IF you’re 25, a visionary and the creator and owner of a runaway fashion hit online, then hello Samantha Choong. An economics and marketing graduate, Choong cut her teeth in fashion as a PR executive at local fashion house FJ Benjamin. In her two years there, she learnt “solid execution” of strategies that she had studied in university.
“I was dealing with La Senza at the time, a very fast-paced, promotional-driven brand. I also assisted a lot with Celine, so studying and working on the strategies of two very different brands was really good groundwork for me. I really love Phoebe Philo, she’s a genius!” says this entrepreneurial and spirited young woman.
While most young people would use the skill and knowledge they gained from their first job to leverage into a higher position in a second, Choong has parlayed the experience she acquired into a website called Stylesofia (www.stylesofia.com). On it, she sells fashion and style.
Choong sells clothes and accessories she sources from all parts of Asia, predominantly Bangkok, South Korea and Hong Kong. She also has a small collection of vintage items. But her space is certainly no blogshop like so many others that inundate the web. It’s a website that is set up like reputable international fashion sites; Net-a-Porter and Style.com come to mind.
Choong did take inspiration from these sites, having done a lot of research before launching Stylesofia. “I wanted something very, very long term. It (fashion) is a hobby, but I take it seriously. I didn’t want to start a blogshop and do it for a few months. It is a creative workroom for me. I used to do a lot of photography and portraiture, and then of course, fashion at work. So this is my way of combining everything into one,” she says.
The name comes from the Greek “sofia” which means wisdom and knowledge. This was what she wanted to reflect throughout the site.
“I wanted to differentiate it from other online stores so that it would also function as a fun, interactive platform for the fashion savvy and curious,” she says.
Choong’s labour of love resulted in the highly polished and sophisticated Lookbook on the site. Click on the tab and you’ll see that it works like an online magazine, where she features interviews with prolific fashion bloggers from around the world and styling tips.
“One of the best things about starting Stylesofia is the flexibility I get to creatively manage and plan for the site. It feels completely exhilarating as I am free to experiment on various campaigns and collaborations. You don’t get such freedom when you work for a corporate company. When a project goes well I really cannot describe how gratifying it feels,” she says.
Within 15 minutes of talking to her, you start to see her vision, and how much further she wants to take it. In exactly 12 months, she has brought the site to the consciousness of the fashion world, garnering many fans in the fashion blogosphere. For her one-year anniversary last month, Choong celebrated with an impressive fashion feather in her cap – a collaboration with Vogue UK for its inaugural Fashion’s Night In!
“It is an online fashion extravaganza conceptualised by Anna Wintour shortly after the recession, to boost sales,” explains Choong. There was an open call for online retailers to participate, but Choong downplays Stylesofia’s involvement by saying all she did was apply.
Yes, she applied, but she was also prepared. She had planned a lot of activities for her anniversary – the launch of Stylesofia TV (SS-TV), which is an online fashion channel hosted on YouTube (www.youtube.com/STYLESOFIATV), an art project with Chicago-based art and fashion magazine INK to promote the work of four independent fashion and portrait photographers and her lookbook. With such an impressive lineup, Choong was the natural choice for Vogue UK. She was also the only Malaysian retailer to participate.
“Fashion’s Night In went amazing! We had to work very closely with our developers to ensure the site had enough bandwidth to accommodate the high amount of traffic flowing towards our site! We received many orders from new customers, new queries and we are really happy that the revamped lookbook received such good feedback,” says Choong.
She worked smart from the beginning. She started out with a very small budget, which taught her to squeeze the maximum out of whatever she had. She also planned in great detail.
“I didn’t want to be somebody who started a website on a whim, so I took a lot of care to make sure everything would go really well,” she says.
Believing in the power of word-of-mouth – she sees no point in spending her limited resources on advertising – she set about creating awareness of her brand among fashion bloggers.
“The fashion world is already so saturated, how do you get yourself out there? Nothing beats word-of-mouth,” she says.
Her viral marketing campaign got her another mention internationally, this time in Vogue Japan, when a customer and fashion blogger was spotted at New York fashion week by the Japanese Vogue team.
This is just the beginning, says Choong, for she sees this as a long-term career. She is always looking for ways to grow her brand and business. Newsletters go out to subscribers every week, and the lookbook is updated weekly. She uses social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to reach out to existing and new customers and is in constant contact with fashion bloggers for creative collaborations,
Choong works mostly alone, occasionally getting in two assistants when she needs to shoot her merchandise. She is both model and photographer for Stylesofia, and hires a good web development team to help her with the website.
“What I do (the website) is not rocket science. But you do need a lot of passion and motivation to make it work. My father always taught me to give at least 110% of myself in anything I do and make it an extension of myself,” she says.
Choong works out of a home office, but this ambitious lady has plans for international expansion. “I hope to open up a New York office by year’s end, and a Paris office by 2011,” she declares.
Choong gets a handful of Malaysian customers – the majority are from the United States, with the rest coming from Australia, France, Germany and the Netherlands, mostly because her PR activities so far have been on an international level. Also, her items are priced in US dollars, and Malaysian customers find them a little expensive after conversion. But business from Sabah and Sarawak is starting to pick up, she says cheerfully.
Right now, Choong’s website gets 10,000 unique visitors a month and that number grows daily. She works with three fashion bloggers from Australia and Finland who contribute to her blog, and is currently in talks with a fashion blogger from India to collaborate.
In hindsight, would she have done anything differently?
“It was a ‘do or die’ thing for me,” says Choong. “I really threw myself into this. I think contingency plans are great to have for any business, but not a backout plan. Backout plans prepare you for failure. When I started this, many doubted whether I would be able to successfully launch the business. It is very competitive and I understood their concerns. Today, I still see an uphill journey for Stylesofia – so many more people to meet, places to be and collaborations to partake in – but I’m more than ready to keep hustling!”