Part two of our interview with Mae Karwowski is here y’all! Get it while it’s hot… or come back when your boss isn’t looking over your shoulders to finish where we left off.
How do you essentially vet your clients? I mean, you can’t work with everyone.
Well, I mean, we’ll just kind of keep growing to handle the client need. Yeah, we have a checklist of things. It’s like, one, do you really have the budget to support working with influencers? I have a lot of friends in start-ups who are like, “Oh, I really want to work with you. That’s awesome.” But we’re going to take up 80% of their marketing budget. They need to be doing a lot of other things other than influencer marketing if the only have a small budget every month. Just really making sure that they have the actual feasible budget for us to grow a real influencer network for them is huge.
Then the other thing to think about is, is this something that our influencers are going to really, influencers or tastemakers, is this a product or a brand that they’re going to like and get behind? Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes some really, really large companies the answer is no. We’ll take on a really small company.
We did a great event on Monday with this super small e-commerce company called Plan De Ville. Really high-end clothing and accessories and just the brand’s awesome. Their viewpoint is great. We really want them to succeed, so we’re like, “Okay, there’s not really a budget here. That’s fine. Let’s just do something cool with them because their influencers will be really excited. See their showroom and visit their office and kind of get to know them.” So, there’s always sort of a tradeoff to make sure that we’re not sending Q-tips to influencers, like giant brands. You got to make sure that you’re kind of sending really cool things but also that the brands have the wherewithal and really want to work with influencers.
A lot of brands now will have conversations and they just don’t understand that this is not just a business person. This is a cool person who has a great account who creates great content who isn’t going to post your script in their comments. They also have a following that will call them out if it looks super sales-y and not something they would normally do.
Yeah like The Cut. Whenever they write posts their people comment and it can be brutal. They’re like, “Oh my god. This is The Cut I love to read, blah blah blah.” Then when there’s something really pitchy, people are kind of like, “What the fuck is this?” They’ll be like, “This is shit, The Cut.” You’re just like, “Oh, god.”
People are mean in the comments. Having a YouTube channel, I’ve thought about it, but I was like, “People are really mean.” You need a thick skin or just don’t read them at all. My mom is now on Instagram. She was like, “Some of these people’s comments are really mean,” on people she follows that she likes. I was like, “Don’t read the comments.” Everyone is really mean online. It’s horrible.
I think it’s a protector. I can be mean behind the screen and you’ll never know who I am theory. You know if you were to see them on the street they’d be like, “Oh my god. I love you.”
Exactly. I know. It’s so true. When I was in college we had a class where we were all in a chatroom instead of having our normal discussion. We weren’t facing each other. We were facing the wall. Then, also it was a super great class. We all knew each other really well. We loved each other. Then it devolved in this chatroom. I was like, “Wow. People are just so mean online. They just don’t think you’re really going to hurt someone’s feelings. Then we had to read them out loud to each other. We were like, “This is nasty. This is a bad thing to do.”
That’s such a smart thing to do, though.
I actually think about it a few times a week now still. It was like a 50-minute class, but it’s still just very much like, whoa, okay. Some things psychologically you’re just venting online and you don’t realize that someone else is going to read it and internalize it.Wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. Okay, maybe you wouldn’t have done that.
Was there at Fashion Tech Forum that you saw or you took away from it, or the platform in general, what do you think about it?
I thought Fashion Tech Forum was an awesome conference. I mean, I thought just the caliber or people who were there was really great. I do go to a lot of conferences and sometimes it’s hard to get presenters who really say substantive things. A lot of times it’s like, “We need to present our company as killing it, doing awesome.”
Yeah, I met so many interesting people who are just attending, too, which was really great. We had our little booth and we had a lot of our influencers there going and learning things and taking photos. That was so cool just to hang out with them.
Then just really interesting people who were the head of marketing or the head of tech. I met the woman who’s head of engineering for Snapchat. They all just stopped by our little table. I was like, “This is awesome.” I just had some really good conversations when sometimes the conferences can be very … It’s very pitchy, very sales-oriented, or people don’t want to stay that long at your table. People were just like, hanging out.
That was like, this is really great. I’m having some really awesome conversations and really learning a lot from brands, too, just in my conversations. I always think that presenters and actually watching panels, yeah, that can be great. There can be like, one line that really sticks in your head and resonates, but I always kind of judge a conference by the other conversations I just have as I’m walking around. This one was really, really great. Are you going to any others?
No. Well, I’m not really a conference forum-type person. I knew about Fashion Tech Forum because I went to it last year. I was like, “Why don’t people know about this?” I think the more and more that I’m in spaces that are like Fashion Tech Forum that it’s very much so about the brand. If you have an issue with a woman heading it then go fuck yourself. I too love all women’s spaces but I kind of want us to be able to be in a space where it’s not only women. You know? Because the world isn’t only women. I’m not going to be living in a convent.
I know. Another thing that drives me crazy is when the moderator isn’t good and they don’t ask follow-up questions. It’s clearly like, pre-scripted and everyone got on a conference call before like, “This is what I’m going to say.” Sometimes … I can’t even think of an example, but you see a crazy anecdote about how someone started a certain portion of their company. They’re like, “ask a follow-up question.”
I hate it when they’re like, “Oh, man. This panel’s all men. Gotta get 1 woman.” That woman is like, kickass and I love her, but I’ve literally seen her on 25 panels.
Right!
I want to see someone else. I know so many awesome women who just aren’t being … Aren’t bubbling up.
Yeah, that’s how I feel with fashion in general. With the CFDA, I’m like, “I get it, but guess what? She’s been selling millions of dollars worth of stuff for a while. There’s another person who has this beautiful line and you guys for some reason just aren’t really … You’re making a choice not to notice them.” It’s like everything that starts out, “we want to do good” almost turns in to a mean girls club. It’s kind of like, open your doors and look for whatever else is out there.
Right. I think that’s one huge difference between beauty and fashion and our beauty and fashion clients. Beauty, the whole industry is being so rewarded and brands are being so rewarded for being so inclusive. Having 40 different skin shades is so obvious and it’s so great. We’ll have different clients be like, “We need way more diversity or we need people who look totally different and stick out. We want a lot of transgender people on these campaigns.”
I’m like, “Whoa.” Those conversations compared to some of the fashion conversations, who are like, ‘This woman is not small enough.’” Some crazy things that I didn’t think I would actually hear.
Around here in Soho at these amazing boutiques where they spend like, $40,000 a month in rent. You could put out a size 6 or a size 8 or a size 12 and not have it downstairs? You shouldn’t make me who’s going to be paying full price ask you to go to the basement.
These very conscious decisions to exclude people, I think that with social media and with things being so much more accessible and everyone wanting to learn more and get super involved and share stories of the founder, the creator, it’s just the fashion industry is really suffering for the fact that they’re kind of shutting out those voices and shutting out those people.
I think the other crazy part about that it’s become so divisive, especially during Fashion Week. They’re like, “Oh, good job Chromat and Christian Siriano. They had diversity. He had different sizes.” I’m like, “Do you want a cookie?” A lot of designers sort of did that just because last season there was this huge backlash. The following season they decide, “We’re going to have the casting of all black women.” Well, that’s actually a huge insult. That’s not your core value.
We’re going to do this to get PR. It’s like, this is our story. It’s like, “No, this should just be the status quo.”
I do applaud Christian Siriano because there are a lot of great, talented women who aren’t getting dress by other designers and he’s like, “Listen, I’m going to do it.” But I also feel that it shouldn’t be the headline every single time; people should just be doing it!
Exactly. I’m like, okay, everyone’s not a size 0 at 21 years old and not making their own money to pay for this. Then I’m at Sephora and see so many different people in there. Everyone feels really comfortable trying on awesome, bright, cool lipsticks. Or doing their own look and being creative with it. That’s great. I think that the fashion industry has so much to learn in that respect.
Now it’s really hard to distinguish a lot of these brands that are all doing the exact same thing.