This week, we take a look at a new podcast launched by the luxury resale company Fashionphile. We also check in on the fashion brand podcasts that are thriving and the ones that have quietly gone dark, and what separates a good brand podcast from an ill-fated one.
Being a fashion brand these days means producing a lot of content: short-form videos, microdramas, splashy celebrity campaigns, grid posts on social, and more. But for many brands, it can be frustrating spending a lot of time and money on a piece of content only to watch it disappear into the maw of the social media algorithm.
Now, fashion brands are taking a different approach: launching podcasts. The hope is that podcasts have a longer shelf life and that existing customers can engage with a brand on a deeper, more long-form level than by scrolling past a video on social media.
Fashionphile, the luxury handbag resale company, is the latest fashion brand to do this, launching Fashionphile Unboxed this week. The show is hosted by Fashionphile’s CEO and co-founder, Sarah Davis, and will feature a new guest each week. Most of the guests are drawn from the wider world of fashion, luxury and handbag collecting. For example, the inaugural episode features fashion creator Charles Gross, who discusses how he got into the handbag world.
But episodes also have internal guests pulled from other parts of Fashionphile. Alex Tiger, who heads up Fashionphile’s Japan business, is a guest on an upcoming episode, which Davis told Glossy was partially done because many customers weren’t even aware that Fashionphile has a branch in Japan. In fact, Fashionphile has operated in Japan for nearly a decade and has 15 employees based there.
“We talk to so many interesting people, and we make a lot of content, and with social, it feels like it just goes away,” Davis said. “With Reels and other social content, we get a lot of value out of it, but also it disappears so fast. With the podcast, we wanted to create a catalog that you can discover and really dig into and engage more deeply with the brand.”
Davis said the hope is that the podcast episodes will have a longer shelf life than social content. In her own podcast listening habits, she said she regularly finds a podcast she likes and goes back through older episodes. Data from Riverside backs this up. Nearly half the country listens to an average of one podcast episode per day, and nearly 60% of podcast listeners go back and listen to older episodes of podcasts they like.
The high level of engagement has led a number of fashion brands and retailers to launch podcasts in recent months. Daydream, the AI-powered fashion shopping app, launched a video podcast called The Fashion Stack earlier this summer, which just wrapped its first season.
“[Launching the podcast] was about establishing Daydream as a defining voice at the intersection of tech and fashion,” said Jennifer Koen, Daydream’s head of marketing and communications. “We partner with over 325 fashion brands, and, in addition to offering them another distribution channel, we wanted to be a partner in growing their brand and awareness through co-marketing. Launching our Substack, featuring leaders and designers on our IG and now telling their stories in long form with The Fashion Stack has rounded out this strategy.”
“Podcasts are excellent both for helping brands reach new audiences and for strengthening loyalty among their existing audience, as they provide a wealth of content that feels more evergreen than an ad campaign,” said Jack Williams, principal strategist at the brand consultancy Mackasey. “They also provide a way for brands to collaborate with existing podcasters and influencers, which can greatly amplify their message.”
Davis cited Nordstrom’s The Nordy Pod as an example of a retailer that has turned a regular podcast into a success. The podcast has maintained a regular release cadence over the last two years, releasing nearly 120 episodes so far, and it has been nominated for a Shorty Award.
“Brands have finally noticed that the consumer’s interest doesn’t start and stop on the feed,” said Dayna Carney, founder of the content studio Dayna’s House, which has produced long-form content for fashion brands like Nuuly and Hoka. “She listens to podcasts, watches shows, then goes down a rabbit hole on Reddit. There’s an opportunity for discovery at every touchpoint. Podcasts are an interesting entry point for more storytelling.”
But not every fashion brand podcast has lasted. While brands like Chanel and Dior have launched successful podcasts that are still updating, many others have quietly phased them out. Hermés shut down an experimental podcast in 2021, while Chloe has also discontinued Chloe Radio. Gucci has normally taken several months between episodes of the Gucci Podcast, but the feed hasn’t been updated since May of 2025.
Davis said her team plans to release one episode a week, and did not want to launch the podcast unless they felt like they could commit to investing in it long term. For longevity, experts like Williams said brands need to avoid repetition and insularity and create content that is both interesting to a wider audience and able to hold people’s attention longer.
“Brands considering starting a podcast should consider creating a content calendar that is varied and deep enough to provide listeners from a variety of different backgrounds and levels of interest in the brand with distinct, compelling entry points,” Williams said.
News to know
- Sabato De Sarno, formerly of Gucci, finally announced where he was going after leaving the brand in February of last year. De Sarno announced this week that he would become the new creative director of the Shanghai-based fashion brand Icicle.
- Meanwhile, Theory has appointed former Fast Retailing executive James Kelly as its new CEO.
- Nike, along with a number of other publicly traded companies, was dropped from the S&P 100 this week. It’s a mostly symbolic move, but it does underline the brand’s relative lack of growth compared to previous years.
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