Actress and singer Jessica Simpson is boosting her fashion mogul status with an e-commerce store at JessicaSimpson.com. The site launch aims to celebrate her fashion collection’s 10th anniversary, according to Sequential Brands Group, the brand management and licensing group that in April bought a majority stake in Simpson’s brand.
The online store marks Simpson’s first foray into e-commerce. Sequential Brands realized in April that the absence of a retail website was a huge hole in the Jessica Simpson brand’s distribution strategy, says Jameel Spencer, division president of fashion and entertainment for Sequential Brands.
“She has built a $1 billion brand at retail over the past decade, enabling her to take advantage of this direct access to her fans and audience,” Spencer says. Simpson has 7.2 million Twitter followers, 2.9 million Facebook fans and 1.8 million followers on Instagram. “Our customer is not only consuming but interacting with technology, so we made sure that the e-commerce site is multiplatform,” Spencer says.
The old website, which has been updated with the new e-commerce functions, linked online shoppers to retailers’ sites that sell Simpson’s Collection fashion line, such as Amazon.com, No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide; Belk (No. 123); Bon-Ton (No. 181); Dillard’s (No. 147); Macy’s (No. 7); Nordstrom (No. 19); Bed Bath & Beyond (No. 80); and Motherhood Maternity and Destination Maternity (No. 351).
Sequential Brands chose Delivery Agent for its new e-commerce platform and will use it for merchandising, fulfillment, interactive marketing, customer care and research and analytics, Spencer says.
Mike Fitzsimmons, CEO and founder of San Francisco-based Delivery Agent, says the company’s proprietary technology lets shoppers buy Simpson’s products from her website, and directly from a tweet on Twitter, a video on YouTube or with a click of their remote via an Internet-connected “smart TV” device from LG, Sony, Samsung or Roku. Delivery Agent hopes to eventually work with Apple TV, he says.
“We can enable transactions across social media experiences,” says Fitzsimmons, whose company recently launched Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Channel’s new e-commerce site. “We call this omniscreen commerce. We think this is where the world is going,” Fitzsimmons says
“One of the most important parts of this partnership with Delivery Agent is giving consumers a unique, all-access look into the inner workings of how (Jessica Simpson) has become a cultural juggernaut in terms of being a $1 billion brand and growing,” Spencer says.
Delivery Agent launched its Smart TV app and “t-commerce” (TV commerce) technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2014. The technology is cloud-based and uses one code base that works with multiple smart devices, Fitzsimmons says.
The technology for shopping directly from smart TVs is a cloud-based solution in the form of an HTML5 application—a version of the foundational programming language of the web designed to incorporate features geared to mobile devices—that comes pre-installed in smart-TV firmware, similar to Netflix, Fitzsimmons says. Shoppers access the app at no charge and see a shopping mall from which they choose products from participating retailers.
Among Delivery Agent’s 1,200 clients are Wal-Mart Stores Inc., No. 3 in the Top 500 Guide, which uses the web-based TV shopping application, and Rachael Ray, Katy Perry, Snoop Dogg, Tiger Woods, the Boston Celtics and the U.S. Open Tennis tournament, all of which use the vendor for their e-commerce platforms, Fitzsimmons says.
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