IF YOU'RE LIKE ME, there’s always someone whose style you admire from a distance. The mom at drop off that manages to look chic despite sub-zero temperatures and gale force winds. The woman with the perfect nude-colored wedges you spot through the crowded legs of the subway train. Or the former model on the 3rd floor that you love sharing an elevator ride with just so you can check out what she’s wearing – and copy it. But my days of being a style stalker are over. The “it girl” – the one whose style everyone envies. She works for me now. Her name is Olivia Peters and she’s my personal stylist.
Olivia, a former-lawyer and now stay-at-home mom, is a stylist for Keaton Row a recently launched startup that’s shaking up the way corporate gals shop for fashion online. Founded by Harvard Business School grads Cheryl Han, 30, and Elenor Mak, 33, the site pairs busy professional women with personal stylists who curate customized looks for their clients. Through its team of now 200 stylists Keaton Row is updating Avon-style direct sales for the Twitter generation. Paid on a commission basis, the stylists cultivate their own clients, often through social media, and do all of their business online.
Says co-founder Cheryl Han: “It’s about empowering two groups of women. The busy professional woman who’s overwhelmed by what fashion has become online…And the new generation of Avon woman seeking that entrepreneurial experience to build her own business.”
CHERYL AND ELENOR MET while working in the cosmetics industry – Han in e-commerce at L’Oreal and Mak in operations finance at Victoria’s Secret. Both saw an opportunity to disrupt fashion and beauty in the online marketplace. Inspiration struck while Elenor was at Avon and Han was finishing up business school.
As Cheryl explains: “In our social groups there was always the advice giver. I happened to be the girl in my social circle that all of my friends would go to and say ‘hey, what should I wear to this formal?’ or ‘what should I wear to this interview?’ or ‘where’d you get that jacket?’ So, I’d be the one who, for example, would know the five things Elenor would like. I’d then send her the urls for those items and say you should buy these things. And what we noticed is that these [advice givers like me] were really providing a service that wasn’t available anywhere online.”
Elenor, meanwhile, was a division sales manager at Avon, overseeing 10,000 sales reps at a tumultuous time for the company when many questioned whether its model was seriously broken. But Elenor was not convinced that the era of direct sales was over.
“What I saw first-hand was that everyone was coming for something very similar.” Elenor says. “An opportunity. A chance to earn money and develop other skills. I saw that the idea of social selling still existed. The only difference was the way women were doing it now was different. She’s online. She’s on Facebook. She’s on YouTube. She’s on Skype. It’s not door to door, party to party anymore.”
And that’s where Elenor and Cheryl came up with the idea of pairing busy professional women with stylists – fashion influencers who have a knack for creating looks. As they tell it, “It was an ‘Aha’ moment. We realized we can service this end customer need by providing this new generation of women an opportunity to do something they are really good at and they love. It was a no-brainer!”
CUSTOMERS COME TO KEATON ROW in two ways. They’re brought in by a Keaton Row stylist or they go to the home page like I did and fill out a questionnaire that then matches them with a stylist. After answering questions that elicit things like your personal style and budget, you’re sent profiles of three stylists to choose from. Armed with your styling needs request and at no cost to you, the stylist then prepares a series of outfits – called “lookbooks” for you to choose from.
I asked my stylist Olivia to suggest some options for a few charity events this Spring. She came up with three “looks” -- each of which not only suited my style sensibility precisely but did so with a unexpected twist. The winner: a one-shoulder silk charmeuse jumpsuit paired with python printed d’Orsay pumps.
The magic of the Keaton Row model, Cheryl explains, is the one-to-one relationship. Proving that concept was the key to getting investors onboard. The metrics when matching a customer with their own stylist who provides a curated look “are much more compelling than you see in traditional e-commerce,” says Cheryl. “That customer was much more willing to buy. She was a much stickier customer because she had that personal relationship.” VC firms Rho Capital and Grape Arbor were persuaded – and invested $1 million in their first round of financing last August.
Launched just five months later in January 2013, Keaton Row already has a stable of over 200 stylists. The goal? 10,000 stylists within the next five years. Ambitious? Yes. But not without precedent. Stella & Dot, the direct sales jewelry business, launched in 2004 had 30,000 sales reps by 2010 and $104 million in revenue. Its three year growth rate is an impressive 4,315%. Like Stella & Dot, Keaton Row stylists are paid commission on the sales they generate and the sales of other stylists whom they recruit. Retailers pay Keaton Row a percentage of the sales they generate, a majority of which is then passed on to the stylists.
AS ELENOR SEES IT, the $100 billion direct sales industry is ripe for disruption. “ There’s been very little innovation from a technological perspective. …In direct sales, it’s all about the personal relationship. Where companies like Avon struggled is they still forced it to be an in person face to face experience. Companies like Stella & Dot have embraced technology a little bit more. They give you the tools to build your business online. Keaton Row takes it a step further. It’s 100% online. We are not asking you to buy any products. We are not asking you to host any parties. We are asking you to sell something that people truly want which is styling advice. … What Keaton Row does is take the traditional direct sales approach and combine it with social selling.”
Adds Cheryl: “We envision Keaton Row to become the future version of Nordstrom. We start with this woman and we build out to other areas of her closet – where we’re serving her home, her kids, her husband, her parents. We see ourselves as a new retail channel.”
Apparently, the retailers do too. Several have approached Keaton Row to license their technology (they won’t disclose which ones). “They want exclusives with our sales force,” says Elenor. “They really see the power of these influencers in terms of bringing new customers and shopping the online experience today.” Currently, Keaton Row has limited its retail partners to Piperlime and Shopbop – two e-commerce-only sites whose advanced technology is easiest to connect with their own.
Some of the Keaton Row stylists have day jobs in retail and are used to working on commission. But many of the most successful have no formal background in fashion. Among those in their “100K club” (those tracking to earn $100,000 this year) are a special-ed teacher, a PR consultant, and a recent college grad. “These are women,” says Elenor, “who are spending their time on Polyvore, on Pinterest, and on blogs. We are really the first to create legitimacy around the skills that they have – to really help them get noticed by brands and by retailers.”
And for those Rachel Zoe wannabes, professional women are a receptive target. While stylists are de rigeur among the celebrity set, meeting face-to-face with a stylist is not high on most corporate women’s to do list. And yet fashion advice for this time-strapped client base is often hard to come by. Says Cheryl: “Having been in the fashion and beauty industry, it’s a very underserved customer.”
That’s a reality that Keaton Row is well positioned to change. One lookbook at a time.
