Michelle Lomas
Hey there, hustlers. Welcome back to another episode of Flex Your Hustle. I'm your host, Michelle Lomas, and we have a very special episode for you today. It's what we call a Publisher Spotlight. In this episode, we talk to one of the great publishers that you can access via the team at Commission Factory who are making waves in the retail and affiliate marketing sector.
Julie Stevanja
Thank you so much. We're stoked. I wanna use the word Wrapd, but I use it too often. We're really happy with it. It's a beautiful brand, we love the word mark, we love that it's short, sharp, and techy.
Michelle Lomas
So we'll get into that a little bit, but for the people listening, why don't you introduce yourself and share a little bit about Wrapd, formerly Her Black Book, how it got started?
Julie Stevanja
Yeah, sure. So my name is Julie Stevanja. I'm the co-founder of Wrapd, co-founded it with my twin sister, Sali. We also, ten years ago, co-founded a retail business called Style Runner. So I was a merchant for ten years and know the rollercoaster that is. I love retail. I live and breathe it.
Michelle Lomas
Am I understanding Wrapd correctly, it's basically a shopping app where I can curate everything that I'm interested in. Is it personalised? Like how does it work for a consumer?
Julie Stevanja
Yeah, so one of the things that we have, which I don't see at many other places in the affiliate space, is a following feed. A lot of affiliate spaces are like a mall that you walk into and discover lots of brands that you'll probably love. But what we've done is create a following feed.
Michelle Lomas
And I'm just curious, what are some of those brands that you mentioned that are amazing and emerging?
Julie Stevanja
Oh, we had one yesterday that joined. It's a dive mask brand. Gentle Habits. Beautiful brand. Gorgeous branding, like snorkel masks and fins, but in just super cool colours. Like it makes you wanna go snorkelling.
Michelle Lomas
I love that.
Julie Stevanja
Another joining very soon, it's called Raie, R-A-I-E. Not sure exactly how to pronounce that. It's the most gorgeous packaging, and they do face oils and things like that. It was just a new brand onboarding, and then people on our team were like, oh I use that brand, I love it. And it's really great hearing that these brands are already much loved. They're just cult emerging brands.
Michelle Lomas
I love that ability for discoverability. Even though it's personalised, you can get in a rut, particularly with the products that you buy, and so I love that you're still able to discover those emerging Australian brands, Australian designers, Australian skincare, which are all fantastic. It is harder in the places where traditionally the channels were helping them.
Julie Stevanja
Yeah. So when you talk about our different business model, it isn't largely advertising revenue driven, which is where social media has gone and is what is changing the brands that you discover there.
Michelle Lomas
Yeah, exactly. It sounds great. So Wrapd, what can people expect from the new platform?
Julie Stevanja
We've got so many big features, and it took a long time to get this rebrand done. I think it's really important to get the branding right. Part of what we're doing is not reinventing the model, there are great affiliate platforms out there, but we're communicating to this demographic and building trust in a brand that cares about curation. So we had to get that right and it took us a long time. But in the background we've been steadily building some really big new features. I can't share them yet, but we've got some big features going live in September.
Michelle Lomas
No, but I love a new term.
Julie Stevanja
It really is exactly what we've been speaking about, and that is that platforms like social media have been getting worse for the consumer because their revenue models are advertising. So they're serving up stuff the consumer doesn't wanna see. Our mission is the opposite of that. We want you to enter our app and have the brand world that you wanna see, that you love, that you know you have great experiences with.
Michelle Lomas
That's great. And gender neutral too. So I know you've predominantly been a female focused brand, but you've moved towards more of a gender neutral play. Even the colours and everything I can see are obviously catered to both genders. So what can we expect from bringing more of the other side of the spectrum for shopping in?
Julie Stevanja
Yeah. Look, we still are very focused on the consumer that we know really well. The low hanging fruit is just making ourselves not exclude that other audience, because they were already shopping with us. We already have brands like Nike and The Iconic and Selfridges. We have lots of brands that have products for the male consumer. And so the first step is actually just not calling ourselves a brand name that they could be using but feel like they shouldn't. We're just making ourselves more welcoming.
Michelle Lomas
I'm sure people listening are like, what did you do with Porsche? That's interesting.
Julie Stevanja
Porsche was really just a mutual marketing activation. I say just, but it was fabulous. They particularly also wanted to grow their female audience and we were Her Black Book with this really active shopping consumer. But it wasn't so much a sales activation for them as an awareness activation. Porsche have got a huge wait list for their cars. They don't really need to drive more sales right now, so it was a great time for them to do a brand awareness campaign in a female sphere.
Michelle Lomas
Where to start?
Julie Stevanja
Where to start. I think about this so much because I was a retailer for ten years and I absolutely know where brands come from and sometimes the hesitation.
Michelle Lomas
And so I know you guys did some research. What did you learn from that?
Julie Stevanja
Really interestingly, we expected to be largely coupon and sales driven, and that was absolutely the place we started because it's easy to attract customers with that. But the research that we did, both external research and a survey we ran to over a thousand shoppers, asked why do you subscribe to brands? And what came about was truly about fifty fifty. Sign up and follow a brand because they wanna know about the sales, they want a discount code. Or they wanted to know when new collections are coming from that brand, they wanna stay in touch with that brand. That was a much higher number than I thought.
Michelle Lomas
Interesting.
Julie Stevanja
I really thought that seventy, eighty percent of people are signing up for that coupon code.
Michelle Lomas
Ten percent off your first purchase. Yeah.
Julie Stevanja
It does make sense. There are certain brands that I love and I wanna know about new collections and new drops. Give me forty-eight hours notice so I can plan my Friday morning and block it out in my calendar, because there's a new drop coming. And so it's great because it's led to where we've always wanted to be, which is helping brands communicate not just the sales and discounts, but also the new collections and new drops.
Michelle Lomas
People can access you guys via the Commission Factory platform and the team there. But if I'm a brand listening, what can I expect? What's it like to work with you guys and how can I work with you?
Julie Stevanja
So we have a wonderful partnership team. Sali, my twin sister and co-founder, leads that team. They would jump on a call with any brand and walk you through how it all works. It's very easy to get connected through a partner like Commission Factory. We will apply, you'll approve us, and then we would take you through best practice for how frequently to post, how do we flesh out your page and make sure that a new consumer who might discover you for the first time can get to understand your bestselling categories or your bestselling products.
Michelle Lomas
That is a super important point. You spend so much time as a brand creating and curating your look books and your style and your new campaign, only to be told that's not gonna work on another platform. So the fact that it does work for you, and all you are doing is figuring out what tactics are gonna work best, I think that should be a great pull for clients.
Michelle Lomas
Julie, thank you so much. Congratulations again on a lovely launch. I'm excited to see how it goes. For everybody listening, that's wrapd.ai and there is an app as well that can be found in the app store. That's Wrapd, W-R-A-P-D.
Julie Stevanja
Thank you again. Thank you so much for having me.
Michelle Lomas
I hope you got a little bit of inspiration from that great chat with Julie. If you like what you heard, reach out to your local rep at Commission Factory and tell them we sent you. Next week is our last episode of the season, and you won't wanna miss it.
Verity Rowe
I was brand new to affiliate marketing when I joined lululemon. When I first started, my manager said, you've got all this great experience in performance marketing channels. By the way, you're also gonna be managing our affiliate program. I thought, nothing like a challenge. I've always been one to learn, so I am always happy to take on new things. Affiliate marketing was quite the deep end for me when I first joined lululemon. When I found out that it was gonna be part of my remit, the first thing I did was jump onto Apple Podcasts and start listening to every podcast I could find about affiliate marketing.
Michelle Lomas
If you aren't already, don't forget to follow so you don't miss an ep. And while you're there, why not drop us a rating and review? We'd love to hear what you think. Flex Your Hustle is made possible by the great team at Commission Factory and produced by Ampel. I'm Michelle Lomas, keep hustling and bye for now.