This story is part of Glossy’s series breaking down the big conversations at Shoptalk.
Early this month, Free People managed to do the seemingly impossible in 2024: It achieved virality via a still image posted on Instagram.
Despite many brands exclusively focusing on short-form video for video-focused platforms including TikTok and YouTube Shorts, Free People has continued to test, learn and diversify its content, including what’s featured and on what platforms. And it’s working to the company’s advantage.
Aside from maintaining a strong social presence, with 4.4 million followers on Instagram and more than 250,000 on TikTok, Free People has been a star revenue driver among parent company URBN’s brand portfolio. During its fiscal year ending on January 31, URBN saw record sales of $5.15 billion, marking a 7.5% year-over-year increase. Of those sales, Free People drove $1.3 billion.
“In terms of our marketing budget, we don’t have all of our eggs in one basket,” Libby Strachan, Free People’s director of brand marketing, told Glossy at this week’s Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas. “And we see higher engagement when we’re not just repurposing content for the different platforms; we’re making original content specifically for the platform it’s living on.”
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Free People has an organic social and influencer team of eight, which also partners with relevant third parties including influencer agency Influential.
“We live in an unparalleled era of innovation,” said Kristen Dolan, svp of growth at Influential, the largest influencer marketing agency, based on revenue. “For brands, the world is your oyster. If you have a certain KPI, influencers can help you find it.”
Below, Strachan breaks down Free People’s marketing rules of thumb that have worked to its advantage.
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Don’t take yourself too seriously.
“We just very randomly had a still carousel post go viral on Instagram — it was a roundup of micro shorts that attracted a lot of comments. It was the latest reminder that you have to be able to laugh at yourself on social media; you have to be able to take a joke. … When the post first went live and the comments started rolling in, we got an internal email from someone asking if we were going to delete it. If it had been a post where it was a creator image and people were saying something disparaging and it was hurting someone’s feelings, we would remove it. But in this situation, we were like, ‘No, there’s no harm here. People are just having a laugh. They’re enjoying it.’ There were over 600,000 shares of that post and about 50,000 comments. Gayle King was talking about it and reading the comments on ‘CBS Mornings.’ When a post goes viral like that, it helps the rest of our feed. We sent an email last week nodding to the post. It said, ‘Just call us micro influencers,’ followed by, ‘Short shorts, big impact.’”
According to Strachan, in the two weeks following the post, Free People’s shorts category saw 33% increase in demand and several colors of the micro shorts sold out. In addition, there was a 700% increase in social conversations involving Free People and the term “micro,” and the term “micro shorts” saw a 974% increase in reach. With over 22 million engagement actions, Free People’s engagement significantly outpaced competitors while maintaining a similar level of positive and negative sentiment compared to competitors.
Test and learn.
“We’re working with influencers in so many different ways: We’re doing direct paid posts and working with them on an affiliate commission basis, and we just started working with Substack influencers. We’re getting ready to do a sponsorship of someone’s Substack newsletter for the first time. It’s a single sponsorship, and we’re going to see how it goes. … Substack is the new Instagram; it’s catching on and it’s going to be an [important] channel. What’s old is new — blogging is back. …Some people with [popular] Substacks are influencers — I’m seeing a lot of influencer posts that say, ‘I’m getting tired of just posting all these links on my Instagram Stories, so I’m gonna do a weekly Substack.’ And then you have editors, too. A lot of these newsletters are [thriving] off of affiliate links — the [writers] have big deals with companies like Mytheresa, for example. … A lot of the same influencers who have Substacks now have [Instagram broadcast] channels where they’re sharing links before they share them on their Stories. DMs are becoming a go-to way to communicate. So we’re discussing ways to [tap into that trend], too.”
Move fast.
“We got in on live shopping early: We started working with Bambuser to host live shopping [segments] while we were waiting for TikTok Shop and IG Checkout to launch. At first, we thought of it as a test or a sandbox, to figure out what type of [live] content our customers would care about. But since then, we’ve come to realize that live shopping on our site works better than IG Live, for example. When we have an IG Live, many people are accidentally clicking into it and then they’re immediately clicking out. The viewers are not an engaged audience. But when we drive people to our site for a live [shopping segment], they’re engaged — and then they’re on the site and they’re shopping, and we gain access to their first-party data. … We’ve had paid influencers and celebrities host, but we’ve found that segments featuring internal employee hosts perform just as well. People want to see the behind-the-scenes [action] from our Philadelphia office, and they want to see our designers talking about a piece of clothing they made. We’ll still use TikTok Shop and IG Checkout, but in different ways.”
