Tag: Fashion

Ted Baker Taps Google Voice For An Interactive In-Store Experience

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Fashion retailer Ted Baker is teaming up with Google for a voice-activated, in-store experience that leverages Google Voice to engage with shoppers. Customers visiting Ted Baker stores can open the Google Voice app, utter the phrases printed on the store windows, and receive clues to unlock rewards. The feature is geo-fenced so only shoppers in Ted Baker stores will have access to it. Besides this interactive experience, Ted Baker also created a shoppable film which will be distributed through retail partners and department stores to play on their websites.

What Brands Need To Do
By tapping into the voice activation enabled by Google Voice, Ted Baker devised a fun way to engage with customers and reward them for visiting stores. Together with the shoppable film, this initiative is illustrative of the fashion retailer’s willingness to venture beyond traditional marketing channels and explore newer forms of marketing. At a time when consumers are growing tired of ads and increasingly turning to ad-free services and ad-blockers, brands need to experiment with new approaches such as interactive store experiences and shoppable content to effectively reach their audience.

The Lab has extensive experience in designing interactive store experiences for beauty and fashion brands to engage customers. Our recent work with NYX Cosmetics includes a digital beauty bar that incorporates social and mobile elements into a sampling experience. If you’d like to advance your strategy to reach connected shoppers, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.

 

Source: Glossy

New Google Search Ad Wants You To “Shop The Look”

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Google has started testing a new search ad format that aims to sell mobile shoppers on curated looks. Dubbed “shop the look,” the new ad format is designed to appear when users search for broad queries such as “wedding outfit” or “cocktail attire,” and present them with buyable looks sourced from a network of partners, including Curalate, LIKEtoKNOW.it, and Yahoo-owned Polyvore.

What Brands Need To Do
Earlier this summer, Google introduced a new Showcase Shopping ad format that surfaces shoppable items when users search for apparel keywords. As the search giant continues to improve its buyable ad products and making them more visually driven, retailers and fashion brands should seize the opportunity presented by these new ad products and leverage them to reach online shoppers.

 

Source: Search Engine Land

Corona Taps Gilt For A Fashion-Themed Social Campaign

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Corona launched a summer-fashion-themed social campaign with some help from fashion e-retailer Gilt Groupe. The companies worked with fashion bloggers and influencers to create “Light Look” outfits inspired by Corona products and push out the content through its website and the influencers’ Instagram accounts. Consumers can also submit their own Corona-inspired summer looks for a chance to win a $200 shopping credit provided by Gilt.

What Brands Need To Do
This campaign provides a new example of how a brand can leverage fashion, a buzzy topic on Instagram with a vibrant community of users, to explore a fun, seasonal angle to engage with fans and elevate its brand. Previously, Budweiser had partnered with fashion brands Been Trill and Supreme for two limited editions of branded apparel, and auto brands Ford and Cadillac recently inked partnerships with fashion brands and institutions to add a stylish sheen to their cars. For brands seeking to reach a wider audience on social channels, a fashion partnership may be something worth looking into.

 

Source: Glossy

 

How Ford Leverages Fashion Partnerships To Promote Fusion

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Ford is looking outside the auto industry to promote its Fusion model. The company launched the Fusion Labs workshop in June and partnered with two sustainable fashion labels, 69 Denim and RTA Crew and Collective, to sell branded fashion products and drive home the eco-friendly message of the Fusion model. 69 Denim will also donate “upcycled” denim materials to be used as insulation in the cars’ sound systems. Ford has previously worked with other fashion companies such as Rent the Runway and Vogue.

What Auto Brands Need To Do
Ford is not the only auto maker trying to catch customers’ eyes with fashion partnerships. Earlier this year, Cadillac teamed up with the Council of Fashion Designers of America for the launch of the Retail Lab initiative, aiming to elevate its brand and appeal to the upscale luxury market. Due to the fragmentation of media attention and the rise of ad blocking, it is becoming increasingly difficult for car companies to reach potential buyers via traditional ads. Therefore, auto brands should take a cue from Ford and Cadillac and consider branching out to partner with compatible brands in other industries in order to develop a unique marketing hook that captures consumer attention.

 

Source: Glossy

Why JackThreads Pivoted To Its New Business Model

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Online men’s clothing retailer JackThreads is moving away from the deep discounting it has been known for since the site launched in 2008. Instead, CEO Mark Walker says JackThreads will pivot to a “try-at-home-before-buying” model, which gives customers a week to decide whether they want to keep what they ordered before their cards are charged. All orders will come with free delivery and free returns. The company is also in talks with on-demand shipping startups Shyp and Happy Returns, hoping to integrate their services into its app so as to make the return process as friction-free as possible.

What Retailers Need To Do
JackThreads’s pivot points to the diminishing returns of the online flash-sale fad due to the unsustainability of that business model. By granting customers a generous week-long tryout period and removing all the hassles surrounding online shopping and returns, JackThreads is bringing the fitting room into the online shopping experience and encouraging its customers to shop more – at full price. This pivot provides a great example in how retailers can modernize their shopping experience to meet the demands of connected shoppers.

For more information on this topic, check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Recode

 

Amazon Debuts First Live Show With Shoppable Content

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon is set to launch its first live programming today as the ecommerce giant pushes deeper into original content development. The show, titled Style Code Live, features a trio of YouTube stars and reality TV personalities on a QVC-like set where they talk about fashion trends, give make-up advice, and, of course, plug select products. Viewers will be able to buy the corresponding products from a carousel under the video player. The half-hour show airs live every weekday at 9PM ET, which puts it in direct competition with primetime TV programs. All previous episodes will also be available for streaming for free on Amazon’s site, no Prime membership required.

What Fashion And Beauty Brands Need To Do
Amazon has yet to reveal which brands will be featured on the show, but it seems safe to assume that the company will feature items from its own private fashion labels like Scout + Ro and Franklin Tailored. Amazon reportedly stands to make as high as a 40% profit margin on apparel, but only 15% of Amazon’s customers ever buy clothing and accessories on the site. So it makes perfect sense for Amazon to launch this live show to give its apparel products a strong push. For fashion and beauty brands, this live show presents a great new opportunity to get their products in front of online viewers with a better discovery mechanism and encourage purchases right on Amazon’s site.

With viewers moving away from linear TV to OTT viewing, the proliferation of streaming content is giving brands more opportunities than ever to be discovered by new audiences. To learn more about how brands can reach viewers on OTT platforms with branded or sponsored content, check out the Appified TV section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Variety

Net-a-Porter Puts Shoppable Content In Branded Print Magazine

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Net-a-Porter’s in-house print magazine, Porter, may has relatively small circulations, but it boasts purchases through the e-retailer’s website and its affiliate brands with buyable content. On average, an issue of Porter features 500 piece of buyable items, enabled by Net-a-Porter’s mobile app. When readers flip through Porter’s pages, they can scan each page to find more information on the items presented on the page, as well as tapping on the buy buttons to order the items within the app. The London-based fashion e-retailer first launched the magazine in February 2014, and, based on a survey it conducted last year, the buyable items had been scanned 85,000 times, an interaction rate of 78%.

What Brands Need To Do
This shoppable magazine from Net-a-Porter provides a great examples in how brands can leverage their branded content to reach customers and convert those eyeballs into sales. As consumers become more and more comfortable with shopping on smartphones, with mobile commerce now making up over 30% of all U.S. ecommerce sales, it is up to retail brands to figure out new way to use buyable content on mobile to move shoppers down the sales funnel.

For more details on how retailers can better utilize customer data to connect with shoppers across channels. check out the Boundless Retail section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: Digiday

Header image courtesy of Net-a-Porter.com

How Burberry Tripled Its Base Of Mobile Shoppers

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Burberry has been embracing digital channels with a bullish strategy, and its effort is starting to pay off. The British luxury retailer retooled its online store to be more mobile-friendly and built a frictionless checkout and payment process. Those changes helped it triple its base of mobile shoppers since the site relaunched at the end of 2014, with online and mobile sales doubling their share of the company’s revenue in the past year.

Moreover, Burberry has been eagerly experimenting with new mobile platforms to reach younger consumers. It debuted its Spring/Summer 2016 collection on Snapchat, became the first brand to have a branded channel on Apple Music, and partnered with messaging app Line in Japan to court shoppers with branded stickers.

What Brands Need To Do
Burberry’s success shows the importance of building a frictionless online shopping experience and engaging today’s consumers on the popular mobile platforms with branded content. More retail brands should take some cues from Burberry and revamp their mobile strategy to cater to today’s mobile-first consumers.

 

Source: Digiday

Pinterest Launches Visual Search To Help You Find Specific Items

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Earlier today, Pinterest started to roll out an interesting new image search tool for its apps and website. The visual search allows users to zoom in on a specific item – for example, a lamp, a coffee table, or a pair of shoes – in Pinterest images and search for pins that contain that item or similar-looking ones. Users can also filter the visual search by topic to narrow down the results.

What Brands Need To Do
Hailed as a “sales conversion powerhouse,” Pinterest has been beating all other social media sites in ecommerce conversion rate, especially in categories such as fashion, home goods, and food. In order to capitalize on Pinterest’s conversion prowess, brands marketing on Pinterest would be smart to create a pinned inventory of their products, with each pin linked to the corresponding purchase page. This will make them more likely to show up in the new visual search results. Popular items can also be promoted with Pinterest’s one-click “buyable pins” to boost sales.

 

Source: Wall Street Journal

Header image is a promotional image courtesy of Pinterest Blog

InStyle Magazine To Launch A VR-Enhanced Issue

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Women’s fashion and lifestyle magazine InStyle has unveiled its first-ever VR-enhanced issue. With the help of cinematic VR content studio Jaunt, InStyle created some complementary content that readers will have access to via VR headsets. The content includes behind-the-scenes footage of covergirl Drew Barrymore’s photoshoot, a closer look at the items she wore, as well as some makeup tutorials. The magazine is also open to exploring native advertisements and sponsorship opportunities in its VR content as a new revenue source.

What Brands Need To Do
With Amazon set to become the largest clothing retailer in the U.S. by 2017, fashion brands and clothing retailers need to think outside of conventional means in order to drive store visits and revenue. Virtual reality provides a new tool to do so through immersive experiences. Though typically associated with young male gamers, virtual reality is a versatile media platform that can be applied to many industry verticals to serve diverse demographics. With VR headsets on the cusp of going mainstream, now is the time for brands to start developing VR content that reflects the interests of their audience.

 

Source: Digiday