First, fashion bloggers came to Tumblr, and now brands are headed there too.

The latest major brand to land on the platform is Kate Spade, which went live at katespadeny.tumblr.com Thursday morning. The brand is already active on Facebook (for fielding, primarily, customer inquiries), Twitter (for talking to fans, and sharing images and content related to the brand's #livecolorfully and #thingswelove campaigns), YouTube (for distributing branded short films), Instagram and Foursquare.

Tumblr, Digital Marketing Manager Cecilia Liu says, is an opportunity for Kate Spate to engage with fans on a more visual level. "People are using and sharing beautiful visuals on Tumblr, posting things they think are inspirational," she observes. "In that vein, it seems like a really great platform for us to get our voice out there, not just as tweets and text, but through images and color, which is the DNA of the brand," she says.

Like the company's Twitter account, the Tumblr blog is already proving to be highly interactive by frequently responding to and reblogging other users' questions and content. The brand plans to ask users to submit posts that align with Kate Spade's #livecolorfully and #thingswelove campaigns in the future, which Liu says they will then share with the brand's Twitter and Tumblr followers.

Tumblr's Appeal

Fashion brands are creating increasing amounts of visually rich, branded content to share via their websites, blogs and social networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. Tumblr provides, among other things, another outlet for distributing that material. And, best of all, the native fashion community on Tumblr is highly receptive to it.

According to Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, approximately 180 of the top 1,000 Tumblr blogs are fashion-related. And fashion-related Tumblr posts are reblogged on a much greater scale than general Tumblr posts, Tumblr Fashion Director Rich Tong says, suggesting that "there's a huge capacity for fashion content to go viral on Tumblr."

Tong joined the startup in September 2010 to help advance the Tumblr experience for the fashion community, and to bring fashion brands, publications and personalities onto Tumblr. As part of that effort, and to increase awareness of Tumblr among the fashion industry in general, the startup is sending around 20 bloggers to New York Fashion Week next week, and hosting a party for attendees.

Luxury Brands







Other fashion brands are taking a slightly different approach from Kate Spade.

Erika Bearman, director of communications for luxury brand Oscar de la Renta, launched a Tumblr under the same handle she uses for Twitter, @oscarprgirl, in December 2010. Like Kate Spade's marketing team, Bearman uses Tumblr as an extension of Twitter, but with a greater emphasis on images — mainly vintage photographs of Oscar de la Renta and women wearing his designs — with the occasional short caption or quotation. For Bearman, the platform is primarily a way to distribute branded content; she does not use Tumblr to interact with fans, reblog others' posts, or, notably, push merchandise.

After all, most Tumblr users can't afford a $5,000 cocktail dress, Tong pointed out, noting that most users in the fashion community are in the 13 to 24 age demographic. The goal of Oscar PR Girl's Tumblr, he said, is to give the community something to aspire to, to make Oscar de la Renta "present and persistent in their minds" so that if and when they can afford a dress or a prized accessory, it's one of Mr. de la Renta's.

Another luxury brand that's established a presence on Tumblr is Alexander McQueen, which is using the platform to get the word out about the relaunch of its younger, more affordable McQ line through a series of photographs and videos.

Mid-Range Retailers







ModCloth, a retro indie e-tailer whose target consumer is the Tumblr fashion set, and Ann Taylor, a brand whose products are marketed to a slightly older clientele, have approached Tumblr in still different ways, but in ways that still resonate with the Tumblr community.

Their Tumblr blogs are more product-focused. ModCloth's Tumblr is simply a collection of other Tumblr bloggers wearing ModCloth clothes, which the e-tailer has reblogged from their respective Tumblrs. Ann Taylor's Tumblr is comprised mainly of styling collages featuring Ann Taylor wares, and contains frequent links to the company's e-commerce site.

Ann Taylor also has two side blogs on Tumblr that are far less commercial, and more experimental: one, On Tumblr, produced in collaboration with BlackBook, which uses Tumblr's API to unearth real-time trending topics across the network. The other, called “The Smartest Thing She’s Ever Said," ran for 12 weeks beginning in mid-August, and featured sponsored content created by artists and writers under that theme. At the end of the campaign, Ann Taylor gave away the theme it created to all of its followers.

Both blogs allow Ann Taylor to reach users who wouldn't necessarily go out of their way to subscribe to Ann Taylor's blog, but are still involved in many of the things Ann Taylor celebrates as a brand.

"We wanted to be blogging because we knew it was relevant; that's what smart, stylish woman do these days: they blog or read blogs," Julie Fredrickson, Ann Taylor's digital marketing manager, says of the latter project. "We wanted to get our voice out there in a way that wasn't contrived, that was as natural and beautiful as we are as a brand. Tumblr has been good for telling the holistic story of who Ann Taylor is," she says.

Looking Ahead

Several major brands and retailers I've spoken to in recent weeks are planning to launch Tumblr blogs in the near future. It will be a space to watch as fashion brands look for new outlets and communities to share their branded content beyond more established platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.