Tod’s aims to rejuvenate iconic Gommino shoes with Dots to Life blogger campaign

Avid fashion blog followers may have noticed several high-calibre bloggers have simultaneously started wearing and drawing attention to Tod’s footwear of late. This is not down to coincidence – earlier this month the quintessential Italian brand launched a social influencer campaign to create buzz around its signature Gommino shoes.

On the campaign website, customers can check out the various style leaders who have been coveting the style, as well as submit their own photos.

Bloggers from all over the world have taken part in the so-called ‘Dots to Life’ campaign, including Italy’s Chiara Ferragni of The Blonde Salad, Switzerland’s Kristina Bazan of Kayture, and Shanghai-based Han Huohuo.

And it’s not just bloggers that have jumped on board – industry heavyweights such as Anna Dello Russo are also featured on site. The result: a showcase of the worldwide popularity of the Gommino, highlighting the shoe’s versatility and serving as outfit styling inspiration alongside.

The move for Tod’s to predominantly use bloggers over celebrities is a smart one in today’s online world. These stars – many of them now enjoying a level of celebrity status themselves – serve as influencers through their connection to existing customers and those highly engaged in fashion, but also yield influence over a much younger crowd who may not be as aware of the understated brand.

The endorsement should emphasise the brand’s heritage, reduce the ‘old person’s shoe’ stigma around the Gomminos, and boost its popularity among potential future customers. It’s helping the brand get it’s ‘cool’ back among the younger, digitally-savvy generation, effectively.

Tod’s is making the blogger campaign all the more social by inviting its Facebook fans to upload their own images to the campaign website. The post on its Facebook page has received over 22,800 likes so far. Participation through Instagram is also possible – with the tags #todsgommino and #dotsoflife.

This is a great example of an influencer campaign leveraging the power of social media as a means of inspiration and conversation. As with many campaigns, the site is curated and not all fan images are published. As with Burberry’s Art of the Trench, this creates a more exclusive feel and may inspire fans to put more creative thought into their snaps.

Tod’s is also pushing content over social related to the FIFA World Cup – recent posts have referenced the theme, I Cheer For My Colors. Working with bloggers seems to have yielded positive results for the brand in the past too. In February, for instance, it partnered with Ferragni of The Blonde Salad to promote its Touch handbag.

By Anna Abrell

Digital snippets: Prada, John Lewis, Comptoir des Cotonniers, Sephora, L’Oréal

A round-up of the latest stories to know about surrounding all things fashion and tech:

• Prada delves into visual past with Pradasphere microsite [Luxury Daily]

• John Lewis picks iBeacons, smart-home Sonos rival, and 3D planning start-ups as final partners for JLab incubator scheme [The Drum]

• You can now buy Comptoir des Cotonniers directly from ads on bus shelters in France [Fashionista]

• The ROI: Sephora, Thismoment share results of Pinteresting beauty board launch [BrandChannel]

• L’Oréal targets ads based on hair colour in online photos [AdAge]

• ‘Vogue’ makes its Instagram shoppable with Liketoknow.it [Fashionista]

• adidas promises to exclude consumers unless they opt ‘#allin’ to World Cup campaign [Marketing]

• Visual search set to make world of imagery instantly shoppable [BoF]

• Condé Nast drafts an internal ‘Magna Carta’ for native advertising [AdAge]

• Lingerie brand turns to Snapchat for a voyeuristic, vanishing lookbook [PSFK]

• Fruit of the Loom turns GIFs into Father’s Day gifts [AdWeek]

• The power women who are reinventing the way you shop fashion online [Forbes]

• Mary Meeker’s 2014 internet trends report: all the slides plus highlights [Quartz]

Digital snippets: Oculus, Luxottica, Wren, Asos, Nike, Birchbox, Tom Ford, Kenzo

The big tech story this week has of course been about Facebook’s purchase of virtual reality headset company Oculus VR. But there were lots of others to know about too. Read on for an edit…

• Google deal with Luxottica will bring Glass to Ray-Ban, Oakley [WSJ]

• How Wren made a viral video of strangers kissing and increased sales by nearly 14,000% [Business Insider]

• Asos and Nike celebrate 27 years of Air Max with first Google+ shoppable hangout [Marketing Magazine]

• Birchbox, seller of beauty products, steps out from web to open New York store [NY Times]

• Tom Ford joins the world of e-commerce with sexy new web store [Fashionista]

• Kenzo’s virtual aquarium highlights the danger of overfishing [PSFK]

• Chanel releases new Coco Mademoiselle Keira Knightley ad – She’s Not There [The Inspiration Room]

• Lancôme ramping up digital initiatives [WWD]

• How Yoox became the Amazon of the fashion world [Telegraph]

• Why in-store tracking might not be as bad as it sounds [CNNMoney]

• The Shazam of fashion is here, introducing ‘ASAP54′ [Styleite]

• Silicon Valley never talks about the real reason you don’t own a smart watch or ‘wearable tech’ [Business Insider]

 

Zappos piloting personal shopping service on Instagram with #nextootd

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Most of you will have already heard of the hashtag #ootd. For those who haven’t, this is the epitome of the #selfie phenomenon. “Outfit of the day” as it stands for, has over 23 million posts attached to it on Instagram.

That’s 23 million images associated with what people are wearing, said Will Young, director of Zappos Labs – the San Francisco-based experimentation and innovation arm of e-commerce site Zappos – during SXSW last week. “We looked at [those figures] and asked as a retailer how do we be a part of that?”

The answer? His team recently launched a pilot project on the platform called Next OOTD. Very simply, followers are invited to post a selfie along with the hashtag #nextootd. Those who do will receive a personalised shopping recommendation based on their Instagram from Zappos in return.

Zappos is of course a company that prides itself, and has become known, for customer service (its longest ever phone call was nine and a half hours – and celebrated for that fact, Young revealed). He said they are constantly trying to think of lots of different ways to take that service to the next level.

At the moment this project is entirely manual – there’s one person doing it who doesn’t even work weekends – so the potential to scale isn’t really there, he admitted, but that’s not to say it won’t be down the line.

“Personal shopping via Instagram… that could be the future of our business,” he argued – and perhaps rightly so given the buzz around social shopping once again at present. “It could have a 50 person team manning it and making personalised shopping recommendations.”

To his own strategy, he added: “I heard Sarah Friar, CFO of Square speak recently, and she said: ‘Think big but start small.’ That’s kind of how we approach things at Zappos Labs.”

Digital snippets: Wren, Gucci, John Lewis, Lord & Taylor, Kenneth Cole, Sephora

A bit of a catch-up post today in light of several weeks of travel… here then all the latest stories to know about surrounding fashion and tech from the past fortnight or so:

 

• “First Kiss” film (as above) goes viral with 63 million views – is ad for clothing label Wren [NY Times]

• Gucci launches own Spotify music hub to promote short film ‘The Fringe’ [The Drum]

• John Lewis looks to digital innovation as next big thing in retail with ‘JLab incubator’ [The Guardian]

• Lord & Taylor now accepting bitcoin [CNBC]

• Kenneth Cole challenges consumers to do good deeds and prove it via Google Glass [Creativity]

• Sephora launches ‘Beauty Board’ social shopping platform [USA Today]

• Bergdorf Goodman makes Instagram shots shoppable at SXSW with 52Grams [5th/58th]

• Dolce & Gabbana crafts love story around perfume to appeal to consumer emotion [Luxury Daily] 

• adidas launches gaming platform powered by social media starring Lionel Messi [Marketing Magazine]

• Can Instagram save ageing teen retailer Aeropostale? [CNBC]

• Which big brands are courting the maker movement, and why – from Levi’s to Home Depot  [AdWeek]

• How beacon technology could change the way we shop [Fashionista]

• On Instagram, a bazaar where you least expect it [Bits blog]

• What Google’s wearable tech platform could mean for the fashion industry [Fashionista]

• Smartphone payment system to be unveiled in UK [FT]

• Alibaba ramping up efforts to sell US brands in China [WSJ]

• What does WeChat’s new e-credit card mean for luxury? [JingDaily]

• How the top 10 US retailers use Pinterest [Econsultancy]

• The NYC start-ups you need to know [Refinery29]

• Op-Ed | Are camera phones killing fashion? [BoF]

Looking back at SXSW: wearables, privacy and avoiding bandwagons

This article first appeared on The Business of Fashion 

Rachel Arthur recaps the highlights of this year’s SXSW Interactive conference and identifies key takeaways for the fashion industry.

AUSTIN, United States — The marketing and tech crowd hit Austin, Texas, once again this week for the annual SXSW Interactive conference, bringing with them more members of the fashion industry than ever before. There were representatives from long-time attendees like Burberry and Bergdorf Goodman, alongside a flurry of first timers from Parisian fashion houses and UK department stores alike, a sure sign of technology’s increasingly pervasive impact on fashion retail.

Thought of as an incubator for tech-enabled creativity which aims to provide a “view on the future,” the annual event is overloaded with keynotes, panel discussions and pop-up events, not to mention a trade show floor. But, as usual, much of the action also happened off-piste, in spontaneous conversations at hundreds of events and parties.

Here, we’ve compiled some key takeaways, on themes ranging from wearable technology to consumer privacy.

The State of Wearables

It was clear wearables — an emerging category of personal accessories with embedded sensors, displays and other digital technology (such as Nike’s FuelBand, Google Glass and Apple’s rumoured iWatch) — were going to be a key topic even before SXSW began. They’d dominated the scene at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas each January and over 60 sessions addressed the topic, up from a mere handful last year.

Speakers unanimously agreed that the category is advancing rapidly. American basketball star Shaquille O’Neal even made an appearance to discuss his new interest in wearable technology with Rick Valencia of Qualcomm. Yet despite predictions that the market for wearables could reach $30-$50 billion over the next 3 to 5 years, the growing consensus was that mass adoption was still a ways off. On Google Glass, Robert Scoble (author and startup liason officer of Rackspace) said: “This is one of those products you know is the future, but it’s so unfinished at this point that it’s frustrating. It’s three to five years away before it’s really useful.”

And indeed, it was the word ‘useful,’ more than design or aesthetics — which the current crop of wearables are widely thought to lack — that came up the most. Jennifer Darmour, user experience design director at Artefact, said she has a drawer full of wearables that she had worn for just a week or two each before abandoning them. There was too much focus on novelty, she said, rather than on creating real functional value. “We’ve been taking a technology and trying to find a problem for that technology, instead of the other way round,” she added. “We need a more human-centric approach.”

Q Manning, chief executive of app design company Rocksauce Studios, agreed: “We need to solve problems. Just because we can build it, doesn’t mean we should. We need to pinpoint will this actually be useful? Is it beneficial? Will it help me live my life better?”

Jay Morgan, digital creative director of Havas Worldwide, added: “When wearable tech becomes [part of our] normal clothes and we don’t have to [actively] interact with it, it’s not then going to be about whether people care about it, it’s just going to be a part of your life. That’s what brands need to think about it now.”

Managing Privacy

Privacy was another key topic at SXSW this year, perhaps unsurprisingly as whistleblower Edward Snowden gave one of the headline talks. Appearing via Google Hangout from an undisclosed location in Russia, Snowden called on the technology community to help protect privacy rights by building them into technical standards. “There is a policy response that needs to occur, but there is also a technical response that needs to occur,” he said. “It is the development community that can really craft the solutions and make sure we are safe.”

Christopher Soghoian, principle technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, added: “I really think that consumers need to rethink their relationship with many of the companies to whom they entrust their private data. I really think what this comes down to is if you are getting the service for free, the company isn’t going to be optimising your experience with your best interests in mind.”

While Soghoian was referring to Internet services like Facebook, the issue of consumer privacy should be of concern to retailers as well, as they increasingly collect and leverage personal data.

“The bottom line is data should not be collected without people’s knowledge and consent,” said Snowden. “If data is being clandestinely acquired and the public doesn’t have any way to review it and it is not legislatively authorised, it is not reviewed by courts, it is not consonant with our constitution — that is a problem.”

For others, the issue of privacy and personal data was seen in the context of a value exchange, with consumers increasingly willing to reveal information in return for benefit. “The more utility you get, the more you’re going to have to give away your privacy,” said Scoble, adding he’d happily do so himself in return for more useful and personalised experiences. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, agreed: “I’m excited about data being about me. The marketer gets a certain amount of value in the stats on my demographic, but the real value is for me.”

Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, said the way forward was giving consumers control of their data. “We are now developing technologies to give people control over who manages their data and how. We are ensuring privacy, so it will be very easy and very comfortable for them to give their data over and get something out of it.”

Avoiding Bandwagons

Elsewhere at SXSW, conversation swirled around everything from “embeddables” (technology emebedded in the world around us, such that “virtually any human activity we can think of is going to be modified and amplified with an invisible mesh of data and processing that we will drift through obliviously,” according to one panel) to bioengineering. But ultimately, “good technology is no excuse for a bad idea,” said Paul Kemp-Robertson, co-founder and editorial director of marketing consultancy and magazine, Contagious. “It’s easy to jump onto bandwagons just because a new technology looks cool. Everyone enjoys feeling like that little kid chasing after the bright, shiny tool in the distance. But in this age of service design and living data, if a marketing idea is not useful, relevant or entertaining, then really there’s very little point in letting it loose on the world.”

Kristina Simmons, a partner at leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, agreed. Wearable technology, for example, should not be a priority just because everyone is talking about it. “It needs to be something that makes sense for your business. It’s about thinking about your top five priorities, versus saying I want to do something with wearables.”

“Innovation isn’t just giant leaps and bounds and the sexy stuff — it’s also about the basics and thinking about how we do things better. Incremental changes can make a big difference too,” said Will Young, director of Zappos Labs.

“Being first has always been a big thing,” said Ben Malbon, Google’s head of creative partnerships. “But the future is here already. We should use the existing tools we have on the table. Innovation doesn’t need invention.”

Digital snippets: Burberry, Calvin Klein, Moschino, Saks, M&S, Primark

A round-up of all the latest stories surrounding fashion and tech…

 

• Burberry reveals ‘digital innovation’ partnership with WeChat to strengthen social presence in China [The Drum]

• Calvin Klein asks fans to snap selfies in their skivvies for #MyCalvins campaign [BrandChannel]

• Fast-fashion: Moschino offers fans the ability to shop its McDonald’s-themed show live [Dazed Digital]

• Saks recreates in-store beauty tutorials with six-second videos on Vine [LuxuryDaily]

• Marks & Spencer launches new website to replace Amazon platform, after three years in the making [The Telegraph]

• How Primark achieved 1.7m Facebook Likes in just six months [Econsultancy]

• Former GQ editor Lauren Bans comes out as @CondeElevator Tweeter [Fashionista]

• New privacy website lets you opt out of tracking in retail stores [AdAge]

• Ebay buys virtual fitting room start-up PhiSix Fashion Labs [PC Mag]

Digital snippets: Michael Kors, Rebecca Minkoff, Vivienne Tam, Marc Jacobs, Zac Posen

From New York to London, and everything in between, here’s a mega round-up of all the latest stories surrounding fashion and tech…

• Michael Kors dominates social conversation during NYFW [New York Business Journal]

• Rebecca Minkoff gives inside look at fashion week with Keek app [Mashable]

• Vivienne Tam’s WeChat partnership delivers NYFW front-row access [Jing Daily]

• Marc Jacobs opens fashion week pop-up that accepts Tweets as payment (as pictured) [Fashionista]

• Zac Posen curated a Spotify playlist for his new lookbook [Styleite]

• Alexander Wang showed colour-changing clothes during fashion week [Technical.ly]

• Warby Parker tops list of top 10 retail innovators [Fast Company]

• London Fashion Week: Nokia and Fyodor Golan create ‘world’s first’ smart skirt [Marketing]

• Net-a-Porter puts its fashion sense on paper in new print magazine [BrandChannel]

• Miu Miu unveils ‘Spark and Light’ short film [WWD]

• Sass & Bide launches 360-degree shoppable ad [PSFK]

• Bloomingdale’s hosts live-styling event on Instagram to drive interaction [Luxury Daily]

• The new Moda Operandi app is like Tinder for designer clothes [NY Observer]

• Instagram is shaping up to be the world’s most powerful selling tool [Forbes]

• Twitter planning to move into e-commerce [The Telegraph]

• Seven ways retailers are embracing tech, from body scanning to digital wallets [AdAge]

• A trend for fashion search apps [FT Material World]

• What’s so alluring about a woman known as Man Repeller? [NY Mag]

Cath Kidston, Bauble Bar driving traffic with Christmas treasure hunt campaigns

UK home furnishings brand, Cath Kidston, is running a cute campaign on its website in the run up to Christmas that invites shoppers to hunt through its pages to try and find Santa.

Every time they spot him they could be in with the chance of winning the products found on that page.

Based on the idea that Santa’s gone into hiding due to having too many wish lists to read through from the retailer’s main Christmas competition, the initiative sends fans on a hunt around its day bags, zip wallets, baby sleep suits and Christmas stocking fillers.

It is of course a clever move to get shoppers searching through the whole site, not to mention popping back on a regular basis, at a time when present inspiration doesn’t go amiss.

US online jewellery retailer, Bauble Bar, is running something similar for the festive season too. Email subscribers are being sent clues to “Buried Baubles” each day – items with serious markdowns hidden somewhere on the site. Meanwhile, its “30-days of Sparkle” campaign – as below – also sees daily discounts and offers being unveiled in the run up to Christmas.

Digital snippets: Selfridges, Prada, Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Asos, Lancôme, Valentino

A highlight of the top stories surrounding all things fashion and digital of late: 

• Drive-through Dior? Coming right up at Selfridges London [CN Traveler] 

• Wes Anderson debuts latest Prada feature [Fashionotes] 

• Victoria’s Secret creates 3D-printed angel wings for fashion models [Huffington Post] 

• Gap rolls out “reserve in store” service [CNBC] 

• Asos plans China launch with ‘culturally relevant’ marketing [Marketing Magazine] 

• Behind the Lancôme digital experience [L2 The Daily] 

• Valentino jumps in on China’s high-tech runway revolution [JingDaily] 

• Under Armour looks to take a bite out of FuelBand success with MapMyFitness acquisition [BrandChannel] 

• Nasty Gal is opening a brick and mortar store [Hollywood Reporter] 

• Pinterest opens API to retail partners [TechCrunch] 

• Google’s Eric Schmidt invests in retail tech designed to help personalisation and data measurement [WWD] 

• Here’s why ‘The Internet of Things’ will be huge, and drive tremendous value for people and businesses [Business Insider] 

• Why companies desperately need to make wearables cool [Wired] 

• How brands get shoppers to volunteer their personal data: transparency and better experiences [PSFK] 

• Social media drives less than 1% of shopping sessions, study says [Fashionista] 

• Fashion retailers are still failing to optimise email marketing for mobile [Econsultancy] 

• What retailers can learn from mobile commerce in the UK [Shop.org] 

• 15 stats that show why click-and-collect is so important for retailers [Econsultancy] 

Note: Look out for a separate holiday-specific digital round-up later this week, featuring all the top retail campaign stories as well as insights into the biggest innovations being pushed for the festive season.