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For the fall 2015 fashion season, which wrapped up earlier this month, blogger network Fohr Card published its second leaderboard—an amazingly detailed collection of stats on blogger influence when it comes to spreading the word about the brands they love. This is the second leaderboard Fohr Card has published, and the number of impressions generated by style bloggers doubled—to 711 million—from last season. It would cost brands more than $10 million to buy that many impressions. Say what you will about the state of fashion blogging, but the numbers show that the power of the blogger is strong and increasing by the minute.
And when you look at the content that bloggers created during fashion month, it’s easy to see it’s the most extensive and beautiful coverage of the fall 2015 shows anywhere online. Take this data and use it to your advantage when you negotiate your next collaboration. Your value is written in black and white.
We wanted to know more about how Fohr Card determined that, for example,
Louis Vuitton was the top ranking brand among influencers (followed by
Chanel,
Kenzo and
Chloe, respectively), and how they came up with
Kayture as the #2 influencer for Chloe. So we asked the Fohr Card co-founder James Nord. Read on for the DL!
1. You really drilled down into these numbers and came up with fascinating stats. How long have you been planning this? How difficult was it to get the numbers?
“This is the second season that we have published the leaderboard, so it’s always in the back of our minds as we roll into fashion week. Actually collecting the data would be incredibly difficult for most, but for us it is relatively simple. This is because our community of over 4,500 bloggers and influencers have all given us access to their Google Analytics and social platforms. So it’s a matter of the system sorting and attributing posts to the correct designers.”
2. What was most surprising about the results? Also what’s most important about the results?
”Maybe surprised isn’t the right word, but we were pleased with continued increase in brands’ desire to work with influencers. This season’s fashion week had twice as much influencer coverage on Fohr Card than last season!
I think the most important thing the leaderboard highlights is that influencers are helping to open up the historically closed world of fashion.
Fashion weeks were once just about designers presenting collections to buyers, press and VIP customers, but now it’s different. Now, it’s digested, interpreted, documented and shared with more variety, more insight, and myriad view points. The leaderboard showcases the best results of that.”
3. This data brings to light the realities of blogger influence in a way that I don’t think has happened before. What effect do you think it will have on the way brands work with bloggers? What other changes do you think the date will influence?
“Every day, our community of influencers speaks to over 300 million people, that’s 3X the number of people who watch the Super Bowl! This is an incredibly powerful community and everything we do at Fohr Card is about giving brands the information they need to understand the value in working with them. The conversation is steadily shifting in the right direction, but seeing these numbers allows brands to directly compare working with influencers to other advertising and marketing expenses.”
4. How did you determine who would be counted as the “influencers?”
“Do you create original content online? Do people follow you in the places you create that content? Then you’re an influencer. We don’t care if you’re speaking to 10 people or 1 million. Either way, we want you on Fohr Card!”
5. You focused specifically on fashion week, which by some outlets has been described as becoming less important in the fashion industry. Would you say this data proves that notion wrong?
“As I mentioned before, this season our community produced 2 times the number of impressions as last season, seems to us that the data says it’s becoming more important than ever, and that makes sense. Brands are increasingly using fashion week as an opportunity to showcase their vision and brand story, and for them success is in getting as many people as is possible to see that vision. Thus,
we are in the midst of a shift in the industry from one of mystery and closed doors to one that asks people to come in and look around.
6. Do you have other similar research projects planned for the future?
“We will continue to produce the leaderboard every season, and you can bet on us continuing to cull insights out of the vast amount of data we collect everyday. I would encourage influencers around the world to sign up and be included in future reports.”
