Accessories label Coach has launched a new project with Ari Seth Cohen of Advanced Style, who teams some of the characters from the Advanced Style blog with high profile fashion bloggers including Leandra Medine of Man Repeller, Susie Lau of Style Bubble and Nadia Sarwar of FrouFrouu. In the videos, each pair discusses what it means to have a distinctive personal style and how it changes with age.
When talking about the project, Cohen says “I love these intergenerational projects that bring younger people into the same environment as older people to discuss things that they can both relate to and really show that there is a lot that they can learn from each other.”
The project offers a lighthearted look on inter-generational style, whilst highlighting some of Coach’s new-season bags - suitable for any age, obviously.
The rest of the videos are available on the Coach Youtube channel.
First week at & Other Stories
It’s been a busy week for the H&M group in London: the opening of the much-hyped & Other Stories store on Regent, followed by the relaunch of the H&M flagship a stone’s throw away at Oxford Circus.
& Other Stories is in some respects the more exciting *ahem* story for the H&M group - a brand new offering that seems designed to sit somewhere between H&M/Monki and the more expensive Cos, in terms of pricing, product and store aesthetic and merchandising.
H&M and Monki are clearly aimed at a younger, ‘cheap and cheerful’ audience (in which I include myself), with Cos representing a higher end high street with a style aptly described by Susie Bubble as ‘austere and rigorous’ (in my dreams) - but all three brands (four if you include Cheap Monday, also part of the H&M family) are hugely popular across the board, leading the H&M family to be the second largest fashion group in the world. So expectations of & Other Stories were understandably high.
An intriguing part of & Other Stories’ offer is it’s openness about how it’s been influenced by blogging and social media. In an interview with the Guardian, the brand’s creative director Sara Hilden-Bengtsson said:
“We went to different cities and looked at how the impact of social media, street style and bloggers has made women more fashion savvy. Women create looks differently than they did 10-15 years ago. They create their own stories through their personal style and they know fashion.”
This approach is evident in the decisions made in the in-store visual merchandising. The displays focus around editorial ‘stories’, with customers able to shop an entire look at once, from clothing to accessories and even beauty products. Every rail is also adorned with street style-esque images of the garments being worn out and about. With images taped to surfaces or hanging from bulldog clips, the aesthetic of the displays nods more to a mood board or design studio than a high-street chain.
In her write-up, Susie Bubble also rightly notes that where & Other Stories really shines is the equal emphasis it places on all the elements of its offering: ready to wear, accessories, and beauty all take equal place in the spotlight. For me, a real strength is the footwear - where H&M particularly chases price rather than style, & Other Stories has produced a range of footwear that’s stylish and completes at price point with Topshop and the like. My favourites include some particularly hardcore sandals that seem appropriate for a London summer tube ride. The jewellery and beauty offering also provides a price point that’s even more accessible.
This egalitarian approach to product is also visible online: each ‘story’ gives attention to various elements of a look, rather than concentrating on the clothes to the exclusion of all else. In store, shoppers are directed back to www.stories.com, completing the cycle of influence and inspiration from online to IRL and back again. Following the example of brands like Proenza Schouler, mirroring a digital presence with an overarching brand strategy as well as a great retail experience can pay (metaphorical) dividends if executed correctly. If the daily emptying of rails at the & Other Stories store is anything to go by, it certainly is right now.
Below is a blog piece I wrote for Junior Strategy, an great project which I’ve recently begun to contribute to, which aims to be a resource for any current or aspiring junior planner or strategist. Started by Ben and Ashly who are both currently based in Amsterdam, over the last year Junior Strategy has grown to include contributors from Europe and the US, with more hubs springing up all the time.
Up until now the format of the site has been in-depth interviews with planners or strategists at a senior or director level, probing them for pearls of wisdom gained along their journey that could be of use to anyone just starting out. But this week sees the launch of the newest ‘arm’ of Junior Strategy - a blog aimed to provide some food for thought around issues in planning or strategy today. My first outing as a regular written contributor was to the ‘Wildcard’ section, talking about the impact of big data on consumer insight for brands, and the perils of taking big numbers at face value.
Read below or on the Junior Strategy blog here, and head over to the main site for all the video interviews, plus other blog stuffs for your reading pleasure.
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‘Big data’ is increasingly cited by commentators as the future of insight for brands and agencies alike, with 2013 already christened as ‘the year of big data’. In a study conducted by Winterberry Group which surveyed over 150 senior figures in advertising, marketing, publishing and technology, 77 percent said data management platforms will play either a “critical” or “major supporting” role in analysing and improving their advertising and marketing efforts in the long term.
This isn’t just about marketing either – brands are using consumer data to create and improve their services and products – the Nike + and Fuelband ecosystem being just one example. Netflix has even taken big data to the next level – using in-depth knowledge of their consumer’s viewing habits in their new venture as content producer with their new series House of Cards.
Despite the hype, this isn’t a new phenomenon: the use of algorithm and analysis to make sense of the huge streams of information left in our digital wake has been on the cards for some time. In 2008, Wired’s Chris Anderson wrote:
“This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.”
But this might be just the problem – the numbers can’t always speak for themselves. Or rather, they can say a number of things, depending on who’s reading them. What’s missing is a more human intuition about the consumer – vital to making sense of data sets, giving them a context beyond the numbers. And increasingly, companies are struggling to use the data to make the decisions that matter.
In his final all-staff email after being fired, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason wrote:
“If there’s one piece of wisdom that this simple pilgrim would like to impart upon you: have the courage to start with the customer. My biggest regrets are the moments that I let a lack of data override my intuition on what’s best for our customers.”
Reliance on data (whether you have too much or too little) risks being at the detriment of a real understanding of the customer and their needs and motivations. For strategists and planners both client side and in agencies, this intuition about the consumer comes from being immersed in their world – in all its contradictions and immeasurability. Multinational brands like P&G are beginning to tackle this by sending their product teams in-field for days or even weeks to better understand their consumers.
In an article for the Boston Globe, Samuel Arbesman refers to the ‘bias towards measurable information’:
“Throughout history, in one field after another, science has made huge progress in precisely the areas where we can measure things—and lagged where we can’t… The result, over time, has been that we know a lot about the things that are closer to our size, our altitude, our spot in the universe—and less about things that are hard to reach, hard to dig up, and hard to quantify. What we know has a bias, in other words, and is biased in favor of what we can measure.”
So while the never-ending streams of big data coming out of social media, online transactions and smartphone use might seem to reflect a huge amount of information about the consumer’s life, it doesn’t reflect everything. It might be possible to track how someone shops, or how they interact with their peers on Facebook, but it would be a mistake to imagine that this represents how they are all the time, in every situation. We also need to be aware of assuming that this data even represents all people – 76% of people globally still don’t use smartphones, and while it may seem that Facebook is everywhere, only 14% of the world’s population are active users. As Arbesman says, “big data might be deep… but it’s not wide”.
It’s here that human intuition about the consumer comes into play – data tells us that something happened, but not the complex emotions and drivers behind it, the ‘why’. A balance needs to be struck between using big data to see behaviour on a grand scale, while acknowledging its limitations. Offsetting huge data sets with a more intuitive understanding of the small-scale drivers and emotions behind behaviours is vital to avoid the perils of believing in numbers over people:
“Data-driven predictions can succeed — and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.” Nate Silver: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t.
From Garage Magazine comes Take My Picture, a short documentary that takes a wry look at the street style phenomenon that seems to have exploded in recent years, prompting comment and debate across in the fashion industry.
Throughout the documentary, fashion journalist Tim Blanks muses on the meteoric rise of street style - and what can possibly be next after the scrums outside fashion shows seen over the last month. With years of experience, Blanks takes a cynical view on these ‘stars of the street’, particularly those who pursue the street style limelight to the extreme.
Considering the reason why street style has gathered so much momentum amongst a public desperate to consume these images, Blanks points to a cyclical need for glamour that occurs when times are hard. Comparing this economic downturn to that felt in the early 90s (or even further back), Blanks points out that fashion (and now street style) can provide a much needed escape from the realities of our recession-hit lives. The interesting difference is, according to Blanks, that rather than wanting unattainable icons, we now look for someone a bit closer to our own reality - someone we can identify with:
“Times are hard again now, but this escapism is not about you being taken somewhere… you’re involved, everyone is involved.”
Happy International Women's Day!
To celebrate International Women’s Day, watch this video from filmmaker Kathryn Ferguson in association with Selfridges feautring inspirational female role models.
In the accompanying essay, Phoebe Frangol muses on what it means to have - and to be - a female role model.
“Role models have an effect on us not because they’re perfect, but the opposite - they’re imperfect, just like us. Our role models have to be flawed so that we can feel connected to and invested in them.”
Courtesy of A Parliament of Owls:
“Copa Room showgirl Lee Merlin poses in a cotton mushroom cloud swimsuit as she is crowned Miss Atomic Bomb in this 1957 photograph. Above-ground nuclear testing was a major public attraction during the late 1950s, and hotels capitalized on the craze by hosting nuclear bomb watch parties, which usually included the dubbing of a chorus girl as Miss Atomic Bomb. Merlin was the last and most famous of the Miss Atomic Bomb girls.”
SHOWstudio and Lane Crawford
The venture between Lane Crawford and SHOWstudio has been on my list of things to share ever since I saw the amazing video created by Nick Night and the team for the SS/13 collection. Using a combination of 3D scanning and motion capture, the melding of some futuristic tech with some elements (namely some of the repurposed and distorted shots that reminded me of glitches in video games from childhood) quite frankly blew my mind.
To follow up on the video itself, Lane Crawford have launched a competition where participants have to create new content using stills from the original video. Simply clicking on a specially created canvas reveals multiple layers of imagery (like a reverse eraser tool). Different brush sizes and hardnesses allow you to be as creative as you like (don’t take my terrible attempt as an example - check out the gallery here).
This project struck me as a great way to use content from a creative project to creative a connection between creator and audience. Not only is SHOWstudio a respected outlet for fashion film content, but the core audience of that site must be made of of at least some some serious aficionados of fashion and fashion film - therefore much more likely to care about such a competition and enter it. The interesting thing to watch is how content like this actually works when it leaves the production studio and goes into the world of t’internet.
Firstly, it’s interesting to watch how branded content reaches the relevant audience for the brand, but more importantly how these people interact with it - how it becomes relevant to their lives - why they should care. To me, this competition is a great example of getting it right - serious fashion fans are more likely to be engaged than the average punter, which is why they visit a site like SHOWstudio in the first place. Also, the chance to show off their creativity to a panel that includes SHOWstudio team members as well as Lane Crawford would draw a lot of young, fashion-conscious creatives, even without the cash prize. A much better interaction with a brand than ‘post this link to your Facebook and win a voucher’ in my book. If all brand interactions are about a transactional relationships (and they are), this feels more authentic, with both sides getting value other than monetary out of it.
This idea of contributing for the love as well as for the cash prize reminds me of an excellent talk by Aaron Koblin of Google Creative labs at Dazed Live a few years ago. Amongst many inspiring works he showed, one that stuck with me was The Johnny Cash Project (http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/). Using a custom drawing tool, fans were asked to recreate archive footage of Johnny cash frame by frame. The images would then be composited to form the music video for his last single ‘Aint no Grave’. That the video not only got made, but that there were enough frames to recreate the video many times over is testament to the project’s success in engaging its key audience. These fans were inspired by their idol to express themselves creatively - and seeing their frame in the video was enough, no cash incentive needed.
New media models in the fashion industry
Business of Fashion ran a great piece today on new media models springing up within the fashion industry. I would recommend anyone interested in the future of media models to have a read as it will get the brain juices flowing I imagine (in agreement or not), so I won’t regurgitate the whole thing here. Instead, I’ll focus on a few things that specifically caught my attention:
- Advertising spend in print media is forecast to decline by 4% in 2013
- Curation is set to be massive in terms of the hierarchy of online information, and not just in the fashion industry. I’m not the first to say that of course (here, here and here are much better ways of talking about that), but in Vfiles the BoF piece gives a nice example of a site where respected industry figures curate content to give it another layer of value to the readers.
- Social. Following the success of Pinterest and the like, there are going to be more and more places that act as, in the words of the BoF piece, like when you used to keep “your favourite things in a box under your bed”, just digital.
-Video. Online video accounted for 56% of all consumer internet traffic in 2012. It’s not going away.
- Looking beyond ads for revenue. The BoF mentions a few smart sponsorship deals between brands that they term ‘deep partnerships’ - long term project that go beyond just signing a cheque and having your name on the website. Brands making smart choices about how to connect with increasingly media (read: advertising) savvy audiences, particularly those creatives who are ‘influencing’ (yuck) a wider mass of people.
All of these are interesting ideas that aren’t answers in themselves, but are examples of perhaps where brands should be beginning to explore when looking to connect with consumers, and spend a little less while they’re doing it. Watch this space.
