and they can look at all of those images that we’ve suggested and download immediately from there,” Antoniou explains. If the publication wants a sample, the brief response tool has the capability to process that too.
“A little window pops up, they type what issue, when the deadline is, and we get a notification all these pieces have been requested. Our brands get the same thing. They can click and accept and the brand sample goes off from there,” McCullagh explains.
The tool is designed to cut out the wading through client product that PR agents usually have to do to find garments that match incoming briefs, and increase the press coverage Door121’s brands receive because of the capacity to suggest multiple products with speed and ease.
“To get that [editorial] placement can sometimes take one to three weeks,” Antoniou says of traditional PR firms. “With Door121, we say we’ve got a deadline of two hours and we have
to turn it around within two hours.”
Companies on all sides of the exchange can keep track of what images are going where by the logs that measure such things as how many times an image is viewed and when it was downloaded. That’s not to say there is no overlap at all in what traditional PR agencies and Door121 offer clients. What McCullagh and Antoniou emphasise about Door121 however is its specialisation in content exchange and its unique transparency.
“Brands can see a running tally of the brief requests, and also the amount of time we have used the response tool and suggested them out to media. Also the amount of downloads received, which then clicks on to who has downloaded what. Then the fourth part is what sample requests have come through,” McCullagh says.
Antoniou explains traditional PR agencies don’t offer the same detailed reporting.
“I used to do it all the time, I know what the reports look like,” she adds. “It’s all about the end result. So, ‘we got you a quarter page in Famous and they’ve got circulation numbers of this, readership of this and it’s valued at $6,000’ or whatever. They wouldn’t be talking about how many briefs they’ve got in or how many times they’ve pushed their clients over to media. They wouldn’t get anything like that. I think it all comes down to ‘is it value for money?’ That’s what people want these days.”
The success of Door121’s online technology can perhaps be made most plain by the fact that PR agencies themselves are using the service.
“We work with [agencies] CavCon, Tailormaid, Agent25, Bespoke,” Antoniou reveals. “We seem to harness a wider scope of media briefs than they achieve and we also seem to be able to help them with the product placement side of things. So they in effect give that to us and then they concentrate on the other side of comprehensive PR. We’re certainly not a comprehensive PR agency.”
Antoniou and McCullagh believe one of the reasons their niche service works so well is because of the type of content fashion publications like Grazia, Shop Til You Drop and newspaper weekend supplements currently run. Unlike extravagant editorial shoots of yesteryear, today flat lay spreads are king.
“We’ve actually done some independent research on that,” Antoniou says. “We’ve taken six magazines and we’ve gone through a couple of issues, say three issues, and we’ve counted how many editorial garments they’ve used in an editorial shoot, campaign shots they’ve just got from the lookbook, or in flat lays. You’d be surprised to see the percentages [of flat lay].”
Another trend the pair have observed is media demand for garments specifically under $100 and $200. In June, Door121 enriched its search options.
“They can search now under season and price point as well,” Antoniou says.
The boom in online shopping is paying off for online portals like Door121 as well. While originally conceived as a business to business service, the site now has a consumer side to it where web browsers can see member brands’ lookbooks from the current season as well as video, news and contact details. Antoniou and McCullagh plan to capitalise on this traffic.
“One of the new features we’ll have is a bit of a ‘buy it now’ section,” Antoniou says. “What that means is we don’t have a store per se but it will link you to the store of that particular brand.”
The pair have also found themselves acting as brand advisors after seeing the statistics on what kinds of images publications download versus those they won’t touch with a 10-foot pole.
“It’s not really part of Door121, our service, but it’s just something that we do because a lot of brands don’t have any idea sometimes. They might be super creative but they get the wrong model, the wrong photographer, they format the lookbook terribly.”
It’s a part of the market they’re catering for via their growing online fashion directory. Photographers, stylists, hair stylists, make-up artists – all can include themselves in the directory.
“It’s sort of like a pared down version of the online brand showroom … a small body of their work, a collection of images, their contact details,” McCullagh says.
The building of all of these features appears to be paying off for Antoniou and McCullagh, with over 70 brands signed up to Door121. After hiring some additional staff and seeing changes to their website go live, the pair are now lifting the hold they had on taking on new clients.
In fact, this time next year the company wants to be servicing international brands and media, particularly those in New Zealand, as well as have launched a similar service for the lifestyle industry.
“Our outlook is quite ambitious but we believe that we’ve got a product that will suit every brand in Australia,” Antoniou says.
“We really want to aggressively have every single brand in Australia, that’s our goal. It might not happen in 12 months, it might in five years, but that’s where our headspace is at.”