California Apparel News

Fashion bloggers who post photos of their daily outfits on social-media platforms may earn a ton of “likes,” but unless they have endorsement deals with brands and retailers, fans don’t equal cash. The iPhone app Pose gives fashion bloggers and influencers the chance to monetize their popularity when any of their brand tags lead to purchase clicks.

Pose launched in 2011 and has more than 1.5 million registered users. Socially, it works like Instagram, in which users can upload photos, follow, be followed and comment.

“The key elements are really authentic fashion and beauty content, meaning that it comes from the user. They are uploading their own look, their own personal style. Within that image, they have the ability to embed all the information [brands and descriptions] one might need to understand it,” said Alisa Gould-Simon, co-founder and vice president of creative direction and partnerships of Pose.

From the beginning, Pose secured fashion leaders such as celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe, model Coco Rocha and top fashion bloggers to contribute “poses.” Retailers with active profiles range from Forever 21 to Saks Fifth Avenue. Today the app has grown beyond the mobile device. The iPad app has a magazine-like browsing format, and the website (www.pose.com) elevates the content curation with featured “posers,” hashtag trends and the ability to search the 3 million poses.

“Users can come [to the website] and search for something as specific as Alexander Wang booties or can broadly search all the little black dresses and not only see those products but also see many ways to wear them. We also have the ability to share, so if users want to share beyond the Pose platform to Twitter, Tumblr or Pinterest, they can distribute the content elsewhere as well,” Gould-Simon said.

Through the “collections” feature, active on all devices, users can “save” and organize their favorites into different folders for later reference, similar to the way Pinterest boards are organized. Gould-Simon said users tend to save their favorites in the collections feature while browsing on their mobile devices and making shopping purchases later through the website.

Users that want to take advantage of the direct-shopping feature through Pose’s affiliates must pass an approval process. Otherwise they may add links within the comment to direct the audience to an external site. Gould-Simon said that is to ensure the quality remains high. Most of the featured content is editorially chosen, and the advertisements are clearly marked as such.

“Curation and high-quality nature of the content is something we’ve been particular about,” Gould-Simon said. “When you are being entertained and spending five or 10 minutes within our platform, users want to see a lot of beautiful images. The higher quality the content, the more compelling it can be.”