Trying Customization on for Size

Wet Seal has always tried to stay fashion-forward in its bid to reach teenage girls. Now it’s finding big business in staying at the forefront of social media as well.

The clothing retailer started out with a simple mission: To create a site that increased the average order value while allowing the business team to handle much of its functionality. To accomplish that, Wet Seal partnered with e-commerce pioneer Fry, whose Open Commerce Platform could easily accommodate the changes Wet Seal wanted to make.

Using Fry’s outfitting model, Wet Seal created a two-fold application: “My Boutique” allows users to assemble an entire look, complete with accessories and footwear from Wet Seal’s product line; “The Runway” provides a view into what others have created, and includes the ability to purchase the look in whole or in part. Outfits are tagged by creators, who can choose from a list of tags that include styles or suggested use.

In just over a year, WetSeal.com’s users have created hundreds of thousands of different ensembles, racking up some 14 million outfit views and millions of ratings. “In all, about 85 percent of the items have outfits,” says Jon Kosoff, Wet Seal’s director of e-commerce and direct marketing.

“We have a lot more than we ever anticipated, approximately 20,000 outfits built by our user base at any given time,” he says. “The number of people building the outfits is less than we thought it would be. But they’re building a lot more outfits per person than we thought.”

The boom in the number of volunteer “stylists” has allowed Wet Seal to put more of its resources into its own marketing goals. “When we first built it, we actually had it segmented two ways: user-generated and Wet Seal-generated,” Kosoff says. “We noticed the user-generated outfits were getting more attention and we stopped using Wet Seal-generated outfits.”

But, he adds, “They still want to hear from us, so we use our photography and marketing to push our message.”

Because the “outfitting” function is relatively new, Wet Seal is still determining how to best integrate the website’s popular features into its bricks-and-mortar stores. It is testing an in-store kiosk near corporate headquarters in Irvine, Calif., that allows shoppers to scan a product and see how it has been styled by users on the site. The company also developed an iPhone application that lets shoppers see top-rated outfits simply by scanning a bar code on the item’s price tag.

User content boosts buzz
Wet Seal’s use of the outfitting tool has tapped into a powerful new movement, says Dayna Bateman, principal analyst with Fry. “Social media is changing the way we interact online,” Bateman says. “You’ve got fashionistas at Wet Seal who have reputations. They’re out there creating content that’s attracting followers and driving sales. The technology allows them to have that voice. The architecture that harnesses that is of the greatest advantage to the retailer.”

Thousands of users generating content keep the website fresh in a way corporate staff simply can’t. That has become increasingly critical since Google revised its search engine algorithm to factor in new content. “Historically, retailers had a leg up because they had the equity that time online provides, along with inbound links,” Bateman says. “Freshness doesn’t have history associated with it, but it has powerful relevancy. With that tweak, the search game changed.”

Even search engines themselves have changed thanks to social media. YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second-most-used search engine (behind Google) in November 2008, according to a January 2009 article in The New York Times. As YouTube has become more important, especially among Wet Seal’s target demographic, it makes sense for the company to roll out rich content on that site. Two contests have offered back-to-school makeovers, with contestants submitting YouTube videos. Wet Seal selected five finalists; from those, users voted on the winner and created Wet Seal outfits that they thought would improve the contestant’s style. Creators of the top video and the top user-generated look received $500 gift cards. The company also offered a model search and a stylist search, again combining the runway tool with YouTube. “We’re continually trying to integrate YouTube and our outfitter,” Kosoff says. “The user content is so rich.”

Bateman believes that social media is appropriate for all retailers – they just need to determine how best to reach their target. “It’s not about deciding whether Facebook is the place to play, or Twitter,” she says. “Social media is a new way of sharing information online. Retailers have to decide: ‘What do you want to share, how do you want to share, how to do you want to enable users to share as well?’”

Building an online community can literally take retailers to new heights. Bateman cites work with Eddie Bauer on its First Ascent line of adventure wear. To celebrate the launch of the new brand, Eddie Bauer sponsored an expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. “They were blogging as they ascended,” Bateman says. “We advised them to take that content and feed it back into merchandising, featuring the mountaineer and the gear they care about.”

Easier starting from scratch
Wet Seal had one distinct advantage over most retailers when it came to integrating social media: It was in the midst of a total website revamping. “We had the best possible solution,” Kosoff says. “Some people are trying to incorporate features like this into an existing site and it isn’t an easy project to do.”

Incorporating the outfitting tool into its redesign did create some additional work -- making sure every item is photographed -- but “the beauty is that we’ve built it into our workflow,” Kosoff says. “Other than the images, it really runs itself.”

As a result, Wet Seal is better able to target content to specific groups and to offer complex marketing messages to individual users. “If we have a special online offer, we can display a different message if they come to us from a specific link,” Kosoff says. “We didn’t have the ability to do it this easily before.”