The IdeaLists

As fashion's master storytellers wield new tools to develop deeper narratives, coding becomes as important as cameras, e-commerce as important as retail and designers from multiple media converge on single projects to create amazing new experiences.

As part of The One Club's New York Creative Week, we invited 50 of our favorite friends to Consulate Films for a panel discussion on the Future of Fashion Storytelling and the Future of Fashion Retail. Because seating was limited, we wanted to share it here for those who couldn't attend.

The Future of Fashion Storytelling

Timothee Verrecchia talks to Quynh Mai (Founder and CEO Moving Image & Content), Cameron Connors (Executive Director Condé Nast Studio) and Theresa Canning Zast (Executive Director, Creative Services Kate Spade New York)

+ Timothee: Is it the creatives, is it the consumers, or the brands who are pushing innovation?

Theresa: For us it would be the consumer. That’s what’s guiding us to tell our story in a unique way. The web is our flagship store. Only a certain percentage of consumers will walk through our stores. So on the website you have a shop side and a play side. If you go into a play side we can be teaching consumers about the brand personality. It’s a bit of a competition because when you create something, how many likes will it get, how many downloads will it get? Even if it’s email messaging, we're watching the analytics of where people are clicking and why, and how long they’re spending.

Quynh: It's really artist-lead. I actually thought it would be the marketers who would be pushing fashion filmmaking. I think it's the creativity and ideas, because at the end of the day it’s the story that counts.

Cameron: For us it’s kind of a tie. The artists are where all this emanates from but the consumer is who’s pushing us. If you think about Condé Nast, our brand is really a means of communication from creative to consumer. The proliferation of all this access... you have sort of this instant feedback from consumers. If you change out your creative you do it right on the spot, whereas back in the day you didn’t have that flexibility. I think a lot of brands are doing creative stuff; it’s not to say they are not, but from where we sit [artists and consumers are] where the creative juices are flowing.

+ Timothee: Now consumers have access to information about brands— the product, the quality—do you think there's a new demand for what the brands are giving them. Do you see it as something that’s more accountability or more a compensation?

Theresa: Where we thought Facebook would be a big place for content, it's much more like answering customer service calls. With our other channels it’s a little more creative. At Kate Spade New York we have a challenge, because Kate Spade the person is no longer at the company. So we have to create a persona of what the brand is. We found that in social media we get to flush out this personality, this Kate Spade girl.

Seven Henrietta Street, a film by Kinga Burza for Kate Spade New York

+Timothee: What do you feel are the primary motivations of your clients? Do they come because their backs are against the wall, or because they now have ways to exercise more creativity, more of their brand experience?

Quynh: Everyone lumps digital into one huge pile. Everyone says social media, blogs, online publications, Tumblr, mobile, tablet, android, iPhone iPad—it's all digital. I say, choose a lane. You may not be a Facebook brand. You may be a Twitter or a Tumblr brand. Don’t just jump on the bandwagon and get a digital platform. It’s like birthing a giant monster that you can't satiate, so you keep having to feed it more and more content and more and more engagement. Step back and say ‘what do I really want to achieve and am I willing to do this 12 months out of the year? If I'm not, what am I willing to do?’

+ Timothee: Do you feel that we're somehow experiencing 'MySpace syndrome' in that as there's more music, there’s also more noise? Do you feel that a lot of brands feel the need to express themselves just because the technology is there and platforms are there?

Theresa: As each channel is developed, it definitely takes a while to find your footing and make yourself unique. So how would Kate Spade do a Twitter? We set up a red typewriter in our 5th Avenue store, and we called it our 'Tweet Writer.' People would come in and type a message 140 characters or less, and we'd upload it to our feed. It was right at the beginning of Twitter so people weren’t even sure what it was. We took an old-fashioned approach for the first three months until we figured out exactly what we wanted to be doing. But if it’s not working, take it down.

+ Timothee: But does that mean that you feel as a brand the need to explore any new technology or any new platform that comes to you?

Theresa: I would definitely admit to there being a certain pressure, because when Burberry is getting all the exposure on the [Art of the] Trench, my boss is asking ‘How come we don’t do that?' There’s the pressure of being on the cutting edge, using different media to get noticed, but you still have to be selective. You can’t jump in and realize, ‘Oh my God we just created a blog and we have no one to create the content for it.’

+ Timothee: How do you feel about all these things changing everyone’s roles? Now clients seem to go directly to creatives to express their content without necessarily going through intermediaries. How does that change the media ecosystem?

Quynh: I think agencies are realizing that all the roles have to sit together. Media is my first question: what is the distribution channel? My second question is, what content fits well with this medium? And account management is part of all this. If I were to start again in this industry now, I’d be a media planner, because it’s the most creative aspect with what's happening with earned media or social media or paid media—which is moving away from traditional advertising and going into a more integrated contact.

Cameron: I would say the same thing is happening in the publishing industry. Two years ago at Condé Nast, a guy at the editorial side would never sit a table with [the ad sales teams] and now we have a weekly meeting. Technology is becoming front-and-center in every presentation that we give and every solution that we provide. The idea may come from anywhere, but the technologists make it happen. They're going to be very important looking forward and drive a lot of what we do.

Condé Nast Digital Solutions

+ Timothee: What are some of the possible developments you believe will keep pushing boundaries?

Quynh: We’ve experimented a lot with QR codes, AR, SMS short code, clickable software, shoppable video. I have to say, are we doing it for our marketing partners, or are we doing it for the consumer? Because at the end of the day the consumer isn’t using those products, and I think as industry evolves I see this obsession of wanting to be first. It goes back to storytelling. When I work with brands, it's that that cuts through.

Moving Image & Content - Branded Content Reel

+ Timothee: We've talked a lot about social media, but when you’re talking about luxury, a lot of the marketing is aspirational whereas social media is democratizing. So how do you balance that aspirational image that you’re all used to selling with these new media demands?

Cameron: It’s a tricky little slope we’re on. Social media has a lot of transparency, and luxury in the past wanted to create a lifestyle with the look and feel of an aspirational component. But this can still live and breathe in social spaces. It’s a matter of how you go about it. Even though there’s that level of transparency, people can always walk into the Chanel store even if they can't actually activate the purchase. They can actually check into the brand now at their own leisure as opposed to having to seek it out. But yes, brands have to be careful about what they put out there.

The Future of Fashion Retail

Adam Glickman (Founder, The IdeaLists) talks to Michael Ventura (CEO/CCO Sub Rosa) and John Jones (Executive Creative Director, retail R/GA)

+ Adam: Michael, can you start by telling me a bit about working on the Levis workshops?

Michael: We looked at Levis and what it embodies: this idea of craftsmanship, pioneering spirit, interesting people doing interesting things, and how we bring that to life in a retail environment. So we went out to San Francisco first, and we found pioneers, people doing prolific work in their respective fields, like Alice Waters, or Craig Newmark or Dave Eggers, and then paired them with different people in the Bay from a design standpoint. We opened an antique leather press and screen-printing shop to the public, doing collaborative projects with them for 60 days. Anyone could come. Then in New York we did a photo studio. 50,000 people came through that front. There were half a billion earned media impressions for Levis; we didn’t pay a dollar for media. So now we’re active on our third workshop, which is inside the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, and it’s centered around filmmaking.

Levi’s® Workshops

+ Adam: So in a sense this is applying web 2.0 community-building philosophies to brick and mortar spaces. Is this something that would be of interest for them to scale in retail locations nationwide?  Not simply pulling from a marketing budget but as something that could actually drive sales?

Michael: This year there will be three international ones opened up that will also have a bit more retail component built into them. The ones that we had done last year and currently have a very curated, very small selection of product because we wanted to make sure people didn’t feel this was a store with something else, and that it was first and foremost a community space. But now that the message has kind of been laid, we’re able to do it.

+ Adam: The notion of curating is something you’re seeing increasingly in both retail locations as well as online. Is that a space you’re exploring with your clients?

John: Yeah, I think with social media, it's sort of a new curation channel. And I think people are starting to respect that the store is going to resemble the web experience. If you go to a website it remembers who you are, it remembers what you bought, it remembers your whole history. There’s no reason a store can’t do the same thing if you walk into it and you have a mobile device with you. It’s not about surfing your mobile device—it’s about getting people to touch the objects and have their own technology enable them to touch objects and get information.

77kids by american eagle® Interactive Retail Space by R/GA

+ Adam: A lot of people want to integrate mobile and retail shopping together, but when you really think it through, how are you going to avoid having a situation where you go into a store in five years and everyone is walking around with their phone in front of their face?

John: Well it’s already there. Something that scared retail was when people would come in and scan the barcode and find out where it could be bought cheaper. If you go to a restaurant and find out what the mark up is on a bottle of wine, it frightens people a little bit. But at the same time you have to keep on your toes to stay competitive.

+ Adam: When people talk about click and mortar, e-commerce and retail coming together as one, give us an example of what this going to start to look like?

Michael: One thing that we’re working on, not for Levis, is augmented reality changing room. Where you don’t have to take your clothes off and you’re able to see yourself in different forms of the clothes. Obviously there’s some complexity, but there are ways to augment what you’re looking at. We’re working with MIT Lab to evolve how this might play out. Where it breaks down is if someone builds something just because it’s a trend, it doesn’t mean it’s relevant or helpful. Does it make for a faster, richer, more informative experience? If the answer is 'no' to any of those then it doesn’t really make sense.

John: One of the things to consider about this whole convergence is how do we use things that are online to enable the store? Like customization. So how do we recognize the costumer?

Michael: I would add that it's important to think what will bring people back to the space. What we’ve consistently tried to do is not the one-off gimmick, but it’s thinking about things that are consistent and continue to evolve with the consumer experience.

+ Adam: It’s much more cost-effective to run a store online, and you reach a lot more people through e-commerce than a retail store. Will there be boutiques in the future? What might a boutique look like in the future?

Michael: We’ve been helping brands to curate a bit more—boutiques where not everything is going to be Reebok or Nike. So here are noncompetitive brands that subscribe to a lifestyle, but if you’re also engendered, then this space becomes a destination for that. You may not always need to buy a pair of jeans, but maybe you may want to buy a pair of sneakers, or that magazine, or that DVD, or new pair of sneakers. And bringing it back to programming, so that space also has talks and screenings and really creates a true destination.

John: I think what we’re seeing with a lot of communities online is curation. People are used to the way Target curates certain types of products. You go to Target and you know you’re going to get a certain level, whether you’re okay with that level or not. But we’re starting to see  stores that are curated in slightly different ways. I think we’ll see brands that can curate a style better than others. That’s how it’s starting to work online.

Thanks to all involved, especially Consulate Films, for hosting us in their gorgeous loft space, and Reed + Rader for sharing their fantastic work!

Check out more event pictures on Facebook.