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The pitch is pretty powerful: “Start your fashion business with no overhead, no barriers, just possibilities.” Scroll the Kollectin.com site further and you’ll see not just opportunities to shop or sell like other fashion sites, but a call-to-action to open your own digital storefront. In minutes. With no inventory. Let me explain…
It all starts with the vision of lifelong serial entrepreneur and successful fashion SheEO Nadia Lee. In the late Nineties, before online shopping was “a thing,” the LA-based Lee found success with her jewelry brand Adia Kibur. Her innate sense of style and business acumen inspired her to create a brand featuring designs that combined quality, affordable price points and what was trending into a rapidly expanding enterprise that is today carried in over 5,000 retailers ranging from small boutiques to national notables like Neiman-Marcus and Nordstroms.
Even with the success she was enjoying with her jewelry business, by 2018, Lee was ready to launch her next venture, Kollectin.com. Driven by her desire to disrupt the online retail space while simultaneously empowering women with an easy on-ramp business model, she went on to create something decidedly different than the standard online storefront or brick-and-mortar play. Indeed, beyond blouses, denim, swimwear, jewelry and other fashion finds, part of Kollectin’s business DNA is to serve as a vehicle to bring other women—particularly aspirational entrepreneurs—along for the ride, including profits.
“Our data shows women want to be entrepreneurs, they want to sell stuff, especially fashion—but what stops them is start-up money,” says Lee. “I wanted to tap into that mindset and give them the space to give it a try by creating a simple, easy tool for women to access current technology, source products, and not worry about backend issues like customer service and shipping.”
A New Fashion Business Model
The new approach Lee developed for Kollectin.com leverages person-to-person social selling and influencer marketing. She dubs it a “B2B2C” model where site visitors discover and purchase from trusted collections by emerging brands as well as influencers who curate their own Kollectin collections. By breaking down traditional barriers between buyers and sellers, the app streamlines the fashion discovery process, making it easier for buyers to find their preferred fashion items and for sellers to expand their customer base. A classic win-win.
“We want the people to determine what sells,” says Lee. “Back in the day, you would walk through a trade show, the buyer buys certain styles and that ends up in the boutique or store. So what’s on offer is curated by someone else.” On the Kollectin app, the community of sellers curates their own stores and the behaviors of their personal cohorts drives what the algorithms show to their shoppers.The way Kollectin’s B2B2C platform works is there are around 80 brands selling their own products as well as individual sellers who discovered the site on their own or were invited by a current user.
The process of going from a new visitor to an influencer and seller with a self-curated collection takes just a matter of minutes and involves only a few steps. First, they scan the QR code or directly download the app, then sign-up, which includes choosing a store name, uploading a store banner image and a few other steps. The site then gives the user a walk-through on how to build the store and pick the first six items from the approximately 6,500 SKUs available at any given time. The new seller’s store then goes live with a dedicated URL and QR code ready to be shared on social networks or IRL.
Lee says she’s seen many Mompreneurs hit the ground running with the platform, doing activations like livestreams from their socials where they wear and share outfits with their cohorts and others. By simultaneously posting the unique URLs of their store and the outfits, shoppers can then buy in three clicks.
Another powerful networking feature that Lee built into the platform is a gamified profit-sharing model where sellers can earn income from not only their sales, but from the sales of their circle of customers—called cohorts—who have decided to become sellers themselves. The app uses a sliding scale that begins at the 5 to 10 percent range of sales and increases with the number of people a certain user shares the product links with. Lee says that power sellers who actively share can regularly earn over a thousand dollars through the sales of their cohorts alone.
Harnessing the Power of Ai
Beyond the human connections the app facilitates, Kollectin also harnesses the novel and sweeping power of Ai that is now so prevalent in a wide range of industries. For both customers and sellers on the app, Ai is used extensively to upgrade interactions and extend the utility of multiple functions. On the seller’s side, Kollectin offers a chatbot that essentially serves as a 24/7 assistant (that never calls in sick).
For example, if a buyer has a return, the chatbot will instruct them how to complete the return, rather than the seller having to manage the interaction. With all the data being collected by the app (which is kept private), the Ai chatbot also becomes a powerful sales and recommendation tool with its ability to pull selections that are very specific to a shopper’s preferences.
On the buyers’ side, the chatbot replicates a conversational tone, guiding the shopper through the entire customer journey. It will initiate the conversation with a question about what the customer is looking for. If they say something like “an outfit for a beach party with warm weather,” the chatbot will drill down to more specifics, asking about patterns and lengths. After a few more questions, the chatbot will generate six recommendations, including descriptions and images. If the shopper likes what she sees, a click will take them directly to check-out, not some affiliate link.
“We’re the first to close the loop,” says Lee. “You have a conversation with the chatbot, see the images and discover the designs you like, then press and checkout all in one place, without going to another link.”
By bridging the gap between obstacles and opportunity with a powerful, tech-driven solution, Nadia Lee with her Kollectin.com app has found a way to shape the fashion industry with an innovation uniquely designed to empower the entrepreneurial spirit of women.
The post Ai-powered Online Fashion Hub Kollectin.com Is turning Mompreneurs and Other Aspiring Micro-business Owners into Digital Divas appeared first on Home Business Magazine.
