At BoF VOICES, four creators who shaped fashion online sat down to look at what influencing has become: Susanna Lau, Bryan Yambao, Camille Charrière and the satirist Gstaad Guy. I come from fashion and editorial, at Vogue and Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, and their conversation reads like a history of the industry I work in.
From no roadmap to an industry
Yambao recalls the early days in Manila: scanning magazines, posting affiliate links from his bedroom, and the shock of realising that the people he wrote about were reading him. There was no roadmap, only a voice. What followed, from the first affiliate cheques to today’s commerce media, turned that voice into a business.
The thirty-page brief
Charrière describes the arc from “do your thing” to briefs of thirty pages with layers of approvers. Her argument is that creators have to push back, because the audience’s trust is what made them valuable in the first place. She is not a brand, she says; her online self is an extension of her offline self.
This is the part brands should hear. A long brief does not protect the brand. It flattens the creator into an ad, and the audience scrolls past. My briefs fit on one page: the goal, the message, the approved claims, the must-haves and no-gos, the label, the rights and the dates. The rest belongs to the creator. How I build that is in my influencer marketing workflow.
Integrity as briefs multiply
Lau opened with the harder question: how do creators keep their integrity as agencies, briefs and budgets multiply? Yambao’s answer is that a seat at the table comes with a responsibility to say things that mean something. Both see the same risk: an industry so efficient it forgets why anyone listened.
Say it before the audience does
Gstaad Guy brings a different tool: satire. Consumers are getting smarter, he argues, and brands should let creators test a story honestly, even with humour, before the audience says it for them. A brand that can laugh at itself is easier to trust.
What still holds
Twenty years in, the basics have not changed. People follow a voice. They stay for taste and honesty. They leave when the voice starts to sound like a press release.
For brands, that means choosing creators whose voice already fits, and then letting them use it. It is the principle behind my talent sourcing and the way I direct creator shoots: prepare everything, then leave room for the person in front of the camera.
Source: “The BoF Podcast: Examining 20 Years of Fashion’s Influencer Economy”, with Susanna Lau, Bryan Yambao, Camille Charrière and Gstaad Guy, The Business of Fashion.
