Engagement, Crowdsourcing and Fashion Savvy Users: There’s An App For That

The fashion industry’s adaptation of all things digital has started to move from social media and social networks into brands creating and distributing their own content. The marketing vehicle of choice: mobile devices.

The popularity of style applications (also known as apps) is trending faster than people’s interest in the latest runway fashions. As brands and retailers move into mobile marketing, they are integrating the engagement they receive from social networks, online videos and their websites into the style apps they develop.

Two style applications, Stylish Girl and Cool Guy (which have been downloaded over 500,000 times and have over 100,000 active users) are leading the way with their cross platform compatibility, feature integration and ability to continually engage their users.

To get a better understanding of the evolution and future of fashion apps, I spoke withDDN Media’s Dimitar Popovski to discuss what’s next in style application development.

What are Stylish Girl and Cool Guy?

Stylish Girl and Cool Guy are multi-purpose style apps for men and women. They are virtual closet apps that help users store and organize all their clothes in the apps, then create and plan their outfits. Stylish Girl and Cool Guy are also online shopping portals as well as social media network platforms for anyone interested in fashion and style.

The apps allow you to take, upload and categorize photos of your clothes and accessories, so that you can put together outfits right on your iPhone. The apps allow the user to mix and match what’s in their wardrobe with what’s offered in online stores. The Stylish Girl and Cool Guy applications contain an interface to ShopStyle that enables users to shop for fashion from top retailers and various independent designers. Users then add these items to their ‘wishbag’.

The users filter the results to specific criteria by brand, tag or price (e.g. Prada, black boots, between $150 and $250). In the same way, the same features helps users while shopping in a retail location where they can also do price comparison on the spot, using filter by brand or search keywords.

With more than half a million downloads and over 100,000 very active users, these apps’ popularity have led them to be featured in Apple’s national TV ad campaigns. How did you develop such a large, active community?

We believe that there are a few contributing factors to their success.  First is the usefulness of the product itself.  The apps (Stylish Girl and Cool Guy) are useful tools that can be used for a variety of reasons all day long. We received tons of emails from users telling us how they cannot wake up in the morning without checking the apps to see what outfit they will wear.  Our traffic stats show that this is only half of the story. A large portion of the users are heavily involved in seeing what is in the stores, making outfits and buying items online. The quick and intuitive interface of the apps is also a contributing factor to users’ retention.

The second way we were able to create such a robust community are the social elements of the apps. The apps are fully integrated with Twitter and Facebook, as sharing is a frequently used feature since our users want to share what they are wearing or what they are buying with their friends.

Once a user’s friends see what is happening, they also download the app and start getting involved. Also, our fashion portal StylishAndCool integrates the communication between the apps and the social media sites and anchors the overall user experience.

Apple presented Stylish Girl and Cool Guy on Mercedes Benz New York Fashion Week and later incorporated the apps in their TV and print ads, which created amazing awareness; the success was measured by the download/user rate, which was about 20 percent worldwide.

How have you used social networks, bloggers and other forms of digital outreach to grow the apps’ user base?

Once we launched the app we contacted a number of bloggers who talk about fashion or style and also had a heavy interest in technology, specifically apps, and got them on board as our alpha users. We leveraged those users to become the content creators of the StylishAndCool blog, which we use now to showcase their 20 most stylish apparel and accessories picks. It offers them tremendous acknowledgment for their contributions.

We actively participated in forum discussions for style apps, promoted our brand through making connections on Twitter and Facebook ads to promote the apps.

Feature integration and sharp functionality is key for style application development. How have you addressed this with Stylish Girl and Cool Guy?

We heavily rely on feedback from our community. We take their suggestions and new feature requests very seriously.  The users are a crucial part of our feature selection/design process.

Sometimes, it’s us as a company. Before we create new features, though, we make sure that the feature is really needed. We also talk to or friends in the fashion industry (designers, stylists, et al.) and get their opinion on a particular use of a feature.  Then we think what is the simplest way to implement it so that the users will need to tap only a few times to see the feature work.

Style apps are becoming multi-functional, some enable you to shop without venturing on the net, offer style advice, interactive games, and ability to read blogs and watch videos. How have Stylish Girl and Cool Guy combined these features?

There are quite a few apps that are multifunctional, but are limited in what they do and fail to create a cohesive experience for the user.  For example, Gap’s StyleMixer app has a virtual closet feature and allows you to view few of their products, but the product selection is limited only to GAP branded merchandise.

We did not want Stylish Girl and Cool Guy to be just a virtual closet app or a shopping portal. We wanted to inspire the users to get creative.  So we added feeds from stylists, influential bloggers and fashion designers. Incorporating blogs, price comparisons,video and advice along with the users wardrobe makes the app a one stop mobile shop for all they need.

Geo-location sites like Gowalla and Foursquare are generating tremendous amounts of buzz as potential outlets for retailers to possibly monetize social media. What is your plan for integrating location-based services into Stylish Girl and Cool Guy?

We are working with the geo-location concept and experimenting with a few different designs. This feature will be included in next planned release of Stylish Girl and Cool Guy.  Geo-location is huge.  We’re focusing on the user experience and want the contribution from our apps to be meaningful. So when one of our users tells their friends where the next shop or event is, there may be some competition for mayorship.

You integrated product feeds for independent, emerging Canadian designers. I think it’s a brilliant idea, why did you do it?

As a Canadian company, we made sure that independent, emerging Canadian designers like Erdem and Jay Godfrey are included in the product selection.  This is something we want to develop more. We feel that bringing independent designer products in the mix promotes much more creativity for our apps and gives users the opportunity to wear something more unique than just big brand labels. We are actively working on establishing links with new upcoming independent designers that we could feature in the app, of course not limited to Canada only.

How can retailers and brands use apps such as these to generate revenue, drive in-store traffic and/or create more cohesive marketing strategies for their digital initiatives?

The key here is that the retailers should create apps that will be useful to the customers which in return will bring the users into the brand’s community.  The feedback that the retailers would receive from the users is invaluable when creating new products.  The users would use the app and as members of the community would see the retailers products and promotions, comment on them. They can buy the brand online or  they can talk about the brand to friends via Twitter or Facebook (which as a word of mouth is a powerful advertising).  This has been our experience so far.

Did your online marketing lead to Stylish Girl being featured in Apple’s app commercial for New York Fashion Week?

Six weeks after their launch in the US, Stylish Girl and Cool Guy were in top 25 most downloaded apps in App Store lifestyle category and were top 10 in Europe.  This was not a direct result from our marketing efforts, but it helped our marketing efforts quite a bit, because it is much easier to market a product that is already recognized by the users.

Our online marketing and social networking (Facebook, Twitter) kept the momentum going and helped build greater awareness even beyond the iPhone user community.  So directly or indirectly Apple noticed us for both the quality of the apps, as well as for our marketing activities.

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