3. The Chiara Ferragni Case
3.1 Who is Chiara Ferragni?
The following section is retrieved from the Harvard Business Review “The Blonde Salad Case” (Keinan et al, 2015).
Chiara Ferragni is an Italian fashion blogger and business entrepreneur. Born in 1987, from a young age Ferragni developed a strong interest in fashion and photography. She initially gave voice to her passion by sharing her outfits on popular social media like Lookbook.nu and Flickr, and from the very beginning Chiara´s pictures gained an extremely high number of views. As a result, in 2009, together with her then boyfriend and future business partner, Riccardo Pozzoli, she launched her own fashion blog: “The Blonde Salad”. Every single day she posted a picture of her outfit together with a small caption about what she was doing in her routine life. In one month, The Blonde Salad reached an average of 30.000 visitors per day. From that moment on, Ferragni started to gain official recognition and acknowledgment by the fashion world while monetizing her own image.
In 2010, Ferragni received the first invitations to collaborate to advertisement campaigns and at the same time, she also started selling advertising banners, making online profits on the blog. Consequently, Ferragni and Pozzoli started to focus on raising the blog’s awareness around the world not limiting the audience to Italy anymore. Ferragni took part to fashion weeks worldwide and documented the events daily, making the blog contents much more international and positioning herself as a worldwide fashion icon.
By March 2011, the blog had reached 70.000 daily visitors and Ferragni decided to officially turn the blog into a company: The Blonde Salad company.
In the same period profits started coming from content engagement and product placement and every blog post embedded a link to the collaborating companies’
websites. This engaged visitors and drove them to the companies much more than
simple banner ads used to. A careful selection was needed when choosing who to collaborate with since the brands had to reflect Ferragni’s lifestyle and had to make Chiara look natural to her followers. The aim was to build stories together with the brands, stories that followers were “living” through Ferragni’s eyes. All of this contributed to bring value to The Blonde Salad Brand and to Ferragni as a celebrity.
In 2012, Ferragni started to create “capsule” collections for brands, but even though these brought profit, positioning efforts were needed. Thanks to collaborations such as Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Chanel, and by nurturing relationships with similarly positioned brands, Chiara Ferragni image began to be associated not just to fashion but to high-end top brands.
By 2013, Ferragni had become an international celebrity. She was appearing very frequently in fashion press and events, and she earned the reputation of “most popular blogger” in terms of number of daily followers spread all over the world. In the same period, Ferragni and Pozzoli created another company: The Chiara Ferragni Collection, a “small designer collection with a strong brand identity”. The brand manufactured high quality made in Italy shoes. In one year’s time the new company had already made 4 million USD of revenue, with the shoes being sold through the online store and in more than 200 stores in 25 different countries worldwide. While the blog had recently reached the record of 140.000 daily visitors, in 2013 the number decreased. As a matter of fact, in the same year, Instagram, the photo sharing application developed by Sysrom and Krieger, had gained a massive popularity and had already became the most used media in the fashion. Instagram was a very effective tool as it allowed followers to view thousands of contents, clothes and outfits in just a minute by scrolling down the feed.
As seen before in the dedicated section, Instagram offers users the chance to publish pictures and videos. Chiara Ferragni immediately understood the value of the social media and started synchronizing the blog to her Instagram account. Consequently, the blog visitors shifted immediately to the new channel, and in one year Ferragni’s account had already reached 3 million followers.
The impressive reach and efficacy of the Instagram account brought to the restructuring
magazine, separated and independent from Ferragni and was also expanded into an e-commerce integrated platform where followers could directly purchase exclusive limited edition clothes from selected brands.
In the meantime, in 2016, when sales from the Chiara Ferragni Collection reached 10 million USD, Ferragni and Pozzoli opted for a differentiation strategy: the line now included to not only shoes but also t-shirts, jumpers, trousers and so on so forth. The duo also focused on the geographical expansion of the collection by not limiting it only to Europe and the USA, but also to booming markets.
By that point, one of the main area of focus for Ferragni and Pozzoli was to carefully manage all the three brands that had come to exist by 2016:
● The Blonde Salad Lifestyle Online Magazine and E-commerce
● The Chiara Ferragni Clothing Collection
● Chiara Ferragni the influencer and celebrity partner of luxury brands
In the last couple of years, The Blonde Salad website came to be worth 7 million USD, 83% more than its 2016 value (Colombo, 2017). In September 2017, Ferragni was recognized as the “Most powerful Fashion Influencer” according to Forbes (O’Connor, 2017) Ferragni net worth was estimated to be 12 million dollars in June 2017 and once again, the American business magazine recognized her as The Most Powerful Fashion Blogger in the World” by Forbes in 2016 (O’Connor, 2017). In January 2018, Ferragni reached 12 million followers on Instagram and she also became CEO of the company, officially becoming a powerful businesswoman (Colombo, 2017). However, most of the profit currently comes from the clothes collection.
Since 2017, it started being sold not only online and in retailer stores, but also in pop-up stores spread all over the world, from South America to Asia (Halo, 2017). In September 2017, the first official brick and mortar Chiara Ferragni Collection store was opened in Milan, followed by the first Chinese stores in Shanghai and Chengdu.
Between June 2016 and June 2017 CFC witnessed a 235% revenue growth and the current plan is to proceed with the stores expansion, specifically in China where Ferragni has closed a deal with Riqing group and where she intends to open 35 stores.
(Halo, 2017)