Inside WSJ. Magazine's Milan Design Week Cocktail
WSJ. Magazine
Take a look inside WSJ. Magazine's celebration of Milan Design Week at Villa Eugénie, where guests toasted the start of Salone del Mobile.
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New York Times
26-05-2025
- New York Times
A New Super-Group of Creative Talent
For two days in April, during the Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan, the fashion brand Miu Miu hosted a book club. It was quite an undertaking, one that involved only a small amount of actual reading. Produced to the exacting taste of Miuccia Prada, the event, a cultural experience of sorts to promote the arts, involved the creation of a 96-page branding guide, which included a color palette of six shades of orange, blue and ocher, as well as a custom logotype and its application across posters, banners, digital ads, menus, coasters, pencils, notebooks and more. Guests sat on tasseled couches, lit by table lamps. The dress code was Miu Miu, of course. Executed with the help of two external agencies — 2x4, the New York design firm founded by Michael Rock, Susan Sellers and Georgie Stout in 1994, and Kennedy, the London experiential design agency founded by Jan Kennedy in 2000 — the second annual Miu Miu Literary Club attracted more than 2,000 attendees, among them the International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree. Both 2x4 and Kennedy have collaborated on all manner of 'activations,' as events like this are known in marketing speak, but after decades of operating independently, the firms are now under the same ownership, having recently sold majority stakes to a rapidly growing entity called the Independents. In fact, they are two of 13 such small companies to be gobbled up in the last two years, joining a total of 19 agencies worldwide. A Unique Collective The Independents was founded in 2017 when Isabelle and Olivier Chouvet and a third partner, Alexandre Monteux, merged K2, their Shanghai event and production company, with Karla Otto, a veteran fashion and luxury public relations firm. Together, their clients included Chanel, Cartier, Celine, Moncler, Valentino and Nike. The Independents' original funding came from the private equity firm Cathay Capital, which was bought out in 2023 with a new round of $580 million funding led by a bank pool, TowerBrook Capital Partners, and Banijay, a strategic long-term investor that has the opportunity to increase its investment in 2026. Mr. and Ms. Chouvet remain majority investors. Mr. and Ms. Chouvet, both French, made their mark in Asia with a string of entrepreneurial ventures, including the Chinese flash sale site which Mr. Chouvet and his partners sold to Alibaba in 2015. The couple set up K2 in 2002. Its first project was the introduction of Chanel's J12 watch in Japan. By 2017, Ms. Chouvet had developed a network that made her firm the go-to for luxury brands looking to do world-class activations — the public relations, branding, events, production and social media — in Japan, China and Korea. 'I wanted to do what I did in Asia worldwide,' Ms. Chouvet said of founding the Independents. 'I only had the experience and capabilities in Asia, so I immediately looked for a partner in a different geographic location.' Karla Otto, the German-born publicist who opened her agency in 1982 in Milan, had the connections Ms. Chouvet sought. With Ms. Chouvet as chief executive, the Independents group has gone on an ambitious acquisition spree. Names like Bureau Betak, Prodject, Lucien Pages, Kitten and Sunshine may not mean much to the average civilian, but within the increasingly all-encompassing world of luxury, fashion and cultural branding, the agencies in the Independents portfolio are as blue chip as they come. When Alessandro Michele wanted to turn his fall 2025 Paris fashion show for Valentino into a giant, blood-red David Lynchian public toilet, he hired Bureau Betak to stage the scene. For the past 14 years, Anna Wintour has not planned a Met Gala without Prodject, the firm responsible for implementing her vision — whether 'Camp," 'Heavenly Bodies,' 'Sleeping Beauties" or 'Superfine' — inside the museum. When Dior set about staging a Villa Dior presentation in Dali, China, it worked with K2 to realize it. The Independents now has 1,200 employees across offices in Barcelona, Beijing, Dubai, Hong Kong, Jeddah, London, Los Angeles, Milano, Munich, New York, Paris, Riyadh, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo. The 2x4 agency and Terminal 9 Studios, a documentary film production company in Paris, are the most recent acquisitions. It's obvious why Ms. Chouvet would want to bundle these firms under one roof. The Independents group reported $800 million in revenue for 2024. She is far from the first to try to consolidate and capitalize on creative agencies. Venture capital roll-ups, in which a group of investors buy a bunch of agencies, eliminate redundancies, install a central administrative staff to cut costs and eventually take it public or sell to a mega group like Publicis are common practice. These deals come with pressure to deliver return on investment. Many of the agencies that have signed on with the Independents have spent their careers avoiding this acquisition model. 'It might work for tech companies or other things, but it doesn't work for creative industries,' Mr. Rock said. 'Whatever made that company great in the beginning is completely lost.' Yet Mr. Rock and his associates, whose clients include Prada, Chanel Arts and Culture, Nike, Instagram and Lincoln Center, signed over a majority stake to the Independents, which, from the outside, looks like a roll-up despite protests to the contrary. Ms. Chouvet said there is no exit strategy at the moment, and she has no financial or growth obligations to her investors. 'It's working so well because all of the interests are aligned, and everyone feels they are stronger by being together,' Ms. Chouvet said. 'There remains independence. That's why our name is the Independents.' The point of the group is to create a united network of partners who can work together, if they want to. 'By no means is it a forced march,' said Keith Baptista, a founder of Prodject. 'Nobody's telling me, 'You must work with this person.'' Many of the agencies have already shared clients for years. Bureau Betak does the design and production for Saint Laurent and Jacquemus fashion shows, and Lucien Pages does their PR. So what is the point, and where's the catch? If everyone was happily working together for decades on end with no shortage of business, why consolidate? Ms. Otto and Mr. de Betak used the sale to step back from the day-to-day of their agencies. She essentially retired, and he is now focusing on an art and architecture business. The practice of a principal exiting the business after a three-year earn-out period is common practice after a company is acquired. The idea that Ms. Chouvet is hoovering up a bunch of companies whose success hinges on the singular vision of the founder, just when the founder is looking to retire, is not a negligible one. 'You get to a certain age and you think about those kinds of things,' Mr. Rock said. We weren't looking to cash out like an exit strategy. We still want to work.' Why wouldn't he? A few weeks later, Mr. Rock was reached by phone to confirm the Pantone colors chosen for the Miu Miu Literary Club. He was at the airport, flying back from a weeklong photo shoot for Chanel in the South of France. 'I'm feeling very ragged,' Mr. Rock said. 'But we were at Coco Chanel's house on the Riviera, so it's kind of like … can't really complain.'
Business of Fashion
23-05-2025
- Business of Fashion
Fashion's World-Builder-in-Chief
If a name is destiny, Niklas Bildstein Zaar has more than lived up to his. It could belong to a scion of House Harkonnen, an impression that is consolidated by his ascetic appearance — ghostly pale, shaven-headed, invariably swathed in voluminous black — and doubly underscored by the work his Berlin-based architecture and design studio Sub produces. Sub enthralls and unhinges with its otherworldly fusions of the monumental and the intimate, all scale and shadow, light and smoke, blaring sound and startling silence. It's easy to see how Sub's stark, sensual hybrids have insinuated themselves into popular culture. Their fearlessness is kind of overwhelming — and kind of omnipresent. On March 3, Bildstein was helping Anne Imhof launch 'Doom,' the artist's latest immersive extravaganza, in New York. Two days later in Paris, when Haider Ackermann debuted his first collection for Tom Ford, it was against a hermetically erotic backdrop created in tandem with Bildstein. Four days after that, Sub was responsible for Balenciaga's labyrinthine staging. A month later, Bildstein was working with Bill Kouligas of the Berlin record label PAN on an installation to debut their reworked Nike Air Max 180 at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and then his latest collab with Travis Scott launched at Coachella. It suspended twitching human forms like puppets on string while plumes of fire roared around them. Bildstein (the Zaar is apparently negotiable) and I have been talking since last October, when we met in Iceland where he 'designed' Ackermann's mindboggling journey to the centre of the earth for Canada Goose. That particular exercise threw a spotlight on Bildstein's very timely specialty. He is helping realise the creative visions of his fashion, art and music collaborators by designing experiences for them in novel ways, resulting in highly scrollable spectacles for the audience following along on social media. Canada Goose's excursion in Iceland in 2024. (Thibaut Grevet) He's also his own best ambassador. Bildstein is one of those conversationalists where it is really just a pleasure to shut up and listen. One thing I instantly gravitate towards is his idea of world-building. The planet is cursed with fools attempting their own versions of the same thing, but there is a seductive scale to Sub's output, even when it's as contained as it was for Ackermann's Tom Ford debut. So let's start there. Start small. 'Orchestrating feeling,' Bildstein calls it. He and the designer were in perfect sync, keen to combine then and now. 'Tom Ford is really pornographic,' he says, 'so we wanted something raunchy but also dreamy and ephemeral and light.' How many people in the audience took full note of the backdrop, the mirrors smeared with the phone numbers, the messages, the graffiti of the hookers Ackermann remembered from his old job at a nightclub in Antwerp? Who would have grasped that in the moment? It didn't matter to Bildstein if it wasn't seen for what it really was, if the details got blurred. 'If things get over-proscribed or too literal, the magic gets lost,' he insists. 'The space sets the tone with a sense of immediacy, but people are still projecting their own desires. You need to project yourself onto something.' Bildstein calls this 'sensory filler.' 'In memory, things are not clear,' he claims. 'You think you know in great detail what you've experienced, but people have a very loose idea of what they are.' Tom Ford Autumn 2025 show set. (Stéphane Aït Ouarab) I could ride that train of thought to the end of our conversation. Right now, Bildstein is on the phone from Venice, where Sub has designed the main exhibition at this year's Architecture Biennale. The very opposite of starting small, it marks a new degree of professional application and appreciation, acknowledged by a profile of Bildstein in The New York Times. 'Apocalypse Chic' the headline brayed. He wasn't best-pleased. The single word that has occurred more often than any other in coverage of Sub is 'dystopian.' Maybe that's inevitable when your longtime collaborators are people like Anne Imhof and Demna, or when they get the kind of coverage that Travis Scott and Ye, for whom he has also designed elaborate stage sets, have attracted of late. 'But that trope is looking lazy now,' Bildstein says, especially after Biennale curator Carlo Ratti's declaration that he'd chosen Sub because of the studio's proven ability to connect with a wider audience through its work in fashion and music. He will acknowledge, however, that in Sub's formative years, it felt important to talk about bleakness, and that is what really connected with the audience Ratti wants to speak to now. 'The thematics that were interesting to me were showing the hypocrisy of how the world was operating,' Bildstein explains. 'Everything was very 'imagine a space that is built with the intention of not providing any kind of comfort to people.' That's really the financial model a lot of real estate developers have. I wanted to respond to that so spaces of abandon, spaces that were comprised of generic elements, generic materials, galvanized steel, plaster board, simple concrete textures, all became part of a vocabulary of materials of the undecorated and valueless. The surprising thing, though, was that in the way that we deconstructed them or reassembled them, what remained was a kind of an attitude. Some would have it as a nihilistic, dystopian attitude, but it was clearly an attitude through space that people were responding to. The kids loved it.' I think that's because there's always a convincing sense of grandeur in everything Bildstein has done. However dark or nihilistic, it's been huge. Anne Imhof has taken over whole museums. Balenciaga has made and unmade worlds. 'I think it needs that, to have some authority in its proposition,' Bildstein offers. But, in a way, it's the grandeur of ruins. The artful decay of the Balenciaga salon in Paris and the frayed edges of the brand's shop on London's Bond Street speak to the end of days, a failed human touch. It is storytelling at its finest, its most subtle. And maybe its most dystopian, however much he's tired of the notion. In one of his rare early interviews, Bildstein suggested, 'We're ridding ourselves of previously accepted forms of an idealist mindset.' That hinted at a significant degree of cynicism, bordering even on despair. Now he counters, 'People want some of their primary needs fulfilled, people don't want to feel embarrassed, they don't want to feel guilt, they don't want to feel shame, they don't want to feel fear. And so if someone has a compelling enough vision that reduces these primary emotional attributes, then that will be a really appealing mode to adopt. I think we're experiencing that really very well in this very moment.' (At which point, I would advise everyone to run, not walk, to find a reprint of the visionary psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's 'Escape from Freedom,' originally published in 1941, which succinctly outlines the contrary and irresistible allure of authoritarianism.) When I ask Bildstein how important despair has been to him as a motivator, he answers, 'Definitely with the work I did for Balenciaga, but actually across the board… chronicling trauma as a design response has been something that people have been addressing in my work as dystopian. It's a reoccurring word that I hear to the detriment of Balenciaga, for sure. 'Can you just make it a little bit more cheerful…?'' Balenciaga's Summer 2020 show set. (Courtesy Balenciaga) Balenciaga has been Bildstein's defining client relationship to date. He claims he was essentially a nobody until Demna invited him into his world in 2019 with the show that simulated the parliament of the European Union in the aftermath of Brexit, an act of wilful economic suicide on the part of the UK government. But if Brexit was the unmentionable elephant in the room, Demna kept his design focus on literal power dressing. 'You omit the primary sentiment, but obviously, if you're able to design all the consequential things around it, it's a very powerful way to mediate ideas,' Bildstein acknowledges. 'And to see the work I'd been thinking about for so long suddenly being given a forum to express itself, and to see people responding to it in such huge numbers, was scary but also thrilling.' It's doubtful that many people in the audience considered the seating, but Bildstein had, in an early testament to his incredible eye for detail. Blue conference chairs, the chairs you sit on in parliament. 'The seating wasn't by chance. You become sort of entrapped in this role play by doing just one single action of sitting down. And I like the idea of entrapment. The reason why fashion shows are so good is the audience only need to do one thing. Enter, take a seat, see what's in front of them, and then it's over. Then, of course, you can play with lighting and sound and all the rest. But if we orchestrate that properly, the act of taking a seat actually turns you as an audience member into a protagonist.' The notion of audience complicity is always compelling. True, the vastness and occasional fury of Bildstein's concepts for Balenciaga shows have loaned them an inescapable intensity. Autumn/Winter 2022, to select just one controversial instance, was widely interpreted as a comment on Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Every seat had a t-shirt in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, the massive catwalk circled what looked like a bomb crater, and at show's end, the 'horizon' that ringed that catwalk was illuminated with random flashes as a distant war grew closer. But according to Bildstein, that wasn't at all the original intent (the t-shirt was a last minute addition). 'I would never try to do something that speaks to violence in that way, that would be obscene,' he insists now. 'It was more about the idea of a crescendo, a Wagnerian thunderstorm.' He claims the set — white ceiling, black glass — was supposed to be an architectural representation of all things Apple, with the steadily escalating sound and fury of the show an analogue for how we digest the turmoil of the world through the screen of our devices. It wasn't a warzone we were in, it was an iPhone. Balenciaga's Winter 2022 show set. (Courtesy Balenciaga) It's testament, at the very least, to the power of ambiguity, which isn't a negative in Bildstein's eyes. 'I think that's the powerful thing,' he says, 'especially when you're using space as a kind of narrative device. It should be immediate in its feeling, but not over-proscribed in terms of what it is. As soon as you tell the full story, when it becomes literal, you lose engagement.' In other words, there has never been a 'full story' with Balenciaga's shows, only loaded and elliptical spectaculars that stimulate conjecture like no one else's fashion week presentations. And presumably, tantalizingly, that will continue as Demna moves on to Gucci. Bildstein is already working with him on concepts for his debut. 'A new visual language, a new tone of voice,' he teases. Born and raised deep in Sweden's Arctic territory, Bildstein dropped out of school at 16. By dislocating himself from the conventional academic route, he closed off one set of opportunities but opened up another, where insatiable curiosity would be his teacher. 'That's why the notion of working transdisciplinary — which might seem like a kind of buzz word — is really just a consequence of how I've accumulated my knowledge over my life. The older I get, the more I discover. But as I take on different types of projects, or integrate layers into projects, I learn that everybody else is not prone to understanding how to weave these different threads from architecture, technology, storytelling, visual communication into some type of whole. They're not different categories. To me, they're really just different modes of communication. I'm finding it a little bit challenging as I get older to hold these conversations. But I think that's also my purpose, to try to give a bit of clarity, to showcase that things actually do connect.' That was the mission that became a manifesto for Sub. Bildstein and business partner Andrea Faraguna created Sub in 2017 as something between a research institute and a design studio with the metaverse as its playground. 'By the early 2020s, there was this general idea that there was a digital twin of the world that we could all interact with. Virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality. These were the kind of conversations that were held at that time. But the metaverse became a little bit simplified because the term got really unsexy, due to Facebook, I think. Today, there's less talk of metaverse. It feels like a dying terminology. What's emerging is something else.' Along with that shift, Sub is changing. If Bildstein and Faraguna originally presented an inseparable front in their rare appearances in the press (he describes them as 'a phenomenal combination'), they've recently drawn apart a little. He acknowledges that architecture is the umbrella under which Sub operates and that is Faraguna's bailiwick, while his work is more within a framework he calls entertainment. 'It's a bit of a random thing, and it sounds a little corny in a way because it doesn't have any kind of intellectual proposition tied to it. But I think it's important to call it what it is. So that would be, for instance, when we collaborate with musicians and fashion. And then we have this digital and strategy side, and that's really where we will be focusing moving forward. A lot of innovation can come out of that, and I'm really excited with what's on the horizon.' That's where the 'something else' comes in. 'We don't really know what that is,' Bildstein says. 'We don't even have the terminology for it. But the point might be that we don't really need to be embedded in these high-fidelity visual graphics. There's another type of mixed reality which is much more intriguing. Be okay with reality as it is for now, but let's embed a lot of other tools within it that are maybe not so visually dominant. What's happening now is, with the development of discriminative computer vision or object recognition, we have these algorithms that can actually understand the reality around us. Instead of trying to build a synthetic, three-dimensional replica, or digital twin of a world, we can let the world be what it is.' It's been a while since he told a journalist that he felt like an obsolete life form. 'We're just not equipped for what technology is throwing at us,' Bildstein said then. Now, he has a plateful of AI. Is he positive? 'It's a sticky thing,' he says. 'A really sticky thing. But what I do know for a fact is the only way to harness it towards something good is actually to engage with it and understand how it operates instead of being, like, here is this opaque, powerful new mode. It's a responsibility to understand how to break it down into smaller elements so we can generate something of our preference.' Travis Scott's stage set for Coachella in 2025. (Courtesy) The way we consume imagery is an unsurprising obsession for Bildstein, especially with the emergence of AI image generators. 'Images used to hold a lot of meaning, because there used to be a kind of sampling of something that took place and you felt historically that it transmitted something to you. It doesn't work like that anymore. You don't really know what is synthetic or what is real. And with the frequency and abundance of imagery over our phones, we don't actually lend ourselves to it to absorb any kind of emotional meaning. It doesn't transmit anything. It just becomes a vibe. And vibe is such a complicated word, because it's so profound, but it's also so hollow.' He might have found the perfect paradigm for that sentiment in the set of Demna's last ready-to-wear show for Balenciaga in March. It was clearly a labyrinth in the livestream's aerial shots. 'It's a shame the actual physical audience never got that,' Bildstein says ruefully. The show meant a lot to him personally, given that it was informed by the work of the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, one of his biggest youthful inspirations. Borges was blind, but he conjured worlds out of his darkness. 'A lot of that world-building is maybe what we're trying to replicate,' Bildstein suggests. Borges's best-known collection of stories is named Labyrinths, and one of the most famous stories in it is 'Funes the Memorious.' After suffering a head injury, Funes remembers everything. As one thing comes to mind, it instantly triggers a memory of another association. Bildstein considers Funes' situation 'maybe one of the most beautiful literary metaphors in terms of living in an information-heavy society. Imagine feeding the journal of an entire life into a context window to make a magnum opus. It's quite a Borgesian idea.' But is it a blessing or a curse? Funes chooses to live in darkness, a kind of voluntary blindness. When Bildstein describes his own living situation, it sounds similarly cerebral, stripped to monkish basics, bar his pit bull mix Diablo who goes everywhere with him. As another touchstone, he mentions Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, with its poetic tale of astronauts who travel to the end of the known universe only to discover their own shadow. 'We need to look inwards to look outwards,' he proposes. 'We need to understand or investigate our own biases in order to be more open.' Bildstein himself has clearly been doing a little self-scrutiny. 'It is so much more profitable to be deceptive or act as a defector. That said, I think deep down inside I'm a little bit sinister and I'm trying to overcome that. I'm being a little bit more hopeful now, and I also realize that what you create mirrors the future to come.' Anne Imhof's 'Doom' at the Park Avenue Armory in 2025. (Matt Grub) Maybe he's even fallen a little out of love with tech. 'The way we choose to utilise some of these emerging technologies is not actually improving our lives,' Bildstein concedes. 'Isn't it absurd that with social media in general, instead of being this gateway into this kind of Shared Photo Album which is a beautiful thing as a journal of what we're doing, it becomes a kind of doom-scrolling, dopamine-addictive, gamified slot machine. It's like we're living in an infinite feedback loop of negativity, and it's easy to go down the sensationalistic route. I feel a responsibility to take a step back, to try and prompt myself to look at things from multiple points of view, and to allow an audience to feel free.' 'I've been propagating a sort of dystopian visual output in my work, that's already established now,' Bildstein continues. 'So what am I interested in coming up with next? I keep on thinking about intimacy and connection and how that is something I want to explore a little bit further.' He's even floating the idea of permanence, maybe a home, as an antidote to the fiercely nomadic nature of his life to date. That's pretty radical for him. We're both fascinated by the incredible estate the artist Anselm Kiefer has created for himself near Barjac in the South of France. It is an aesthetic magnum opus given monumental physical form. But Bildstein finds that hard to imagine at his age. He is, after all, only 36, nowhere near the end of his life as Kiefer is. 'Permanence for me doesn't have to mean there's a kind of a monument that is transmitted to the next generation,' he muses. 'I don't think I've really defined that to myself yet, but there's definitely a kind of acknowledgement that human needs are very simple — food, clothing, shelter — and it could be a home. It's just a suggestion.'
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Yahoo
Long Considered Second-tier, Affiliate Marketing Gains Ground
Emerging brands are not just new and scrappy, but are becoming increasingly sophisticated in getting the word out, tapping into the full marketing funnel and navigating the creator economy. With the number of social media users projected to top 330 million by 2029, according to Statista, creators make a buck or two on links that pay commissions while brands rake in revenue with a cost-effective, pay-per-sale fee. Done right, it can cost much less than traditional marketing. More from WWD A Look Back at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's Royal Wedding: The Dress, Ring and Celebrity Guests Loro Piana, Dimorestudio, OTW by Vans Top Drivers of $26.1 Million in EMV for Milan Design Week EXCLUSIVE: WNBA's Golden State Valkyries Team Up With Rakuten for Tunnel Looks For brands like Aligne that don't have a six-figure marketing budget and are looking to test ground in a new market, affiliate marketing has proven to be the right bet. 'The U.S. is huge, and you can approach it through these big, flashy campaigns or you can go more micro to start and work with great content creators who have created huge businesses for themselves,' said Ginny Seymour, CEO of the British clothing label. Arielle Charnas, influencer and founder of Something Navy, a now-defunct clothing brand turned Substack newsletter, visited the New York pop-up store and posted on social, spiking sales 3,000 percent from the year prior in a matter of an hour, according to Seymour. By partnering with creators who have shown an affinity for the brand, Seymour leverages their point-of-view, community and inclination to share styles they selected and enjoy wearing. With the right partnership, synergy between brand and creator could generate far more benefits beyond sales. It could increase reach — in this case, Charnas' 1.3 million Instagram followers — and engagement, raise brand profile and provide immediate, crucial data on customers. Wholesale accounts are often slow or just not equipped to provide that kind of data. Aligne, which entered the U.S. market in August 2023, reached over $1.4 million in sales through affiliate links during its first year, out of $6.5 million in sales for the brand overall. Seymour allocates more than half her marketing budget to affiliate marketing, and projects that budget will only increase. The U.S. business will account for 70 percent of sales by the end of December. The creator economy is projected to reach $480 billion by 2027, per Goldman Sachs Research, which includes a range of revenue streams such as affiliate commissions, brand partnerships and sponsored content. Commissions in particular are a measurable form of spending that can be foundational to a business' growth, particularly for a still-emerging brand. For contemporary shoe brand Larroudé, affiliate links have been instrumental since the start. Founded in 2020 by former fashion editor Marina Larroudé and husband and financier Ricardo Larroudé, the New York-based company not only works with affiliate platforms, but has created a program of their own where customers recommend shoes to other friends and earn credit in the process. 'We do believe in the power of sharing. We do believe in a world that a woman sells more once someone is wearing it and when someone is talking about it,' said Marina Larroudé. In 2023, the company generated $30 million in sales and allocates budget across commissions, seeding, paid search, social media advertising and off-the-wall campaigns. While Larroudé said the brand would never outright pay anyone for a blog post or form a paid partnership, she does believe in the value of gifting product and paying commission to affiliate partners. 'The budget is infinite as long as it has a return on investment. Our affiliate commission for influencers is 20 percent, which is higher than any other one in the market, and if they sell 1,000 shoes, then they're going to be paid,' Larroudé said. 'So everyone is incentivized and motivated to do more, but it depends on them. If they don't post and then don't tag, I won't be gifting again because we're not a charity business.' Affiliate marketing spend in the U.S. is projected to increase to $12 billion this year, according to Statista. And platforms like ShopMy have elevated social commerce to the stratosphere. Cofounders Tiffany Lopinsky, Harry Rein and Chris Tinsley offer user-friendly, real-time analytics to track performance of creators from clicks and conversion, while connecting luxury brands like Saint Laurent and Prada to 150,000 creators across 130 countries. In addition to its automated gifting program, which streamlines logistics, the platform offers creator discovery capabilities and a tool that serves as the middleman for guaranteed coverage. 'It's [affiliate performance] becoming almost like the validation layer for brands to do a bigger partnership [with a creator] because otherwise they're flying blind,' said Lopinsky. While gifting to celebrities and influencers are often managed by PR teams, Lopinsky reasons that the process should be informed by affiliate strategy, requiring cross-departmental communication and collaboration to determine which talents are best to partner with to enforce brand image and generate sales. The practicality of having a one-stop shop for clear reporting, communicating and seeding along with AI-generated recommendations on who to align with is an attractive feature for brands that may not be able to staff a full team dedicated to influencer marketing. 'Brands have been separated; brand [marketing] is way up here in the marketing funnel, performance is way down there, and they're not working together at all, and they really have no knowledge about who's doing what,' said the cofounder. And that can lead to missed opportunities. For 2024, ShopMy generated $262 million in sales for brands, and drives approximately $70 million a month in sales to brands and affiliate partners. And now, with the Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle as one of its 150,000 partners — a partnership Lopinsky would not discuss when asked — it's likely that number will rise. Brands weren't always on board with affiliate programming. Luxury players were late adopters to this channel, considering it second tier, joining once the numbers were on paper and there was less stigma associated with pay-to-play. For New York-based creator Lilly Sisto — who counts over 100,000 followers on Instagram, 70,000 on TikTok and 16,000 on Substack — linking back to products was her modus operandi since the early days. 'I just kind of did it because I loved it,' said Sisto. 'And then I really started getting traction, and realized I can actually make money and do this as a side hustle.' It didn't take long for Sisto to commit to creating content full time, crediting TikTok for the start of her brand deals. Sisto has partnered with Giorgio Armani, Tory Burch and Polo Ralph Lauren. Now, she gets about 20 percent of her revenue from commissions, but continues to share her favorite products via links. And that's a plus for brands as affiliate-driven customers not only have a 21 percent higher lifetime value than those acquired through other channels, according to Awin, but they associate brands and products to a particular context and attributes creators put on display. But, as with everything, brands must contend with oversight as the influencer marketing sphere is increasingly being regulated. A class action lawsuit against Revolve Group brought to light how the creator market is no longer the Wild West and distinctions between sponsored and organic content must be clear. The company declined to comment on the lawsuit or its influencer program. One thing's for sure, affiliate marketing will continue to grow as brands look for quantifiable returns on investments, especially in this uncertain market. Lopinsky said that, once brands see the full marketing funnel, then they can realize their full potential. Best of WWD Influencer Marketer LTK Raises $300 Million TikTok Users Crave Entertainment, Unboxing Videos and Luxury Experiences Bally Taps Chinese Actor Johnny Huang as Global Brand Ambassador
