Social Shopping Stylefruits: 'Women helping women'

Social Shopping is one of the new commercial business models in the field of e-commerce. Internet platform Stylefruits utilizes the successful model Social Shopping and recorded a turnover of 17 million euros last year. Stylefruits founder and CEO Ingo Heinrich tells FashionUnited how the model works and how Stylefruits has developed since the establishment of the company in 2008.

You call Stylefruits a “social shopping platform”: what does this mean?

There are many possible definitions. We differentiate between a social media platform, e.g. Facebook, and social shopping. Social media is pure communication, but with us there is additionally the shopping component. While we ourselves are not an actual shop, we are a natural advertising platform for fashion brands and retailers. Since 2008, our philosophy has been that with our site, women should have the opportunity to talk about fashion, offer and receive advice, and create outfits, hence our motto: authentic recommendations for women, by women. All of the outfits that our users create on Stylefruits can of course be purchased through our partner shops. We earn our revenue, therefore, by driving targeted, conversion- oriented traffic to our partners.

How large is the influence on the product assortment, if Stylefruits is "only" an advertising platform?

We decide which products go online on stylefruits. This is because we have the best knowledge about which products our users prefer. With our business intelligence system, called “styletracking”, we optimize our array of products, for example regarding the number of generated sales in our partner shops. We focus on trendy, affordable fashion with prices no higher than 250€. We want to offer products that young women can afford and are interested in, as opposed to the high fashion products seen in premium fashion magazines, which most readers cannot afford. With these attainable products, we aim to inspire our users, just as premium magazines.

Stylefruits knowledge about consumers is definitely of interest to your partner-shops – is this also a form of exchange?

For us, an intense cooperation as well as a long-term relationship with our partners is very important. The client can always see which products or product categories are performing well. For new clients, we initially offer space for a small assortment of fifty to one hundred products on the website, so that they can test how well they perform on stylefruits.

Do you actively influence what users create on Stylefruits?

One thing is very important for us: users decide for themselves what is fashionable and which items they like to combine in an outfit. Therefore, we do not influence or alter what users create. Our users create their outfits only for fun. On average, it takes about fifteen to thirty minutes for a user to create a new outfit. This shows that there must be a lot of passion behind it.

Who is the target group?

We actually have two target groups: first everyone who enjoys styling and fashion, creating outfits and giving advice about fashion. These users are normally around 25 years old. Then there are the other users, who prefer to let others inspire them, who tend to be around twenty-eight years old. The central target group falls between 18-34 years old, with about sixty per cent of our users falling within this range. Users between thirty-five and forty-four constitute about twenty per cent of our target group as well.

What percentage of your users is active on the website and consistently creates new outfits or offer advice?

About ten percent.

Stylefruits focuses primarily on women. Why?

Actually, approximately 5 percent of our revenue comes from our men’s fashion section in Germany, but all of these conversions are being made by women. In our experience, most men are not interested in fashion to the same degree that women are. Men rather shop out of necessity, whereas women tend to shop to get inspired. It’s the same reason why there are so many more women’s fashion magazines on the market than men’s.

What trends are currently seeing in the e-commerce sector?

We are seeing a radical trend towards mobile. Seventy per cent of our traffic currently comes from mobile devices, and we earn sixty-five per cent of our revenue via mobile. By the end of the year, we expect this figure to be around eighty per cent. Since we launched our mobile app in autumn 2014 the number of created outfits has exploded. We are now seeing double the amount of outfits created monthly than before the app launch! I had always believed that users would prefer to use a desktop for this, but apparently not! I am confident that apps will continue to grow stronger, and with them, so will in-app advertising. Advertising that used to occur via television and print will certainly, in the future, be done primarily on smartphones. Mobile videos are also becoming increasingly relevant.

Currently, the big issue in retail is the combination of online and offline commerce. How do you think fashion retail will develop in the future?

Today, people already show a strong tendency towards online shopping. In fashion, online shopping constitutes about ten per cent of total shares in Germany – depending on which numbers you are reading. Compared to books and travel tickets, online fashion retail is still at its beginning. I am therefore convinced that online shopping in the fashion sector will continue to grow. However, offline shopping will of course continue, and I believe the two will become increasingly integrated. Concurrent to that theme, we will also be starting a couponing project in the upcoming months.

How will that look, exactly?

Currently, the Stylefruits app has been downloaded about 1.5 million times. Using GPS synchronisation, the app will offer vouchers as soon as the user is near a store from one of our partner shops. This should result in a higher frequency of store visits.

Stylefruits is present in several different countries: what differences have you noticed between them?

About three years ago, Stylefruits started expanding from Germany into the UK, France, Poland and the Netherlands. France and the Netherlands both function very similarly to Germany. On the other hand, the UK is very different: There, mainstream fashion must always be very inexpensive, and also tends to be a little “crazier”.

Have you got your eyes on any other markets?

Spain, Italy and Scandinavia are interesting for us, too. Certainly we will continue to expand, but at the moment mobile development is our top priority.

Not afraid brands copy the Stylefruits business model to their own website?

No. So far, those who have tried have not succeeded. I often compare it to a travel website. The question is always: who do you believe? The people offering travel packages, or the users recommending them? We don’t sell anything; we offer a neutral recommendation platform.