Social Media Speed Of Fast Fashion?

Speed of reaction to social media trends is becoming more important in the battle between fast fashion and more established High Street retailers, say experts..

Young women are increasingly being influenced by what they see on apps such as Instagram, as well as by celebrities.

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Fast fashion brands are jumping on these trends.

But High Street retailers say they are upping their game to compete.

The fashion industry is important to the UK economy. It supports 880,000 jobs, and contributes £28 Billion to GDP.

And for five days from Friday, the fashion world descends on the capital for London Fashion Week, which showcases British fashion and global brands.

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Topshop's global marketing director Sheena Sauvaire told the BBC's Today programme that while the concoctions on the catwalk influence High Street retail design, social media is increasingly playing a role.

"The thing right now in fashion is it's not just runway that's inspiring those trends, trends are bubbling up on the streets.

"Street style will also inspire trends, so really it's become a melting pot of inspiration."

Just as social media is inspiring designers, it is also influencing young women in making style choices, she says.

"That's been the big shift... this inclusivity that social media brings, and the diversity. Girls want to see girls who look like them, that they can relate to wearing fashion, as opposed to those images that have been driven through print fashion magazines for many years."

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Disruptive fashion firms, which quickly jump on trends, have recognized this and are gaining ground against High Street retailers.

Pink Boutique, one of the fastest growing fashion brands, says it takes design inspiration from sources including social media, says Dan Arden, the firm's chief commercial officer.

"There was... a saying that was trending over social media over recent months which was 'U OK hun?'," says Dan Arden, the firm's chief commercial officer.

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"We were able to very quickly get that into slogan T-shirts - I think we turned that around in three days, and we were able to get that selling and online very quickly."

How quickly a brand can get a product through its supply chain directly correlates with sales, he adds.

Bricks and Clicks

The fashion industry is evolving. In the past year, nearly seven out of 10 women have bought clothes online.

This year online fashion sales increased to 24% of total fashion spend, up from 17% in 2013.

Quiz Clothing defines itself as an "ultra-fast" fashion firm. Based in Glasgow, it recently floated on the AIM stock exchange, valuing the company at £200 Million.

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Chief commercial officer Sheraz Ramzan says the firm has grown from "a couple of stores in Scotland to what is now over 300 outlets trading in over 20 countries".

"We've always been a fast fashion brand, and I think now that the buzzword that we're hearing is that we are an 'ultra-fast' fashion brand, and we've developed a very slick supply chain to allow the brand to react very quickly to fashion trends."

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'Fierce Competition'

So where does that leave bricks and mortar retailers? Have they been swept aside by this tsunami of fast fashion - or are they OK hun?

Richard Cristofoli, marketing director at Debenhams, isn't fazed: "Retail generally has always been fast moving, and critically it's a multi-channel business, not just a High Street business.

"So Debenhams today - over a fifth of our sales are online, and increasingly people are blending the channels - they are shopping online, collecting in store, or browsing in store, and shopping on their phones.

"We see it as a very fluid and dynamic place to be, but undoubtedly it is challenging."

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Topshop is another retailer that is finding the line between online and physical shopping is getting blurred.

Ms Sauvaire says: "We know from insight that pretty much anyone now that's coming into our store, she's been on our site already.

She said people see trends on social media, browse online, then go into a physical store to try on clothes.

And it's this blurring of the lines that represents a real opportunity for established retailers, she says.

"If we can knit together the online experience with the physical experience, get to better know our customer and give her personalized choices, the right product at the right time, that's going to be the winning place for retail."

And how to do this? Through technology that is still in development, she says.

Guest Authored By Lucy Burton & Tom Espiner. Lucy and Tom are Business Reporters for BBC News, London UK. Follow Them on Twitter.

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“The battle between fast fashion and the High Street continues.

"It keeps us on our toes.

Fierce competition, nimble, agile competition is what they are, and it means that you really interrogate your business and your operating model, and who you're for as well," Ms Sauvaire says.." -Lucy Burton & Tom Espiner

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Social Media Influencer Internship?

You may have heard about Chiara Ferragni, who started a personal style blog as a 27-year-old that now generates $8 million per year..

Or Johnny Ward, who started blogging about his travels as a budget backpacker and ended up with a successful media company. Or the food blogger who earns $150,000 per year.

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The internet is overflowing with how-to guides on how to imitate their successes by becoming a full-time Instagrammer, blogger, and fashion guru.

But you have probably never heard of the women featured in (not) getting paid to do what you love, a book by Cornell researcher Brooke Erin Duffy that examines the myth that working hard on a personal brand will pay off in the long run.

She compares this premise to that of unpaid internships. "The expectation is, if you invest yourself now, this will pay off in the future with this glamorous, fantastic job," Duffy says. "But the reality is much less auspicious in terms of how often these actually do turn into full-time employment."

Just as not everyone can make it based on unpaid internships, which inherently favor those with connections and families who will pay for their living expenses, not everyone can build a huge online presence and find enough advertisers to make a living. "You have to think about the investments they're making upfront, the investments in the fashion or the makeup or the food," she says.

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Social influencers with 1,000 to 100,000 followers can be paid between $50 to $1,000 to advertise for a brand, according to influencer marketing firm Hireinfluence, which works with brands such as Oreo and Microsoft to place products in the social feeds of popular personalities.

Most of the dozens of women who Duffy interviewed, despite many hours of unpaid work, have little to show for their efforts.

Meanwhile, companies are benefiting from the free labor, which Duffy calls "aspirational work," by running "influencer marketing" campaigns that sometimes only pay in free swag.

Q: What is the myth that powers aspirational labor?

The myth is very much a meritocratic one: That if you are putting the most creative, unique content out there, and you have a special voice, you will rise to the top. And by rise to the top, I mean you will earn an income.

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The reason that I call this a myth is that if you look at people who have actually risen to the top - the super bloggers, the super influencers - I don't see them as people just like us. They have some sort of existing capital. They have the right connections. And so, the myth is one of digital meritocracy. If we work hard enough, if we have this creative vision that nobody else has provided, we can get our dream job and do what we love and get paid.

What is the difference between aspirational labor and posting on Facebook once in a while?

What is different with aspirational labor activities is that they are very much seen as something that will provide a return on investment. They'll provide you access to the right people who will turn this into a job.

How much work did the people you interviewed put into their personal brands?

Let's take the case of someone uploading an image on Instagram. We see the final image and the cutesy caption, but we don't see the amount of thought and strategy that goes on before any of this happens.

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You have them preparing the photo, staging the photo, doing the photo shoot, afterwards editing the photo and coming up with a caption. And then you have this self-promotion.

A lot of people who had been doing this for years were shocked at how a culture of self-promotion eclipsed the creative elements. They got into this because they really enjoyed styling or writing or photos. They would say, I'm coming up with my creative product, and then I'm spending hours promoting it - sharing it on Instagram, sharing it on Facebook, sharing it on Twitter.

It can't be the same content. They have to vary it depending on the audience for each platform. And after that, they would say, we have to go through and respond to all of our followers, and we have to engage this culture of reciprocal following. I follow a blogger because she'll follow me.

It was just staggering to hear all of the work that goes into this.

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Was anyone you interviewed successful?

A lot of people who were successful had worked for years moonlighting as a blogger while maintaining their full-time jobs. They were essentially doing two jobs in order to make enough to subsist on.

There was also a sense that they always had to be on. You can't just abandon your blog for a week, or you see a huge dip in your followers, which directly links to your advertising income.

And so, there's this kind of, what is this doing to my personal life?

But also, when is this going to pay off enough for me to leave my job?

Or is it not?

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How are companies benefiting from this myth that anyone can make it on social media?

Native advertising and influencer marketing is all predicated on this idea that "real people" are promoting their favorite brands and products. It's much cheaper for an advertiser to reach out to a young person with their own "organic following" than it is to place an ad in a magazine or on TV.

Brands kind of dangle this promise of hope. You'll see campaigns where brands will say, hey, hashtag your favorite jeans look and post on Instagram and maybe we'll feature your image for people to see. There are also more dubious promises of exposure. I talked with people who said the companies would not offer them any sort of financial compensation. In one case, this woman was a cosmetics blogger and she had a sizable following. She said companies would sometimes send her products unsolicited and say, hey, could you just do us a solid and blog about this?

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You drew a parallel between aspirational labor and other types of traditional "women's work." Can you explain?

"Women's work" is a form of invisible labor that goes unrecognized and uncompensated. Child care, domestic work are seen as activities that women inherently do and they're naturally good at.

It's invisible in that it's unseen and also there are no economic rewards associated with it.

We now see the lineage of this devaluing of work in the social media economy.

I see these investments of time and energy as a form of work, but they're often seen as leisure, they're seen as fun, and they're seen as something that shouldn't be materially compensated.

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After interviewing all of these women, did you come away with a conclusion about what you think should change?

I think the best place to call attention to that are in the very same places where this activity is happening, which is online, across social media.

I would love to see more attention to how few people are making it in this industry, how few businesses are willing to compensate influencers. They have this incredibly saturated market, it's teeming with young people who are willing to work as so-called influencers. I think transparency about how lopsided the system is what I'd like to see as the first step.

Guest Authored By Sarah Kessler. Sarah writes about the future of work. Before coming to Quartz, she was a senior writer at Fast Company. She is also the author of an upcoming book about the gig economy. Follow Sarah on Twitter.

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“Begg says it should be fairly easy for marketers used to using Social Studio to figure out how to incorporate the visual recognition tools into their repertoire.

The new functionality should be available immediately to Salesforce Social Studio users.."

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)