Content + Commerce: A Love Story

0:03Hello and welcome to Fashion People. I'm Lauren Sherman, writer of Puck's fashion and beauty memo, Line Cheat. And today with me on the show are Claire Mazur and Erica Cerullo, co-founders of 831 Stories. We're talking content, commerce, and so much more.

0:26Before we get going, I wanted to remind you that if you like this podcast, you'll definitely love Puck, where I send an email called Line Cheat. If you're a fashion person, you get that reference. it's an original look at what's really going on inside the fashion and beauty industries line sheet is scoopy analytical and above all fun along with me a subscription to puck gains you access to an unmatched roster of experts reporting on powerful people and companies in entertainment media sports politics finance the art world and much more if you're interested listeners of fashion people get a discount.

1:02Just go to puck.news slash fashion people to join puck or start a free trial.

1:11Happy Friday, everyone. The news never stops over here. This past week online, Rachel Sturgatz revealed everything that's happening over a drunk elephant at Shiseido. Lots of drama. This brand is such a big part of pop culture, and there is literally no one else who can break it down like Rachel. In other news, Mark Guaducci is the new global editorial director of Vanity Fair. I shared my thoughts on his appointment and also hopped on a call with Dylan Byers and Julia Alexander over at our sibling pod, The Grill Room, to discuss. So you should check that out. My baseline thoughts are that Mark was the best and really the only choice.

1:54But wait, there's more. I address the succession speculation over at Caring, and I take a look at Meula, the Qatari Royal Family-Backed Investment Fund that bought Valentino and Balmain years ago with ambitions to rival the big strategic groups. How's that going? I answer that question. Also, Sarah Shapiro has a really great mailbag issue on Friday, So check that out. Laura Piana is involved. And let's just get going with Claire and Erica. These are two of my closest friends. We have podcasted together many times before, and they are experts on something a lot of people try to get right, but rarely do, which is figuring out how to create digital content that gets people to buy physical stuff.

2:39So it was really fun to chat with them about their still pretty new business, but also everything else. I hope you enjoy it.

2:50Erica Cirulo, Claire Mazur, welcome to Fashion People. Oh my gosh, what a privilege. What a privilege. I've been looking forward to it all day. What did you two have for breakfast? Oh, great question. I had my favorite skier, this Painterland sister's skier. It's so good. I can't shut the fuck up about it. It's like basically halfway between Greek yogurt and creme fraiche flavor profile with some blueberries. Well, as you will both know from listening to the well from one co-hosting the podcast and two listening I've been eating spinach salads for breakfast And unfortunately for better or worse, I guess that's what I had today But I had homemade chicken nuggets on top of it because I made them last night for dinner We're both just ourselves.

3:36I guess is how this goes. That sounds so good. Okay. A couple of comments one is I did hear about both of these foods on The finale of your 10-year long podcast a thing or two. Imagine our podcast ending when we were bringing content that interesting and then we rolled it out on a second podcast. I didn't leave you a voice memo about that because I left you a voice memo, just an emotional voice memo saying how much I'm going to miss you too. So Claire and Erica, you can look them up on claireanderica.com, have had a podcast for 10 years. And we should talk a little bit about how we know each other, but we want, I want to get into content and commerce because you two are the Queens of content and commerce, but you had a podcast for about 10 years.

4:24Most it was, was it always called a thing or two? It was called a few things, a few things, originally a few things. Yeah. Yes. And then changed to a thing or two. And I was a guest many times, but it was a sort of mix of like what they think is interesting in the culture and what's happening in their lives. And in the finale, they talked about what they were eating and the skier yogurt came up, which felt very Erica to me. And I liked the conversation about whether or not it was savory or sweet. And Claire, the spinach salad thing, I have to say, I was like half listening, but so you're basically eating breakfast at 10 a.m.

5:00now. Yeah. Like between nine and 10, I would say. And she's making like a country club salad that would have been served in like 1994. There's always sliced apple in it. There's often blueberries. if I have them. And today it was especially country club because of the sliced and diced chicken fingers. Like a chicken finger as a topper. Exactly. But we call it in our house dinosaur time because of a famous TikTok about eating spinach every morning. And it's my spinach salad. Yeah. Okay. I also, my whole thing is that, you know, I love breakfast food. Yes. But because of being more sedentary in LA.

5:41Like sometimes I walk a thousand steps. Yeah. You're like the least sedentary person in LA. And this is according to all of your LA friends. I am. I am pretty. I do love to walk, but, but so, but I just, it's, I'm not as hungry. And I have noticed that if I eat two substantial meals a day that like, I feel really good. I really enjoy the food. I don't feel like I'm eating too much. I don't feel like I'm eating too little. But essentially, because my ideal dinner time is 530, obviously. Right. Of course. Of course. So are you eating like a brunch? So essentially, I'm eating at like 11. Yeah. Yeah.

6:20And then eating at five. Or, you know, I also do go out a lot for work. And then I end up eating at 930 on those days. And those days, I definitely don't want to eat in the morning. It's complex. And then I've just so I've just adopted this thing where I eat it like the 1030 or 11. And I usually have a avocado toast type situation. Yeah. Well, you could do a salad. You're at a salad hour, you know. Yes. Yes. Yeah. If you if you believe there is such a thing. No offense. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Anyway, I love how this sort of became an extension of a thing or two. I was I have so much more to say and I'm just shutting my mouth because I'm told we're supposed to talk about content and commerce.

7:00Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to have you all on because so we've known each other for almost 15 years. Probably 15. Yeah. Yeah. We met through our dear friend who I haven't talked to in about five years, Alisa Gold Simon. Yes. We met because we were on a South by Southwest panel together. Yes. In like 2012. Is that right? In 2012. 2011 and 2012. And I knew of you all because I had covered my fashionista and lucky magazine. I covered of a kind, this company you had, but also Erica, you had worked at lucky and you two were the kind of people who everyone I said, I knew said, Oh, you should know them.

7:40And when we met, we were instantly friends. And I remember I had just turned 30 and thought, Oh, I, I had this idea that I wasn't going to make new friends in my thirties and you all became my first like really good friends that I made in my 30s. I love all of this and I love that we're learning this right now. I love this. Yes. And you all are very good friends. So anyway, again, this is not a thing or two. This is a podcast about the fashion industry. So the reason I wanted to have you on is because I write a lot about, and Sarah Shapiro, my colleague who covers retail, we write a lot about this idea of content and commerce and the two things sort of feeding off of each other.

8:23It works so much into so many of the worlds that we cover, the consumer brands world, the luxury world where they've brought in more editorial and everything's so much more direct to consumer. But I found that a lot of companies where their thesis is based on content and commerce, on content sort of fueling commerce, they don't work. but, but you all have sort of made a life out of making content fuel commerce in a real way. And so you have this new business called eight, three, one stories, which is in the romance novel space, but romance space, not, let's just not say novels. So we're going to talk about eight, three, one stories and how you're using content and commerce, but let's talk about of a kind really quickly and what you all think of that idea of content and commerce and, and what you learned from the other kind of experience, et cetera.

9:18I mean, I think I was trying, you, you had mentioned in your notes to us about, you know, what was sort of the original idea. And it really stems back to the fact that Eric and I went to college together in Chicago and used to go shopping together on the North side when there was at that time, there were a lot of really interesting indie boutiques. And I remember when we would shop, they're always getting some nugget of a story behind something we were buying. I remember I got this jacket that I held on for way too long and bought in part because the store owner told me that the person who had designed the jacket had left Theory to start her own line.

9:52And it was 2004 and I loved Theory. And I was like, that's so cool. And that's so chic. And there are more sort of like career and professional insights we had around of a kind. But the truth was at that time, all of these, so much shopping was moving online. And it was very obvious to us that none of that experience of getting to learn something about this indie designer and that like emotional attachment you could form was happening online in the same way it was happening when you were going into these boutiques? So the vision behind of A Kind, we launched it in 2010. The idea was that we would sell pieces from emerging designers and tell their stories.

10:32And it was just as designers started to move online. Claire came from the arts world and was really interested in thinking about ways to support emerging artists. And for us, as people in our mid-20s, designers were the artists whose work that was accessible to us. And so like fashion was our entree into that. And I came from magazine editorial. I worked at Details and Lucky and was seeing the way that, you know, we were having trouble selling ad pages, but of course the things we were writing about were selling. And why not just sort of integrate the editorial with the commerce piece of it so that they were feeling each other and we are making revenue off of selling the things as opposed to hoping that someone bought a Gillette ad.

11:13So we would commission these limited edition pieces because we wanted to sort of introduce the idea of these things being collectible and that you could take a sort of collector's mentality where you felt like you were sort of getting in on the ground floor of a young designer before they blew up. And we did. We worked with Claire Vivier, Doosin Doosin, Lizzie Fortunato, all of these people who went on to become much bigger, more sort of household names in the space. And a lot of the people who are following of a kind at the time, you know, bought stuff from them in their first year of business.

11:38And what we would do is we would tell the story of the item itself, but we would also tell the backstory of the designer to give a sense of who they were, what inspired them, who they were when they weren't making clothes or home goods or jewelry or whatever it was. Because we knew that to get people excited about buying stuff from an unknown designer, you had to give them that emotional element. You had to have that storytelling piece. So the question I have for you right now is there was a lot of work put into the storytelling. Yes. And the conversion was good because you would sell out, you would do a hundred items, you would sell out, but that was small scale.

12:18For sure. Was the effort that you were putting in to the storytelling worth it? I don't know if you all were able to measure it, but because you did this for about a decade, what did you learn as the business grew and you scaled further? A couple of things. One, because we were doing this kind of content marketing that really told the designer stories, we were able to leverage that when we were making deals with designers. So we were able to get higher markups. We were able to commission these limited edition pieces that would draw on a new audience. And because designers didn't have the capacity to be doing this on their own, this was like, we want just business-free Instagram.

13:04There was no social that people were using to gather an audience. And it became a calling card for designers or a marker of their success to be featured on of a kind and to reach our audience because finding an audience was really challenging. The other thing I think that became interesting was that we weren't looking at what is the conversion on this story. There were people that really loved the content. And then there were people that really loved that there was content. And there was a very high percentage of customers, followers, newsletters, subscribers who maybe weren't reading the content around each piece, but they liked seeing the designer's picture in the newsletter when we would email about an edition release.

13:49They liked knowing what the deck was, that this person was an Austin and they used and they're a silversmith or like whatever the things were. And we found that our audience that we developed was a very sort of like thoughtful, sophisticated, engaged audience as a result of having the content on the site, whether or not they were consuming all of it. Well, I also think that content gave us the credibility to start a podcast and a newsletter that weren't directly storytelling about the makers whose pieces we were selling, but were arguably like some of the most successful content that came out of of a kind became huge brand calling cards for us.

14:24And I think we're a discovery path for a lot of people to of a kind and to the products that we sold. And the podcast and the newsletter were just about discovery writ large. So we started a newsletter in 2012. Yeah. Right. It was originally called 10 Things and now it's called A Thing or Two. This is all just like for, yeah, anyway. Now called A Thing or Two, where we listed my favorite discoveries of my five favorite discoveries last week, clarify favorite discoveries of the last week. It was essentially like we had a sub stack in 2012 in a way that was related to the things that we were selling, but was not necessarily driving the things that we were selling.

15:06And we would market that on Facebook to grow our newsletter audience, which we would then send newsletters about our product releases and convert people to customers that way. Interesting. But ultimately, like my other big learning from that business had very little to do with content. And it was that I, by the time we shut it down, which by the time we shut it down, which was late 2019 and had less to do with the performance of our business and more with the fact that we had sold to Bed Bath & Beyond, who at that time had activist investors. Who were like this tiny business that you own, you should get rid of that and we'll be happy.

15:40Exactly. It made no sense. I mean, they got rid of a handful of businesses. They were like, You need to focus. That was right. Does it still exist? No. Overstock.com bought the brand and the audience. Oh, I loved Bed Bath & Beyond. But I mean, and this is a lesson from Bed Bath. This is a lesson from Of A Kind. This is a lesson from Barney's. Multi-brand retail to me seemed an impossible uphill battle, and especially online. And if it's hard with brick and mortar, when you go online, you introduce the competition of ad prices and SEO and all of that. And it just felt like I don't actually know how you grow a big business here.

16:16And I'm so grateful for the people who are still doing it because I love multibrand business, multibrand retail. But it's really tough. Yeah, it really is, as you can read in line sheet pretty much every single day.

16:56So, I think one thing that a lot of investors and also retailers and also just people, marketers, think is that like you mentioned this about it was worth putting the work into the content because of the fact that it just raised awareness overall and it made people engaged with what you do. And a couple of weeks before you all were on, I had the Foster sisters on who are Aaron and Sarah Foster, who are investors in 831. And we talked a lot about this idea of a flywheel, which Claire and I have talked about offline because I was like, what does that actually mean? And how the Aaron and Sarah's business of having a clothing line and a TV show and a podcast and investing in things that they like, they all sort of feed off of each other.

17:58And it does feel like your newsletter and the stories you were telling on of a kind and the stuff you were selling that has had a similar effect. And also we'll get into eight, three, one soon. But I think one, the, the point I was trying to make was that I think that a lot of people who want to make money by telling stories in a meaningful way, don't understand that it might not be a direct conversion. Yes. And you have to be okay with that. I think about the company Hodinkee a lot and the challenges that they've had where Hodinkee was this incredible site. They tried to make a really robust e-commerce and it just didn't work for whatever reason.

18:48And I mean, I'm sure it worked to an extent, but they weren't able to figure it out. And I think one of the biggest issues was that they were betting that by writing these long stories about a watch, they were going to sell$50 ,000 watches. And it doesn't really work like that. If you were advising a brand, which you all have done a lot of that, especially since of a kind close, what should people be trying to get out of all this work they're putting into storytelling? I think it's all world building. Sporty and Rich is content and commerce. That's what content and commerce looks like now. She does all of that world building on her own Instagram and some of it through Sporty and Rich too.

19:34But that's just another way of building a world and saying, if you want to be a part of this world, here's how to truly engage with it. And here's how to acquire the elements of it. And so when we were working in consulting capacity with brands, we were very much just saying, like, what does your brand stand for? And how can you communicate that, whether it's through a magazine or Instagram or the hang tags that you put on your product? I think Isamo does another, does a really good job of that, of just like being a brand that is very commerce forward. But then this is about travel. This is about moving through the world.

20:10This is about Italy. And so you are getting all of these stories that, again, like just feel additive and sort of experiential in that way, where if I am traveling to like a ski slope in the Alps, I'm going to go on that website and see what they've had to say about it. Yeah. The Isamo Byredo candle. There's no reason to buy it. And yet I'm restocking anytime I can. It smells right. But I know about it because of the world that they built. That's a good reason. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Right. And I think what's hard, I love everything about Essence. But somebody made the comment to us the other day that it's like, actually really hard to find the stories when you're shopping.

20:50And it's hard to find the shopping when you're telling stories. And I think, you know, I don't know that business well enough to know whether or not the content is working for them. I obviously care that they have it. And it makes me think differently about their brand than they have it. But I also think trying to think about, it's not just about publishing an article and putting it on your website. It's all the different places that you're have the opportunity to do storytelling. That's, that's the content piece of it. And, you know, that can be on the product page. So let's talk about 831 and how you have sort of reverse engineered what you did to me.

21:25I don't know if you've all said that. Yeah, we do. Yeah. No, I think that's how we think of it too. I think that's how we think of it too. I mean, basically 831 story sort of flips the model of what we did at Of A Kind. So now the foundation of the business is publishing romance novellas that we are now releasing every other month or so. Next year, we'll be releasing them once a month. And then building out the worlds from there in ways that include additional content, but then also include product. And so the product is sort of serving as the like bonus content in the case of this business. I mean, the inspiration for 831 was first and foremost that we were just rapidly consuming romance novels ourselves.

22:10We were fascinated by what was happening on a cultural level, the way these romance novels seem to be giving permission to women to center their own desire, sexuality, joy, romance, et cetera, in their own lives. But then that those women were all behaving honestly like comic book fans and that there was that same desire that comic book fans to have to stay immersed in the world of these stories and engage with these characters beyond just like the original sort of foundational text of them. And to us, what was really interesting was like, there's actually opportunity here to give romance readers that same experience where you get to just like sort of continue on with the life of these characters and these stories.

22:50And so that, like Erica said, is what is sort of the bonus part in this business. It's like, what are the Spider-Man PJs of our world? you know and what's the action figure exactly and so for us it is like from you know in the second draft of the book saying what are the products from this book that we could develop and so you know we worked with Lizzie Fortunato for a necklace for our first book based on the description in the book we worked with the designer Naomi Otsu on various products including a t-shirt that is the fan club t-shirt of a band in the first book and so really like thinking of how to draw product out of this in a way that feels fun and interesting for someone that is part of a burgeoning fandom.

23:32And you also have a lot of great merch, keychains, hats, t-shirts. One of the teacher's t-shirts says everyone reads romance novels, which I love. But you worked with a really fancy design firm, right? And you're both very design-oriented people and have a lot of taste. So it's important to you, but why kind of invest in making the merch good, making that all? Because that, I mean, I don't want to answer for you, but that could become a giant business in and of itself. Yeah. And it's been a much bigger piece of our business than we anticipated. in large part because our design team, which is C47, so it's led by Phil Chang, Naomi Atsu, Sunny Park, Hani Kang, and Jamin Lee, they are just remarkably good at what they do.

24:27The reason that we wanted to really invest in it and that we have invested in the way that we have is because romance is a genre that has always been dominated by these monolithic aesthetics and these visual identifiers that have done a lot of work both to help and hinder it, right? So when a lot of people think about romance novels, they think of the bodice rippers with a half-naked man on the cover. They think of Fabio. And either that speaks to you because you love romance novels, and the minute you see Fabio, you're like, oh, that's a book that I'm going to like because you have a sense of what's inside.

24:55Or you're someone who's like, romance novels are not for me. That's not the type of reader I am, and therefore, I'm not going to read it. And so to us, the challenge was how do you design romance novels and design covers and a brand that is not going to alienate the existing romance reader who is, you know, especially now very loud and proud about it, but is also going to maybe pull in that reader who thinks that romance isn't for them, that maybe romance is like beneath them or that their sense of it is that it's not good literature. um and so we that was that was sort of the first um piece of it was making sure that the assignment yeah yeah the assignment but when it comes to our merch and everything else you know we just we erica always says you know that we have just always acted as if romance was the coolest thing there is and have never questioned whether or not it's cool um which we're just working from the assumption that it's cool um and not trying to hedge or convince people just presenting it is cool.

25:51Yeah, that's it. And design is a big piece of that, right?