The Fashion Industry Revolution – Styled By Community

Thursday, February 10th, 2011

We’re in the midst of a fashion revolution, but the people leading the charge aren’t in the pages of Vogue. Instead, they’re behind computers at tech start-ups in the Bay Area and around the world.

The music industry knows all too well what this type of revolution looks and feels like, both on the charts and on the bottom line. Fashionistas, have you been taking notes from the past ten years? If you have been, you’ll know it’s about time to take your nose out of the magazine and point it squarely at your iPad. It’s time to embrace the world of online fashion.

On Monday, I went to Seesmic’s office in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco to attend Social Media Week’s Shopping with Friends: How Technologies are Reinventing the Fashion Industry. Susan Etlinger of the Altimeter Group moderated and Jennifer Yuille of Polyvore, Julia Kung of Moxsie, and Natasha Khan Kazi of ModCloth participated.

Let me tell you, nobody in the elevator going up to session would be considered to be decked out in the traditional fabulous fashion sense. Actually most of the folks in the elevator were your typical schleppy geeks, donning laptops, logo tees, sneakers and a backpack.  Yet, these are the trend-setters making the fashion revolution happen.

One theme I heard over and over—which I agree with completely—is that listening to your community is key, and is becoming more and more important for fashion companies.

Other Takeaways:

1) Responding to your community is key to building a following. It’s essential your brand has personality and is about more than just your product:

Moxsie,  an online retailer of independent designers, started with six Twitter followers and today has over 132,000 followers. How did they do it? By listening and responding to their followers. They tweet not only about fashion but also about anything they and their followers are interested in including music, movies and celebrities. Julia Kung said, “Based upon branding alone, big brands can get a lot of followers and don’t think they need to do much.” She pointed to a brand like Louis Vuitton, which tells an incredible story in their traditional advertising but hasn’t brought that story to life in their Twitter stream. Many of their tweets are links to press releases and she isn’t sure why they haven’t expanded this perspective to their social media presence.

2) Give your community input into and let them have an impact on your products. This feeling of ownership is powerful:

Moxsie and Polyvore allow their community to have incredible input and creativity in very different ways. Moxsie has a buyer chat program on Twitter that invites aspiring fashion professionals to give their buyers feedback on what products they should buy. In return they earn recognition and gift cards. Some shoe designers have gotten hip to this. This is so helpful that one brand went to Moxsie’s customers and asked them what colors they should make their shoes in before they go to this year’s Magic fashion retailers convention in Vegas.

Polyvore, which allows anyone to make their own fashion collages aka “sets,” enables their members to show off their fashion stylist skills and become a tastemaker no matter where they live. Today, over 30,000 amazing fashion sets are being created a day. Fashion brands are recognizing the power of Polyvore, and fashion designers like Rebecca Minkoff are working with the community. In fact, a Polyvore user will be styling Rebecca’s runway show at fashion week.

This was a fantastic panel and very exciting for me personally to see these parts of the fashion world embracing social media in this way. The question is if the traditional fashion industry will be able to keep up with the trends or not.