Fashion finds new ways to connect
Labels are hosting online drawing classes and studio tours to connect with customers in isolation
With cities dormant under the shroud of a pandemic, fashion brands have found many of their traditional marketing tactics either impossible to execute or ill suited to a global crisis. Suddenly, there are no shops open in which to hold events, few commuters to take in ads on public transit, and no summer festivals around which to merchandise collections. In response, labels of all sizes are experimenting with initiatives to capture the attention of screen-glued audiences now largely confined to their homes.
For many, this has meant quickly rolling out new types of content via Instagram — fashion’s favourite app — and the channel with the lowest barrier to entry. At the end of March, Loewe, the LVMH brand led by Jonathan Anderson, debuted a series of digital events called Loewe En Casa. In the series, artisans who have been nominated for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize offer tours of their studios, demonstrate their respective practices via instructional workshops, and participate in live interviews. Elsewhere on Instagram, brands such as Nanushka are offering respite from work-from-home torpor in the form of guided meditations and yoga classes, while Marc Jacobs has tapped illustrators to lead a series of guided drawing sessions called Drawn Together. The idea with each of these initiatives is to create points of contact between the brand and the audience — to stay on the consumer’s mind even when shopping is not.
Labels helmed by big, outspoken personalities are at a natural advantage in this new landscape. Social media may have been hijacked long ago by advertising, but it was created to facilitate connections between individuals, and still works best — and feels most natural — when used in this fashion.
Jacquemus, the decade-old French label known for statement accessories such as its miniature Chiquito bag, has seen tremendous growth over the past year. It now boasts 2m Instagram followers, up from about 750,000 at the end of 2018, thanks in large part to the charming persona of its founder, Simon Porte Jacquemus.
Jacquemus typically uses the brand’s Instagram as though it is his personal account, mixing runway and lookbook shots with photos and captions that are funny, insouciant and seemingly unmediated by a PR team. Last week, he prompted followers to mimic one of his posts — a photo of someone standing on tiptoes, heels hovering above oranges like a pair of his stilettos — and share it using the #jacquemusathome hashtag.
With cities dormant under the shroud of a pandemic, fashion brands have found many of their traditional marketing tactics either impossible to execute or ill suited to a global crisis. Suddenly, there are no shops open in which to hold events, few commuters to take in ads on public transit, and no summer festivals around which to merchandise collections. In response, labels of all sizes are experimenting with initiatives to capture the attention of screen-glued audiences now largely confined to their homes.
For many, this has meant quickly rolling out new types of content via Instagram — fashion’s favourite app — and the channel with the lowest barrier to entry. At the end of March, Loewe, the LVMH brand led by Jonathan Anderson, debuted a series of digital events called Loewe En Casa. In the series, artisans who have been nominated for the Loewe Foundation Craft Prize offer tours of their studios, demonstrate their respective practices via instructional workshops, and participate in live interviews. Elsewhere on Instagram, brands such as Nanushka are offering respite from work-from-home torpor in the form of guided meditations and yoga classes, while Marc Jacobs has tapped illustrators to lead a series of guided drawing sessions called Drawn Together. The idea with each of these initiatives is to create points of contact between the brand and the audience — to stay on the consumer’s mind even when shopping is not.
Labels helmed by big, outspoken personalities are at a natural advantage in this new landscape. Social media may have been hijacked long ago by advertising, but it was created to facilitate connections between individuals, and still works best — and feels most natural — when used in this fashion.
Jacquemus, the decade-old French label known for statement accessories such as its miniature Chiquito bag, has seen tremendous growth over the past year. It now boasts 2m Instagram followers, up from about 750,000 at the end of 2018, thanks in large part to the charming persona of its founder, Simon Porte Jacquemus.
Jacquemus typically uses the brand’s Instagram as though it is his personal account, mixing runway and lookbook shots with photos and captions that are funny, insouciant and seemingly unmediated by a PR team. Last week, he prompted followers to mimic one of his posts — a photo of someone standing on tiptoes, heels hovering above oranges like a pair of his stilettos — and share it using the #jacquemusathome hashtag.
Summersalt, an American travel-wear brand built on swimwear and comfy basics, is using a less conventional content channel to engage its followers: SMS. In mid-March, it launched a tool called Joycast, aimed at delivering notes of emotional support and pleasant distraction to subscribers’ text-message inboxes, ranging from meditation videos to cute animal photos.
Although Summersalt has used SMS as part of its communications strategy for several years — co-founder and chief executive Lori Coulter favours the channel for its direct-to-consumer intimacy — Joycast represents a turn towards non-commercial content.
“When we started Summersalt, one of our goals was to spread joy by inspiring wanderlust,” says Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin, the brand’s other co-founder and chief digital brand officer. “With all the uncertainty in the world right now, we wanted to continue to find ways to spread joy, just differently.”
Chamberlin says that Summersalt took Joycast from idea to execution in just two days, and within hours of launching on March 17 had picked up hundreds of subscribers. Managed by Summersalt’s 13-person customer care team, the service has continued to gain momentum.
“We’ve had thousands of people opt in to the Joycast,” Chamberlin says, “both existing customers and people who’ve never heard of our brand before.”
Each of these social-first ventures is a product of speed and thrift. None of them are especially resource-intensive, and all were executed in a matter of weeks, if not days. They are, in this sense, the polar opposite of the industry’s traditional marketing vehicle — the fashion show. With men’s fashion events in June and July’s haute couture week already cancelled, brands are facing a major creative challenge — and an opportunity.
Questioning the necessity of costly, high-production shows has become, over the past half-decade, as common an industry trope as Meryl Streep’s cerulean speech from The Devil Wears Prada, and now brands have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to upend the system and devise different methods of introducing consumers to their new collections.
It might be months before physical distancing protocols are relaxed in Europe and North America; and even when cities emerge from stasis, brands will be operating under a new commercial paradigm. “What the ‘new normal’ looks like after this crisis is not clear yet, but we do expect enduring changes in consumer behaviour — with consumers being even more health- and environmentally aware, and digital becoming even more paramount and consumer pathways migrating even faster from offline towards online,” says Sarah Willersdorf, head of luxury at Boston Consulting Group.
“Companies who have produced real time, rough-and-ready content to keep their customers engaged throughout this crisis have seen early successes, and I believe this increased focus on connection and community will remain as stores start to reopen.”
Eventually, the situation will stabilise, and consumers will return to shopping. When they are ready to open their wallets again, the brands that were able to forge genuine connections with them at the pandemic’s nadir will stand to benefit most.