After Katherine Lin put out a photo of herself with friends at the Coachella music festival on Twitter and Instagram this spring, she was thrilled to discover the photo posted on the website of Dannijo.com, the retailer whose necklace she was wearing. “It shows how much they want to connect with us as consumers,” says the 21-year-old University of Southern California student.
Ms. Lin is one of thousands of young women and men who are becoming real-world models for retailers, from Coach to Lululemon, when brands upload their photos from social media. Retailers troll the web for pictures of their products, which are usually tagged with the name of the company; Ms. Lin tagged her photo #Dannijo in hopes of reaching the community of Dannijo fans. The brands then create links to their own websites or collect the photos in galleries.
Some retailers, like Modcloth.com, simply ask customers to upload photos directly to their site. The brands’ embrace of real-people photos feeds the needs of young consumers for connection, as well as retailers’ need to engage them. “It makes it more real to see it on a real person at a real event,” says Ms. Lin, who also peruses the photos uploaded by other consumers. “With professional models it’s different—obviously it looks good on them.”
Showcasing amateur photos of people who aren’t models is an about-face for the hyper-controlled fashion industry. Traditionally, marketers dealt in aspiration: Put a product on a preternaturally beautiful model, shoot it artfully, and consumers will yearn to have it, though they know they will never on their best day look as good as that model. But retailers are learning new approaches in the do-it-yourself digital world, where word-of-mouth can be more powerful than a well-funded national advertising campaign. Celebrity street-style photos have prepared consumers for caught-in-the-moment fashion photos. And marketers are searching for new guerrilla ways to evangelize.
“People trust complete strangers more than they trust brands,” says Jose de Cabo, co-founder of Olapic, a two-year-old company whose software applications help retailers search social media for photos and post them on websites. Many of Olapic’s clients, which include Dannijo, the Lululemon brand of workout clothes and the Nastygal fashion site, create click-throughs that allow shoppers to tap the picture on Instagram and be taken to the product page where the item can be purchased. “People who click on real-people photos are two times more likely to convert to a sale” than people clicking on a model’s photo, Mr. de Cabo says.
While marketers’ use of content from social-media sites like Instagram has raised privacy concerns, the retailers and Olapic say they are in line with the social-media sites’ user policies. Olapic, based in New York, says it has had only one person ask to have her picture taken down, a request it honored.
Some brands say they were struck by their customers’ willingness to share. The speed with which many consumers uploaded photos of themselves inspired Nastygal to use the photos on its site, says Amanda Nelson, the company’s vice president of merchandising. The use of hashtags—words or phrases used to identify messages on Twitter and Instagram—makes it easy for consumers to identify looks and for retailers to search for topics, brands and ad campaigns. Brands hope that real-people photos cement relationships with customers, keeping people on their websites longer, and selling more merchandise.
On one Lululemon page, it is possible to see how dozens of people wore Lululemon’s $42 “cool racerback” tank, which the retailer invited people to hashtag “#coolracerback.” People have photographed themselves in the top doing awkward yoga poses, doing push-ups and lifting weights. Lululemon invites more photos with phrasing on its website: “yoga. run. hashtag it.”
Since Lululemon last fall asked customers to upload photos of themselves in its athletic wear with the hashtag #TheSweatLife, 26,000 people have responded with photos via Instagram. The photos have generated two million page views on Lululemon’s website, as well as about a million Instagram “likes,” says Nancy Richardson, Lululemon’s vice president of digital and brand strategy.
The real-world pictures don’t break too many fashion taboos. Most brands curate the photos they place on their sites—and the subjects are often young and attractive. Still, the results are relatively idiosyncratic, including jewelry shown on dogs and womenswear shown on men.
A gallery at Coach.com is replete with cellphone shots of shoes, many taken from above, in response to a promotion called #CoachFromAbove. “It’s a way to deepen consumers’ involvement in the Coach community,” says a Coach spokesman. Dannijo started posting photos after its customer-service representatives said they had received phone calls from people who described jewelry they had seen on Instagram. “We’re a very voyeuristic community,” says Danielle Snyder, one of the site’s co-founders with her sister Jodie Snyder Morel. “You want to see what your friends are wearing and you want to see yourself on your friend’s page.”
