Turning Obsessive Fan Communities into Customers: 5 Lessons From Live Shopping Platform NTWRK
In 2018, I wrote a newsletter entitled “Have Product Drops Peaked?” in which I examined the trend of drops.
After exploding decades ago out of the Japanese streetwear scene, drops had caught fire in the US thanks to brands like Supreme, and just about every type of consumer brand—from high fashion to burgers, toothbrushes to tacos, leggings to sandals—was suddenly embracing exclusive, limited-edition product releases.
While plenty of people were rolling their eyes at drops as just another flash-in-the-pan marketing fad, I predicted that not only were drops not going anywhere, they were poised to proliferate. Why? Because they were part of a much bigger shift in how we consume today that was just beginning to take flight—one that drop-focused shopping platforms like NTWRK, which had just launched that year, were brilliantly tapping into.
Two years later, drops are bigger than ever. Apps like GOAT and StockX dominate, Instagram is rolling out a tool to facilitate high-heat drops, and NTWRK has grown to become a red-hot digital campfire with daily shoppable shows, each with its own exclusive, limited-edition products created in collaboration with luminaries like Billie Eilish, DJ Khaled and Wu-Tang Clan, thus fulfilling an early prediction by industry publication Business of Fashion that it would become “the QVC for the YouTube generation.”
At the heart of NTWRK’s success is an obsessive focus on passion-driven fan communities. I spoke with CEO Aaron Levant about why these communities have been key to the platform’s growth, and why the future of the platform depends on them. Below, five key takeaways from our chat.
1. Identify obsessive audiences and build specifically for them
Before NTWRK, Aaron founded Agenda, an independent streetwear and action sports trade show, then built the iconic streetwear show ComplexCon. With both, his approach was to take small passionate communities and build marketplaces around them, first physical marketplaces, then digital ones. What, exactly, defines a passion community, according to Aaron? Fans who are crazy about their “thing”, meaning they’ll sleep overnight on a sidewalk to be able to buy a pair of sneakers, spend their last dollar to get their hands on a collectible toy, or show up at Comic-Con dressed like The Incredible Hulk just to get a glimpse of their comic book heroes. (Gamers fall into this category, so it’s no wonder NTWRK recently kicked off a partnership with FaZe Clan, the e-sports giant). Viewed through this lens, it’s easy to identify obsessive audiences within other categories like beauty and food, which NTWRK intends to target down the road.
2. Think about ways to make your power users feel special, but if you’re just getting started, don’t overthink it—a little goes a long way
When you’re in the business of building a digital community, it can be easy to forget your users are humans who also exist offline. Aaron didn’t loose sight of that. In NTWRK’s early days, he wrote personal thank you notes to the platform’s top 100 customers. Today, the platform continues to communicate directly with its power users. In the future, Aaron says the goal is to roll out digital rewards such as badges, skins, credits, and verified accounts to impart elevated status for NTWRK’s most highly-engaged customers.
3. Curation is key to building a community
“The world is as big as the internet,” says Aaron. “People need you to editorialize.” That’s the reason he thinks of NTWRK as a platform that curates products and experiences, in the same way a magazine would, scouring the world for a collection of goods and ideas tailored to the taste of its audience, vs. say, a platform like Amazon which has everything. It’s also why Aaron sees HBO as his brand’s North Star “There are shows on there I like and 5 others I have zero interest in. But I still love HBO. We aspire to have a brand that has that kind of affinity.”
4. Use other platforms to create a conversational feedback loop, and to listen to your community
When building a digital campfire, it’s essential to look at where the campfire sits in the broader digital ecosystem for your consumer, as this will help inform the mechanisms you leverage to bring people there, as well as keep them coming back. While NTWRK isn’t a social platform, it leverages social platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram to speak to its audience pre-and-post-show. The effect? A feedback loop of people sharing their hauls on social media that alerts others to the platform’s existence and finely-tuned curatorial sensibility and also helps the platform monitor its audience’s behavior and conversations beyond the bounds of the app. Having built-in mechanisms to keep tabs on what the community is thinking and feeling is especially important during this time of massive societal upheaval.
5. Working with influencers can be key to building your community, but bigger isn’t always better
Getting the word out about your community is essential, and influencers can be a key ingredient in that, but it’s important to remember that big followings don’t always drive results. Often, says Aaron, influencers with smaller audiences drive higher engagement and can drive more commerce than those with a large community of followers. Why? Sometimes people want to watch influencers with big followings purely for entertainment—or to talk trash about them. So when considering influencers to collaborate with, look at who actually has credibility in a certain category.
Want to hear more insights from NTWRK CEO Aaron Levant? Check out our full 55-minute conversation on The Digital Campfire Download here.
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Additional reporting by Cara Straus.