Ashley Laurel

Model Moment at Private Party with Soma Magazine and Diesel

Posted on April 24, 2012April 24, 2012 by Ashley Laurel

When you get an invitation to a private party for fashion insiders, you don’t say no.

Last week I received an invitation to a dinner hosted by Soma magazine and Diesel at Diesel’s San Francisco flagship location. Just as I was sipping on my first Cosmo I was approached by one of the Diesel team and Ali Ghanbarian Publisher and Editor in Chief of Soma magazine and asked if I would model a pair of jeans. Of course I said yes! Then I was told I could keep them, along with the shirt of my choosing. Double yes!!

I headed to the dressing room with four other girls where we were each outfitted in a different style of jean and top. I tried on Diesel’s Flairlegg jean and instantly felt comfortable and confident in them.

It was nice to meet a group of girls who were all very friendly and ready for some fun. We took way too many pictures in the dressing room as we were getting ready, each admiring the others’ jean styles.

According to many, I was the model with the most personality (which I hope is a good thing). Not all of my moves were caught on video, but here’s a sneak peak at the event.

After cocktail hour, we enjoyed a lovely catered meal, complete with flowing laughter and wine. There was a little bit of tech present too. At each place setting a chunky silver watch was used as a napkin ring, as a gift for each girl. And there were small cards prompting attendees to tweet using #dieseldinner.

Just before dessert it was time to model. Each of us was called up to the “front” of the room and asked to show off her jeans for the rest of the dinner party, while a Diesel representative, and special host Yuan Zhang of ShopNear.me, explained the best ways to style each jean.

Overall I had a wonderful evening and couldn’t have asked for a better group of people to share it with.

After a four year hiatus, I can add model back on my resume.

Check out the blog post from another model of the evening, complete with more photos, over at Complacency Kills.

Virtual Dressing Room Assistant Helps Online Shoppers with Sizing

Posted on April 17, 2012April 16, 2012 by Ashley Laurel

Have you ever been a size S at one store and a size M at another? Often I shop on ecommerce sites headquartered in Europe or Asia hoping to find a little something different, and the scariest part is trying to find a good fit for a new piece of apparel.

Enter Fits.me, a company that offers the technology online clothing retailers can use to give customers a realistic view of how different sizes of a piece of clothing will fit their body.

“Our robots and the Virtual Fitting Room technology have solved the main problem that online clothing retailers face – the lack of a fitting room,” Heikki Haldre, CEO and co-founder of Fits.me said.

The technology, created by teams from Estonia (Tartu University and Tallinn Technical University) and Germany (Human Solutions GmbH), is the basis for the robotic mannequins whose shapes can deftly shrink to slimmer sizes or grow to hunkier frames. These robots- there are 14 total- can morph into 100,000 body shapes.

Right now, brands like Ermenegildo Zegna (a men’s luxury brand), Thomas Pink, and Park & Bond use this technology to help give their clients a better understanding of how their pieces fit. Why did all the men’s retailers jump on board first? According to the Fits.me team, a man’s torso is less complicated than a woman’s so the team started there, back in 2010. And just recently, the first woman’s robot model was launched.

Vogue magazine named Fits.me one of the most influential names in digital fashion in their 2012 Online Fashion 100 list so rest assured, this invention is fashion forward. Now here’s hoping the Fits.me team can create an army of robots to send to more than a few luxury retailers so I can spend less time on guesswork and returns and more time shopping for pieces that will actually flatter.

Fashion Startup Betabrand Pairs Quality with Quirky

Posted on March 23, 2012March 28, 2012 by Ashley Laurel

Nothing gets most of my guy friends more excited about fashion than making fun of it. Seriously.

Recently, on two separate occasions, both my boyfriend and a male friend of mine showed me a pair of sweatpants they had found for sale online. These weren’t ordinary sweatpants though, they’re Dress Pant Sweatpants, a line of classed up, Barney Stintson-style of sweatpants meant to be office friendly.

Anyway, these Dress Sweatpants are a creation of Betabrand, a San Francisco based fashion startup who’s mission it is to create unique, quality clothing for those with a sense of humor about how they present themselves to the world.

Betabrand is also well known for other creative fashions such as Disco Pants (perfect for anyone staring in the next LMFAO music video), the Black Reversible Smoking Jacket, and the original design (how the whole company started), Cordarounds.

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After doing some investigating of the site on my own, I decided to see if I could get an interview with someone at Betabrand and set up a coffee with the brand’s creative director, Jared Graf.

Graf started with the company three years ago, as its first official employee, helping out on product development. Today, he oversees the brand’s creative direction.

Today, Betabrand has about 18 employees and has had press coverage in some major news outlets, including Time. In fact, Graf admits that the press this brand gets is “disproportionate” to the actual size of the startup.

But hey, when you’re doing something unique, people will take notice.

“We like to try to reach audiences maybe other clothing companies aren’t speaking to, and engaging them online,” Graf said during our discussion over coffee. “If you have a little bit of a different perspective, we’d like to be the forum where you could share that.”

Betabrand’s marketing tactics are as unique as the clothing designs themselves. For example, at Maker Faire 2011, the brand collaborated with Inventor Saul Griffith and Onya Cycles to create a small event called “Eco Knievel“. And, the online personality of the brand (think Twitter, Facebook) is very vibrant. Fans of the brand are so engaged that there’s a 40 – 50% open rate of the e-newsletters, but no wonder. All of the copy is as hilarious as the clothing concepts themselves.

To keep fans of the brand engaged, site users can upload photos of themselves and apply B-glasses, without even purchasing any clothing. Actual brand buyers can upload photos via mobile phone to Betabrand’s Model Citizen community. Unlike on most e-commerce sites, (expect for sites like ASOS) where users aren’t really encouraged to participate with the brand other than to make purchases, Betabrand displays photos of fans wearing pieces of their clothes right on the page where that particular item is sold. To date, over 2,000 have been uploaded.

To generate even more buzz about the brand, the team came up with NSFWorkwear (which has a NSFBlog photo up now, so you can just click the link), a line of that’s not actually created and sold, but definitely talked about. Comments from users on Facebook show up in real-time on this page, like they do for the real place where Betabrand does its market research, the Think Tank.

One key thing discovered through paying attention to their customers, is that women want in on the fun! Starting with The Elope Dress, Betabrand now offers more than 8 clothing designs for purchase, and the womenswear designer has been known to personal email customers to build relationships and get feedback.

While Betabrand is expanding into womenswear and continually testing the boundaries of inappropriateness, it’s main demographic skews male, between the ages of 25- 55. Most customers, according to Graf, are tech savvy, geeky, and like large computer monitors. Sounds like the perfect target audience for perhaps San Francisco’s most wackiest (albeit brilliant) startup yet.

Online Shopping Through a Man’s Perspective

Posted on March 20, 2012March 20, 2012 by Ashley Laurel

I’m not an expert in men’s fashion by any means, but I’d like to give my programmer boyfriend, Jon, lots of credit for being so. Yesterday he wrote a post over on his blog about the three main things that need improvement on in the online shopping scene for guys- better pricing, correctly targeted written content, and more style variety. According to Jon, there is a big opportunity for the right startup to succeed here.

Check out his thoughts at staringispolite.com/blog.

420356_603527120225_57400943_32589978_737604657_n — My well dressed boyfriend horsing around.

Nighttime Snowboarder Glows in LED Studded Suit

Posted on February 17, 2012February 17, 2012 by Ashley Laurel

I’ve seen LEDs worn many times by music artists, but never before on a nighttime snowboarder.

Created by John Spatcher from thousands of white LED lights, and worn by Artec pro snowboarder William Hughes, the video of this glowing white suit in action was shot by Jacob Sutton, a photographer and filmmaker who’s worked for fashion brands like Burberry and Hermès. This video was shot over the course of three nights on the slopes of France’s Rhône-Alpes.

Thanks to my friend Sharon Vaknin for passing this along! Somehow I feel that I won’t be as well dressed while snowboarding on the slopes of Heavenly this weekend.

Etsy Find: Twitter Inspired Heels

Posted on February 14, 2012July 3, 2012 by Ashley Laurel

My friend Ashley LaFerriere just got engaged. Among the many social media themed wedding finds I’ve thrown her way lately, here’s one more- “something blue” Twitter themed heels. These $225 shoes are hand painted by Nora Karen, a designer located in Boca Raton, Florida.

What can I say? These are stylish without fail.

Three Things to Learn from Rebecca Minkoff’s Social Strategy

Posted on February 10, 2012February 10, 2012 by Ashley Laurel

Rebecca Minkoff is a name I’ve been hearing everywhere lately, and no wonder, because the Rebecca Minkoff brand IS everywhere these days. Minkoff has been designing handbags since 2005 and just two years later jumped right into connecting with customers through social media. And efforts are showing. Just this week, the brand was among the top nominees for Best Blog at the third annual Fashion 2.0 Awards. Pretty good, right? So just how does this brand stay at the helm of fashion brands in the digital space?

When thinking about the Rebecca Minkoff brand, I immediately figured who better to talk to than Maria Morales of Kitties + Couture, a blog on which I’ve been repeatedly spotting Minkoff bags.

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Style Blogger (and Senior Marketing Manager at Poshmark) Maria Morales had some great insights into how the social marketing portion of the Rebecca Minkoff brand is faring.

1. If you want it done right, do it yourself.

In 2007, the Minkoffs (Rebecca and her brother, Uri, CEO of the Rebecca Minkoff brand) began to grow the brand name pretty much organically online. They participated in blog comment sections, chat rooms and forum discussions and over time began to create the “Minketts”, their online brand ambassadors.

“I remember the first time I checked my Twitter and saw that Rebecca Minkoff had tweeted to me complimenting me on one of my outfit posts–I most likely let out a squeal (or two)! That one little tweet from the designer herself made me feel so much more connected to the brand, which in turn influenced me to keep writing and promoting the brand, feeding a never ending cycle of (free) word-of-mouth marketing,” says Maria of Kitties + Couture.

Now how’s that for getting your customers interested? Designers who handle their own Twitter accounts, and handle them in the right ways, can basically putting in a little effort (a few tweets directly to consumers here and there) in exchange for big returns.

Learning through hands on trial and error and reviewing consumer feedback right out there posted to the social web was a good move for the Rebecca and Uri. The Rebecca Minkoff brand is now at the forefront of fashion brands in the digital space, and remains well respected for it.

2. Get involved in multiple social networks

Unlike some fashion brands, Rebecca Minkoff is pretty much a social media veteran at this point, and today, the brand is involved across a variety of social networks.

“I think Rebecca Minkoff and her on-the-pulse team have made the Rebecca Minkoff brand one of the most socially aware and active in the digital space today. They’re active across nearly all types of social platforms on a daily basis, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pose, Polyvore, and their own personal “Minkette” blog,” Maria of Kitties + Couture reports.

Not only is the team behind the Minkoff brand active, but also innovative. Along with other creative ideas, they’ve created a community of brand enthusiasts and then giving those fans a place on the website.

3. Keep ’em wanting more with behind-the-scenes looks

While entering the social media world back in 2007, the brand began cultivating a following which they dubbed the “Minkettes”. In 2009, a community site called Minkette was launched. This site isn’t where fans shop, but where they go to experience a behind-the-scenes look at the brand. My favorite sections include Style, where celebrities sporting the Minkoff bags are showcased, Play, where fans can enter giveaways and learn DIY tips, and Minkette Muse, a look at the brand from the PR girl’s perspective.
After about a decade in the fashion business, it’s clear that the Rebecca Minkoff brand is innovative, energetic, and here to stay awhile.

See what’s next for the brand during coverage of Rebecca Minkoff’s Fall 2012 show streaming live at 3 pm today.