Fashion Blogger and Fashion Stylist – Know Your Influencers
Reading Time: 7 minutesFashion eCommerce is one segment that is highly competitive. You would find tens of thousands of brands selling some kind of fashion online.
You will find various fashion marketplaces as well as niche fashion brands.
But the common struggle for every fashion eCommerce brand is to increase sales. Fashion bloggers doing Influencer marketing are definitely boon for fashion brands. But can there be another set of influencers?
Globally leading brands have fashion stylists who help in growing online sales and conversion. Have you thought about it? Let’s figure out how fashion bloggers and fashion stylists both can add value to online sales.
Who is a fashion blogger?
A fashion blogger is a person who writes articles around fashion on their blog and third-party websites. Nowadays video bloggers are gaining more traction specifically in the fashion industry.
They try different fashion clothes, materials, and accessories, and share their experiences about the same through their blogs and social media.
Google Trends says that the full-fledged search for fashion blogging started around January 2009-
It was the time when fashion bloggers came into picture.
What role a fashion blogger plays to drive sales?
Because fashion bloggers share their experiences around different fashion elements, people follow them for inspiration.
These fashion bloggers are also known as fashion influencers that review various fashion products and guide their fans in choosing the right ones.
Fashion bloggers have a huge number of followers that have a deep interest in fashion and their taste. And these followers are the target buyers for the fashion brands. That’s the reason why brands reach out to these influencers to write recommendations for their products.
When fashion bloggers write product reviews, make videos, stories, they add dedicated product links. The audience can click and land on to those product pages for more information. If the audience is convinced with the reviews shared by the influencers, they’ll most likely buy them.
Fashion bloggers not only write blogs about the products, but even create YouTube videos, stories or IGTV, and share them on their social media profiles tagging the brands. Such promotions give the brands visibility among the right audience.
By hiring fashion bloggers, fashion brands achieve the following-
- Better brand visibility
- Increased fan following
- Higher sales and revenues
- Better ROI
Now, let’s understand who is a fashion stylist.
Who is a fashion stylist?
A fashion stylist is a person who decides everything from fashion apparel to fashion accessories for HNIs, upmarket buyers, early adaptors, trendsetters, celebrities, or public figures during their campaigns, published editorial features, performances, or any public appearances.
Google Trends says the search trend for the “fashion stylists” was present even before January 2004-
Don’t confuse fashion stylists with fashion designers because fashion designers design as per the requirements. But, the fashion stylists consider the clients’ personality, profession, preferences, choices, and trends, to plan a look for their clients and ask designers to create that look for their clients.
What role a fashion stylist plays to drive sales?
You might wonder how fashion stylists can help eCommerce brands drive sales.
Have a look at the following picture from H&M–
When brands need to create a look for their products and conduct a photo shoot, they hire fashion stylists. The stylists pair the tops, bottoms, accessories, shoes, jackets, and more from a brand for their brand ambassadors or models.
The professional graphics on the online store helps eCommerce brands to persuade their potential buyers and sell more.
Another thing you can do is to on-board multiple fashion stylists for your online store. They can create different looks for your online store, which you can share on your store. Your customers can pick-up those styled products and if they buy your products, you give commission to the stylists.
Check out how Limeroad does that-
Here multiple stylists create their look and based on the look, customers can buy the products.
Your customers get a perfect understanding of how your products will look by combining them with a perfect set of products.
Persuasion and buying takes place at the same time.
Fashion Blogger Vs. Fashion Stylist – How to decide whom to choose when
Fashion bloggers are completely different from fashion stylists and obviously, their role in driving sales.
But, it’s necessary to understand when you need either or both of them. Let’s identify the criteria on when to choose fashion stylists and when to choose fashion bloggers-
1. Creating a digital catalog
When you’re building your eCommerce store, you need to put your products digitally and hence we call it a digital catalog of your store. The product presentation gives the first impression of how fashionable your products would be.
Hence, when you do a professional photoshoot, create a lookbook, make Ads with models, hiring a fashion stylist is a must.
2. Styling your brand ambassadors
Tanishq launched a brand campaign for their new collection – Though it’s a jewelry brand, they invest heavily in how the celebrities or models are styled.
Each look of these brand ambassadors is created by the fashion stylists. So, when you want to launch some brand campaigns whether, during store launch or feature launch, you can involve fashion stylists to create looks for the brand ambassadors.
3. Cross-selling and upselling bulk products
A cool way to increase your sales is to cross-sell and upsell your products. And, fashion brands have this opportunity to create an entire look and sell the same.
From recent years, various brands have a feature on their online store called, “Shop the Look.”
For example, look at the Shoppers Stop–
To sell products in bulk, fashion brands create a look for their brand ambassadors with the help of stylists and boost average ticket size.
4. Planning influencer marketing campaigns
Today, the moment a fashion brand is launched, they focus on hiring fashion bloggers as influencers to drive instant traction and sales to the new online store.
If you are targeting a mid-market, and need a flood of traffic in your store, fashion bloggers are your saviors. When you want to increase your brand visibility and boost sales through influencer marketing, you need to choose fashion bloggers.
Also, influencer marketing is not a one-time affair. You need to consistently stay in front of your customers and for that, you need to hire fashion bloggers or influencers with the highest influence to keep driving sales. And they come into action for each new collection launch.
How to find and engage with them? Things to consider and setting the right working model
Though both of these help you drive sales, the working models are completely different.
Let’s find out how to engage with fashion bloggers cum influencers-
1. Choose according to your niche and requirements
The very first way is to find the influencers that have the highest influence in your niche. For example, if you’re into selling fashion sportswear, think of the influencers who review and share sportswear products.
Look at what type of blogging, videos, and IGTVs they create to better understand which blogger would be the right fit for your brand.
Incorrect choice of influencers can waste your investments, time and effort.
2. Approach the influencers
The next step is to approach influencers and ask them about their audience or fan following, their geographical locations, their traffic and more.
Before you make a choice you need to know you’re investing in the right place.
3. Price negotiation
Another step is to work on pricing with them. Whether you’re looking for a one-time engagement or an affiliate program, you need to finalize the pricing you would offer them for the product recommendations. Fashion stylists and bloggers are also paid back for the result produced – commission on increased sales.
4. Measure the results
The last step is to check if you’ve chosen the right influencer, and they’re the best fit to drive sales for your brand.
Consider looking at both- a number of orders and average order size because for the eCommerce business, both of these success measures matter the most.
Fashion stylists work in this way-
– Prescribe your brand products
Fashion stylists help the clients with their wardrobe shopping. So whenever their clients need wardrobe refreshments or a specific outfit for any occasion, the fashion stylists accompany them for their shopping.
So, fashion stylists can prescribe your brand products to their customers or help them buy those resulting in driving sales for you.
– Choose your products in creating looks
Another way fashion stylists work is that they are working on creating looks for either brands, celebrities or models.
Whenever they are working on creating a look, they can select your product for the same. And, if a customer buys your product from that look, you can pay them a commission for the sale.
Affiliate arrangement can also work here, but you need to see how it works for your brand as well as the fashion stylist to make sure you measure the sales.
– They are trend changers
Fashion stylists also play a big role in changing trends. If you go and check out Google, you’ll find tens of thousands of fashion stylists influence trends. The things are going to be high on trend and low as well.
Here is your chance to connect with the fashion stylists and ask them to review your products and suggest them as a trend.
For that, this could be sponsored, but fashion stylists take the call of whether it could be considered as a trend or not.
– Measure the results
Irrespective of the way you choose to hire fashion stylists, you need to check if they’re able to drive you sales or not. If yes, how much and if not, who would be the next.
Keep one clear- the results should be a win-win situation for both fashion stylists as well as your brand.
Every fashion stylist would show their worth, but you should be able to identify who can drive you better results.
Recommendation
Now after knowing these points, you can choose what you shall have – Fashion blogger or Fashion stylist. If you are a designer brand or a boutique we recommend that you hire a fashion blogger. And if you are a brand with a huge catalog where you can mix-match clothes, create looks, and sell them well, go for a fashion stylist. We have also seen top brands focusing on HNI clients are loved by fashion stylists to serve their premium clients.
But overall, to stay relevant into the market, both of them drive lot of traffic to your site or store for sure.
