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Transcript of Quirky Content
How Betabrand created a viral social clothing brand.
(And what you can learn from it.)
By Clare McDermott
QUIRKYCONTENT
Betabrand sells strangely appealing oddities like this:
Disco Tuxedo Jacket
But don’t lump it in with the thousands of other online-only fashion retailers because Betabrand is totally unique.
The company relies on its customers to model clothing, share ecommerce pages with their friends, and produce beautiful videos of hip people wearing Betabrand clothing. More than simple crowdsourcing, Betabrand sources ideas and inspiration from customers to make it a totally authentic social brand.
We spoke to Chris Lindland, Betabrand founder and content marketing visionary, about how he makes it all work.
Why Betabrand may be the
most exciting company you’ve never heard of.
Along with plain khakis and shirts, Betabrand sells clothing that gets attention, like Disco Pants, Sport Karate
Casuals and Bike to Work Pants. The designs are so fun and interesting that customers are inspired to buy.
Lindland: We made 100 pairs of Disco Pants on a lark. We’ve sold well
more than 20,000 pairs by now. What happened is, people took photos
of themselves wearing this stuff, showing new audiences how to wear
and use these products. At the beginning, the Burning Man crowd went bananas
over it, then golfers got into it, and now the BASE jumping community has
adopted it. And it just keeps going and going.
The company’s Think Tank solicits ideas from customers. The most promising ideas are sketched out by in-house designers and put on the site for voting. Case in point:
pants with a banana pocket. We asked Lindland, “How can you be sure you won’t go off the rails?”
“How can you be sure you won’t go off the rails?”
Lindland: The banana pocket? That’s what our Think Tank is about.
Let me tell you how much we’ve invested in that banana pocket. It was
an idea that a junior graphic designer of ours sketched. So in terms of
hours and time invested in that one, you’re looking at about two to three hours.
If that idea is popular, we’ll have all kinds of signups from customers who want
it, which essentially gives us a mailing list of customers to whom we can then sell
the initial few hundred items.
We don’t need to invest any more
dollars in that concept until we’ve seen
that people actually want it.
Betabrand even has fun with product descriptions. Why describe Disco Pants by their size and fabric
specifications when you can do this?
Betabrand uses a totally unique way to garner social page views. When customers upload photos of themselves in Betabrand clothing, they get a unique URL to share with friends and family — a link that leads to the e-commerce
site. From your friends’ perspective, you look like thelatest Betabrand model.
Lindland: Then we thought, why does there just have to be a single
Disco Pants page? What if there were 1,000 Disco Pants pages, and
each one was headlined by whoever uploaded the most recent photo?
What we did was create a hack that enabled people to insert themselves as image
number one in the gallery, and then that unique URL was something they could
share with their friends and family.
We filed a patent on it. It’s something
done by nobody else. It allows you to
basically throw a purchase button on your
forehead and mail it to your friends.
Lindland believes the GoPro camera and other portable, high-def cameras can revolutionize how marketers do their
jobs… if marketers are willing to give up control.
Lindland: Chances are good the people you’re selling your products to
own really high-quality HD devices. People have affordable HD cameras
strapped all over their bodies. To me it’s thrilling because it speaks of a
wide-open world where you can have mountains of storytelling performed by your
customers, and they put a unique and very personalized spin on the product that
you sell through their social networks.
Lindland: When GoPro came
out, it really changed my view
of the potential of customer
marketing. Now everything beautiful
on Earth is captured by ordinary
people — not photographers who
cost a ton of money. You can go through
it all and pull out the things that are
good for your brand. Then your brand
begins to look like this wondrous
reflection of human experience.
The GoPro is a rugged, “wearable” camera used most often to capture high-definition, adrenaline-soaked videography. The company sells a series of mounting systems to attach the camera to your body, racecars, surfboards and bikes (to name just a few) to capture amazing footage. And the starting price for its entry-level camera — just $199 — puts it well within the reach of amateurs everywhere. Amateur videographers rejoice!
Betabrand got a flood of attention when it debuted its Executive Hoodie at roughly the same time as Facebook’s
IPO. (Mark Zuckerberg is famous for wearing casual hoodies to business meetings, so why not a Merino wool,
pin-striped hoodie for the new billionare?)
Lindland: Betabrand has been a big-time press darling because we’ve
been making products that people like to talk about. What’s interesting
now is to ask, ‘Can we sell you a pair of khaki pants? Can we sell you a
white T-shirt?’ How do we start selling other parts of the wardrobe — products
that may not have such supreme novelty?
Because Betabrand solicits photographs from customers, it gets plenty of images that may not be ‘brand-ready’ for
the majority of art directors. To stay true to its roots as a social clothing company, Betabrand doesn’t let
these hang ups get in the way.
Lindland: We want to enable people to be the principal model, no
matter how good or bad their image is because 100 percent of the
people who upload images think their photo is good or
interesting — while an editor will probably think only
1 or 2 percent of photos are good or “on
brand.” The photo may be out of focus, or
the person doesn’t fit our demographic. It
doesn’t matter. That singular piece of our
website is owned by that person.
Want to read more about Betabrand’s quirky-but-effective strategy?Find the entire interview with Chris Lindland here:
http://bit.ly/CCO_BetaBrand
Betabrand was featured in our August 2013 issue of
Chief Content Officer magazine. To get more content
like this, sign up for your free subscription:
http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/chief-content-officer/.
All images courtesy of www.betabrand.com.Design by Joseph Kalinowski.