In the age of Instagram anyone can be a blogger, but it takes something special to make a million-pound career out of pouting and posing. Laura Craik meets the personal style bloggers winning on the web.
Credit: Haute
Waltzing through Mulberry HQ in Kensington, picking out anything you fancy from the rails, sounds like a fantasy. For Ella Catliff, 23, it’s an average morning. Catliff is not a starlet being dressed for awards season; her red carpet is the pavement. Her blog, La Petite Anglaise, is at the vanguard (in Britain, at least) of that popular phenomenon known as personal style blogging. Critics might dismiss the practice as one giant ego trip, but it’s easy to be jealous of someone who makes more money in a week attending parties, hosting store launches and posting photos of herself in various outfits than most women her age do in a month. Actually, make that six months.
Catliff started her blog at the suggestion of her mother Anne, an artist and jewellery designer, who thought it would give her daughter something to do while she interned for a now-defunct label in Paris. ‘There was a lot of Googling how to do stuff,’ she says. ‘My pictures were crap. I was literally asking a stranger on the street to take a picture of me.’ She now has 23,300 Instagram followers, 10,600 Twitter followers and her blog receives 80,000 visitors a month. She won’t reveal her earnings, but says: ‘They’re definitely enough to live off, and going up.’ While most people’s cack-handed selfies will invoke a handful of thumbs-up emojis on Instagram, Catliff and her ilk have turned their photos into pounds.
Credit: Vanessa Jackman
Personal style blogging is nothing new, but it’s only now that the financial opportunities it offers are being recognised. Lured by the idea of big bucks and free clothes, thousands of blogs now exist featuring gorgeous girls in fabulous outfits. The website Fashionista recently listed its 20 Most Influential Personal Style Bloggers Right Now, crunching numbers aggregated from Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest followers, as well as website traffic, brand extension and the more nebulous ‘It factor’, gained from ‘talking to industry insiders about whom advertisers are loving, and who is moving the most products via affiliate links’. The winner? Chiara Ferragni, who blogs as The Blonde Salad. According to industry bible WWD, Ferragni stood to make £5.3m in 2014.
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How did dressing up in skorts, Dior trainers and a Kate Spade handbag become so lucrative? The short answer is that big brands have been experimenting with native advertising, sometimes known as ‘creative content’, forming a bridge between advertising and editorial. But while glossy fashion bibles have struggled to integrate native advertising into their existing formats, bloggers are perfectly placed to offer it organically. The best bloggers already have meaningful relationships with their readers. Their ability to storytell, and offer deeper context, has huge value for fashion brands. As it becomes harder to differentiate between one premium product and the next, the ability to create an emotional relationship, and an ongoing conversation, has become increasingly important. As Sabina Szymura, press officer for Mulberry, says: ‘Normally, customers just see the clothes in a shop, or on a website. When Ella wears Mulberry, and blogs about it, it gives them a bit of insight, as well as ideas of how they can style it on themselves.’
‘You might see a Mulberry item in the pages of a magazine,’ Catliff adds, ‘but the user journey is so much longer. By the time you get to the store, the product might not be in, or you might have forgotten about it.’
Credit: Glamour Magazine
Catliff started La Petite Anglaise in 2010, which makes her one of the first wave of fashion bloggers. A lot has changed in five years and she now finds herself with infinitely more competition than when she first started out. To stay on top, you have to keep moving: Catliff plans to start a YouTube channel soon. She is managed by Storm Vision, the digital and broadcast division of the modelling agency that represents Cara Delevingne and Kate Moss. ‘Storm is very innovative in all things digital,’ Catliff admits. She is also highly visible on the London party scene, where her well-dressed, photogenic presence (she used to be a model) ensures regular coverage in the glossies. Her working days can be up to 18 hours long. Evenings may be glamorous, but her days are spent working from her flat in Olympia, uploading content to her site. She recently advertised for an intern and was surprised to receive ‘over a hundred’ applications.
Read more at London Evening Standard.