Tmall and ELLE: Key takeaways
- Tmall and ELLE created three video-podcast series featuring actors, designers, founders and eight Tmall category managers
- Putting platform employees on camera recasts Tmall’s commercial expertise as fashion curation
If every e-commerce platform offers extensive choice and competitive prices, what makes shoppers trust one more than another? One answer is taste. It comes from Tmall, which has put eight fashion category managers on a video podcast series with ELLE.
Figures in these fields will appear on the video podcasts to discuss clothing on a more philosophical level
The Tmall Huafu Awards (天猫华服奖) played backdrop for the announcement. There, Tmall Fashion and ELLE rolled out a lineup of actors, designers, brand founders and platform employees to make the announcement.
Figures in these fields will appear on the video podcasts to discuss clothing on a more philosophical level. The first series, Fashion Without Boundaries, Obsessions Given Voice, is hosted by Chinese media personality Jiang Sida (姜思达). His guests include actor Chun Xia (春夏), model-turned-Comme Moi founder Lü Yan (吕燕) and Samuel Gui Yang founder Yang Guidong (杨桂东).
Two further series put the microphone in front of independent fashion founders and Tmall’s own category managers. The latter is important. A hefty celeb roster offers little that other platforms can’t do too, but putting in-house category managers in the limelight positions Tmall’s fashion heads as industry observers with taste and opinions of their own.
The Dao view: Tmall turns commerce into curation
These video podcasts give Tmall’s recommendations and algorithmics a human face. Essentially what they’ve done is position their category managers as something closer to buyers in the fashion industry. Curators may be a sharper comparison.
Partnering with ELLE lends established fashion credibility to this new tack
Partnering with ELLE lends established fashion credibility to this new tack. Long-form discussion also gives Tmall room to escape the language of livestream discounts and product specifications. Through a podcast series, fashion can be viewed as culture rather than inventory.
This doesn’t change the fact that Tmall is still a giant e-commerce platform. It is still driven by transaction volume and mass commercial interest. We doubt that Tmall will ever be able to shake that reputation. The campaign’s real task then is to convince audiences that Tmall is the place within that platform ecosystem that recognises long-term design-led value.
