Camille Gray is a strategist at Initiative. She specialises in retail marketing, specifically e-commerce, focusing on cultural and media trends. She has a regular column, Add to Cart.
Kanye West is a trap.
Yes, he has tweeted he is running for president. Yawn. But please don’t let this latest cry for clicks distract you from something far more fascinating, and genuinely deserving of your attention; his latest retail project.
Kanye West recently teased that his new e-commerce website that took three years to make. I’m here to tell you why it was worth the wait.
First, note that West is no small player in retail. He is the founder of an outrageously successful footwear brand known as Yeezy – which has collaborations with Luis Vuitton, Nike and Adidas and turned over USD $1.3 billion in revenue last year.
After signing a 10-year deal with Gap, Kanye West is soon to unveil his latest website for his collection of shoes, clothes and accessories known as Yeezy Supply. West’s creative partner Nick Knight claims the website took over “10,000 hours of design work” (someone has recently read Malcom Gladwell). Details of the new e-commerce site emerged and it is nothing short of revolutionary.
In Kanye’s world, customer journeys change like fashion trends. The way he sells products work in tandem with new designs.
In this latest venture, Kanye positions e-commerce as an interactive game; entirely devoid of ‘traditional’ retail conventions. In doing so, the Yeezy Supply site offers three key lessons for online retailers:
1. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.
Yeezy Supply borrows from the birthplace of digital innovation: gaming. The exponential rise of the $134 billion industry is increasingly getting the attention of brands for its audience and scale, with the likes of Luis Vuitton and Moschino using gaming platforms to advertise their products. However rather than insert Yeezy products into games, Kanye brings gaming into retail.
Selecting clothing items is much like a ‘choose your player’ screen on Fortnite. Avatar-like models walks onto the screen, with clothing items spinning in rotation as 3D graphics.
As with video games, motion and graphics replace words. The site is highly accessibly regardless of language or computer literacy.
Yeezy’s consumer buys for a future in which real and digital identities converge. With every two in three Australians playing video games (and Fortnite making $2.3B in selling character skins), a digital fashion identity is every bit as ‘real’ as the physical. Many youth-focused retailers have played with this concept, including Man Repeller’s merchandise minisite which asked players to select either ‘Shop’ or ‘Play’ on the homepage.
Along with gaming, Kanye’s site seeks inspiration from other highly ‘functional’ categories including camping and medical supplies. Knight says Kanye became fixated on the “lo fi” aesthetic of a hospital gown retailer (pictured below), so much so he adopted the sterile blue background for his own site. In doing so, Yeezy proves that retailers shouldn’t think of their product within a specific category; much like Danish brand Han Kjobenhavn’s site which takes inspiration from excel spreadsheets or Nike’s Skateboarding site which mimics a collage of skate magazine cut-outs.
When retailers move online, they enter a space shared by an infinite number of categories and products. Yeezy is hanging on the largest clothing rack in the world, competing against the latest Fortnite skin as well as your cousin’s Depop account.
This ultimately means anything from gaming to hospital gowns is worthy of theft, because consumer attention is the true battlefield.
2. Delight in destruction
As FastCompany points out, most shopping sites share the same infrastructure: rows of products, filter navigation tools and an "add to cart" button. In what sounds like a highly counter-intuitive brainstorming strategy, Kanye began the process by listing out everything he hated in a website. He then constructed a site by finding inspiration in the opposite of personal (and category) preferences.
For example, on a regular fashion site, the models are almost certainly already wearing the brand. On Yeezy’s site, the opposite is true. Models begin undressed, and put on selected clothing items in front of your eyes.
Similarly, rather than the shopping cart remaining a hidden mysterious function sitting as an icon in the top right corner, Kanye brings a giant hovering shopping basket and/or plastic bag to the front of the screen. Rather than obsessively showing items to scale, Kanye plays with the imaginary space of the internet with products taking outrageous proportions.
3. Put the "personal" back into personalised
Just because the product exists in a digital space rather than a face-to-face physical store, doesn’t mean human interactions need to be absent. Instead, Yeezy’s site aims to “make the internet a more humane place,” by emphasising the connectivity of the people we see on screen.
Yeezy’s models can be selected from a significant range of different body types, taking personalisation to its most extreme level. Already some retailers are playing with deepfake technology to super-impose consumer faces into models; an extension of the virtual changeroom.
Yeezy’s online models are not just chosen for their looks – rather- their compelling stories.
They are real nurses, firefighters and teachers; and their "human" qualities (e.g. favourite food, significant life experiences) can be explored by the consumer.
Much like a video game avatar with special powers and weapons, the site’s models are a crucial navigation point for the customer, and a way to form a personal connection between consumers and brand. This is a strategy used by many retailers; from early American teen catalogues of the '90s (where models were “real” girls who showcased their personalities) to premium pram retailer Bugaboo which features real parents on site.
Kanye West famously admitted, “I was never really good at anything except for the ability to learn.”
And after 10,000 hours of learning, he’s produced a site that showcases his greatest talent: transformation. As both rapper, fashion designer, preacher and now politician – Kanye knows best how to merge fields of expertise.
Retail should likewise exist in a constant state of transformation, especially e-commerce, where category rules are made to be broken.
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.