California Apparel News

One of retail’s tried-and-true slogans is that the customer is always right.

But some e-commerce and multi-channel retailers are taking that motto to an extreme. They are putting their customers in the driver’s seat and making them the store buyers.

A growing number of retailers are holding events on Facebook and other online sites where consumers get the chance to vote on the merchandise they would like a store to carry.

This twist on merchandising is just one of the latest trends that retailers are undertaking to use social media to boost traffic and sales.

Josh Olivo has witnessed the wild possibilities and the limits of putting a store’s buying choices up for a vote. When he and fellow buyers for ShopRuche (www.shopruche.com) were at the MAGIC trade show last month in Las Vegas, they stopped at the Covet booth. Perusing the merchandise, they couldn’t decide which of the label’s dresses to order for their Fullerton, Calif.–based e-boutique site.

Olivo, the website’s co-founder, decided to let the people make the choice. He took a picture of each Covet dress and posted the pictures on the e-commerce store’s Facebook page. He asked consumers to vote for either the dress on the right or the dress on the left. “The response was enormous,” Olivo said. “We had a few hundred comments in a minute.”

The votes drove a lot of traffic to ShopRuche. “It’s a fun way for fans to connect with us,” Olivo said. “It helps us make the right decision on what to buy and what not to buy.”

Voting increases traffic

Social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become more prominent in consumers’ lives, to the point where retailers have increasingly shifted their marketing budgets and customer-relations operations to social media, said Casey C. Chroust, executive vice president of retail operations for trade group Retail Industry Leaders Association. “It’s become integral to how retailers connect to their consumers,” he said. “Many customers will reach out to retailers from Facebook and Twitter accounts, and they expect to hear back from retailers through social media.”

But with social-media trends changing quickly, the field is ripe for experiment.

Contests, votes and social commerce are growing on new sites and veteran e-commerce locations such as ShopRuche, Planet Blue, Velvet Brigade and Lyst. But one of the grandmothers of this voting method is e-tailer ModCloth (www.modcloth.com) in San Francisco, which sells vintage, vintage-inspired clothes and new designer apparel.

In 2009, ModCloth founder Susan Gregg Koger launched her site’s “Be the Buyer” program. It mixes business with pleasure. ModCloth buyers receive excellent data on what garments to buy and, at the same time, get to indulge in their fantasy of being a store buyer.

Only 11 percent of ModCloth consumers participate in the program, said Kerry Cooper, the e-tailer’s chief marketing officer and chief operating officer. But traffic to the site increased 25 percent after the program debuted, and ModCloth executives observed that “Be the Buyer” participants typically made bigger purchases.

ModCloth has collaborated with 58 different designers for its “Be the Buyer” program.Putting up designs for votes increases chances of big sales, said Amanda Parenti, national sales director, business development, for Los Angeles–based fashion label Eva Franco.

“With this economy, it is difficult to get reorders,” Parenti said.Many boutiques choose to reorder a few pieces. After participating in the “Be the Buyer” program, the most popular Eva Franco dress received a reorder for more than 150 pieces. “This is a significant order for a small company,” Parenti said.

On “Be the Buyer,” designers also can submit garments that did not sell well. Voters will often include comments on the garment. If designers change the garment to the voters’ advice, a loser can be turned into a big seller, Cooper said.

Planet Blue is a prominent multi-channel boutique chain headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif. Every time Planet Blue buyers ask consumers to play buyer, comments on the retailer’s Facebook page skyrocket.But there is a delayed reaction for turning votes into sales, said Haley Magrini, the director of e-commerce for Planet Blue’s site at www.shopplanetblue.com.

Reaction is delayed because merchandise is not delivered to stores immediately after trade shows. Planet Blue buyers typically give their consumers a preview of some of the garments they liked on their trade show trips. They will get a Facebook reaction to these trade show favorites. When the garments are delivered to the store, they’ll notify those who liked the item, typically through a Facebook thread. If an item gets an overwhelmingly positive reaction on Facebook, it is rare that the order will not be delivered by manufacturers, Magrini said.

If a specific piece elicits an overwhelmingly positive reaction, Planet Blue store buyers typically make a larger order for that piece. Like ShopRuche, Planet Blue sometimes defers to its Facebook fans if buyers cannot decide on which piece to order.

Planet Blue has been experimenting with other social media to drive sales and to raise the profile of the store’s fashion brands. Every day, Planet Blue store clerks post pictures of themselves in Planet Blue merchandise on the blog-hosting site Tumblr. Sales have resulted after consumers view Tumblr’s “Drink the Planet Blue Kool-Aid” site because merchandise is already in the five Planet Blue shops and at www.shopplanetblue.com.

As social commerce evolves, it will meet basic goals of retailing, said Lindsay McConnon, co-founder of e-tailer Velvet Brigade. It attracts people to the site similar to the way loyalty cards have traditionally attracted people to physical stores. “It is just a different way of marketing,” she said.

But retailers must know what they are getting into, said Chris Morton, founder of Lyst, an e-tailer with headquarters in New York and London. Some sites are best for shopping entertainment; others seem to be more serious for making purchases.

ShopRuche’s Olivo noted that social media drove traffic to his e-commerce site, but voting has not resulted in skyrocketing sales yet.