Wednesday, November 11, 2009

originally posted Nov. 10, 2009 by Fashionably Marketing

I wanted to share this with the community, one because I think there are great sites highlighted. If you don’t already know about them you need to take the time to click through to all of them. Two because Smashing Darling is included. As always please feel free to share this with as many people as you like.

17 Fashion Sites Every Fashion Industry
Professional Should Know About

As the fashion industry adapts to technology, more and more fashion sites and communities are coming to fruition every day. Digital space is becoming increasingly cluttered as brands build their own social networks and burgeoning fashion bloggers use their blogs to develop their expertise in any given niche.

Last February, we wrote about the top 25 fashion-oriented sites everyone should know about; recently, AdAge released its top six fashion site picks for fashion marketers.

With so many social networks, branded fashion communities and blogs, we’ve decided to share which ones continue to hold our attention.

Fusing Fashion + Technology

1. Inside The Tents – Now in its (upcoming) third season, Inside The Tents offers up-to-the-minute online news coverage on everything related to New York Fashion Week. Creator Yuli Ziv (founder of Style Coalition and My It Things) has done an amazing job in creating real-time coverage, and the site aggregates blog posts, on-the-spot interviews with designers, fashion-related Tweets and tagged Flickr images.

2. Polyvore.com – As far as social fashion websites go, Polyvore is leading the democratization of fashion in the digital space. What’s more, Polyvore now offers amazing opportunities for fashion brands and retailers with their custom PPC programs (rumored by many brands to deliver better conversions than Google – WHAT!?!?). Polyvore allows community users to create and edit fashion sets created from items saved from real online stores. Once completed, members save the “sets” they’ve created and share them with other community members; sets can be embedded to most social networks and to any blog.

3. Weardrobe.com – Weardrobe is addicting as it is beautiful. Weardrobe touts that  it is “a fashion community focused not just on what you wear, but how you wear it”. Weardrobe was inspired by the unique and inspirational styles of “What I Wore” fashion bloggers and groups like Wardrobe Remix. Weardrobe even held their own blogger conference before S/S 2010.

4. MyItThings.com –  MyItThings.com is an online, user-generated fashion and trend magazine. MyItThings encourages its community to contribute their own articles, pictures and photos from their blogs and websites. The site even allows apparel and accessories designers to submit their own designs as content. The content is extensive – covering everything from home to men’s fashion to eco-inspired design.

Bridging Brands + Bloggers

5. IndependentFashionBloggers.org – IFB is a blog and community forum for fashion bloggers and website owners. IFB was created in reaction to corporate networks springing up faster than Jennine Tamm (author of The Coveted) could keep track of. IFB is a community of independent fashion labels, men and women who love some aspect of fashion/design and have dedicated their writing to their passion. The community is supportive and informative; forum participants are dedicated to supporting fellow members in growing their online businesses and monetizing their websites. Recently, the community has been trying establish guidelines for brands and bloggers working together and help address new FTC regulations.

6. SmashingDarling – SmashingDarling is  a site that’s hard to classify, simply because of owner Trisha Ginter’s amazing online social engagement. It’s an e-commerce site, similar to Shopflick or MarketPublique, but geared towards emerging or small brands that want to sell their product lines online. Cleaner and less confusing than Etsy, the site is easy to use. Designers can create an account for free and upload their products. The products sell at set prices and the sales go directly to designers, minus an 18% selling fee. We feel this is more than reasonable given that average sales representatives take 15-20% in commission. What’s more, the Smashing Darling blog is an addictive read.

Read the rest of this post here.

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