Khaki pants, pastel colors, vibrant patterns, collared shirts and cable knit sweaters. These all are the staples to an optimal preppy outfit, and they are the core foundation of the Country Club Prep business.
As a lifestyle brand designed to represent the preppy lifestyle, Country Club Prep relies on social media to curate lifestyle content and lead generation strategies, according to Matt Watson, Co-Founder of Country Club Prep. “For the most part, we rely on social media to create the appropriate image and environment — the context for the lifestyle that our clothing promotes. We do not leverage social media as frequently for revenue generation or product placement, as engagement tends to suffer.”
And although detailed product images for brands like Birkenstock, Lilly Pulitzer and Southern Proper help inspire online shoppers and drive sales, Country Club Prep relies more on user-generated content to show consumers how products are worn by everyday people. Using Pixlee, the retailer can leverage user-generated content in multiple areas of the e-Commerce site.
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A key area of the Country Club Prep site is “Preppies In The Wild,” which is a digital album where “one might find hundreds of pictures of user-submitted photos of customers wearing their favorite new Country Club Prep gear,” Watson said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “In addition, we include user-generated photos from some of our best brands on the brands’ collection pages, and even on many of the individual products.”
Showing happy customers wearing Country Club Prep apparel “provides an element of authenticity to the product and lifestyle that helps lift conversions and corroborate our brand message,” Watson explained. To participate, consumers can upload photos on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #PrepInABox. Team members then sift through photos and includes them in relevant web site albums. In addition to sifting through entire albums, consumers also have the option of logging in to their social accounts and personalizing their albums and searching for friends.
The Pixlee platform integrates with Country Club Prep’s Shopify-run e-Commerce site and allows the retailer to more seamlessly link user-generated photos to specific products. With this new functionality, consumers sifting through Instagram can click on a designated link and shop through a feed of photos from the social network.
Moving forward, Country Club Prep plans to get more aggressive with its user-generated content strategy, Watson explained. “Eventually, we would like to include all of the social media content available for the top 20% of our brands on our website, both on the brand biography pages and on the product detail pages.”
