So I’ve been spending the last 2-3 years of my life telling people what company I worked for and how I was in fashion retail but working for the UK’s top magazine publisher Bauer (who were Emap before Bauer bought them out).
In July 2011, Cocosa was bought out by the Mohamed Al-Fayed who formed a new company called Cocosa Lifestyle Limited and finally we became a serious retail business and not just a retail business tacked onto Bauer, who with all the best intentions, were not experienced in the retail sector.
It’s always been hard explaining who Cocosa and what we did, mainly down to 2 reasons.
- Membership barrier - Cocosa until October 2011 was a members only site, which meant you had to be invited in before you could see any of the sales. We had a great reception page showing images of catwalk fashion with the tag line ‘Front Row Fashion, Beautifully Cut’. But what did it really mean? Without clicking on the About Us link to find out more, one could easily mistaken it for NOT being a fashion retail site. Yes it was perceived to be exclusive and when it was much younger/smaller, the idea worked. Faced with the prospect of mass expansion, the membership had to come down in order to attract a larger audience.
- Advertising - This I think was our biggest barrier, yes even bigger than the above (which frankly, if you knew a code, you could get in). Because Cocosa was part of the Bauer empire, a lot of the other magazine publishers (the likes of Conde Nast, IPC etc) didn’t want us in their advertising space and didn’t want to talk to us. So as you can imagine, this proved to be a tricky situation when trying to get us out there in terms of marketing (not mentioning the finite resource we had in the first place). We had good coverage amongst bloggers and some newspapers, and the word of mouth did spread pretty quick.
Just going about day to day and talking to people, no one knew who Cocosa were. My conversations would usually end up going along the lines of ‘do you know Brand Alley and Secret Sales? Well we’re a bit like them’. This was true of the people I know who photograph and model in the fashion industry. The mention of ASOS, Net-A-Porter, The OutNet would usually be greeted with excitement, but the mention of Cocosa would be met with the unknown.
Fast forward to November 2011 and we’ve now got a digiwall in Bond Street tube station. In terms of getting the Cocosa brand out there, I don’t think it gets much better than this, with thousands of passengers using Bond Street station every day.
Then this morning I was on the London Underground travelling to work reading through a copy of Short List, the free weekly men’s lifestyle magazine and whilst checking through the fashion editorial pages and there it was, a full page advert for Cocosa advertising menswear sales.
What’s the big deal? It’s a big deal because under Bauer, this would have never happened. This in fact is a new dawn for the Cocosa brand and one to be reckoned with. All the years of yearning for there to be better coverage in the media has finally become a reality.
Cocosa has arrived.
