Personalising the Shopping Experience with Julie Stevanja, Wrapd (Formerly Her Black Book)

Michelle Lomas: Hey there, hustlers. Welcome back to another episode of Flex Your Hustle. I'm your host, Michelle Lomas, and we have a very special episode for you today. It's what we call a Publisher Spotlight. In this episode, we talk to one of the great publishers that you can access via the team at Commission Factory who are making waves in the retail and affiliate marketing sector.

Today I'll be speaking to Julie Stevanja, the co-founder of Wrapd formerly Her Black Book. Julie and her twin sister founded the original Her Black Book with a mission to make shopping easier and more personalised and to help consumers discover new and exciting brands. As the newly rebranded Wrapd, they hope to take this even further and open up the market to a broader and more male audience.

In this discussion, we talk about the new rebrand to Wrapd, what it means for the consumer and brands, and discover the exciting ways Wrapd are creating holistic campaigns that help move product and build brands.

Julie, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. I'm loving the new branding. I was very excited to see it pop up on my phone when we spoke about three weeks ago.

You were her black book. You are now Wrapd. Very exciting. How's it been? Congratulations.

Julie Stevanja: Thank you so much. We're stoked. I wanna use the word Wrapd, but I use it too often. We're really happy with it. It's a beautiful brand, we love the word mark, we love that it's short, sharp, and techy.

It's the space that we play in. It just gives us so much scope to expand, it really opens things up for us in the future.

Michelle Lomas: So we'll get into that a little bit, but for the people listening, why don't you introduce yourself and share a little bit about Wrapd, formerly Her Black Book, how it got started?

Julie Stevanja: Yeah, sure. So my name is Julie Stevanja. I'm the co-founder of Wrapd, co-founded it with my twin sister, Sali. We also, 10 years ago, co-founded a retail business called Style Runner. So I was a merchant for 10 years and know the rollercoaster that is. I love retail. I live and breathe it.

And so Sali came to me with this idea. I was still at Style Runner and we were using affiliate partners for growth. And when she had this idea for a similar sort of channel, but it was more premium, not necessarily too aspirational, it was really inclusive. We call it the Style Runner effect. There are players out there doing an amazing job and they target particular brands that target particular demographic.

But there's this group of, customers who want that curation. They want that, beautiful brand and tone of voice. And what that leads to is a different brand cohort. You attract brands that are in that more aspirational space. So she came to me with the idea, and at Style Runner, I would love that partner because we're working with affiliates that aren't necessarily, adding that brand halo in that space.

Why doesn't it exist? And so what we've done is we've created, a platform for brands to grow. We have attracted an amazing array of brands, especially across fashion which is our largest category. Beauty, homewares, children's wears, and men's wear. Most of our consumers are women and we were, Her Black Book, twenty percent of customers were male.

I can't believe they were doing that while we were called Her Black Book, but we love them for it. But we definitely saw that cohort growing. So I guess in a nutshell, Wrapd curates beautiful brands across nearly 20 categories for consumers to browse and shop from and discover. And we do that with affiliate partners and we actually have a model for brands that aren't in the affiliate space as well, 'cause not everyone is there yet, but they are, learning about it then moving across. So we have actually opened up to allow both sets of brands to partner with us. Think about that type of relationship between a consumer who wants to follow brands. I wanna know when you go on sale, I wanna know when you have a new collection dropping.

We've done that visually through a visual first feed, but it's a very similar type of relationship. Follow your brands, get updated when they've got a new message for you.

Michelle Lomas: Am I understanding Wrapd Ride is basically a shopping app where I can curate everything that I'm interested in. Is it personalised?

Like how does it work for a consumer?

Julie Stevanja: Yeah, so one of the things that we have, which I don't see at many other places in the affiliate space, I find a lot of affiliate spaces are like a mall that you walk into and you discover lots of brands that you probably will love. But what we've done is we've created a following feed.

So a bit like your social media where you can actually follow all of the brands and you have a completely separate feed that is that kind of visual version of your email subscriptions. You'll only see the brands that you wanna see there, and it's not going to be interrupted by advertising. We have a following feed so you can just curate your own brand world and just things, brands that you love.

But our explore feed is still incredibly popular because we do put a lot of effort into discovering and curating new brands. The quality of some of these brands that we're bringing on board are phenomenal. We as a team are always going, oh my God, look at this. And we all end up jumping on and buying things from these new brands that we're bringing on board because.

There really are some truly beautiful, new emerging brands, whether they're, six months old or three years old, they're still in that, undiscovered phase to a certain degree and that's still a very popular place to find new brands. And so there, what happens is really easy to follow those brands and add them to your following feed or can just press a button and you're instantly following them.

It's a much faster way to build that brand world of your favorites and also new brands that you're sure to love.

Michelle Lomas: And I'm just curious, what are some of those brands that you mentioned that are amazing and emerging?

Julie Stevanja: Oh, like we had one yesterday that joined. It's a dive mask brand. Gentle Habits. Oh, beautiful brand.

Gorgeous branding, like snorkel, masks, and fins, but in just super cool colours. Like it makes you wanna go snorkeling.

Michelle Lomas: I love that.

Julie Stevanja: Another joining very soon, it's called Raie, R A I E. Not sure exactly how to pronounce that. It's the mosts gorgeous packaging, and they do face oils and things like that.

We were okay, it's a new brand onboarding. And then people on our team were like, oh I use that brand. I love it. And it's really great hearing that these brands are, already much loved. They're just there's cult emerging brands, so there's a few.

Michelle Lomas: I love that ability for discoverability. Even though it's personalised, you can get in a rut, particularly with the products that you buy, and so I love that you're still able to discover that and that discoverability of those sort of emerging Australian brands, Australian designers, Australian skincare, which are all fantastic. It is harder I think in, places where traditionally the channels were helping them.

Like Instagram for instance. Instagram used to be the place where we had to be there and it would help scale your business really fast and drive awareness. The algorithms and everything around it is becoming much harder and people are curating their feeds a lot differently to what they used to as well.

So I love that your app is another way to discover these kind of brands, but it's purely focused on that.

Julie Stevanja: Yeah. So when you talk about our different business model that isn't, largely revenue driven, so you know, that's where social media has gone and that is what is changing the brands that you discover now in social media.

It breaks my heart because we grew to over $5 million in revenue with $0 in marketing spent because we had this beautiful curation of brands that people had never seen before in this women's activewear space. And so we were growing virally. People were like tagging their friends and look at this new thing.

And that just doesn't happen anymore. Essentially when you're not forced to serve up advertising incessantly. What happens is quality rises to the top, relevance rises to the top. Our model is really about being consumer centric. We're not forced to just sell as much advertising space as we can.

It's about what do you wanna see as a consumer and what can we learn about the brands that you are following and interacting with and clicking through to serve you more brand development, which is what social media used to be.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah, exactly. It sounds great. So you know, Wrapd, what can people expect from the new platform?

Julie Stevanja: We've got so many big features, like it just, it took a long time to get this rebrand done, and I think it's really important to get their branding right. Like we said, part of what we're doing is not reinventing the model. There are great affiliate platforms out there, but we're communicating to this demographic and building trust in a brand that cares about the brand curation, et cetera.

So we had to get that right and it took us a long time. But in the background, we've steadily been building some really big new features. So yeah, I can't share them yet, but we've got some big features going live in September, which, we just wanna keep adding value to the consumer. Our website is now Wrapd.ai. A lot of people, it's used quite a lot overseas, but .ai is not that common here in Australia.

AI is being used in so many places that consumers aren't even already, aware of, the recommendation engines and things that we've already been interacting with. So you come in and you truly find brands that you've already opted into because you love them, but you additionally will continue to, be recommended brands that we know that you'll love based on your preferences.

So that's our North Star. It's actually the opposite of this trend, trend, the enshittification of platforms. Have you heard of that?

Michelle Lomas: No, but I love a new term.

Julie Stevanja: It really is exactly what we've been speaking about, and that is that brand platforms like social media have been getting shittier for the consumer because their revenue models are advertising.

And so the serving up stuff that consumer doesn't wanna see, where really our mission is like the opposite of that. We want you to enter our app and have the brand world that you wanna see, that you love, that you know you have great experience with.

Michelle Lomas: That's great. And gender neutral too. So I know you've predominantly been a female focused brand.

Julie Stevanja: Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: You've moved towards more of a gender neutral play. Even the colours and everything I can see is obviously something that's catered to both genders. So what can we expect from bringing more of the other side of the spectrum for shopping in?

Julie Stevanja: Yeah. Look, we still are very focused on the consumer that we know really well.

The low hanging fruit is just making ourselves not exclude that other audience, 'cause they were already shopping with us and we already have brands like Nike and The Iconic and Selfridges. Like we have lots of brands that have products for the male consumer. And so the first step is actually just not calling ourself a brand name that actually they could be using, but they feel like they shouldn't. We're just making ourselves more welcoming. The other thing is we have been doing some really fabulous partnerships over the last year. So we've done some things with Porsche, we've done some things with banks and credit cards.

And a lot of those consumers, they are a mixed gender base. And there are a lot of those partnerships that we work with that have male consumers. We know where they're coming from and we know that's only going to grow. It's definitely become a kind of pillar for us to flesh out and grow from there.

Michelle Lomas: I'm sure people listening are like, what did you do with Porsche? That's interesting.

The Flex Your Hustle Podcast is made possible by the team at Commission Factory. Commission Factory is the largest performance and partner marketing network in Asia Pacific. Powering tens of thousands of meaningful and scalable partnerships.

If you are listening to this show, you might be looking for ways to find and activate successful connections that drive revenue for your business. Well, Commission Factory works with everyone from e-commerce brands to influencers, big digital editorial titles and cashback communities, right through to the latest apps and software that help customers convert and they aggregate all those partnerships in the one place.

You'll love how easy that makes managing it if you're tired of paying for clicks and impressions. Commission Factory is a pay on performance marketing platform where you pay only when tangible sales are generated, not just eyes on the page, so it's low risk and easy to manage your bottom line. So to all you digital publishers, influencers, online retailer and marketing agency folks out there, come see what Commission Factory can do for you.

Visit commissionfactory.com where infinite partnerships are simply enabled.

In this season, the coupon slash discounting versus brand we seem to have been talking about a lot, particularly in the affiliate marketing industry. It is a hot topic. A lot of people that we've had on the show think couponing is a race to the bottom.

Other people think it's natural and it's fine and it's great and it's great for the consumer. So why don't we talk a little bit about that and if you can explain what you did to Porsche. I'm quite curious too.

Julie Stevanja: Porsche was really just a mutual marketing activation. I say just, but it was fabulous.

They particularly also wanted to grow their female audience and we were Her Black Book and we've got this really active kind of shopping consumer, but it wasn't so much a sales activation for them as a, as much as an awareness activation. Porsche have got a huge wait list for their cars. They don't really need to drive more sales right now, so it was a great time for them to do a brand awareness campaign in a female sphere.

So we did a beautiful drive day and we invited a lot of our Her Black Book kind of extended community. And created an amazing day of content, but just celebration. It was celebrating the women that we invited were all in their own rights, fearless, talented hustlers. If we go with a theme of this podcast they're out there doing amazing things and so it was really a day to celebrate them and the outcome was just a feeling of community, a real celebration of brands and beautiful content that we didn't even ask for. But as you can imagine, with gorgeous brands, it was just, all over social media.

They truly were beautiful cars to drive. So that's the Porsche marketing activation.

Couponing.

Michelle Lomas: Where to start?

Julie Stevanja: Where to start. I think about this so much because I was a retailer for 10 years. And I absolutely know where brands come from and sometimes the hesitation, et cetera.

But the truth is, as a retailer, There are times when you need to move inventory, whether you want to for your brand or not. So you might not want to lean into that as a brand, but we know that there are times when you've got too much inventory in your warehouse and the next season is due to arrive in six weeks and you've got a clear some space or it's not selling through.

Unfortunately, not all things sell through magically, and for some reason the new colours are not right or your advertising's not working as well as it used to. All sorts of reasons. You have to make a choice. And normally I would say, much as we hate discounting, cutting that loss sooner and quicker is often the better way to go rather than lingering around all season.

So there are many reasons why we end up in a position where we need it discounted. One of the things that I love to do the most is to do it quickly, like a 24 to 48 hour flash sale if you have to. When you have that sort of urgency, the result is five x fold, sometimes 10 x fold, then like a two week, kind of 20% off.

The problem is it's really hard to scale that as a brand in all of these other digital marketing channels. If you send out an email to your most loyal followers that have followed your brand, not everyone opens that in that 24- 48 hour window, and worse still when they open it late, right? Your sale ended on Wednesday and they've opened it Friday.

Now they're not gonna buy it at full price because they can see they just missed out and they're upset. And so people have turned to SMS marketing. Very expensive. I guess that's one of the areas our app tries to really promote as well, is that we have push notifications that are included in our app. If somebody follows your brand, they'll get a push notification the day that your sale goes live.

That's a really great solution to how do you get that message across? I know some brands don't go on sale, but they, they do. They just try to do it in the most discreet way, and they try to do it while protecting their brand integrity. So one of the things that we do, for example, is we don't use the color red for sale in our app, which I think is very unusual.

Red signifies value and it's probably gonna get a better click through rate. But what we're trying to do is actually prioritise looking after brands, long-term brand value over making that slight compromise with other colours that can signify value. So we have gold for cashback, for example. We like to think we're like the best friend saying, Hey, brand X is on sale, and we do it in a classy way instead of the big red banners.

That's the stuff that makes brands cringe.

Michelle Lomas: And so I know you guys did some research. What did you learn from that research?

Julie Stevanja: Really interestingly, we expected to be largely coupon and sales driven and that was absolutely the place we started, 'cause it's easy to attract customers with that. But the research that we did both externally and we ran a survey as well to over a thousand shoppers, and we asked, why do you subscribe to brands?

And there was a whole bunch of different questions, but what came about was truly that it was about 50 50. Sign up and follow a brand because they wanna know about the sales, they wanna discount code, et cetera. Or they wanted to know when new collections are coming from that brand, they wanna stay in touch with that brand.

That was much higher number than I thought.

Interesting.

I really thought that 70, 80% of people are signing up for that coupon code.

Michelle Lomas: 10% to sign up today off your first purchase. Yeah.

Julie Stevanja: It does make sense. There are certain brands that I love and I wanna know the data and new collection drops.

Yes. Give me 48 hours notice so I can plan my 8:00 AM Friday morning and block it out in my calendar, 'cause there's a new drop coming. And so it's great because it's led to where we've always wanted to be, which is we want to help brands communicate, not just the sales and discounts, but also the new collections and new drops.

And I think about brands margins too. As a past retailer, I get it. We need to help you sell as much full price product as you can through the season. And help you get the results you need when it is time to move inventory or meet your sales budget, et cetera.

Michelle Lomas: People can access you guys via the Commission Factory platform and the team there.

But if I'm a brand listening, what can I expect? What's it like to work with you guys and how can I work with you guys?

Julie Stevanja: So we have a wonderful partnership team. Sali, my twin sister and co-founder, lead that team. They would jump on a call with any brand, walk you through the way that kind of works, it's very easy to get connected through a partner like Commission Factory.

We will apply you'll approve us, et cetera, and then we would take you through best practice for how frequently to post, how do we flush out your page and make sure that a new consumer who might discover you first time, they can get to understand your bestselling categories or your bestselling products, et cetera.

So we'll take you through a little bit of an onboarding process. And then you'd have an account manager who you could reach out to learn more and basically work the platform as best you can. Like any platform out there, whether it's TikTok or Instagram or Pinterest. There are strategies that will help you get the most out of it.

The best thing about this though, that I love is that all of those platforms like TikTok or Instagram, you're probably spending a lot of money creating content for those platforms, right? You have to reverse engineer the right type of content that works on those platforms. We take when you are already communicating, so it might be your homepage tile of a new collection, or your EDM tile, et cetera.

We're taking beautiful campaigns you've already done. You're getting further use of those assets through a new platform and a shopping ready audience.

Michelle Lomas: That is a super important point. You spend so much time as a brand creating and curating your look books and your style and your new campaign, only to be told that's not gonna work another platform.

So the fact that it does work for you and all you are doing is then figuring out what tactics are gonna work best. I think that should be a great pull for clients.

Julie Stevanja: Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: Julie, thank you so much. Congratulations again on a lovely launch. I'm excited to see how it goes. For everybody listening, that's wrapd.ai and there is an app as well that can be found in the app store, and that's Wrapd with a W R A P D.

Julie Stevanja: Thank you again. Thank you so much for having me.

Michelle Lomas: I hope you got a little bit of inspiration from that great chat with Julie. If you like what you heard, reach out to your local rep at Commission Factory and tell them we sent you. Next week is our last episode of the season, and you won't wanna miss it.

Here's a sneak peek.

Verity Rowe: I was brand new to affiliate marketing when I joined lululemon. When I first started, my manager said, you've got all this great experience on performance marketing channels. By the way, you're also gonna be managing our affiliate program. I thought nothing like a challenge. I've always been one to learn. So I am always happy to take on things and learn more about new things. Affiliate marketing was like quite deep end for me when I first joined lululemon. When I found out that it was gonna be part of my remit, the first thing I did was jump onto Apple Podcasts and start listening to every podcast I can find about affiliate marketing.

So I feel like I'm paying it forward now by being here and talking to you about affiliate marketing.

Michelle Lomas: If you aren't already, Don't forget to follow so you don't miss an ep. And while you're there, why not drop us a rating and review? We'd love to hear what you think. Flex Your Hustle is made possible by the great team at Commission Factory and produced by Ampel.

I'm Michelle Lomas, keep hustling and bye for now.