George Condo x Supreme Skate Decks| Source: Hypebeast.com

In Part I, we examined how New York-based streetwear company Supreme became a global cult brand with its own myths, iconography and belief systems. Today, we explore the creative and commercial philosophies that underpin Supreme’s lasting success, courtesy of our friends at 032c.

NEW YORK, United States — The mythology behind legendary New York streetwear brand Supreme is so potent, it’s easy to imagine founder James Jebbia as a king pin of downtown Manhattan. But as he will be the first to tell you, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In fact, Supreme’s core creative and business philosophies are the sum of Jebbia’s patchwork retail past; not, as one might assume, a storied legacy in skateboarding. His resume reads like a series of interconnected Google-map pins on a late-80s and early-90s SoHo New York. A British-transplant who arrived in New York around 1984, Jebbia got a job working at the now-defunct Parachute clothing store in SoHo.

“I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew I enjoyed clothes,” he says. He quit five years later to open, along with his girlfriend at the time, a small flea market on Wooster Street inspired by the myriad of stuff he coveted from The Face and i-D magazines. The project evolved into his first proper store, Union, an experimental shop on Spring Street that carried “mostly English brands” and one very important streetwear juggernaut at the time by the name of Stüssy. This allowed Jebbia to work with Shawn Stüssy, who asked him to partner with him to open one of his eponymous boutiques on Prince Street in 1991.

When Stüssy left the business, Jebbia opened up Supreme in 1994 in a small storefront on Lafayette, a then-desolate street that was a perfect place for his clientele to skate first, shop second – an order that would very quickly be reversed. “I opened Supreme because there were no other decent skate shops around at the time,” Jebbia says. “I thought, cool, I might as well be the one to do it.”

The store was able to become the holy grail of high youth street culture by curating a mix of the city’s iconography – fashion, music, celebrity and politics – within its walls and then instantly sledge-hammering the city’s high-low playing field.

Limited-edition Damien Hirst skateboards are around the same price as decks featuring lyrics from Public Enemy; custom Spalding basketballs might be sold under the artist Nate Lowman’s gritty canvases hanging on the wall. The brand’s iconic T-shirts, like everything in the store, have become collector’s items that are collages of controversial provocations and heady imagery. Designs have included an oversized New York Times logo, a portrait of Kate Moss, lyrics from the reggae musician Lee “Scratch” Perry, Mickey Mouse’s hands praying with rosary beads, Budweiser labels, and alarmist political slogans such as “Illegal business controls America.”

Juxtapositions abound: images of naked girls playing with a hose pop up in a calendar from 2006 but more cerebral women like Chloë Sevigny and Jenn Brill act as brand ambassadors in Japanese style magazines; one of the brand’s most iconic image is of the rapper Raekwon, an Elmo doll, and an Uzi show by the photographer Kenneth Capello. And really, who would have thought Lou Reed would ever become the label’s face, as he did in 2009?

“Supreme embraces the outsider and always does things off-value from their brand,” says Richardson. “But they’re consistent and have always embraced the outsider and the individual. At the end of the day, Supreme is about the legacy of punk through skateboarding and you can really genuinely feel this in everything they do.”

The brand’s insidery-outsidery brilliance often made them precursors to trends that would later pop-up on the catwalk, such as their collaboration with Richard Prince as part of their art deck series well before Prince joined forces with Marc Jacobs to make handbags. “I like to point that out,” Jebbia says with a smile. “Not to be that guy, but just, you know, to point it out.”

The Supreme brand and its products soon became viable forms of creative expression, which in turn became catnip for a particular breed of male consumer hungry for that indefinable but high-quality cool, resounding most immediately with Japan.

“We never purposefully went after a Japanese customer,” Jebbia says. “It wasn’t like that. It’s always been about that really picky New York customer, but I think that translates all over the world.” Nonetheless, the Japanese consumers hyper-related to Jebbia’s choosy modus operandi and were quick to embrace the Supreme product as something culturally valuable and worth a premium price. “Japanese kids respect underground movements and have a good eye for it,” says Bondaroff.

Supreme now has five stores scattered across Japan and just opened their first store in London, featuring installations from the artists Mark Gonzales and Ari Marcopolous, this past September. “We’ve always really been inspired by London youth,” says Jebbia. Evidence of his grimy South London influence can be seen in many of the Supreme staples, such as military jackets, beanies, and oversized Oxford shirts with a neat fit.

But there is also a business component to setting up shop across the pond. “For us, London is the real gateway to Europe,” Jebbia says. Now kids won’t have to fly from all over Europe to come to New York to get a piece of Supreme. “We hope it makes things easier for them, honestly. It can save them a plane ticket, you know what I mean? But, we’re keeping the shop with the same spirit, it will feel like New York.”

In the past, owning a piece of clothing with the red Supreme logo on it was like a more authentic “I Love NY” T-shirt, a tourist token that instantly made you feel a part of a certain downtown New York ethos. Jebbia is mindful of this, but he doesn’t seem worried about diluting the potency of his brand by going global: “We’re not going to open up stores everywhere, that’s just not us. I can’t even think of somewhere else I would like to open, really.”

Supreme has been able to grow, but Jebbia has always been able to keep his hand right on the faucet, letting out just enough but not too much. “Supreme represents fresh ideas done right,” says Kenneth Capello. “They’re always one step ahead and always limited, so people want it.”

Mr. Jebbia, however, is playfully cautious about the idea that his small production runs are part of an exploitative plan to skew supply and demand to fever-pitch levels. “The main reason behind the short runs is that we don’t want to get stuck with stuff that nobody wants,” he says. But admitting to a kind of customer trickery isn’t exactly the coolest thing to say, so you let him be. “Let me put it this way,” he adds tellingly. “We work really, really hard to make everything seem effortless.”

As the shop is on the horizon of its second decade in business, all that hard work has become the focal point for a type of New York aesthetic that is just now entering the canon of great American dressing. When it first opened, the shop was a reflection of the times: the raw energy of Larry Clark’s film Kids; the haphazard elegance of grunge; the polished grit of the East Coast hip-hop movement of the time. In Jebbia’s conversation with Glenn O’Brien from the piece in Interview he asked me to read, Jebbia spoke about the lasting influence of that era in his brand’s sensibility:

“There’s always, I think, a sense of the early-90s to it. That era is definitely a big influence running though everything we do – that was a really special time. And since we started back then, I think it’s fine for us to always look to that era and get a lot of influence from it. It’s not nostalgic – it’s more like it’s a part of us.”

It’s been almost 20 years since the birth of this aesthetic, and now, with most menswear designers aimlessly searching in tea-soaked history books for authenticity, it has never felt more right. If Polo reflects a sense of country club prep and A.P.C. a type of louche French rock ’n’ roll (two brands Jebbia says he greatly admires), Supreme has then its own unique form of authentic, time-encapsulated style in early-90s skate culture.

But now, the baggy pants are a little bit more fitted; the Oxford shirts come in a more sophisticated palette of colours; the imagery is more mature. And while other designers such as Rag & Bone, Tommy Hilfiger or J.Crew hark back to a phantom sense of American heritage, Supreme actually embodies a new garde of American classicism without dwelling in dusty clichés. The little skate-shop-that-could has unexpectedly grown to foster one of the strongest statements in men’s sportswear – the hallmark of American fashion – in quite some time.

“People think that because we are widely-known as a skate shop, our clientele must be idiots. But they want new things on a high level. All they care about is quality,” says Jebbia.

He is right, after all. Today, the globalized customer demands a certain tasteful efficiency, not the trappings of exclusivity. To date, Supreme has chosen to refine their signature products, not to forge themselves out in wild, unpredictable directions with their design process, but instead to forge themselves out in new directions in the world at large. “The product keeps getting better and better,” Bondaroff told me in a phone interview. “It’s so solid now, it crosses over to so many different types of people depending on how they want to wear it.”

Solid, in this case, means well-proportioned sportswear without a lot of frill; done with a discerning eye for what is wearable – take a long-sleeved double-ply flannel in yellow, brown, or green, for example. Therein lies Supreme’s striking paradox. Underneath its tough exterior, the brand has always traded on something of cool’s polar opposite: pragmatism and utility – with a keen sense of graphics and sharp design, no doubt.

The crucial thing to know about Supreme clothes is that they reflect everyday style for men. But more importantly, they assuage the fears many men who have come of age alongside the store have about wanting to look grown up – or, dare I say, appropriate – while still being true to their core aesthetic values that Jebbia speaks of. Almost two decades later, the Supreme project has become an updated take on that oh-so American sense of function and pragmatism. It’s a design philosophy that has mostly been missing in men’s fashion in recent years.

“Quality” is a word Jebbia stresses over and over again in conversations about his brand. You get a sense that he is growing impatient with just being known for on-the-nose artist collaborations or an effervescent downtown credibility. His brand’s true worth, and what his customers fetishize above anything else, is its casual matter-of-factness. Nothing looks sharper, but there is nothing snobby about that. There is something universal about it, really. If fashion and award shows have any teachable moments, it’s that cool doesn’t last on the fickle world stage. Quality does.

“It’s not really just a cool skateboard thing anymore. People resist that idea still. It frustrates me,” Jebbia says before taking a pause. “Oh well.”

This article was written by Alex Hawgood and was first published by 032c. Click here for a preview of the current issue of 032c.

Looks from Supreme NYC Fall/Winter 2011 Lookbook | Source: Weareyouneak.com

In a two part series, courtesy of our friends at 032c, BoF takes you inside notoriously press shy, New York-based streetwear brand Supreme. Today, in Part I, we examine how Supreme — the Chanel of downtown streetwear —became a global cult brand with its own myths, iconography and belief systems.

NEW YORK, United States — When the controversial young rapper Tyler, The Creator won the award for Best New Artist at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards in August, he offered an enthusiastic, yet expletive-laden acceptance speech. “Yo, I’m excited as fuck right now, yo,” he said. “I wanted this shit since I was nine. I’m about to cry.” But with MTV’s censors on high alert, the speech was broadcast more like this: “Yo, I’m excited as - -— -- -, yo. I wanted -- -- -- – —- --. - -— - --.”

With the audio missing for about a minute straight to avoid any profanities and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) fines, viewers were left with no choice but to absorb Tyler’s image in mute. Clad in skinny dark jeans, an oversize tie-dye T-shirt with an image of a cat’s face on it, and a Supreme baseball hat with a leopard print brim, Tyler, who is 20 years old, was the only artist at the award show who could be said to actually embody how young people dress today. No outfit made from meat, no fancy three-piece suit with a cocked fedora, no oversize bling: Tyler looked exactly how certain young men at this very moment choose to wear their clothes on the streets all over the globe.

It’s no coincidence that the only logo the image-conscious Tyler wished to communicate was the one on his Supreme hat. After all, Tyler’s hodgepodge street aesthetic – a big chunk of skateboard culture and urban hip-hop with a dose of American sportswear prep and a winking, intelligent take on hipster irony – is the one Supreme has been cultivating for the past 17 years since opening its first shop on Lafayette Street in 1994.

The flashy sartorial sensibilities of, say, Russell Brand or Kanye West have mutated into their own category of sub-entertainment and, more often than not, their personal styles do not reflect the current vogue. So how then did the Supreme aesthetic finally become one of the most honest representations of how men choose to wear their clothes in the global mainstream today?

It’s easy to answer that question if one concedes that Supreme currently makes some of the best clothes for men in America right now. And for a brand routinely overlooked by fashion publications and menswear experts as “skate clothes” or, perhaps even worse, just a fad in a niche subculture, this may come as something of a surprise.

But can you blame the press for sleeping on it? For almost two decades, Supreme has existed in a cult-like bubble. Many of their short-run products have a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shelf-life; you’ll pretty much never, ever receive an invite to some Supreme-sponsored open-bar fête (because they almost never happen); and unless you’ve been systematically tracking its product developments on the array of feverish blogs devoted to the brand, or know a mole on the inside who can text you when a new shipment has been delivered, you’ll miss out entirely.

Starting with its swagger-filled moniker, the label certainly has built a colossal and often intimidating public aura. “The most important thing I think is the name – Supreme,” says the art photographer Ari Marcopolous, a frequent collaborator whose images have helped define the brand’s visuals, including having his work silkscreened on an assortment of sneakers for the label’s partnership with Vans. “Really, you cannot do much better than that.”

Being sovereign – the supreme ruler of culture – is the brand’s unofficial mission statement; everything is appropriated, recontextualised and refitted in Supreme’s hands to be made better. (Not the least of which is the fire-truck red box logo ripped from the oeuvre of Barbara Kruger.) Chinos are constructed with military-grade reinforcement, hats are made with a sturdy square brim, and T-shirts are twice as thick. They’ve carefully chosen to cross-pollinate their homegrown image with unhip but timelessly macho brands like Hanes and The North Face, worked with blue-chip artists such as Jeff Koons and Christopher Wool for their art-deck series, and built ad campaigns around a motley crew of celebrities that have no direct connection to skateboarding, including Kermit the Frog, Mike Tyson and the pop star Lady Gaga.

In fact, the brand’s biggest appropriation of all is the very idea of what a skate shop is – or isn’t. “I don’t see Supreme as a skate shop at all,” says Steve Rodriquez, the owner of 5boro Skateboards and one of the founding members of the New York City Skateboarding Association. “It started a whole new genre of store. To some people, it became like a religion.”

Like most religions, James Jebbia, Supreme’s founder, is fiercely protective of his shop’s doctrine, its history, and of who is allowed to retell its myths. To him, most articles in the press about his brand get it all wrong. “All the magazines, if they’re being nice, just think we’re some cool little skate shop doing kick flips downtown,” Jebbia says. “They always write the same thing over and over.”

Because of this belief system, Jebbia and his team are notoriously press shy. Although Jebbia is soft-spoken and quite generous (by the end our conversation he offered me a checkered North Face for Supreme hat that was no longer on the shelf at the store but still in stock), he is cautious and skeptical about the media and those who write for it. “If you don’t understand us, then what’s the point?” he huffs, referring chiefly to the confusion on how to treat the brand (is it an X-games label like Quicksilver and Billabong, or a legitimate small fashion label more similar to agnès B or A.P.C.) and, more troublingly, the frequent pigeonholing of skateboard culture within the fashion industry as just a passing fad, no different from big shoulders or neon colours.

There are so few examples of stories about Supreme that Jebbia finds successful, he treats the chosen pieces like scripture that he is eager to share. The holy writ includes an interview with Glenn O’Brien from Interview magazine from 2009, a 1995 article from Vogue comparing the persnickety shopping habits of the uppity uptown women who peruse the racks at Chanel’s boutique on East 57th Street and the baggy-pants, bed-head boys who wait in line for hours at a time to shop at Supreme in SoHo; and of course, the 300-page retrospective of the brand released by Rizzoli last year (of which Mr. O’Brien wrote the introduction, and in which the Vogue article was reproduced in full.)

The message is clear: Supreme is sacred, and it’s sacrilegious to get the story wrong.

“The fashion industry doesn’t understand Supreme,” says the stylist Andrew Richardson, who has helped facilitate several projects with the label, including a calendar with Larry Clark. “And that doesn’t bother James one bit. They want James out and about, paying for dinners and hosting parties. But he’s not. Fashion people want something that is uncomplicated and easy to digest – those are the opposite things James embraces. But really, at the end of the day, James doesn’t care. Why should he?”

Hearing Jebbia talk about the press, you don’t get the impression that he is paranoid about being criticised or that he is tyrannical over what is written about his beloved brand. Most articles simply do not live up to the gold standard he has set for his label and himself, or the one expected from his fastidious customer-base. The impression is that most writers and publications are not worthy.

“We always try to shoot for the very best and go for it,” he says. “Some people call that snobbery, I guess. But it’s not.”

Indeed, selectivity and exclusivity are an integral part of the brand’s DNA. When the shop opened in 1994, it immediately became an epicentre for what Aaron “A-Ron” Bondaroff, the label’s front man, has called “train-hopping, taxicab-jumping, runaway kids.” And dudes from all over the city followed in reverence, often lining up for hours to be the first to score the latest products to come in, like candy-collared baseball caps or spacious bomber jackets with the Supreme logo shown discreetly on an outside tag. And even if you made it inside, the really real cool kids knew to ask for the hidden, in-the-know merchandise in the back storage room.

Remembers Bondaroff: “The social club wasn’t so inviting, though, and had a lot of attitude. We made the rules and ran a business that was very successful. People were addicted to the clothes like a drug. We didn’t want to work so hard so we developed a sales style that worked in our favour. In the early days, it was like, come in, but don’t touch. You can look with your eyes, but not with your hands. It was a crazy way to sell garments but the customer learned the deal: don’t fuck with us and we won’t fuck with you.”

The store was so cool, it was, well, scary. “I remember being so nervous walking past it, I would walk across the street,” says Jen Brill, a freelance creative director and “friend” of the brand since it’s inception, “even though a lot of the guys that worked in there were my friends. It was effective, though, and set an impeccable aura around the shop.”

In an interview with the graffiti artist KAWS from the Supreme retrospective, Jebbia maintains that, even in his own tank, he too felt like a fish out of water: “There were 50 or 60 skaters who’d just hang out there. And right at that time, too, Larry Clark was filming Kids. For me, again, it wasn’t part of my world, but I knew it felt very rebellious. It felt right and I liked it.”

Hiding out in the back room and letting the kids rule the roost allowed Jebbia to observe the natural habits and tendencies of his clientele, not unlike the objectivity achieved from a behavioural psychologist studiously taking notes behind a two-way mirror. He didn’t have to be a skateboarder at all, he just had to know what this new generation of skate kids wanted and what they weren’t getting anywhere else.

Most importantly, Jebbia developed the cunning to anticipate what they needed next. If you’re too far in it, you can’t see outside. The distance from the lifestyle, conversely, gave Jebbia a sublime ability to understand how best to represent the lifestyle. “I think James is always thinking with a 25-year-old skateboarder somewhere in his mind with everything he does,” says Richardson.

Tomorrow, in Part II, we explore the creative and commercial philosophies that underpin Supreme’s lasting success.

This article was written by Alex Hawgood and was first published by 032c. Click here for a preview of the current issue of 032c.

Gilt Groupe warehouse | Source: Fantabulously Frugal

Today, BoF takes an in-depth look at the past, present and future of Gilt Groupe’s business model and speaks with Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan on his plans to continue the company’s ascendance.

NEW YORK, United States — Back in November of 2007, BoF was amongst the very first media outlets to write about Gilt Groupe, the New York-based start-up that went on to dramatically reshape the online retail market for fashion, building a community of high value consumers around limited-time, members-only “flash sales” for designer apparel at steeply discounted prices.

The timing of Gilt’s launch couldn’t have been better. In the months that followed, fashion and apparel brands began to feel the impact of a global recession that would ultimately give rise to one of the most challenging macroeconomic environments in the history of modern retailing. Seemingly overnight, wholesale inventories became unmovable as retailers drastically reduced product assortments and orders.

As a consequence, many fashion brands were forced to liquidate excess inventory positions, causing a sudden and significant supply glut for “cut out” goods. Prior to the Great Recession, brands would have sold this excess inventory through off-price channels like Loehmann’s, T.J. Maxx and Century 21. But as the economy sank, these retailers were asking for discounts as high as 90 percent, while merchandising clothes in a haphazard fashion which did nothing to protect the high-end image brands had spent years cultivating.

What’s more, the extreme market conditions of the Great Recession created an acute financial imperative for retailers — off-price, as well as full-price — to convert their own excessively large inventory positions into cash, leaving many brands almost without any viable sales channel, let alone one that would protect brand equity.

Gilt charged onto the scene like a knight on a white horse, providing a novel, efficient and brand-sensitive way to liquidate excess inventory and enjoying explosive growth in the process. Based on this momentum, Gilt Groupe raised $138 million last May in a new round of financing, valuing the four-year-old company at $1 billion.

But fast-forward to the end of 2011 and flash sales are facing significant challenges. Here, BoF examines the rise, stumble and future of Gilt Groupe’s business model.

Although impeccable timing was critical to Gilt Groupe’s meteoric rise, there were other important factors behind the company’s success. Firstly, Gilt’s member base is largely comprised of one of the most desirable demographics in retail: urban sophisticates. The typical Gilt customer has a bachelor’s degree, is in his or her mid-thirties and “significantly over-indexes in higher household income buckets, when compared to the general online population,” according to a spokesperson for Gilt Groupe.

To build this quality customer base, Gilt leveraged online network effects to great success, starting with friends of the founders and early employees. “This is a business that has grown predominantly through word-of-mouth marketing,” one of Gilt’s founders, Alexis Maybank, told The Wall Street Journal last year. “75 percent of our membership has come from the suggestion of a friend, using our on-site ‘Invite Friends’ feature. That’s how we launched. We sent invites to a list of about 15,000 people — friends, former colleagues and classmates, dating back to grade school!”

Second, Gilt’s business model succeeded in driving consumer demand in a novel way: offering designer product at significant discounts, distributed directly to email inboxes, with timing and supply constraints to compel immediate action. Fifty percent of Gilt’s deal revenue is generated in the first hour after a sale starts.

Gilt’s email demand generation strategy also went hand in hand with a strong product assortment. From 2007 to 2009, the company’s core team had powerful relationships with fashion and apparel brands that, in conjunction with Gilt’s high value customer base, enabled them to secure highly desirable product, delivering a unique value proposition to their members.

And finally, Gilt managed to liquidate inventory in a way that protected the image of participating brands. Generally, brands are careful to close out their inventory in a manner that both optimises cash flow and ensures that their target audience doesn’t see it. But, amazingly, the quality of Gilt’s product offering and customer base enabled brands to sell excess inventory at a discount, while still maintaining a positive image.

How did Gilt start to stumble?

Ironically, it was Gilt’s massive success and the demands this placed on securing greater and greater volumes of desirable product that began to undermine the company’s ability to deliver on its core value proposition: great product at a great price.

From 2009 to 2010, Gilt’s revenue rose from $170 million to $425 million, according to estimates published by Internet Retailer. This significant growth created the need for more and more quality product to feed the Gilt machine, something that was difficult to fulfil in ever-increasing volumes.

While Gilt Groupe itself was inspired by the French private sales behemoth Vente-Privée (which recently launched its own a US-focused flash sales venture with American Express) Gilt’s success also spurred hundreds of other competitors to enter the flash sales market, from start-ups like Ideeli and Rue La La to strategic players like Amazon’s MyHabit and Nordstrom’s Hautelook.

With a flood of new Gilt-like clones actively looking for supply, the glut of excess inventory from the mid-2000’s economic boom dried up even faster. Additionally, in response to the global recession, many brands began producing at volumes that were lower than in the heady days of 2007. As a result, brands who were once price takers became price setters, increasing the cost of securing inventory.

An anecdotal comparison of the brands and products available on Gilt today versus those available in the company’s first couple of years shows that, over time, quality level has gone down. Back in 2009, it was possible to find prestige brands like Ralph Lauren Purple Label and Porsche Design on Gilt, in stark contrast to the many unknown brands that populate the site today. This meant that each time a subscriber opened an email and the product did not communicate the excitement-to-value ratio that had originally made Gilt so successful, their inclination to open subsequent emails from Gilt, and the brand’s position as a curator of style, suffered.

To be fair, these are challenges that have impacted all flash sale players and are not unique to Gilt. But they nonetheless present a significant threat to the company’s core business model.

What is Gilt doing to address the issue?

“Today because we are bigger and more well known, we get inventory that we didn’t get before,” Gilt Groupe CEO Kevin Ryan told BoF. This may simply be a matter of showing strength in the face of adversity as market sources suggest that inventory is indeed a major issue for flash sales players.

That said, Mr. Ryan did go on to explain a number of initiatives he has put into place to try and ensure Gilt’s continued ascendance. “We do some things that we didn’t do before,” he said. “We do more cuttings and we are increasing private label,” he continued. “We do pack and hold. At the beginning of a season, brands will go out and get orders from Neiman and Saks — and then we’ll order it as well. You can’t always count on this, but let’s say they end up with 15,000 orders and the minimum from their Chinese producer is 20,000. They’ll come to us and say, we’ll produce 2,000 for you, but you have to hold it until the end of the season.”

Leveraging its database of more than 5 million members, Gilt has also built a number of new businesses, launching Jetsetter, a travel deals site; Gilt Taste, a business unit focused on gourmet food deals; Gilt City, a Groupon-like local deals site; Gilt Home, a deals site for furnishings, home décor and gifts; and Park & Bond, a full-priced menswear business.

“What I do is try and sell more things to my existing customers,” explained Mr. Ryan. “We have new categories: hotels, restaurants, home, which have unlimited inventory,” he continued. “Within our overall business, two years ago, 95 percent of what we did was end of the season men’s and women’s. Today, that’s probably 35 percent of what we do. We’re in most of the big categories I want to be in right now, but we’ll add one or two over time.”

Performance of their new vertical product extensions is mixed, according to annual gross revenue estimates provided by Mr. Ryan. Compared to the size of the original men’s and women’s business (over $300 million), Jetsetter and Gilt Home (each close to $100 million in sales) have been successful. Currently less successful, though only 15 and 7 months old, respectively, are Gilt City (in the $50 million to $100 million range) and Gilt Taste ($10 million to $20 million). But Gilt clearly recognises the need to capture a larger share of their customers’ disposable income and seize adjacent revenue opportunities.

Gilt is on track in a number of other areas, as well. The company recently launched global e-commerce, shipping to over 90 countries, and understands social marketing in a way that many retailers do not, actively engaging with its large audience of fans and followers. Gilt has also seized the opportunity in mobile and tablet, deriving between 17 and 30 percent of revenue, depending on the day of the week, from mobile platforms, according to Chris Maliwat, a former vice president of strategy at Gilt Groupe.

But the negative impacts of reductions in supply, upward pricing pressures and growing deal fatigue are here to stay and will continue to create an increasingly challenging environment for Gilt and its flash sales peers.

What should Gilt do now?

First of all, Gilt could reinvigorate its vendor value proposition and focus on building new relationships with brands. Here, the most valuable asset for the company is the demand source of their customer data, a fact with which Mr. Ryan concurs.

“[Customer data] is a hugely valuable part of our business. I think we have the best personalisation of anyone, maybe second to Amazon,” he said. “For example, when you get an email in the morning, that’s one of 2,000 versions that goes out. The data is run every night, based on the sales, based on what we think [individual customers] are going to buy. When you open up the [website] you get a different page than I do; I actually get different sales than you do.”

But Gilt is not making the most of this data or sharing its full value with vendor partners. For example, Gilt could better quantify and harness the total value of their relationship with customers by doing things like delivering email analytics and driving social media for brands.

Taking a page from fast fashion, Gilt Groupe would also do well to further its focus on analytics, transforming itself from a data-rich, but insight-poor platform to a vertically aligned organisation driven by actionable information derived from its wealth of data. Retailers like H&M and Zara have upended the traditional seasonal approach to retail through intensive use of analytics coupled to a modern, vertically integrated manufacturing machine. Indeed, it’s their ability to transform analytic insights into demand-responsive product compositions that is their core strategic value proposition.

“Store managers communicate directly with Zara designers and feed them data on what sells well and what doesn’t,” reported The Wall Street Journal in September. “If managers say a polka-dotted-black dress is flying off the racks, it is able to turn around quickly and churn out polka-dotted dresses in other colours and have them in stores in a matter of weeks.”

But Gilt has a significant competitive advantage over fast fashion retailers in the structured nature of the demand signals (clicks, views and purchases) the company can read, meaning that it’s possible for Gilt to automate the identification of trends, while retailers like Zara must rely on store managers to proactively surface these insights.

As this game-changing start-up looks ahead to 2012, Mr. Ryan remains confident that the initiatives he has put in place will support a potential IPO and move the business into profitability. “The overall company is not profitable yet,” he said. “Sometime next year we’ll cross over. The zone where we might go public, and I think we probably will go public, is between fourth quarter next year and fourth quarter the year after,” Mr. Ryan told BoF.

Matthew A. Carroll currently runs outdoor brand Cloven Footwear and sits on the board of three tech start-ups in San Francisco, California.

Editor’s Note: This article was revised on 19 December, 2011. An earlier version of this article misstated that Gilt Groupe was not targeting sales to specific consumers based on their shoe size. It is. The article also misstated Chris Maliwat’s affiliation with Gilt Groupe. Having previously served as vice president of strategy, Mr. Maliwat left the company in November 2011. The article also neglected to mention that new business lines Gilt City and Gilt Taste are 15 and 7 months old, respectively, at the time of writing.

Elin Kling | Source: GQ

In this instalment of The Business of Blogging, we speak to Elin Kling, the Swedish blogger behind Style by Kling.

NEW YORK, United States — “For me, it was a business from day one; I did it as a job,” said the ambitious Swedish style blogger Elin Kling, recalling how she first began blogging professionally for Stockholm-based media site Stureplan, back in 2007. “In Sweden, every third girl is running a blog,” said Kling. Indeed, in a country ranked first in the world by the World Economic Forum in its use of computing and communications technology, a staggering 39 percent of young women (aged 16-25) write or have written a blog, according to an annual report by Sweden’s World Internet Institute. “If you do it, you need to do it 100 percent,” explained Kling. “And to do that, I had to make a business of it.”

Kling began chronicling her outfit choices, fashion inspiration and other aspects of her daily life, and success came swiftly. “It became Sweden’s largest fashion blog in two days,” she said, attributing these results to Stureplan’s existing traffic and the popularity of a weekly column, also called Style By Kling, that she had been writing for the site before she began blogging in earnest.

Kling got her start in fashion working at Swedish lifestyle magazine Solo, contributed to Stureplan, and worked her way to head of the fashion desk at Expressen, Sweden’s second-largest daily newspaper, when national broadcaster TV4, the country’s largest television network, started hosting her personal blog on their website, earning Kling local fame.

In fact, Kling’s blog has almost always been hosted by commercial media companies. “I never had my blog just on my own platform. It’s always been hosted by different TV stations or the newspaper I was working for,” explained Kling. “I felt like I needed to reach out to more people than only the crowd that reads fashion blogs. That’s why I started to work with TV and daily newspapers to promote myself and my blog.”

The income Kling derived directly from blogging came in the form of a regular pay check from the media sites where her blog was hosted, with a bonus for generating strong traffic. “I was paid a certain amount of money every month — and then depending on how many visitors I had, I got more,” explained Kling.

In 2009, on the back of her growing celebrity, Kling became the head stylist for reality TV programme “Swedish Idol.” In 2010, she appeared on “Let’s Dance,” a Swedish show based on the BBC series “Strictly Come Dancing.” Then last year, Kling joined forces with Sweden’s largest publisher, Bonnier Tidskrifter, to launch a new fashion magazine called StyleBy, where she is now the fashion editor and creative director. “I’ve been a long admirer [sic] of how Elin works with her brand and has been able to create interest in what she does, both here in Sweden and internationally. Plus she has great contact with her readers,” said Jonna Bergh, editor-in-chief of StyleBy, in a statement that coincided with the magazine’s launch.

“I have a strategy for everything,” revealed Kling. “The way I write [on my blog] has to be professional, but at the same time it’s very important for me to make the readers feel like it’s very personal,” she said. “That’s what Bonnier wanted to bring to the magazine,” she continued. “Because of blogs, readers are so used to knowing the person who says ‘I love this top.’ They don’t want a magazine to tell them that, they want a person to tell them that,” she added. “That’s what we’re trying to get from the blog industry into the magazine: you can feel like a friend of the magazine; my magazine is your friend.”

In February of this year, Kling launched her first line of clothing: Elin Kling for H&M. “It was like a dream,” recalled Kling. “I’m originally from a farm, a really small city; I’ve always been interested in making budget pieces.”

While the line was only distributed in Sweden, Elin Kling for H&M was the retailer’s first ever collection designed in collaboration with a fashion blogger. “For one year I worked with H&M, two days a week,” said Kling. “I made a percentage of the sales and, of course, money to work with them for a year as a consultant.”

But at the centre of Kling’s growing business activities is Fashion Networks, a digital media company she co-founded in 2009 with business partner Christian Remröd. “I’ve been running [Fashion Networks] for a long time, but I’ve never been the face of that until we decided to do this in the States,” she revealed.

In March of this year, Kling moved her blog yet again, this time to Fashion Networks property NowManifest, a website that packages Style by Kling, Bryanboy, Rumi Neely’s Fashiontoast, and Industrie magazine’s blog together to create a kind of one-stop shop for fashion blogs.

The site pays its bloggers a regular monthly paycheck, which, for the bloggers, is perhaps the most appealing part. “I get paid every month, and I get my 20 percent bonus,” said Kling, referring to additional pay earned for generating strong traffic numbers. Of course, the bloggers who participate also hope to benefit from the cross-traffic NowManifest helps them generate for each other.

“Rumi has more traffic than me and that’s great for me, because I get the cross-traffic,” said Kling. “But she also gets new readers from my blog,” she continued, adding that 20 percent of NowManifest’s overall traffic comes from cross-linking. According to Fashion Networks, NowManifest has approximately 950,000 monthly unique visitors.

But which bloggers are benefiting most from this arrangement remains unclear, as Fashion Networks declined to share traffic numbers for individual blogs. Market sources suggest that the lion’s share of NowManifest’s traffic comes from Fashiontoast, which has been reported to have had around 1 million monthly unique visitors even prior to the NowManifest consolidation.

NowManifest takes this traffic and offers a variety advertising packages to luxury and fashion advertisers. “NowManifest takes care of all the advertising, so the bloggers can focus on their content,” said Kling, pointing to a roster of advertising clients including Marc Jacobs, Balenciaga, Kurt Geiger and Net-a-Porter. “They don’t know where to advertise,” she continued. “They have Style.com and Vogue.com, but we’re bigger in terms of unique visitors.”

At press time, there were no ads visible on the NowManifest site. But traditional display advertising may not be the only answer. NowManifest also offers a number of “premium advertorial” options that allow advertisers to integrate their brands directly into the site’s content flow.

In June, Marc Jacobs ran a targeted advertorial campaign on NowManifest in which Kling was photographed in Marc by Marc Jacobs clothing and published the images on her blog, alongside links to MarcJacobs.com. “We wanted to explore new ways to attract people to our site instead of relying on the usual boring banner ads we’ve all conditioned ourselves to ignore,” said Daniel Plenge, web and social media manager at Marc Jacobs.

The campaign performed well. “The day of the launch, we served over 94,000 impressions, drove over 2,000 unique visitors to MarcJacobs.com, and for the two week duration [of the campaign] we saw a two percent click-through rate,” continued Plenge, citing a figure that is many times higher than average display advertising click-through rates and underscoring the potential of this model. “We definitely feel that advertorials are more effective.”

But the benefit to the reader is less clear and the site’s concept of grouping bloggers together under a magazine-like umbrella has been met with mixed reviews. “The concept for the site is awfully precious,” said one reader, and “I love Elin…though her blog used to be a lot more actual outfit of the day posts and so on… now its mostly promoting Styleby and the Nowmanifest deal,” commented another on a Fashionista post announcing the site’s launch.

Fashion Networks has ambitions well beyond NowManifest, illustrating how Kling has leveraged her success as a blogger to work on a number of other businesses. “In Sweden, we have a website where you can show your outfits (Minoutfit), we have the blog website (Freshnet), and we have a website where you can actually sell your outfit (Seconds),” she explained.

Now, Kling and Remröd are planning a big US expansion. Indeed, both have relocated to New York in recent months to run the operation. Up their sleeve is a “stylist community” called Style of Today, a global version of Freshnet and Seconds USA.

But will what worked in Sweden work in the much larger and more diverse US market? “You really need to learn the market in different countries,” Kling acknowledged. In fact, she also has her sights set on China. “Me and Christian are going to Shanghai this fall,” she said. “I’m very into Asia.”

In October, the duo are also launching a new brand called Nowhere. “I’m putting out a clothing line this fall with Christian, but I’m not the designer,” said Kling. “The designer worked with Acne – I’m more about how will we make this sell, because I learned so much from H&M.”

With so many growing business interests, does Kling still consider herself to be a blogger? Or a businesswoman? “I’m not scared of being commercial, but I’m totally a blogger, it’s such an important part of what I’m doing,” she said. “I guess on my business card it will just say Elin Kling.”

Vikram Alexei Kansara is Managing Editor of The Business of Fashion

The Business of Blogging is a series on the rarely discussed business side of fashion blogging. Previous articles are listed below:

Julia Fowler and Geoff Watts | Source: Editd

LONDON, United Kingdom — Clearance sales point to a perennial problem in the fashion industry: the misalignment of supply and demand. Using traditional market research, brands and retailers are unable to predict with high accuracy what products consumers will actually purchase during any given season. As a result, merchandise that doesn’t sell is marked down, while demand for popular items goes unmet, leading to significant loss of income.

But better aligning supply and demand is a complex matter. That’s because, in trend-driven product categories like fashion, historical sales data never results in consistently better commercial decisions. What brands and retailers really require is information about what’s going to happen, not what’s already happened. But traditional fashion forecasting tools like panel-based research and trend reports are slow and unscientific, leaving buyers and merchants to make important business decisions based largely on intuition.

Now, an ambitious London-based startup called Editd — which, earlier this summer, raised a $1.6 million round of seed funding led by Index Ventures, investors in Net-a-Porter, Etsy and ASOS — is offering a realtime data monitoring and analytics platform that makes commercial decision-making in the fashion industry more scientific.

Crawling fashion retail sites, monitoring consumer opinions on social media and analysing output from key industry events, the platform blends machine-learning with human editing to turn vast amounts of raw data, captured in realtime, into the kind of actionable information that can give brands and retailers a competitive edge when making decisions like placing orders, determining pricing and managing merchandising.

BoF spoke with the founders of Editd, Geoff Watts and Julia Fowler, to find out more about how data-driven intelligence is revolutionising retail and reshaping the business of fashion.

BoF: What’s wrong with the way most fashion forecasting works today?

GW: A tangible lack of data and facts, plus the collapse of seasonal fashion is putting a lot of pressure on the way the industry works today. Most businesses have sales reporting or business intelligence to know what is selling, so they already understand the value of data at a trading level. This sales data combined with a great understanding of their customer, inspiration from trend services or their own research is what they use to make an educated guess about where things are going. But even the geniuses can’t get it 100 percent right — otherwise clearance sales wouldn’t exist because everything would sell through!

JF: Seasonal fashion is dead and speed-to-market now is the market — even on the high end. Many brands that work with us are doing 10 or more drops a year, so although the weather is seasonal, fashion is constantly variable. People expect to see new garments on every visit to a store and the production capacity is there to make it happen. Traditional forecasting isn’t a good fit when production can be so close to the market.

BoF: How can technology make this process more scientific?

GW: The cleverest businesses can know exactly what their customers want by using technology. You can measure consumers and the entire trading environment. Customers express themselves constantly online either through Twitter, on their blog, clicking a ‘Like’ button, adding a product to a basket, or buying something. The retail market is measurable — there’s never been more accurate, factual information on exactly what’s happening in realtime than now. It’s an incredible strategic advantage. But the breadth of information out there is too great for people to process and synthesise into actionable information. That’s why we developed Editd.

BoF: Last year, researchers discovered that they could predict, with astonishing accuracy, how well a movie would sell in its first couple of weekends by analysing mentions on Twitter. Can a similar analysis of realtime social data accurately predict demand for fashion products?

JF: Definitely. Though fashion is more nuanced than movie releases. People express opinions about fashion constantly — we have more than 100 million opinions sourced over the past 12 months specifically on individual garments, fabrics, prints and styles. One great example is our data on the longevity of skinny jeans — a trend that endured much longer than traditional forecasting would have predicted. The demand curve was obvious in our data. Making calls on short-term trends based on data is tremendously valuable as well. The ability to know if coloured denim, or leopard print will endure for the next 3 months is vital.

BoF: What types of data should fashion brands be monitoring to generate the most accurate predictions?

GW: Brands should get to know their competition and the full market. Your own sales reporting can’t tell you about something you never produced. Social data should be used beyond the marketing department; buyers and designers should understand what people are saying — it’s an incredibly powerful channel. But good data is useless without good execution. Last week it was 105 degrees in Manhattan and retailers had plenty of notice. Despite that, virtually all summer apparel was on sale and visual merchandising centred around coats and knitwear. It’s a perfect example of lost profit opportunities.

BoF: In a product category as emotional as fashion, to what degree should data drive design, buying and merchandising decisions? Can data-driven intelligence ever completely replace human intuition? What is the right mix?

GW: Some decisions will be handed off to technology, like when to discount, replenish, or what quantities to order. Computing can never replace human creativity, but designers and buyers should always keep their eye on the data — there’s nothing more satisfying than creating a best-seller.

BoF: Who is doing this well today?

JF: Burberry are a great example. They have strong creative direction while blurring the line between being a technology and a fashion company. There’s no doubt that they’ve directly interacted with their customers, understand social and can interpret the whole market. They have short-circuited the risk of production and holding inventory by introducing capsule collections, taking pre-orders before garments are produced, and having iPads in stores to view and order stock that’s not held on-site. Having that much data and being that close to their customers makes traditional forecasting irrelevant.

BoF: How will the rise of data-driven intelligence change the fashion industry in the years to come?

GW: One of the biggest wins will be to reduce wastage, which is an epidemic in the fashion business. We’re excited about the creative benefits too. With production capacity evolving as it is and the ability to understand consumers, we think it won’t be long before the fashion industry can be more experimental and less homogenised, while still being profitable.

Vikram Alexei Kansara is Managing Editor of The Business of Fashion

“Blogs posting things about us, going viral, spreading throughout the internet… it has an extraordinary impact on the business.”

Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough, speaking to BoF Founder Imran Amed at the Independent Fashion Bloggers Conference at New York Fashion Week during a wide-ranging conversation about the power and influence of social media on their budding business

Charles Nolan at BoF Breakfast Club | Photo: Drew Innis

NEW YORK, United States — Today, at a funeral service and celebration, the New York fashion community bids farewell to one its most loved personalities, Charles Nolan, who passed away over the weekend after a long battle with cancer. Before starting his own business, Charles played an instrumental role in the development of iconic American fashion businesses including Bill Blass, Ellen Tracy and Anne Klein.

I only had the chance to meet Charles once, back in November, when he attended our inaugural BoF Breakfast Club in New York, but was struck by his passion and love for our business, and was flattered and excited to hear that he was a regular BoF reader.

As our small way of commemorating his life and contribution to the business of fashion, the following is a casual and intimate interview only previously published in the program notes from one of Charles Nolan’s last fashion shows, conducted by his partner Andrew Tobias, who kindly agreed to share it with the BoF community.

Q (Andrew Tobias): You want me to interview you?

A (Charles Nolan): You’re the writer. You’ve interviewed lots of people. Why not.

Q: I don’t know anything about women’s clothes.

A: That doesn’t matter. It will save us money to have you do it.

Q: Ah [The interviewer, an investor in CHARLES NOLAN, LLC, brightens]

A: The idea is you doing what you do, helping me explain and brand what I do.

Q: You make people cry.

A: I do not make people cry!

Q: Charles.

A: We’re Irish. We’ve always been comfortable expressing ourselves freely. In eleven years, have I ever made you cry?

Q: No. But I have cowered.

A: All right. Start asking questions.

Q: Why are you a fashion designer?

A: I don’t really know. I have always loved to make clothes. I love the whole process of choosing the cloth and then letting it tell you what it wants to be. I’ve always wanted to do this but I’m not sure I’ll ever quite know why.

Q: The cloth tells you what it wants to be?

A: You know what I mean. It’s a bit cliché, but my mom had a terrific style. She loved clothes and the whole ritual of dressing.

Q: Do you have a philosophy when it comes to your work? Do you come out of a particular “school”? Other than F.I.T.

A: That’s a good question. I love making clothes…the whole process…but it’s important to me that they work for the wearer. I think I’m a very practical guy. (I know you don’t think so.) The basic idea is to make something as simple as possible while making the cut and construction as interesting as possible.

Q: Tetrahedrons?

A: Simple, clean lines. The period that really impacted me was 1960 to 1965. It was such a time of change. All the fins came off the car. The simpler dress was always on the leading lady. It was all about neat and pretty and sleek. It was a still fun and young in a very sophisticated way. You had this reaction to Fifties groupthink that led to the idea of self-exploration. ..and by the of the Sixties it’s all about “do your own thing.”

Q: You were three in 1960. How could this period have impacted you?

A: [Interviewee rolls eyes, mutters something about “the 4:30 Movie every day after school”…inaudible…continues:] “Darling,” the 1965 movie with Julie Christie completely captures that moment. All the characters make completely selfish choices. The aesthetic is great. It is so fresh. Still romantic, but it’s easy.

Q: Did the cloth tell you to say this?

A: You really have no feel for this, do you?

Q: None.

A: It’s all about the fabric. And the fit. And find that element of serendipity that adds a spark. I drive people crazy over the fit because that’s the absolutely most important thing. I want women to tell me they love wearing my clothes; that they feel comfortable. But I also want them to get compliments.

Q: What about the serendipity? Is this why you were baking a dress in our oven?

A: That was a pleated skirt from last Fall’s collection. It’s an ancient way of creating a pleat- you wet it, twist it really tight into a ball and knot it, and then slowly bake it just enough to set the pleat.

But the serendipity, or the spark, or whatever you want to call it, can come from anywhere. It’s what draws the customer’s eye to buy the garment- I hope- and then gets her the compliments when she wears it.

Q: What about big feathers? I’ve never seen you use big feathers. Wouldn’t that be great?

A: I used feathers last Fall and you don’t even remember? I made a turkey feather skirt last fall. Do you even see the clothes? You’re really just trying to annoy me, aren’t you?

Q: [Cowers, slightly.}

A: I’ve always shied away from pieces with too much fuss and excess decoration. I like to keep decoration very simple-but if you’re going to do it, it should be strong. And all this while never losing sight of the fit. No matter what the fashion or the season or who I’m designing for, one thing never changes: the clothes have to be comfortable.

Q: Is being a designer a choice, or were you born this way?

A: [Interviewee rolls eyes.]

Q: I seem to remember from writing FIRE AND ICE that Norman Norell was really Norman Levinson from Indiana, and that Halston and Bill Blass grew up in Indiana, too – and my sense was that they much have escaped from the heartland, dissolved all family ties, and come…NORELL! And HALSTON! And BILL BLASS! Did you grow up in Indiana? Tell us your real name.

A: This is my real name. I grew up on Long Island, the fifth of nine kids, and moved into the city when I was 16. We are a very tight-knit family, as you well know, having become enmeshed in it. My brother Kenneth is also a designer and my closest advisor. My sister Carola helps run my shop. My 11-year-old niece Emma accompanied my mother out on the runway of our Spring show, and then your mother walked down the runway-

Q: – the first runway show she’d been in since modeling for Judy & Jill at $75 a pop in 1939-

A: – and I regularly enlist the rest of my four sisters and four brothers, and their kids, as well. We sometimes drive each other crazy but we’re a very close family.

Q: What was the very first thing you remember designing? Where were you? How old were you?

A: I’m sure it was costumes for a play. When we were kids we were always putting on plays and revues for our parents who would sit through them and pretend to enjoy it.

Q: You once designed a ball gown for Arianna Huffington out of table cloths and roll of aluminum foil. Tell that story.

A: You know that story. You made me do it.

Q: Tell it anyway.

A: It was hardly a ball gown. Arianna was supposed to be the Queen of England in front of 1,000 people in an impromptu New Year’s Eve skit. You all gave me three hours to make her costume. I had to work with what I had.

Q: She looked great. What about Tipper?

A:  I had more time for that. I got to design the dress she wore the night Al Gore was nominated in Los Angeles and gave her that famous kiss. That was cool.

Q: And Queen Rania?

A: I’ve never made clothes for Rania. You hear me talk about her because she champions a group I support- FINCA- The Foundation for International Community Assistance. A really great organization that does micro-lending to women in the Third World. For me it’s all about empowering women. Men have had their turn and screwed it up. But now look at Germany. Look at Chile. Look at Liberia. Look at Geena Davis. It’s the women’s turn.

Q: Did having four sisters- and more than one brother with design sense influence you in any way?

A: How could it not? I’ve done prom dresses (junior and senior) wedding gowns, christening robes, Mothers of the bride and groom.

Q: I think of a woman’s clothes a frilly and -

A: You have your own issues.

Q: How much is this show costing us?

A: We’re done.

Andrew Tobias’s first New York Times best-seller was FIRE AND ICE, the biography of Revlon founder Charles Revson. Other than that, Charles Nolan is his only other connection to the fashion world.

Tumblr Screenshots | Source: Google Images

NEW YORK, United States — According to comScore, microblogging platform Tumblr hit an “inflection point” sometime last June. Page views on Tumblr.com — which lets users create mixed-media blog posts with the kind of extreme simplicity and immediacy not found in traditional blogging platforms — began to surge. By October 2010, page views in the U.S. were up a staggering 1,540 percent from the year before. According to the New York-based company, Tumblr now has 47 million unique visitors per month, 2.7 billion page views per month, and over 9 million users, with approximately 30,000 new users joining the platform every day.

With numbers like these, it’s no wonder that Tumblr — which has been compared to Facebook and previously attracted just over $10 million from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures (both key investors in Twitter) — was recently able to raise between $25 million and $30 million in additional financing, valuing the business at an estimated $135 million. Famed Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital was the lead investor. “I will say, it is nice to be well-received on the West Coast,” Tumblr’s president, John Maloney, told Business Insider.

Interestingly, Tumblr has been very well-received in the fashion community, as well, giving rise to a universe of fashion-related microblogs. “Over the past year, fashion has emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of the Tumblr community, with 20% of our top 1000 blogs related to fashion,” said Rich Tong, a co-founder of Weardrobe (sold to Like.com in 2009) and Tumblr’s new fashion director.

It’s not surprising then that Tumblr founder David Karp told TechCrunch last week that Tumblr wants to be “the best place in the world for the best creative communities,” with fashion at the core of this focused strategy.

Tumblr Page Views, 2009-2010 | Source: comScore Inc.

Many of the most popular fashion Tumblrs are personal style blogs like whatiwore and triciawillgoplaces, vintage and craft-focused blogs like psimadethis and hawtvintage, and street style blogs like fuckyeahstreetstyle and lookbookdotnu, launched by the eponymous look-sharing site. But a recent post on Refinery29 entitled “The Best Fashion Tumblrs To Follow Now” reflects the striking diversity of fashion blogs that have sprung up since the platform was launched in 2007. The list includes shoelust, theimpossiblecool, and textbook, a Tumblr dedicated to answering the question “What would Holden Caulfield wear?”

Industry insiders have embraced the platform as well. Purple Fashion editor Olivier Zahm and photographer Terry Richardson, for example, both use Tumblr to publish informal, spontaneous and highly popular personal diaries, Purple Diary and Terry’s Diary.

On one level, Tumblr has struck a chord with the fashion community because, like fashion itself, the platform is both immediate and highly-visual. While Tumblr posts can be text, images, quotes, links, chats, audio clips or videos, 50% of all posts are photos. “As a platform Tumblr is almost purely visual,” said Francine Ballard, founder and editorial director of DesignerSocial, an online showroom that operates a Tumblr. “Most of what gets reblogged is prompted by a sort-of visceral response. So by definition, it has the potential to be a fantastic medium for fashion.”

Indeed, Tumblr has found particular resonance amongst fashion creatives, who use the platform to aggregate and share the inspiration they find online. “I use Tumblr as a way for my creative team to share things that they are inspired by,” said Diana Hong, creative director at digital fashion agency CreateThe Group and an early adoptor of the platform.

Tavi Gevinson, best known for her blog The Style Rookie, also maintains a microblog called Slow Motion Crawl, which she migrated from Blogspot to Tumblr early last year. “It’s much more informal, more for archiving and self-reference than anything else. My favorite thing is how convenient it is for storing inspiration — when I compile images for a post on Style Rookie, I usually find them all in my Tumblr archives.”

But as well as being radically visual, quick and convenient — a Tumblr bookmarklet, as well as Tumblr mobile apps for Blackberry, iPhone and Android, make it incredibly simple to share content — Tumblr is fundamentally different from traditional blogging platforms because it comes with a built-in community. On Tumblr, users can “follow” and “reblog” other bloggers, whose posts appear in realtime streams on a Tumblr “dashboard,” much like on Twitter.

“It’s so addictive because you follow your favourite Tumblrs, which give you the best of the internet, so you just keep clicking through your dashboard and finding more and more that you like,” said Tavi.

“Tumblr seems to now have an audience of regular users and we decided it would be beneficial to drive traffic back to the site, as well as being a source of inspiration,” said Alistair Allan, digital director at Dazed Group, which operates popular fashion, art and music website Dazed Digital and, last month, launched dazeddigital.tumblr.com, a Tumblr that highlights favourite items from Dazed Digital each day.

“Many publications primarily care about Tumblr as a traffic driver, but we’ve noticed that the ones who use Tumblr to express a point of view are the ones who succeed within the community,” said Tumblr’s Mr. Tong, commenting on the Dazed Digital offering. “Once they do that, the traffic takes care of itself.”

Notably, Tumblr has managed to attract a passionate community that’s largely composed of young and influential, design-focused people. For fashion media brands, this is an extremely attractive, high-value demographic who have an almost insatiable appetite for content and share their discoveries with their social graph, both on Tumblr and across the web. “Our community loves original content — and loves reblogging it straight from the source,” said Mr. Tong.

Conveniently, a Facebook app and publish to Twitter feature neatly integrate Tumblr into the two most important social networks on the internet, enabling the platform’s influential userbase to easily distribute content to friends and followers.

It’s no surprise, then, that major fashion publishers like Vogue and Elle have recently launched Tumblrs. “The demographics of the Tumblr audience are very much in line with the demographics of our readers: typically young, fashion-minded people with a strong appreciation for pop culture,” said Keith Pollock, editorial director of Elle.com.

The platform also allows fashion media brands to speak to consumers in a softer, more personal tone. “Tumblr provides a great opportunity for brands and publishers to step out of their strict editorial guidelines and create a down to earth, approachable voice,” said Mr. Tong. What’s more, Tumblr makes it easy to establish the kind of genuine reciprocal relationships that turn fans and followers into brand loyalists. “By following users you think create great content, liking their posts and reblogging their content as well, you establish a very passionate and loyal following,” explained Mr. Tong.

But it’s not just media companies who are getting in on the action. LVMH-backed ethical fashion brand Edun operates a Tumblr called Eye of Edun, where the company shares behind the scenes imagery and visual inspiration. “Tumblr is embraced by artists and creative communities more so than other blogging platforms,” said Edun’s brand director Bianca Barattini. “Edun.com tells our entire story, from backstory to mission and offers a shopping experience, while the Tumblr is purely inspiration.”

But it may not be long before fashion brands start to integrate commerce into their Tumblrs. Last Thursday, a small startup called Of a Kind, which offers limited edition items from emerging designers, became the first store to launch on Tumblr. “Building our site on Tumblr seemed like an obvious move — it has allowed us to put our content in front of early adopters in a place where they were already congregating,” said co-founder and president Erica Cerulo. Tumblr does not technically support e-commerce, but Of a Kind was able to easily connect their Tumblr to Shopify, a simple digital commerce app, to offer a fully shopable experience.

Asked if Tumblr would be adding e-commerce functionality in the future, Mr. Tong responded: “We haven’t yet pursued supporting that feature set, but given the virality of our network, we’re definitely exploring ideas on how best to integrate the e-commerce component into our user experience.”

With the possibility of commerce-enabled Tumblrs on the horizon, the existing opportunities for content distribution and audience engagement, and the minimal time and effort it actually takes to start blogging on Tumblr, we suspect it won’t be too long before smart fashion brands see Tumblr as an indispenable tool in their social media arsenal, alongside Twitter and Facebook.

If fashion and creative communities are at the heart of Tumblr, BoF must be there too. You can now follow us on Tumblr: businessoffashion.tumblr.com

Vikram Alexei Kansara is Managing Editor of The Business of Fashion.

Victoria Bartlett | Source: VPL

NEW YORK, United States — “It was almost like an experiment,” says Victoria Bartlett, of starting her much-loved underwear-as-outerwear line VPL in 2003. “I felt like a scientist going in and I really didn’t know how it was going to go.” Seven years on, with a CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund nomination (2007) under her belt and a recently opened retail presence in New York’s SoHo, we can fairly say that the experiment has been a success.

The road that got her there is paved in equal parts with Bartlett’s adventurousness and the shrewd discipline that has proved a boon for her line. Fresh from the London College of Fashion, in the late ‘80s the British-born Bartlett launched a line called BC, which, as she says, “failed because I was too green and too young.” So the young designer went in search of other avenues to pursue her love of fashion. “I took a sabbatical and decided to take a venture into styling,” she says, “which wasn’t as prevalent as it is now.”

She still speaks passionately about the tools she learned working as a stylist, and the way they inform her life and work now. “You learn how to create clothes,” she says. “A lot of designers (I know from consulting for them for years) get very tunnel-visioned — they start with a skirt or they start items and they don’t know how it all goes together.”

Throughout the ’90s, Bartlett was a star stylist, in fact, shaping fashion editorials for some of the most cutting-edge magazines in the business, before being tapped as the fashion editor for Allure, and then, famously, as the fashion director at Interview.

But having editorial connections wasn’t just peaches and cream when she launched her own line. “It’s a double-edged sword,” she says. “In some ways it’s great because you know all those people and it is exciting and you get a lot of press. On the other hand, not everyone likes it when you change over — they think, alright, you’ve made the jump, now prove it.”

Indeed, having dressed Madonna made no difference when it came to writing a business plan. Bartlett is coolly cavalier about having had little idea about the brass tacks of business. “I think in life, often you are not prepared and the best way is to just amble in to things. I hate to say it, but sometimes it works. And I kind of did amble into this.”

But she didn’t come in totally unarmed. She was full of passion and decisiveness, driven by a clear vision. “I didn’t start with a full collection, I started with this concept,” she explains. “I was sort of obsessed with creating this new arena between lingerie and sportswear, which hadn’t been bridged. I love gym, I love the body and anatomy, the whole geography of it. I’m also in love with the whole architecture of it, looking at old vintage stuff, and I wanted the idea that you were accessorising, like putting on jewellery or a necklace, that you don’t feel it is this naughty sort of under-secret like lingerie for the bedroom. I wanted to take it almost into liberation of women, you know, burn your bra. And we did the breaker tank, which was almost my answer to burning your bra, that you could wear this bra tank on its own or under things and you weren’t exposing yourself. So it was really about creating this new arena that was really exciting for me.” Ergo VPL — Visible Panty Line.

Bartlett speaks of the celebration of the human form with the fervour of a visionary and about Paul Poiret, her fashion idol, with the passion of an undergraduate. Poiret called himself the “King of Fashion,” but we don’t really get a sense of how he ran his company. “I think that’s true,” says Bartlett. “I actually think that’s why the world is divided — right brain, left brain — and I think that’s why creatives are creatives. I think back in the day, way back, it didn’t matter because people revered the artist and the business would just sort of organically happen. In the last ten years though, the business of fashion has changed. It’s really became an industry and that was the death of a lot of creatives. At some point you have to manage and it requires a lot of strategizing.”

While recognizing this, Bartlett happened on a bit of wonderful synchronicity that would ultimately put VPL on it’s present, sure track. While consulting for Theory, Bartlett met Kikka Hanazawa who was doing business strategy for the company. “She’d actually been following my collection and we met and got on really well and we started talking about things and she started getting involved in my collection. We were talking about projects, but she really wanted to be involved fully in creating something.” And so a creative-business partnership was born.

“I’ve learned a lot through Kikka,” says Bartlett. “It’s definitely important to have someone who understands the building blocks of business.” The two seem to really jive together, sharing the same ethos for the growth and disposition of the business. They both have clear ambitions for online retail and a flowering of VPL stores, but also maintain a rigorous sobriety when expanding. “You know what I think’s been great,” Bartlett explains, “we’ve never rushed anything. I think one of the important things is never to take a giant leap, but to take small steps at a time and be cautious in terms of growth.”

Chris Wallace is a contributing editor at The Business of Fashion.

FashionStake Screenshot | Source: FashionStake

The FashionStake Diaries is a four-part series that gives BoF readers a behind the scenes look at the crucial first months of a crowdfunding fashion startup, seen through the eyes of its founders. Today, in the final diary entry, they reflect on the crucial first weeks following launch: what worked, what did not, lessons learned and plans for the future.

NEW YORK, United States —On the day of “go live” for any startup, planning is quickly overtaken by the reality of operational work. For us, September 1st was a memorable launch day. Months of pre-launch strategising, building, debating and recruiting was replaced with the business of actually running the company: answering customer calls, shipping our first items and managing our online merchandising.

We’d like to share our first month in business with you and, since this is our final post in the FashionStake Diaries, thank you for reading and commenting on our entries.

How we launched

After a sleepless night, we launched the website at 9am on September 1st. All of us huddled around our Lead Developer’s laptop and held our collective breath as he turned on the site. The actual launch went pretty smoothly. As we slowly migrated back to our own desks, the day’s first press coverage and social sharing started to drive thousands of hits to the site. Our server actually crashed a few times during the morning. Heart stopping, but memorable moments!

By the afternoon we were busy with actually operating the company. That was the biggest surprise for us: just how quickly the team had to shift modes from planning to doing. Although the launch date had been on the horizon for months, transitioning to the everyday tasks of answering the phone and checking up on the warehouse was an initial shock to many of us too. We also learned that you need to improvise, no matter how well-planned you think your business is.

Funding Lauren Merkin and Nicholas K

Early October was an exhilarating time for us. Lauren Merkin and Nicholas K hit their funding targets of $10,000 and $50,000, respectively, and their collections went into production. The secret to hitting the targets? A genuine co-marketing effort between the designers and FashionStake. Indeed, both these designers marketed their collections to their own existing customers and received a solid response. The folks at Nicholas K also decided to debut their FashionStake collection on the New York Fashion Week runway, which generated tons of interest.

But as expected, there were a few designers who did not meet their targets within the predefined timeframe. We realised that we need to make sure it’s as easy as possible for designers to tell their existing fans about their FashionStake collections through email, social networks and selected offline channels.

Zooming in

A few days after launching, we noticed that many of our customers were pre-ordering pieces. In fact, when we took a look at the data from September, we realized that over 70 percent of our transaction value was actually coming from pre-ordered items. We also observed that many customers were pre-ordering without purchasing the standard $50 stake. We concluded that our customer behaviour was moving us away from the original premise of consumers investing in designers and towards a model where consumers, in essence, fund collections by pre-ordering pieces.

Pre-ordering is a great way to support designers. This way, designers only produce what consumers order (supply is in tune with demand) and can use the revenue they collect to fund production and remain cash flow positive.

Assuming lead times from production to final delivery can be kept within a reasonable timeframe, pre-ordering is a great way to eliminate inventory costs in the supply chain and offer genuine value to customers. It’s also a way for the public to access “sneak previews” of upcoming merchandise, another win-win for designers (who want to generate demand) and consumers (who want early access to their favourite designers).

After careful analysis, we decided to ‘zoom in’ on this aspect of our business and focus on optimising the pre-order experience, since that’s what our customers were doing anyway.

On reflection, our ability to course-correct and listen to exactly what our customers and our internal data were telling us was crucial. What’s more, this process never stops. Doing a startup is iterative and we think it’s important that we remain flexible enough to continually evolve and solve our customers’ changing needs.

Three e-commerce lessons

Amongst the mayhem of the first month, three e-commerce-specific lessons also stood out:

1. Consumers want “pace” online. It’s no use having only a handful of designers on the website for an extended period of time. Consumers made it clear that they wanted a larger cast of designers coming in and out of the website more frequently. We listened to this feedback and are now offering daily trunk shows, with several new designers a week.

2. Emails are important. The biggest mistake we made was overlooking the value of our email database as a driver of traffic to our website. Our problem was that we didn’t really promote our email signup form anywhere on our website, which meant that we weren’t able to open a dialogue with first time visitors to the site.

3. Make things sharable. The power of people’s social graphs is huge and increasing. We’ve seen the significant impact of Facebook sharing and other means of customers referring their friends in our traffic logs. We’re spending a lot of time at the moment making more of our content instantly shareable, with clear incentives for people to refer friends to FashionStake. A fashion democracy only works with a critical mass of people!

We hope you’ve enjoyed reading The FashionStake diaries and look forward to seeing you on FashionStake soon.

Vivian Weng and Daniel Gulati are co-founders of FashionStake, a new online marketplace for fashion that launched September 1, 2010.