Newly launched Kollectin wants its platform to be the place where influencers help shoppers discover jewelry from premium brands.
The app-only platform Kollectin launched in March with more than 250 influencers marketing products from 30 brands, such as Rebecca Minkoff, Kenneth Jay Lane and Vanessa Mooney, as well as white-label products from Kollectin. Instead, Kollectin purchases products wholesale from brands and matches them with influencers on its platform. Consumers go into the app and browse products that are sorted into small “boutiques,” which is the collection of products an influencer selected.
The platform is meant to help brands that want an influencer marketing program but don’t have the time to find the right person who has a coordinating style and audience profile, says co-founder and CEO Nadia Lee. The influencers then promote the products to their audience, directing them to their boutique in the Kollectin app.
Kollectin looks for small-scale influencers, such as women who it considers creative, content creators, entrepreneurs interested the selling part of the business, as well as those who may have a blog or a large audience on social media but don’t have all the assets to run a boutique or a way to monetize their following. Kollectin looks for the influencers in its community in Los Angeles, and invites them to events or mixers to meet Kollectin and other influencers. Kollectin then provides the ecommerce technology and warehouses and ships the inventory.
The influencers who are most effective at driving sales typically have 100,000 to 900,000 followers across all of her social media platforms, says Lee.
Kollectin has influencers build a boutique in its app of 12 Kollectin white-label products that she wants to sell. The influencer has to invite at least 20 friends onto the platform and generate at least two sales from her boutique. This “incubation” period allows influencers to learn about the community and different marketing techniques to drive sales. As an influencer generates sales and drives more consumers onto the platform, she gains access to more brands she can sell and a higher commission rate, Lee says.
Influencers begin earning 10% of the sale price of products and can work their way up to a 40% share, depending on their performance on the platform, such as volume of sales and how many consumers they bring onto the app. Kollectin purchases the products wholesale from the brands and take about a 15% commission on the products, Lee says.
Right now, sales are about 40% of its own Kollectin products and 60% from brands. Eventually, it wants 100% of sales to be from brands so it will truly be the middleman for the products, Lee says.
The app has about 500 SKUs and tries to add about 80-100 products each month, Lee says. In the few months of operation, sales have been “pretty good,” and reached more than $100,000, Lee says. Its goal is to generate $500,000 in sales in 2019, and Kollectin is on track to hit or exceed that, she says.
Kollectin’s augmented reality tool for jewelry
Part of how Kollectin plans to achieve its sales goal is with the augmented reality tool it launched June 1.
The tool allows shoppers to virtually try on the different pieces of jewelry. In the app, a shopper taps on “Xperience Mode” and her smartphone camera launches. She then turns the camera toward herself and can tap on products to try on. The app has a carousel feed of products at the bottom of the screen that the shopper can swipe through and tap on to quickly try on difference pieces.
The tool is meant to show the shopper how the piece will actually look on her. There’s often a disconnect in how large a piece will look when it is actually on the shopper, Lee says.
For example, a shopper may think earrings are small, order them and realize they are a lot bigger than she thought. With the tool, the actual dimensions are shown to scale with the shopper’s face and automatically adjust in size as the consumer moves her smartphone toward and away from her face.
“Even if you turn a little bit, the earrings will turn with you,” Lee says. “It’s not just super-imposed on your face. It feels like it’s on you.”
The time consumers spend in the app has increased 120% since the launch of augmented reality, Kollectin says. Plus, consumers who use the tool have a higher conversion rate, Lee says without revealing specifics.
Kollectin has eight people on its tech team who built the AR tool over the course of a year, and it is patent pending, Lee says. The tool is only available for iPhones, but it is working on an Android version.
All of Kollectin’s marketplace SKUs are available in 3D. When Kollectin takes product images to add a product onto its site, creating the 3D asset is a part of that process, she says.
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