Wet Seal of Approval

After a modern-day version of paper dolls helped launch Wet Seal into mobile retailing, the teen chain is betting on a new Facebook game to help take its business to new heights.

The combination of social media and user-generated merchandise content — enabling Wet Seal devotees to play the role of digital fashion stylist, creating thousands of virtual outfits from the retailer’s product mix — has been the crux of Wet Seal’s mobile strategy to drive sales. Sticking with that blueprint in its next growth phase, the retailer will offer a new mobile application that allows users to run a virtual store on Facebook.

Melding social media and mobile commerce “is really a powerful combination,” says Jon Kubo, vice president and CIO of Wet Seal. “Social media is engaging, and mobile allows you to bring your online experience to the store.” In fact, Kubo expects the convergence “to be the No. 1 game changer in cross-channel, specialty retailing.”

With its focus on user-generated content, Wet Seal appears to be tapping into something bubbling up in the consumer zeitgeist. With websites like blank-label.com, which enable shoppers to co-create their own custom-designed shirts, and I Like My Style, which bills itself as the first user-generated fashion magazine, shoppers are increasingly taking design into their own hands.

Wet Seal began to lay the groundwork for its mobile strategy in 2008 when it launched its Fashion Community on both Wetseal.com and Facebook. Fashion Community allows users to generate their own outfits by pulling products from Wet Seal’s website and Facebook, assembling them in a virtual closet and sharing their creations with Facebook friends. The retailer then linked the Fashion Community to its stores by adding kiosks where shoppers could scan an item and be presented with outfits generated by other users.

Sensing it was on to something, Wet Seal decided to put nearly its entire assortment on Fashion Community. In a little less than two years, users have generated more than 50,000 outfits. “It’s much more of a strategy than a marketing campaign or event,” Kubo says.

Last December, Wet Seal debuted iRunway for the iPhone, a mobile version of Fashion Community. Today, Fashion Community generates about 20 percent of the revenue at Wetseal.com, and “people who look at our outfits have a higher average order,” Kubo says.

Therein lies the power of social media and user-generated content: “No merchant in the world can generate that much advice,” he says, and there is “no [other] retailer today” whose stores you can enter, scan the barcode on literally any items “and it will show you outfits generated by customers. We’re really taking a step in going from an item-driven world to an ensemble world.”

While eBay has recently adopted the strategy, most retailers running similar apps offer a limited number of products, “which only engages you for five minutes,” Kubo says. “It’s one step up from putting mannequins in the window.”