This week, a look at how new strategies like social commerce and emerging platforms like Discord are shaking up fashion marketing. Scroll down to use Glossy+ Comments, giving the Glossy+ community the opportunity to join discussions around industry topics.
You didn’t have to be in Paris this past month to experience Louis Vuitton’s Paris Fashion Week show. In late September, the storied French brand announced the launch of its Discord server where the women’s spring 2024 collection was livestreamed.
Other brands made their shows and PFW activations available on emerging platforms like Roblox and Decentraland, and partnered with new social commerce platforms like Emcee. As customer acquisition costs on traditional platforms like Instagram have skyrocketed, these new social platforms are providing alternative ways for brands to make the most of their fashion shows.
Emcee, a social commerce platform founded in 2021 by John Aghayan, had a presence at Paris Fashion Week thanks to a partnership with French womenswear brand Miaou. Emcee sponsored Miaou’s PFW show and brought in some of its biggest influencer partners to both attend the show in the front row and walk on Miaou’s runway. Among them were Jourdan Sloane (600,000 Instagram folllowers) and Roxette Arisa (300,000 followers).
Each of Emcee’s partner influencers — it has over 1,000 working with 200 brands — has a dedicated page and storefront on Emcee’s website where they can work directly with brands to sell goods. The Miaou show operated on a see-now, buy-now model, so the moment the show was over, those influencers could post the looks to their various social media platforms and make them available for sale through Emcee.
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Emcee founder and CEO John Aghayan said this model is a solution to both the rising customer acquisition costs on traditional platforms and the deficiencies of other social commerce platforms like TikTok Shop. Emcee takes a 10% commission on each sale on its platform. Emcee’s 1,000 influencers have a total reach of over 100 million.
“There is no risk for the brands here,” Aghayan said. “They get content, they get awareness and they get sales through our influencer network. It resonates in a way that I believe TikTok Shop will not. TikTok is focusing on the lower price point, and it’s all about discounts. That could work for some brands, but not for luxury brands.”
Prior to working with Miaou, Emcee had teamed with Luar on a branded party in Brooklyn in August. Previously, it worked with brands including Collina Strada, Kim Shui and Dion Lee. Social commerce is catching on in the U.S., with the local market size expected to reach $629 million this year.
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Miaou founder and designer Alexia Elkaim said that, as customer acquisition costs have increased, brand marketing efforts like working with Emcee are more appealing than paid ads.
“We are focusing primarily on brand marketing, as opposed to product marketing,” Elkaim said. “In a saturated market, we choose to invest in the story of the brand through video and lifestyle marketing.”
Elsewhere at Paris Fashion Week, Louis Vuitton hosted a livestream of its show on Discord, while L’Oréal streamed its showcase on Roblox. Both were first-time debuts on these platforms for the brands, and both platforms are increasingly courting fashion brands.
Roblox, in particular, has recently put its fashion partnerships into overdrive with over 200 brand activations in the last two years alone, including partnerships with Gucci, Tommy Hilfiger and Maybelline. According to a representative from Roblox, the company had an average of 2.3 million cumulative visits to branded experiences and 2 million daily active users engaging with branded experiences, for an average of 11.7 minutes, in June of 2023.
Meanwhile, Louis Vuitton is the latest fashion brand to get into Discord, joining its luxury competitors like Gucci and Prada who both created Discord servers in the last year. The server is tied to both Louis Vuitton’s runway shows as well as its digital collectibles division, Via. A channel in the server is dedicated to the Via NFT project that Louis Vuitton unveiled in June. A statement from Louis Vuitton on the launch of the server said it was meant to “forge an increasingly strong connection between Louis Vuitton and its online communities, while also offering privileged visibility to the latest creations and behind-the-scenes insights.”
David Klingbeil, an NYU professor of luxury marketing and founder of the luxury insights company Submarine.ai, noted that Louis Vuitton is investing in web3 and NFT-related projects like the new Discord server just as many other brands are pulling away from it.
“In 2021, a lot of marketers thought web3 would revolutionize everything immediately, but now their minds have changed,” Klingbeil said. “If you visit many of the web3 or metaverse platforms that were launched back then, you’ll feel a bit lonely. There’s a saying, ‘Bear markets are for building.’ Vuitton could be using the lull in web3 to build up the infrastructure they’ll need for the future.”
Louis Vuitton isn’t the only luxury brand still investing in web3. Dolce & Gabbana was active in Decentraland for Metaverse Fashion Week earlier this year, for example. Ian Rogers, the former LVMH and Apple executive who now runs the crypto wallet company Ledger, echoed the idea that luxury is playing the long game on web3 by building things up slowly.
“Louis Vuitton has always had a long vision on web3,” Rogers said. “They’ve had the tech for five years now and didn’t put out a consumer-facing product until this year [with the Via Trunk NFT]. They’re taking a long-term approach and not getting distracted by shiny objects.”
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