Is it shocking to you if I tell you that a blogger can earn as much as $7.5 million a year for sharing fashion stories? Chiara Ferragni, the 27-year old Italian who runs the blog The Blonde Salad is reportedly making upwards to $8 million in 2014. The blog receives around 600,000 unique visitors and 6 million page-views each month. In the meantime, she has a significant size of audience on Facebook with about 860,000 “likes” and on Instagram with 2.9 million followers.
The Blonde Salad Blog
theblondesalad.com
Her huge popularity on the blog and other social media sites is interestingly not the major way of getting revenues. According to a report from Women’s Wear Daily (wwd.com), only 30 percent of her income (about $2.4 million) comes from her blog, corresponding advertising and brand collaborations, while the remaining 70 percent (about $5.6 million) comes from her footwear line – Chiara Ferragni Collection, created in partnership with Lorenzo Barindelli and Paolo Barletta.
Earlier this year, Ferragni unveiled her own boutique on Depop, a mobile platform founded by Simon Beckerman and backed by investors including Balderton Capital, Holtzbrinck Ventures and Red Circle Investments. It is an app in which you take a picture of something you want to sell and it can be out for sale online in 30 seconds. With the massive amount of followers, Ferragni’s clothes are usually sold minutes after she posts them, as she shared during an interview with The Business of Fashion.
Chiara Ferragni’s Instagram
Ferragni is a very successful example of a fashion blogger who has managed to parlay a personal life-style and fashion blog into a fully realized brand and global business. One essential way leading to her success is the use of integrated marketing on social media and with brand partnerships. Ferragni and her team manage the blog and purposely plan their marketing and PR strategies to pursue retail business. It is obvious that her fashion impact on social media channels is huge: a selfie she posted in February during Milan Fashion Week in a Roberto Cavalli dress received 105,000 likes, and a portrait shot of her several years ago wearing natural makeup garnered more than 100,000 likes. These numbers could be associated with her achievement in market sales. The 10-style capsule collaboration she did with Steve Madden that hit the market in February sold 16,000 pairs in just the first two weeks; her own Chiara Ferragni Collection started in fall 2013 and this line of $220 to $500 shoes is now carried in almost 200 stores in 25 countries worldwide. The brand will launch in the U.S. with the spring 2015 season. So if you think fashion blogging is not really a serious business, Ferragni might ask you to reconsider.
Reference:
Chiara Ferragni’s blog: http://www.theblondesalad.com
http://stylecaster.com/the-blonde-salad-chiara-ferragni-will-make-8-million-this-year
http://www.businessoffashion.com/2014/02/business-blogging-blonde-salad.html
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