From selling her fashion brand Brigid Catiis to Revolve in 2012 to launching the Revolve Festival in 2018, CMO Raissa Gerona has worked with the retailer in some capacity for close to 10 years.
Talking about her journey to joining Revolve, she admitted her experience with her second label, Lovers & Friends, launched in 2011, was key to the company taking an interest in bloggers, who were just starting to gain popularity. When Revolve bought the brand in 2014, she used that experience to develop Revolve’s marketing strategy for influencers and use a relatively under-used social media platform called Instagram.
“When Revolve acquired [Lovers & Friends], Revolve didn’t really have a marketing team at that point. We built everything from the ground up,” she said.
Since then, the company has been on the cutting edge of marketing strategies, from its notorious influencer trips to its newly launched Revolve Social Club to its work with high-end brands like Dundas. The brand has also become a presence at traditional events like New York Fashion Week and the Met Gala, and it hosted an afterparty this year during the Superbowl with Drake and Justin Bieber.
“Historically, we’ve stayed away from Fashion Week, because it’s been such a crowded space. But last year, we wanted to go big, and that is the theme that will carry on for the next year: making sure we are connecting with our consumers,” she said.
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The brand’s openness to trying new things and risk-taking is why Gerona has stayed on with the brand. “I love waking up and doing this job, especially right now as we’re planning the [Coachella-adjacent] Revolve Festival,” she said in March. The Festival hasn’t taken place during the pandemic and was previously a key part of the brand’s event strategy.
But as Revolve is a digitally native company, social media continues to be the company’s No.1 way to market, reach and communicate with its consumers. While Gerona said it’s impossible to be the best on every platform, she called the different channels useful for developing brand awareness.
“You can post 20 times on Instagram and Instagram Stories, for instance, but you can’t send that many emails. It’s about moving quickly. More importantly, it’s about being in the palm of the consumers’ hands,” she said. “Being data-driven is embedded into our culture; we make sure that, when we do something, the numbers reflect what we’re doing, whether that is good or bad, to have a sense of how successful it is,” Gerona said.
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