How two friends built Revolve into a fashion empire with Instagram influencers

Two young tech co-workers named Michael, who knew absolutely nothing about fashion, unexpectedly found themselves in the rag bin of the dot-com bust at the beginning of the century.Revolve Group

Revolve is only one of the fashion e-tailers harnessing the social media marketing juggernaut to sell to young and urban customers, but it’s the first to pull back the dressing room curtain to give the world a look at its financial underpinnings.In lieu of traditional advertising, Revolve uses much of its marketing budget to pamper a revolving group of about 3,500 Instagram influencers — including Kendall Jenner, for a time — for wearing its brands as well as the designer names it carries.

Mente and Karanikolas were out of a job, but had gained valuable insight about themselves and how well they worked together.“Technology was something we’d just grown up with. Data was something we were comfortable with,” Karanikolas said. “And it really helped us spot opportunities consistently, I think, before a lot of the rest of the marketplace.”

“For us, there’s no such thing as fear of failure with experimentation,” he said, “because the data that we gain from this failure also ultimately helps us improve and assess, then ultimately make the algorithms better.” Rumi Neely of Fashion Toast “had one of the bigger audiences in the early days. It was a natural fit for us to work with her first,” Mente said. The timing was also crucial. Revolve began working with Neely and other bloggers in 2009, amid the worst economic downturn the nation had seen since 1929.

“In this day and age with the democratization of content production, we can create imagery that really connects with the consumer on an emotional level, delivers our core message of aspiration and a great, happy lifestyle, and ultimately do it in a way that’s more authentic,” Mente said.

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