Kate Spade’s Kristen Naiman On Content, Context and Authentic Storytelling
Earlier today, New York’s Soho House played host to INDX and Fashion Tech Forum‘s first-ever Fashion for Breakfast talk. For just over an hour, Kristen Naiman, VP of Brand Creative at Kate Spade New York, and PAPER Magazine‘s Chief Creative Officer Drew Elliott discussed the many ways in which brands of the future are approaching content in a quickly changing landscape.
Anyone familiar with Kate Spade’s recent content – from the continuing #MissAdventure film series starring Anna Kendrick to the ad campaign featuring notable New Yorkers like Karlie Kloss and Iris Apfel – can tell you that storytelling is at the heart of the label’s creative output. So much so that the storytelling process actually begins right from the start, during the product development phase.
“Clothes are a language,” Kristen said, noting that successful brands approach content in the same way that individual people do, which is intrinsically different than the approach of publishers. Whereas a magazine may cull what’s happening all over culture to shape their point of view, the point of view of a brand is already inherently present during the creation process. In that sense, content should act as a form of self-expression.
“You should be able to look at [an ad in] a magazine, put your hand over our logo and be able to tell it’s Kate Spade,” she recalled telling her staff.
In today’s digital atmosphere, that self-expression must be a lot of other things, too; one part community-building and one part storytelling, with one part focused on driving sales, as well.
It’s an approach Drew likened to apartment hunting.
“It’s like when you say that it’s got to have a walk-in closet,” he said. In other words, if a piece of content doesn’t check certain pre-determined boxes, it just won’t work.
Despite all of the pressure for content to perform well across many diverse channels, Kristen is firm in her belief that the creative itself should be able to stand alone in terms of artistic merit and emotional resonance, citing the #MissAdventure films as a successful example.
“Because a fashion film is truly shopplable, doesn’t mean it has to be in service of the shopping,” she said. “This is an old-fashioned idea, but if you create something that’s really true to who you are as a brand, that’s what makes people buy things.”
That authenticity is paramount, and Kristen believes that digital culture today affords brands ample opportunity to find new audiences while remaining true to themselves. It’s why she thinks PAPER‘s infamous Kim Kardashian #BreakTheInternet cover worked so well.
“That was just PAPER being their PAPER-y selves,” she said, but all parties involved had a platform digitally that allowed the relatively niche title to reach 50 million users on their website alone with those images.
Even in a world in which the pace of content consumption is, as Kristen deemed it, “sort of inhuman,” content creation is made that much less daunting by having a very clear idea of what story you are trying to tell.
“If you know the story like the back of your hand, and you’re able to tell it intuitively at any given moment, then you’re halfway there,” she said.
