Welcome to Executive Action Items, a Glossy+ member-exclusive series driven by monthly focus groups with subject matter experts. The bi-weekly series will offer actionable takeaways for workers navigating the rapidly evolving beauty and fashion industries.
This month, Glossy brought together a group of marketing executives across the fashion and apparel industry to share their thoughts on the state of marketing. The executives compared notes on topics like the measurability of IRL marketing events and the importance of a holistic digital marketing strategy. Below is a recap of a segment of the discussion focused on influencer marketing, which zeroed in on what’s working and how brands are making the most of their creator partnerships.
Focus group members:
Taylor Capuano, the co-founder of the women’s nipple cover brand Cakes Body. Capuano co-founded the brand in 2022 after working as senior marketing manager at Life is Good.
Kristen D’Arcy, CMO of the 23-year-old denim brand True Religion. D’Arcy’s background in marketing and fashion includes senior marketing positions at Pacsun, Oscar de la Renta, Ralph Lauren, Coty and American Eagle Outfitters.
Samantha Fodrowski, vp of brand marketing at the Western boots brand Tecovas. Fodrowski previously worked as senior director of marketing at Kendra Scott, and has held marketing positions at Clean Cause and Tiff’s Treats.
Dana Mosa-Basha, director of marketing for the Detroit-based watch and handbag brand Shinola. Mosa-Basha has held marketing roles at PVH Corp and TikTok and was most recently head of digital marketing for Soho House.
Customize your influencer marketing strategy based on your brand’s strengths and objectives
Each of the brands represented on the call has a distinct approach to working with influencers. True Religion, for example, has frequent partnerships with A-listers like music artists Anitta and Megan Thee Stallion. Cakes, on the other hand, has seen significant success and millions of dollars in revenue driven by a robust base of affiliate ambassadors on TikTok.
D’Arcy: “We work with layers of influencers. At the very top, we have our A++ talent. That’s like Anitta or Megan Thee Stallion with tens of millions of followers. We use them a couple of times a year to be the face of a new campaign or platform, for example. The most recent one we launched was with Anitta. Below that, we work with people like Jadya Cheaves and others who have highly engaged audiences but maybe not as many followers. Then, under that, we have what we call Team True, which is made up of college and professional athletes, stylists, celebrity stylists and musicians. One thing all these layers have in common is that they all organically love our brand, and that makes a big difference.
One thing we do differently is that everyone we work with is identified in-house. We don’t use an agency to find talent. My marketing team has their ears to the ground, and they know who’s trending, who’s relevant and who’s in our pipeline. Sometimes it lines up well where we don’t even realize the [talent] has other big things happening. When we worked with Megan Thee Stallion, right after, she hosted the MTV Music Awards, then she had a Netflix documentary come out about her and a new album — it was one thing after another. We try to understand what the talent has coming down the pipeline, as well.
In terms of what’s performing, all the different layers of influencers do well for us. When we launched with Anitta last week, we saw an instant lift in sales. We were like, ‘Thank goodness.’ That’s always a good feeling as a marketer. We’ve seen that if there’s any content involving a Team True member on a PDP [product detail page], the add-to-cart rate goes up by 80%. So it’s working for us, no matter which level [of influencer] you look at.”
Fodrowski: “We lean toward authentic Western [wear], so we have a great relationship with fashion influencers who are putting together looks for Stagecoach or a rodeo, for example. … But we’re a product-led brand, and we want to talk about the guts of the boot, the performance. So, we also work with people who are ranchers and construction workers and make content with them. We just launched Tecovas Work, which is targeted specifically at people who work in construction, oil fields, etc. We have influencers like [musician] Kelsea Ballerini, along with the true performance angle — people who are wearing them for function. Every type of ambassador is useful for us.”
Mosa-Basha: “It’s important that you don’t pull some random person in who feels forced and out of left-field. I love [Fodrowski’s] point about making content showing the product in the real world. We’re really trying to push ourselves this year to show our product in less of an aspirational, dreamy, luxury world and to show it more on real people in real situations. You can take one item and show it in a thousand different ways on a thousand different people. The market is saturated, and you need this identity cosign to see how people will really relate to the product.”
Capuano: “We have a little bit of a different perspective on this, maybe because we’re the newest brand on this call. Because we’ve been self-funded up to this point, profitability has always been most important. We couldn’t invest in a lot of big top-of-funnel brand-building stuff, so we tested that alongside affiliate ambassadors. I see the importance of top-of-funnel, for sure, but for us, we saw negative ROI on those top-of-funnel influencer plays. Our perception was that people are sick of being sold to. The pay-to-play wasn’t working for us at all, and we didn’t have the money or the bandwidth to experiment with it much more. So, we built a very large affiliate business network. We have 25,000 affiliates on TikTok who generated $18 million in revenue for us last year. That content is then our top-performing content on Meta. It’s a goldmine.
We’re testing internationally right now, and we want to get into Spanish-speaking countries. We don’t have any Spanish-speaking creators in-house right now. So if we can start with TikTok Shop and affiliates [in Latin America] and mine the creative, then all of a sudden, we have a robust content library ready to go that we have the rights to and can put on Meta. It’s a win-win-win because the affiliate content works on TikTok and on other channels, and the ambassadors get paid a commission, too, which I’m happy about. The consumer is more open to that kind of content.”
