Pre-social media, the biggest benefit of building online stores for large brands like Nine West, Burberry or La Perla has been the ability to listen to customers.
The direct link on the home page, whether it’s info@, assistance@ or customerservice@, has opened an easy-to-use communications tool between brand and customer that had not existed prior to the old school suggestion box.
When launching NineWest.com in 1998, we immediately started getting emails from customers when we moved sandals off the site in September. They were being moved off the selling floor in the Northeastern United States, so why not on the website, which was being managed out of New York?
Well, we had customers from Texas, California and Florida who had their eyes on sandals on the site, and when we moved the inventory to make room for boots, those customers were very vocal. That was my first lesson in online merchandising- you need to keep in mind customers from varying locales.
While working at Burberry in 2004, one day we had increased traffic to a trench coat on Burberry.com from a Sony URL. It turns out a rap artist under the label blogged about buying the coat for his girlfriend with a direct link to the product page. Not only did he drive traffic to the page, but we also sold out of the coat. Lesson here is never underestimate the power of influence.
While managing the e-commerce of LaPerla.com, another lesson learned was to pay attention to cultural influences. In 2009, while reviewing daily analytics and seeing a spike in traffic but flat conversions, when I checked the most popular key words and site referrers on Google Analytics, I noticed traffic and words related to “james bond” or “james bond swimsuit.”
It turns out that three years after the theatrical release of “Casino Royale,” Turner was celebrating James Bond week and was running the trailer of Daniel Craig coming out of the water, wearing his La Perla swim trunks and looking like a demigod. Unfortunately, we couldn’t convert the traffic since we had sold out of the trunks three years prior, and it had also been discontinued. Our team managed to order 20 remaining swim trunks from Bologna in a different style, received the product five weeks later and put them live on the site, where they promptly sold out. It is still unknown to me how many of those swim trunks we could have sold. Lesson learned- you cannot predict demand and supply. Or can you?
StyleTrek is my vision for where e-commerce is headed: very social and where the influence of many and the few matter. I wanted to utilize the power of viral marketing and social media to promote unknown designers and help them sell their products online, to provide a way for designers to get input from their customers and for customers to be involved in supporting designers, either through posting encouraging and uplifting comments or participating in the creative process. I wanted to apply all my lessons learned to support emerging designers and create a forum where style experts and novices alike can have a say in which designers we feature and what products we sell on StyleTrek.
Engagement with customers is often unpredictable. For established brands that have invested 50-plus years building a customer base on carefully articulated messaging sometimes based on artful illusion, social media can be intimidating. For emerging designers, social media is an opportunity to be heard, promoted and compared along with more established brands. At StyleTrek we do not fear engagement, we relish in it.
Within a short timeframe, we were able to find 25 talented designers from five continents through crowd sourcing. As StyleTrek continues to evolve, we look forward to mining data so we may determine not only which designers our customers want the most, but also which trends are passing or here to stay, which colors, patterns, skirt lengths are most desirable. The evolution of e-commerce has come a long way, and StyleTrek plans to be a large part of this movement.--CP
Editor’s Note: StyleTrek CEO Cecilia Pagkalinawan will be a featured speaker at “MESA Presents: Social Commerce” on Tuesday, March 15 in NYC.
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