Project Trends.
Digital fashion magazine
DESIGNER
Ruixin J. Zhang
Ruixin J. Zhang
Create an online platform for creating more fashion content that aligned with the brand, and nurture a better relationship with the consumers in order to promote purchasing and maintain retention.
An online fashion social video streaming platform for user-generated fashion brands to help end-consumers purchase items that fit best and help fashion retailers to achieve long-term growth.
Nowadays, marketing professionals might already spot the fact that digital ads on the internet keep beating TV commercials. Research shows that marketing budgets are increasing dramatically (reaching to $350 billion by 2022). However, where and how to post fashion retailers' brand contents online has become a tricky question. Fashion and retail industries have been increasing their major marketing on social media and running digital campaigns. While one thing fashion industries didn't realize is that traditional marketing strategies won't work for the new generation internet lovers, for which really prefer authentic information by real consumers. Research shows that 90 percent of the branded content online nowadays is actually generated by their leading consumers. And those content are even more popular than the "expensive" brand content the fashion industries generated.
It is already quite common that fashion retailers and brands create "perfect" video content to try to stand out in the crowd of hundreds of social media posts their end-consumer exposed to every day. However, to attract more end-consumers into the ads, those content should be driven by "social influencers" in the new "world". Most of the time, those influencers online produce content that more resonates with the individuals on the social media platform. Those influencers specialized in fashion can be the new leading fashion consumers, later we call them fashion vloggers, which will become the central role of this whole process. To make sure the content they generated based on their own user experience is aligned with the original brand, the fashion retailers and brands need to maintain a proper long term training with the fashion vloggers. By allowing them into the brand and sales promotion inside the social platforms, there is a much higher chance that the end-consumers will look into and purchase.
With 4G and upcoming 5G mobile networks, the video streaming experience will be more and more smooth than ever before. Besides, the mobile purchasing experience has more advantages that a web platform. Users can watch a fashion video anytime anywhere and purchase the items inside the magazine. Those user-generated brand content processes can be automated by machine learning. On one side, based on consumers' gender, age, and the vloggers they followed, the social platform can adjust algorithms to predict what items/vlogs the end-consumers like, instead of just relying on organic search. On the other side, the social platform can start to learn what kind of fashion vloggers the end-consumers like, and make that person help to generate brand contents and promote more brand exposure to their end-consumers.
The App offers a new view of showing fashion items comparing to traditional retail app. The digital magazine starts from multiple featured themes with videos from real leading customers (fashion vloggers).
Based on end-consumers’ interests and personal information, the App suggests items that fits best.
The colorful cards show a list of theme topic of what is trending right now.
Based on different styles and fashion topics, the fashion vlogs are seperated into different themes.
Scroll to view the whole list of themes, and tap on a specific item to check the detail of that theme.
The popular fashion vlogs are made into a playlist. Users can play all together or go to a specific one in the list.
Each vlog consists of a video demo and a short article about their experience with the items.
After browsing the vlogs, users can click on the white dot and go to the purchasing screen of the item.
To end-consumers, Trends offers them a more active and memorable shopping experience comparing to traditional online shopping. The experience brings much joy than just searching for items. It brings an even more enjoyable experience than the paper version fashion magazine. End-consumers can even just come to the platform and have a nice experience of consuming the content. In the meantime, enabling by the smart machine learning algorithms, end-consumers can easily get items they want to purchase.
To the majority of fashion retailers and brands, Trends bring them a new way of marketing for their fashion products, which can be more beneficial comparing to TV ads, and social media ads. Let fashion vloggers promote their brands can potentially be a cheaper and more influential way for the next generation fashion consumers. This becomes even more beneficial especially for independent brands and retailers, who have very limited e-commerce platforms for promoting their brands and selling their products.
In the end, to the fashion industries, this project can possibly bring a new type of job to the new generation fashion lovers and help them become the new brand fashion stylist or models step by step.