The countdown is on to tonight’s unveiling of Google’s new Boutiques.com fashion portal. After revealing the name and details of the site’s looks-matching technology, frockwriter thought we would hone in on one last, local, element: New York-based Kiwi Gala Darling. Frequently cited as one of the world’s most influential fashion/personal style bloggers - who calls her blog "The playgirl's guide to radical self love” and claims it boasts close to a million individual page views per month - Darling is one of a dozen fashion bloggers invited by Google to curate their own virtual fashion boutiques. Update 18/11: Now launched. Click (here) to check out her boutique and see who else is involved. Not bad for a magenta haired, tutu-rocking, tatt-emblazoned self-help dilettante, who launched into the blogosphere in December 2006 with a post entitled “Fashion help for recovering Goths”. Those in her native Wellington might know her better as Amy Paape. Reportedly a graduate of that city’s Chilton St James and Samuel Marsden Collegiate Schools, she moved to Melbourne in 2006, legally changed her name that year, then decamped to New York in 2008. Retail, as it happens, runs in the Paape family. Darling’s mother, Janet Paape, operates a Lower Hutt fashion boutique called She Designer Excitement, while her Porsche-racing uncle, Digby Paape, sells highend audio equipment at Bose Wellington.
Darling is far and away the most successful fashion blogger to emerge from Australasia.
Not surprisingly perhaps, she has attracted plenty of haters along the way. Their biggest beef? Just how she earns her income.
No doubt it is difficult for some to grasp just how much money successful fashion bloggers and other online personalities are currently able to command.
The higher the traffic, of course, the higher the ad revenue. However advertising is just one facet of their revenue streams. Darling started selling podcasts in March 2009. The series is called Love & Sequins and costs US$12 per podcast, including a 10,000-word transcript. Darling told the Evolving Influence fashion blogging conference at New York Fashion Week in September this year that at the time she launched the series, podcasting began generating more income than any other blogging-related activity she had previously undertaken.
Darling also does commercial collaborations. On her blog, she discloses that in 2010 alone, she has worked with Estee Lauder, Juicy Couture, Coach, JC Penney, Ralph Lauren and Jeff Silverman - last month, unveiling a shoe she designed for the latter manufacturer. Here she is in the Coach Christmas campaign:
Then there are public speaking and appearance fees. Frockwriter has heard of day rates starting at US$2,500 and going as high as US$15-20,000 being offered to some of fashion's new media-specialist high profilers in various markets around the world.
As one of Boutiques.com's invited blogger curators, Gala Darling may be earning, we understand, a one off (low) five figure fee.
Yesterday frockwriter revealed the name of Google’s new fashion e-tail venture Boutiques.com, which is launching tomorrow in New York. It was in fact a world scoop........by about 40 minutes (WWD had a page one story in yesterday’s edition). Today we can add some more info. The site, we understand, is moving very rapidly towards the unveil and its offer now embraces boutiques curated either by - or around - 76 celebrities, 27 retailers, 55 designers and 12 bloggers. But the list of designers simply reflects those names who have thus far, apparently, agreed to participate in the venture. A designer directory lists over 200 designer names (including Australians Bassike, Willow, Thurley, sass & bide, Lover and Ksubi). But even that doesn’t embrace the full scope of the Boutiques.com offer, because products from a raft other brands and outlets that are not, it seems, officially involved, are also featured. They include US-based fast fashion chain Forever 21, the bête noir of the US fashion industry, which has been the target of numerous trademark/copyright infringement lawsuits initiated by US designers - including participating Boutiques.com designers Diane von Furstenberg and Anna Sui.
How are these non partner brands involved?
From our understanding, by recommendations - from, for instance, the bloggers and notably, via Google’s own in-house curation using the image-matching technology it acquired from Like.com in August.
Like the $1365 Alexander Mcqueen dress with trompe l’oeil jewelled bodice recommended by The Cherry Blossom Girl? Adjacent to that image, Boutiques.com throws up an array of what it is calling “visually similar” garments at varying price points, which click through to the plethora of online retail partners that are paying a fee to Google to be featured (plus, one assumes, a commission). As we noted yesterday, these include Shopbop, Nêt-à-Porter, Nordstrom, Selfridges, Bluefly and, yes, evidently also Forever 21.
Beyond mere trend matching, frockwriter will be curious to see if Google plans to moderate any direct copies of its designer partners' products that might pop up in the search fields.
If passed, the legislation would provide designers with three year copyright protection on all fashion, accessory and eyewear items from the moment they are first promoted in public and it is fully supported by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, of which von Furstenberg is current president.
On Friday, an anonymous New York fashion PR who calls him/herself No bullshit (actual Twitter handle @NoBtotheS) Tweeted“Breaking news: google is launching an ecommerce site with shop in shops by major designers #google #theyrgonnabepissed #geturshopon”. The Tweet prompted a flurry of coverage, with the penny apparently then dropping on all those who had received invites to Google’s “High Tech Fuses with High Fashion” party this coming Wednesday in SoHo, that the launch revolved around fashion e-tail. In fact, it had already been reported that Google planned to upgrade its shopping services to better compete in the US$140billion e-commerce market by deploying the image-recognition technology of recent acquisition Like.com to enable consumers to do comparison shopping. “We are hosting an exclusive fashion party to celebrate our partners” is all Google would tell WWD on Friday re the launch (see invitation below). Well frockwriter can fill in a few blanks. Our sources say that the new Google fashion initiative is called Boutiques.com and boasts not only online boutiques selling merchandise offered by various designers and retailers, but a large number of curated "boutiques" selling the looks worn by celebrities and other influencers.
There at least 19 participating American designers, from Prabal Gurung to Oscar de la Renta, with participating retailers including Shopbop, Nêt-à-Porter, Nordstrom, Selfridges and Bluefly.
The featured celebrities include Lady Gaga, Victoria Beckham, Emma Watson, Sarah Jessica Parker, Anna Wintour, Rachel Zoe and even Michelle Obama.
These high-profilers, presumably, have no idea they are included in the mix – they are simply being used as style inspirations for Google's designer label boutiques, as curated by Google insiders, who pull together products with a similar look to those sported by the celebs. No different to your regular “Get her look” feature in any fashion magazine in other words... except that in this case, you will be able to buy the product on the spot, with Google pocketing a percentage of sales.
Did we mention bloggers?
A handful of high profile regulars have, we understand, been invited to curate their own Boutiques.com boutiques – in exchange for a one-off payment of (low) five figures. Boutiques.com gets Google into the highend fashion shopping game – seven months after rival eBay launched its own fashion microsite. One facet of the latter isFashion Voice, which includes recommendations from six US stylists: Annabel Tollman, Britt Bardo, Estee Stanley, Karen Bard, Kate Young and former Sex and the City stylist Rebecca Weinberg.
Google's online payments system Google Checkout did not launch until 2006, eight years after the launch of PayPal, which was acquired by eBay in 2002 and is now the market leader.
Welcome to the blog that you have when you're not having a blog [NB This post was published simultaneously on frockwriter's Posterous, to circumvent security issues]. Just a quick headsup about the security ballsup that has gone down today on the frockwriter main blog. As anyone other than RSS and email subscribers may have noticed, since approximately 1144 AEST today, visitors to the site have been greeted by a great big red alert sign with the noticification: “Reported Attack Page! This web page at frockwriter.blogspot.com has been reported as an attack page and has been blocked based on your security preferences”. Together with a nifty little security guard icon holding a stop sign. Having been Google spoofed in April, I immediately assumed that a one-on-one hack job was not beyond the realm of possibilities. On closer inspection, however, it emerged that the issue was affecting several other Australian sites: Pages Digital and at least three other sites, the city-centric digi hipster guides, Two Thousand, Three Thousand and Five Thousand. What’s the common link? UPDATED: NOW OBVIOUSLY BACK ON THE AIR. SEE EXPLANATION AT THE END OF POST.
PagesDigital is frockwriter’s advertising partner and while there is currently no campaign on frockwriter, PagesDigital created and managed the little flash animation that linked through to our recent New Zealand Fashion Week coverage. It in turn was connected to Pages Digital'sOpenX-powered ad server.
OpenX claims to be the world’s leading independent provider of digital advertising technology, serving 350 billion ads per month across 150,000 websites in 10 countries.
According to Pages Digital, an OpenX security issue has been identified and an update was released today and installed. Having utilised Google’s Webmasters Diagnostics service, I can report that no malware is currently detected on frockwriter. To be on the absolute safe side, I removed the flash animation.
However the fact of the matter is that none of this is going to assist anyone immediately remove themselves from Google’s blacklist, as the site review request process can, according to Google, take WEEKS.
Obviously RSS and email subscribers won’t know what’s going on because they’re simply accessing a feed. And of course while subscribers are fantastic, they don’t contribute to daily traffic which, in frockwriter’s case, has really tanked today. I have been referred to Australian agency Feel Creative which reportedly set Pages Digital up with OpenX (and possibly the Two Thousand crew as well). So far noone at Feel Creative has felt very communicative and gotten back to me. So will keep you posted.
UPDATE 2130: Yes indeedy, someone did forget to tell the Australians - and thousands of other publishers that were affected overnight according to Feel Creative's Chris Hang, who just got back to me. Hang reports that only today did Feel Creative head to the OpenX site to track down the security update [OpenX 2.8.7] that was released on September 14. Why didn't Feel Creative have the new security patch prior to today? Hang didn't have an answer for that. But he did say that it would be the last time his company uses OpenX. "This is a dealbreaker" he told me.
In what appears to be a miraculously fast turnaround from Google [and many thanks to the efforts of Feel Creative] at time of writing the security warnings had been removed from both Frockwriter and Pages Digital. They still affect Two Thousand, Three Thousand and Five Thousand [UPDATE 25/10 - the three latter sites are now back on the air as well].
