Lingerie brand Adore Me is back at NYFW this year, after hosting its first fashion show in February of 2022. This season’s show, held on February 10, will have a new component: live-streamed shopping.
According to Adore Me CMO Chloe Chanudet, the brand has been experimenting with live shopping for over a year, but this is the largest experiment to date. On Friday, during the show, online viewers can watch a live-streamed version on Adore Me’s website. There, they can shop the looks in real time as they come down the runway through tech from the live shopping company Caast.tv.
Chanudet said this activation is the culmination of a number Adore Me live shopping experiments that varied widely. Early attempts involved the company renting expensive professional cameras, hiring professional QVC hosts, creating themed streams that showed off products based off astrological signs, for example, and leveraging different platforms like Instagram.
Ultimately, Chanudet said, some clear winning tactics emerged.
“We learned early on that it’s really not worth it to go for high production value,” she said. “We’ve had more success just shooting on a phone and using one of our influencer partners or even our own employees as hosts, rather than bringing someone else in.”
Chanudet said the choice of platform and how the company notifies customers about a stream is a major success factor. On Instagram, Adore Me has more than 800,000 followers, and yet shopping events on Instagram Live only brought in a few hundred viewers. But streams hosted on the brand’s main website with a link sent to its SMS subscribers have regularly attracted more than 4,000 viewers per stream. That’s despite Adore Me having significantly fewer SMS subscribers than Instagram followers, though Chanudet declined to share how many SMS subscribers the brand has.
The NYFW show will use many of these same strategies, which Chanudet said is part of her overarching goal of doing more with less, when it comes to marketing. She said it’s cheaper to produce a fashion show at NYFW and an accompanying live shopping stream than it is to get a single post from a macro influencer on TikTok right now. For context, Christian Siriano said last year that the average NYFW show costs around $40,000 to produce.
“Our kind of DTC brand is not typically present at Fashion Week,” Chanudet said. “But we’ve found a way to approach it that works for us.”
The U.S. livestream shopping market has been growing, reaching around $20 billion in e-commerce revenue last year. But it’s still small compared to China’s $300 billion market size. American companies like Nordstrom and Aldo continue to invest in the opportunity.
“Livestream shopping has grown from a $0 to a $300 billion industry in China in a very short period of time,” said Deborah Weinswig, CEO and founder of Coresight Research. “We are very confident that the U.S. market will reach what we see in China.”
Adore Me was recently acquired by Victoria’s Secret — the deal closed on January 3. Its new parent company was once famous for its annual blowout fashion shows, but leading up to the total overhaul of its playbook, it stopped hosting them. The last Victoria’s Secret fashion show was held in 2018.
Chanudet said she isn’t approach Adore Me’s show the same way as Victoria’s Secret, which orchestrated big pop culture events. Instead, Adore Me’s version of the lingerie brand fashion show is more focused and small scale, aimed at its core existing customers.
“I don’t have any inside knowledge [of Victoria’s Secret’s show strategy],” Chanudet said. “I don’t know if or when they’re going to do another show. Since we joined VS, they’ve been very insistent that we be independent.”
