December 7, 2022 |
Fashion once operated under a hierarchical framework, with big fashion powers possessing dominion over the market. They would source inspiration and innovative ideas from subcultures or the streets and then establish these as trends on the catwalk. Eventually, these hot-ticket items would filter down to the high street and the masses until rendered overdone and obsolete and the cycle would start again. The reigning authority over the collections that would reach consumers were department stores and super-celebrities were the only avenue toward authentic influencer marketing. And though this is a paradigm not entirely out of operation, with time and technology came a shift in the persisting system and a more democratic, authentic and inclusive approach to consumption has gained traction.
Now when it comes to style inspiration, you, like us, probably head straight to your phone, rather than somewhere palpable as you would have had to just a few years ago. So much screen-time is now spent doom-scrolling through meaningless memes and paid-for-posts, and as such, studying someone’s style and then scouring the internet for similar products has become commonplace – who doesn’t love a good ol’ reverse Google image search. If you’re lucky, you might be directed to an immediate and affiliate link. But how can brands tap into influencer marketing in a new, and more effective way, with creators and influencers being able to make a living as a source of style inspo?
This is where the new, revolutionary marketplace platform Moetic, comes into play. Moetic, which launched over the summer, takes an innovative approach to influencer marketing, with a sales system that benefits themselves, brands and consumers alike. Moetic streamlines this process with their link-in-bio storefronts, which place both the product and buy button with the creator and their audience. It’s community-led commerce and its where consumer trust and purchase intent is at its pinnacle – a new leg of the Creator Economy – overhauling dissipated influencer-marketing and tapping into communities through curated storefronts like nothing else. It’s motto, “Shop people, not algorithms.”
Craig Smith is the founder of Moetic and a tech-mogul in his own right. A lifelong skateboarder and street style enthusiast, Smith spent two decades working in the upper echelons of the tech world, serving stints at conglomerates like Skype, Apple and Burberry. There, he contributed to the companies’ transitions to direct-to-consumer sales as global VP of product. Alongside Matthew Murphy, Moetic’s head of business development and fellow patron of Moetic’s parent company, Parade World – a street-centred online retailer – the two trailblazers fell into a 20-year friendship. “Weekends used to start on a Thursday, then I found Matthew and I was like, ‘oh, right, parties start on a Tuesday!’” Smith reminisces. “I was always going to his events and then we became really good friends and you know how it plays out in London. Here we are.” Murphy, a retail maverick, had his own independent store in London for 17 years. “We supported a lot of emerging talent there,” he recalls; and so does Moetic, his latest endeavour alongside Smith.
Moetic, a decentralised retail platform – as Smith describes it – is basically a quick on-ramp to cultivating your own income through social media. Creators sign-up with a username, curate their stores choosing from a collection of 75,000 pre-vetted products and share their unique profile link across their community via a link-in-bio – wherever that may be – all within a few clicks. Plus, it’s platform agnostic, so creator’s stores will work across any and all platforms – TikTok, Substack, YouTube, Instagram, et cetera.
Moetic is for independent creators and influencers – be it niche or established, micro or macro – who are authenticating products for consumers by speaking honestly and organically about them. “That’s where Moetic becomes a super useful tool,” says Murphy. “Because then we don’t necessarily have to have that conversation. We can let the people that have these really engaged communities do the selling for us and the curation for us.” Smith adds, “What we want to do is allow them to monetize that conversation. Afterall, conversation is what draws people in.” So, from each sale, creators earn a standard commission rate – with the larger earners able to command bigger revenue deals orchestrated by Moetic’s business development team. Macro-creators can submit their own brand deals to be included on their Moetic page as well.
Murphy butts in, “What we wanna do is empower the creator. We encourage them not to say they’re a Moetic store but rather, that it’s just their store. They’re just using our technology and platform to enable all of it, but we deal with all the stuff they don’t want to, such as delivery, returns, customer service, operations and logistics.” He adds, “It’s economically more viable for brands too.” From providing the platform and brand onboarding to offering customer services, and covering the hassle of payment and shipping, the back of the house is in their hands.
Moetic’s ultimate goal? To democratise e-commerce through a community of link-in-bio instant storefronts. This will allow creators to benefit from the same endless-aisle business model as Amazon and Farfetch by building a network of relationships with stores and brands throughout the US, Canada and across Europe. “It’s a digital version of an independent store,” Murphy explains. “You are buying from a sales system that’s really passionate when speaking about it, and in turn, excites you about its products.”
“We’ve built our business on trust and legitimacy,” Smith declares. “I’ve known Lucien [Clarke], for instance, for over 20 years. He is a friend and obviously he trusts us. But he’s also a businessman and an entrepreneur; he’s not gonna hop on board just because we’re friends.” Murphy adds, “When creators open the door to certain brands using their own tone of voice, we see an immediate reaction and peak in traffic, which converts to sales because there’s a pre-established trust there, between their community and them as creators.”
Effectively today, every brand is direct-to-consumer. It’s the default business model, because there’s more margin, there’s more control, and with that, the luxury industry is moving toward totally digital concession. As a result of this, brands need to find a way to create long-term sustainability in these unfamiliar markets by diversifying their commerce channels and their traditional marketing spend. Moetic inserts itself into that gap in the market by providing access to a global voice of tastemakers once reserved for reigning brands as well as the building blocks for relationships with creators that last much longer than a disappearing Instagram story. It offers the opportunity to place products on a creator’s storefront, benefiting from a permanent presence.
“From a brand point of view, it’s really, really exciting because effectively, they tend to give a creator something like £5,000 for an Instagram post that lasts, at best, 48 hours or so on social media, and then it’s gone. So how you can ensure that you’re getting good return on that investment is very murky water,” Smith says. “But by having products in a creator’s Moetic store, you’ll have a lasting presence. Then when the next brand comes along and wants to do a sponsored post and put products on that creator’s store, you’ll still get some love from that because you’re already on their store from before.”
Smith also points out that with Apple’s iOS 14 update, there’s this big privacy narrative that’s proving problematic for marketers. When you sign up for a newsletter now, for example, a pop-up prompt will ask if you want to ‘hide your email’. Or if you download an app, it will ask if you want the app to track you, to which most people, of course, say no thank you. With cookies, advertisers could follow you around the internet, but now advertisers and small businesses can’t attribute as precisely as they used to be able with LTK and those kinds of sites. Marketers are really struggling to adapt to this change because advertisers used to be able to follow you around the internet rather easily, tracking their interests and providing personalised ads. But attribution is really, really murky now because of this shift to protect privacy. Brands can’t even tell what creator sold what product and to who, anymore. But Moetic gives brands pure attribution. They know who bought what product from what creator and when the item was listed on the store, etc, because they’re in control of the payments. “Chances are that if we could put the products and the buy button with the creator, they’re not gonna send brand’s one customer,” says Smith, “They’re gonna send them 20, and it’ll be easily traced back to the creator who spoke about it on their socials.” He adds, “This is another reason why you’re gonna see a lot more direct-to-creator ad spend, because there’s attribution.”
Aligning with its advent, a slew of masterful creators have already got their Moetic stores up and operating. Tapping into the Palace Skateboards community, Lucien Clarke and Savannah Stacey Keenan offer a curated selection to their following. Partnering with the next generation of menswear style savants on TikTok, Mark Boutillier has a store-front of his own as well. Cult podcast, Throwing Fits co-hosts Lawrence Schlossman and James Harris are also backing the cutting-edge platform as well as London-based model and skater Aimée Gillingwater. Sage Flowers and Hiking Patrol are jumping on the bandwagon too, and so is costume designer Heidi Bivens. “Obviously at first, it will just be these key creators,” Murphy says, “But three or four years from now, we want anyone and everyone to be able to make a Moetic store. I want my 18-year-old daughter to open a shop and just sell stuff to her friends or whoever, you know?”
At the moment, Moetic only offers direct link-in-bio storefronts to creators and consumers but it is soon to be rolling out a discovery page, similar to Depop, where you can explore other storefronts on the platform. However, “to be fully transparent,” Smith says, “We haven’t got thousands and thousands of creators on here just yet, so if we opened that up today, it would look a little bit sparse.”
Not to mention, with kingpin investors including Jose Neves, the founder of Farfetch.com; Alex Chung, founder of Giphy; Maurice Helfgott of Amery Capital; Beams Japan; and Ian Rogers of LVMH and crypto hardware wallet, Ledger; Moetic’s prospects for industry-altering success are substantial.
Photography courtesy of Moetic.
