The luxury retailer will launch tomorrow a user-generated section of its site called #SaksStyle that aggregates shoppers’ selfies shared on Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter. And the images will be ‘shoppable.’

Saks Fifth Avenue is embracing the selfie

The luxury retailer will launch tomorrow a user-generated section of its site, called #SaksStyle, that aggregates images shoppers share on Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.

The platform, which was created by visual analytics and marketing vendor Curalate, identifies the products featured in the images and when a shopper clicks on a photo it takes her to the item’s product page.

“We live in the age of the selfie and so we wanted to capitalize on that by making selfies shoppable,” says Qianna Smith, director of social media and the SaksPOV blog for the retailer, which is No. 38 in the Internet Retailer 2014 Top 500 Guide.

The retailer’s shoppers, particularly those who buy brands that skew contemporary like Carven, 3.1 Phillip Lim or rag & bone, already were tagging the retailer on various social networks, Smith says. Giving them a standard hashtag to use and featuring the images on the site rewards them for doing so. To encourage more shoppers to share their selfies, the retailer plans to place decals highlighting #SaksStyle in its dressing rooms encouraging shoppers to take a selfie and upload it to a social network.

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Bringing together the various platforms should produce a wider array of content to the platform since the retailer and shoppers use each social network differently. The retailer’s Tumblr page, for example, is devoted to its wide-ranging shoe selection, while its Instagram account focuses on aspirational images from across its categories and Facebook typically features items exclusive to Saks.

Shoppers will be able to sort through the images by “most recent,” “most liked,” and “most trending,” by product category, as well as by images taken in the retailer’s dressing rooms and those taken elsewhere.

“We want to offer our customers real, live inspiration,” Smith says. “It’s one thing to see a model wearing beautiful clothes and another to see a real person wear it.”

Saks plans to maintain the user-generated #SaksStyle page on its site for the foreseeable future and will gauge its success based on the revenue it drives.

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