The original influencers of the pre-Instagram era
Shut down his eponymous brand
Last week, the original fashion blogger Eleshan Chung ("Miss Chung") announced that she would close the eponymous fashion brand she had been establishing for 5 years.
She is arguably the top fashion blogger of the blogging era, and after switching to Instagram, she now has more than 5 million followers.
Miss Zhong said on her Instagram that because of the impact of the epidemic, it is difficult for small retailers like her to survive. Therefore, it was decided to officially close the brand on March 31, not to enter the management stage, and not to sell to third parties - that is, everything that can be bought now is a masterpiece.
At present, she has completed the customer's final order and properly handled all employees' salaries, insurance and store leases.
As soon as the news came out, many fans who had followed Miss Zhong for many years shouted pity.
Last year, she and the British brand Barbar launched a joint series that just set off a boom among fashionable people, and it is even more difficult to find clothes in China, and now it is about to retire.
The launch of their own brands by internet celebrity bloggers has become a conventional "monetization routine".
With its own fame, let the fans who love its style better learn from the wear, but also let the accumulated network circulate to sell goods to make money, it sounds like a beautiful thing.
But the flowers are not red, and the Internet celebrity industry is more famous for pushing the front wave.
How to make your brand go further, it is indeed important to spend time on business design and style, but more often, efforts are difficult to escape the tide of the times.
01
Handsome girl in Mary Jane's shoes
Miss Zhong, whose original name was Alexa Chung, is a foreign fashion blogger who has become popular in the school intranet era, and this Chinese name is also because she has Chinese ancestry, thanks to Chinese fans.
Miss Zhong became popular in 2007, when the style of sweet and well-behaved Japanese magazines in China became popular.
In a group of online celebrities who took pictures to swing scissor hands and inner eight characters, Miss Zhong's eyebrows were heroic, draped in a motorcycle jacket, with a floral dress, and a pair of straight and thin chopstick legs and feet and black ankle boots appeared on the computer screen. It's hard not to make people shine, and there is a school intranet photo album for her.
In the era when Instagram had not yet appeared, Miss Zhong gave many Chinese girls a neutral and neat fashion style of dressing enlightenment, so that we could see more beautiful looks.
At the same time, she was also the darling of the fashion circle in those years, and the British fashion brand Mulberry once used herself as a design inspiration to launch a bag called "Alexa Bag", which was extremely popular.
As a fashion blogger, Miss Chung has brought many pieces of fire in the early days.
The most well-known is the ever-changing Mary Jane shoes on her feet, which are almost the most obvious personal symbols in a variety of height colors and different clothes.
There are also Charlotte Olympia cat-toed flat shoes called "Tears of the Times", which were worn red by Miss Zhong and have used them to match no less than a dozen styles.
The early Miss Zhong liked the retro style, the floral doll collar top with A line short skirt or shorts, and then the wearing formula of a pair of flat shoes, it is not very outdated to see now.
After 2013, her style has become more handsome and neutral, and she often appears with a variety of tough coats and ankle boots.
In addition to fashion bloggers, Miss Zhong is also a very professional host.
She has interviewed many of the industry's leading designers in the British Vogue series "The Future of Fashion".
In 2020, he also served as the host of the reality show "Next in Fashion", which is called "upgraded Project Runway", and confirmed his identity as a "fashion connoisseur".
02
Bloggers do brands
It's like a gust of wind
Fast forward to the 2010s, the Instagram that changed the world for young people was born, and the fashion blogger world is also facing an update iteration.
Italian fashion blogger Chiara Ferragni, known as the "cosmic blogger," spearheaded her own brand in 2013, pioneering the pre-Instagram era of bloggers.
Soon after, more bloggers saw the sweetness of making fame monetize and laid out their business landscapes, in 2016, French fashion blogger Jeanne Damas founded Rouje; in 2017, Miss Zhong also caught up with this craze, announcing the creation of her own eponymous fashion brand Alexa Chung.
Alexa Chung's first collection consists of about 150 pieces, adding a lot of neutral details to the feminine, just like Miss Chung's personal style. But the pricing is not cheap: the unit price is generally converted to about 4-5,000 yuan, and the coat will be more expensive up to 10,000 yuan.
Miss Chung's popularity is there for all to see. The new series has been on sale for less than 3 days, a quarter of the goods on the official website have been sold out, and the skirt series is almost in a replenishment state.
The most popular selling is the following 625-dollar printed cheongsam skirt, which was sold out as soon as it was launched.
In the short film released with the brand, Ms. Zhong and the team's 6 designers discuss the design, and the pattern of the cheongsam is her own meticulous carving and repeated modification. At the time many expected her to be "the next Victoria Beckham".
In the past five years of branding, Alexa Chung has released new collections at fashion weeks such as London and Paris, and has also held pop-up stores and brand parties in Tokyo, Berlin, Los Angeles and New York.
In addition to the sales of her own website, Ms. Zhong's brand relies almost entirely on wholesale sales by department stores and boutiques, such as Net-a-porter, Selfridges, Nordstrom, Bergdorf Goodman and other websites and stores.
With the continuous spread of the epidemic in the past two years, many department stores and buyers have closed their stores intermittently, followed by a large number of orders being cancelled.
Some people suggested that Ms. Zhong change her thinking of selling goods and use her original popularity to advertise her brand on social media, but she was reluctant to do so or give up the deep partnerships she had established with many stores for a long time. In the end, you can only choose to cut love.
03
The clothes of the influencer blogger
Is it good to sell in the end?
Although the epidemic is the last straw that overwhelms many designer brands, from the perspective of the spread of the "net red bloggers creating brands" boom for more than a decade, successful bloggers have no shortage of the following characteristics.
First, "get on the bus" early enough.
Chiara Ferragni, the first "crab-eating" in 2013, was almost popular all over the world in her shiny big-eyed design, and the price was once comparable to luxury goods.
She did not launch a whole series at the beginning, but first tested the water in the shoes, and then began to make clothes, backpacks, and mobile phone cases after a good response, creating round after round of hits.
After Chiara's great commercial success, Harvard Business School even offered a course on her self-management as a typical success story, inviting her to give a lecture.
The sooner you change the track to monetize your fame, the sooner you can earn your first pot of gold – this may sound cruel, but it is a proven reality.
Second, the design needs to be proportional to the price.
A big reason why Miss Chung's style is popular is because it can be imitated with similar pieces.
After she launched her personal brand, the cost of "let you wear Miss Zhong" increased significantly.
Take the clothes that are still being sold on the official website as an example, the jackets and tops in the spring and summer are converted to around 1200 yuan, and the price of dresses or coats with slight thickness is mostly in the range of 1700-3400 yuan.
If it is not for the love of fans, many styles in addition to the joint brand can find similar models with lower prices in other brands.
Third, popularity is not a panacea, the brand itself is more important.
Miss Zhong's brand uses her personal style as a marketing point, and the style of each season since then has been more or less tied to her, and as the original generation of fans change and grow, or fans of other styles of bloggers, the original customer base will be lost.
Behind today's popularity in China is The Swedish fashion blogger Elin Kling, who has retreated to focus on branding, closed her Instagram account and founded Totême with her husband after earning enough eyeballs and connections 7 years ago.
Elin Kling is "well hidden" and when people mention Totême, they rarely think of her name, replaced by the few explosive silk scarves, jeans and embroidered framing tops of this year's fire.
Even if the price is not cheap, fashionable people are always willing to pay for the "blockbuster" and its own design, which is the brand communication effect of the Instagram era.
Of course, among the above factors, the ability of the blogger itself and the team, the opportunities of the times, and the sufficient flow of funds are indispensable, but the opportunity will always throw the olive branch to those who are prepared and put into practice.
"The experience of starting and running my own company has been very meaningful and often enjoyable for me. But the past few years have been really challenging for small startups, and our company is no exception. ”
"Even so, my passion for fashion remained unaffected." Miss Zhong said. She will also be active in the world of modeling and hosting, continuing her passion for fashion.
Text, Editor/Pineapple Dog
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