Instagram offers advice to beauty and fashion brands

By

Sarah Ahssen

Published
Jan 27, 2019

For the first time on Thursday 24 January, Instagram organised a master class in Paris for fashion and beauty brands. The event brought together more than 300 players from these sectors, who spent three and a half hours listening to advice from Eva Chen, an influencer with more than 1 million followers on Instagram, who also happens to be the social network's first head of fashion partnerships. 

"The first reason that we organised this event was to respond to a real demand from brands who want to know how to improve their strategy on Instagram and how to have access to all our tools. We took advantage of the fact that Eva Chen, who's a specialist in fashion, and her teams are in Paris to put something together. We're a small team and we don't always have the time to reply to each brand individually," explained  Julie Pellet, who leads Instagram's brand development in southern Europe.

Although a similar meeting dedicated to fashion was organised by Instagram last December, this was the first event of its kind in France and the social network invited more than 300 brands to attend: from young labels like Patine, Make My Lemonade and Aime Skincare, the brand recently co-founded by Mathilde Lacombe, to established luxury labels such as Dior and Louis Vuitton. 

At the heart of the questions posed by the various brands was one major concern: how to gain visibility on such a crowded network? Creating exclusive content, employing more specific hashtags and using Instagram's video tool were just some of the suggestions given by Eva Chen. 

"Visibility is crucial, especially for small and mid-sized companies, but it's not the only objective for brands, who also want to know how to generate sales through Instagram," continued Pellet. In March 2018, Instagram launched Instagram Shopping in France, a tool which facilitates purchases by allowing users to discover additional information about products. The social network has plans to continue tweaking and improving the function over time. La Redoute, one of the beta testers for Shopping, has reportedly seen 45,000 extra visits to it's e-commerce site thanks to the Instagram tool.