California Apparel News

A Q&A with HauteLook CEO Adam Bernhard

Three years after its launch, online private-sale website HauteLook (www.hautelook.com) has grown to 3 million members and conducted thousands of flash-sales events.

In September, the flash-sale site expanded to include travel with the acquisition of Chicago-based hotel-stay sales site BonVoyou (www.bonvoyou.com).

California Apparel News Fashion Editor N. Jayne Seward recently caught up with HauteLook Chief Executive Adam Bernhard to talk about HauteLook and how he sees social media influencing the future of fashion.How do you use social media on HauteLook?

We are very active on Facebook and Twitter. It’s important for us to be able to communicate with our members outside of our site. We’re able to speak with them about upcoming ideas, events and sales. We listen to what they’re saying on both our Twitter and Facebook pages. It’s a way for us to engage with the membership on a much higher and very intimate level.How has social media helped you grow your customer base to 3 million customers in just 2frac12; years?

Thanks to the blogger community, we were able to grow our customer base. We didn’t have a marketing department for the first year and a half of our business. So the blog community really built our business for us. We are highly engaged with the blogger community and giving back to them, as well. What is important to you now?

The ability for us to continue to give back to our brand partners. We have built this business as a partnership because we don’t buy inventory from brands. We are responsible for delivering more than just an exhaust channel. What we deliver, on a regular basis, is marketing tools for brands to be able to reach consumers. We have over 3 million members we’re speaking to on a regular basis. So we provide brands with marketing capabilities as well as data and insights on what’s happening with their brand out in the world. We have a brand dashboard that allows the brands to see, in real time, everything that’s happening with their sale—which is mind-blowing to most of the brands. They’ve never gotten data like that from any retailer in their life. So our ability to be able to give back and to help the brand grow their business and learn more about what’s happening with their brand—down to the granularity of specific styles—is why we’ve been able to be so successful. What advice do you have for brands going forward?

Don’t be scared. You have to step into the medium—you will learn a lot. You have to be able to take the good with the bad. It’s as important to have bad comments about your brand as it is to have positive comments. It adds credibility to what you’re doing. If you are monitoring your Facebook page and deleting negative commentary, the relationship you have with your followers will not be as strong as if you organically let the story be told. When you see that you’re doing something poorly and someone talks about it, you need to be able to respond to them. Let the community know that you recognized there was an issue and you are taking steps to correct that. That’s the most important thing. Don’t hide. Don’t put your head in the sand. Respond to negative commentary.What sites do you foresee as being important in the future?

Facebook and Twitter will continue to grow in importance. The ability for them to build in things on Facebook such as the “like” button, which allows you to share things that you like with your community of friends, is just another way that Facebook is thinking about connectivity. It’s all about being able to spread the word in a very organic way. We can not only speak to our customer but [also] listen to our customer and our followers. They are innovating every day, and I think it’s going to be very hard for anyone to really break into that space because they’re doing such a good job. I think the next advent is the ability to in-stream communication in people’s individual Facebook pages. We are working on ways in which we can work with our followers and provide them with a service that will allow them to enhance the experience of people looking on their Facebook page.