Why Oscar de la Renta Is So â€œHauteâ€� on Social Media

**Waqas** · September 20, 2011

The Social CMO Series is supported by the Discover Digital Group, a unique consultancy that focuses on identifying new e-revenue opportunities for both Fortune 1000 and startup clients alike. Follow DDG on Facebook to get a taste of the insights that are offered.

That iconic American fashion house Oscar de la Renta has emerged as one of the leaders in social media marketing in its industry has proven to be something of a surprise. Leaders in progressive online marketing tactics tend to be those with vast marketing budgets or those who target young, digitally savvy consumers — not brands whose staple, as CEO Alex Bolen says, are $4,000 cocktail dresses.

We first wrote about the company when it streamed its Resort 2011 collection on Facebook in June 2010. At the time, only a handful of fashion brands were livestreaming, period — and even then, it was usually non-shareable; available only on the brand’s own websites. But during the Oscar livestream, the designer took questions from the audience over Facebook and Twitter.

Since then, we’ve watched social media personality OscarPRGirl become one of the most recognizable personalities on Twitter and Tumblr, and the impressively popular launch of the house’s first fragrance in 10 years via a Facebook sampling campaign. The company ran through 25,000 samples in a mere three days, says Erika Bearman, Oscar de la Rentaâ€™s director of communications.

Most recently, the brand decided to crowdsource photo coverage of its Spring/Summer 2012 collection through a project called #odlrlive. According to Bolen, approximately 1,000 photos of the show were uploaded to Tumblr with the hashtag #odlrlive, generating a kaleidoscopic display of photos from editors, bloggers, models and viewers at home behind a video livestream.

In the middle of Fashion Week, Mashablecaught up with Bolen to discuss Oscar de la Renta’s digital and social media marketing efforts to date, as well as the challenges that lie ahead as the company pushes into new, international markets.

Q&A With Alex Bolen, CEO, Oscar de la Renta

Part I: Ecommerce

How and when did you decide that Oscar de la Renta needed to be involved in ecommerce?

It was years ago now. To be honest, I was very unconvinced that our product would be viable online at first, and when it became clear that it was, we redesigned our site in 2008. We’re going to revamp our website again very soon, probably the early part of the year.

Why are you redesigning?

Very generally, we need to evolve. We need to engage with customers as well as we can online, and in order to do that, our site needs to develop. Specifically, we need to leverage HTML5 and better integrate social.

At what rate is your ecommerce business expanding? What percentage of your sales now occur online?

Assuming things continue at this rate through [December], sales on our site will more than double this year. We expect that trend to continue and perhaps accelerate.

Online sales are still less than 5%. I’ve told you before that we expect our ecommerce site will become our largest store at some point; our growth there is well in excess of our brick-and-mortar retail growth rate.

What’s driving the double-digital growth?

We’re seeing growth across the board. I would love to tell you sunglasses are key to our growth, but it’s really everything. More customers from more parts of the world are buying more things.

Despite that fact, we’re approaching the online world imperfectly. We could have done more business this year if we had been able to reach people in other geographies better, if we’d done a better job with mobile commerce. We’ve reorganized internally [as a consequence], and now have a completely independent ecommerce team. It was probably a mistake to think of ecommerce as part of our brick-and-mortar retail strategy, when they have their own separate sets of challenges.

Do you expect growth to cap at any point? Or could ecommerce one day make up 100% of total sales?

I am reluctant to make predictions about future of online; I’ve been wrong so often. It’s hard for me to imagine a world in which all of our sales were [executed] online. Every day our new developments online allow us to reach new customers, and I don’t see any cap in the growth, but I think brick-and-mortar retail will continue to be an important part of our business.

Part II: Social Media

â€œWe are not all things to all people, but we should always try to be more things to more people.”

What does a brand like Oscar de la Renta, whose staple, as you’ve said, is $4,000 cocktail dresses, stand to benefit from social media?

A couple of things. $4,000 cocktail dresses are very much our staple, but the dialogue we have with our community in the social media world may change that. We’ve certainly started to think more broadly about our products because of it.

How is social media strategy conceived and executed at Oscar de la Renta?

We are blessed to have a very talented team in our communications department. I [maintain] a very active dialogue with Erika [bearman], our communications director, and her team to figure out how we best talk to our community. And to be honest, things change so rapidly, it’s difficult setting strategy today for something 12 months in advance.

At this stage, we’re experimenting. We’re anxious to try new things. We’re not sure what will work well, what will cause our community to engage with our brand more. We’re looking at what we want to invest more time in doing, but how that will develop isn’t always clear. There are so many platforms and options.

How did the idea for OscarPRGirl come about?

Well, Erika came to me and said, ‘I would like to try something,’ and described very generally what OscarPRGirl could become. Very fundamentally, I trust Erika’s judgment. We speak a lot about what OscarPRGirl is doing. It’s very old school in a sense, she has developed a voice that people wanted to listen to and has been successful at engaging our fans.

Did you have concerns about having a personality speaking for the brand? Did you ever try to get Oscar himself to participate on social media, i.e., maintain a Twitter account?

I think that in the social world people can smell a rat a mile away. There’s a need for authenticity. Trying new things is authentic for our brand, social is authentic. Oscar has certainly participated in many of our social media initiatives — he’s taken questions from fans in real-time during our livestreams, for instance — and is hugely engaged with the online world and technology like the iPad. But communicating via Twitter is not Oscar’s thing.

Oscar de la Renta’s runway shows have been livestreamed for several seasons now. How are you benefiting?

I can’t tell you that there is a tremendous measurable brand benefit, although it does up our engagement. There are clear sales benefits too. Several shows ago, we offered jewelry after the show and sold every piece. The idea of just being able to watch the show at one’s desk is less new than it once was though, so we’re trying to bring consumers in for more exciting insider moments, like we did with #odlrlive.

When you establish yourself on a social media channel (i.e. Twitter, or Tumblr), what goals do you set?

Engagement. People talk about likes and fans and gathering big numbers. We’d rather have a smaller group of deeply engaged evangelists for our brand. Ultimately, the goal is to get people to think more about Oscar de la Renta and less about our competitors.

How do you measure the effectiveness of your presences and campaigns on those channels? Do you find greater value in impressions or sales conversions, or is there another metric you prioritize?

Everything you’ve just mentioned is important, and we look at all of them. This is a business, so sales and profits are the measure of our success. How we measure the success of a specific strategy or campaign in the interim requires a different set of metrics. A year ago people talked about fan numbers, now people talk about engagement. We want more people to spend more time interacting with our brand, and that’s exactly what’s happening.

How do you measure engagement?

I think likes and retweets are not the full equation. The power of social in our estimation is a true dialogue. We’ve stopped monologuing, broadcasting to people, and have started to engage in a discussion, meaning we adjust to what we hear, we don’t just talk.

Recently you launched a fragrance through a sampling campaign on Facebook. Why did you decide to hone in on that audience or platform?

It was an experiment. We had our Facebook Page, but it wasn’t something we had used all that well. We were so surprised by the results of that campaign. We had a very quick response, a very international response.

Do you think Facebook or Twitter will ever become major sales channels for you? If not, what value do they offer you as a company?

We expect FB will become a major channel of commerce. Whether it becomes one of ours depends on us, depends on us developing products that are right for our brand and that channel of our commerce. We want to try to be in front.

Right now we’re planning a major fcommerce initiative that will launch in a month and a half or so. We’ve developed a specific product for Facebook that brings together a number of fragrance and beauty and other parts of our brand, at a reasonably high price point for the channel: $65. We have some reservations about whether $65 items will sell well on Facebook. We’ve been meeting to discuss what to do if it’s an abject failure, or if it sells out in an hour. We have plans.

On Twitter, OscarPRGirl is not a proactive seller of product, and I’m reluctant to change that. It’s not something people expect from OscarPRGirl. People clearly want advice from our brand. How do we bake that in to oscarelarenta.com? How do we bring that to customers online in a way that’s authentic or appealing? That’s what we’re asking ourselves.

How has your marketing budget shifted over the past five years? The past year?

We still spend most of our money on print media, and I suspect that that won’t change in the near or even medium term. Let’s face it, Vogue is still the most important publication in the world to reach fashion folks. We will continue to have important advertising in those sorts of publications.

Our online budget has increased massively, and that will continue. The promise of online advertising is that we can completely narrow-cast to the right set of eyeballs that want to buy Oscar de la Renta products. That promise has not been fulfilled yet; the metrics that we have are at best imperfect for analyzing the success or failure of our initiatives.

Let’s talk about click-through rates, for instance. Click-through rates are interesting, but it doesn’t always convert. And we don’t know when they come back to buy.

But with print you can’t measure anything.

That’s right. There’s lots of stats publishers can give you. It’s not like measuring clicks and impressions, but they’re data points.

How is Oscar de la Renta expanding internationally? Is social expanding with it — i.e. on to new, local networks and languages?

Yes. The Facebook sampling program brought to our attention how many fans we have internationally. Beyond an occasional correspondence from OscarPRGirl in Spanish or French, we’re generally communicating in English. One of our key initiatives is to be multi-lingual, to be able to ship and deliver more efficiently in international markets. How quickly we will engage with the Tumblrs of Russia and elsewhere remains to be seen, but it’s definitely coming.

And China?

I think that for us China is something we’re on the one hand actively exploring — brick-and-mortar and newer forms of commerce and communication, as examples — but we’re preceding with caution. It’s a part of the world we think is important to get exactly right, and I think our brand, to be honest, is not as well understood in China as we would like it to be. We’re not so much preceding slowly or cautiously but thoughtfully.

As a brand, what is the value in positioning yourself as a digital pioneer?

Innovation is what people expect of us in our business: innovation in fabrics, print design, styling, communication, the ways we’re offering product and brand. Being innovative and in front is very much a part of our brand.

What advice would you give other luxury brands in the space going forward?

We have a huge opportunity, a whole new world of people we weren’t able to speak to before. Figure out the best way to do that for your brand and what fits in with your DNA. I’ll go back to something Oscar has told me frequently: ‘We are not all things to all people, but we should always try to be more things to more people.’ I think that’s the way to do it.

Series Supported by Discover Digital Group

The Social CMO Series is supported by the Discover Digital Group, a unique consultancy that focuses on identifying new e-revenue opportunities for both Fortune 1000 and startup clients alike. From developing new digital products to generating new audiences and revenue for existing online products, it creates smarter, more effective solutions for your business challenges. Follow DDG on Facebook to get a taste of the insights that are offered.

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