If you’ve seen the movie Air, released last year, you know the history of perhaps the most famous celebrity endorsement in branded apparel. It’s the gripping story of how one oddball executive at struggling Nike in the 1980s, managed to convince Michael Jordan and his parents, who were his managers at the time, to choose the underdog Nike for a brand partnership with the rising basketball star, over the obvious market leader at the time, Adidas.
The Air Jordan story is a powerful preview of what was to come in the internet age. Already in the 1990s, celebrity endorsements of luxury fashion items and other premium, upscale goods ballooned. When the Web 2.0 age arrived a decade later, it didn’t take long for the core focus of social media to switch to what became known as “influencer marketing”: the business of monetizing internet popularity through affiliation with brands.
Fast forward to 2024, and with the rise of mobile-first social networks and the advent of ubiquitous content sharing- and creation, the influencer industry has grown to a massive share of the entire advertising pie. Globally, influencer marketing spend in 2023 was $34 billion, with many top influencers making millions of dollars a year on their brand and product endorsement deals. While top earners like Cristiano Ronaldo ($85 million), Lionel Messi ($71 million), Ellen DeGeneres ($33 million) and Dua Lipa ($13 million), who are famous beyond social media, rake in fortunes through this secondary income stream, there is an entire swath of mid-tier, macro-, micro-, and even nano-influencers who are building their livelihoods on the influencer earning model.
Most of the time, non-celebrity influencers are people who are experts in a certain field or lifestyle, and who have carefully built an online following by engaging with an audience and building a deep sense of connection and community with them. One such person is Lot Keckeis, a self-styled “momfluencer” from the Netherlands. Having worked in various management roles in the fashion world, once she and her husband settled down in a suburb of Amsterdam and welcomed their third child, she discovered she had a voice in parenting and maintaining a happy family balance that appealed to many other moms. Taking the opportunity seriously, Lot focused on maximizing the value of her influencer brand, and quickly discovered that it’s hard work to find and monetize the right brand endorsements, without diluting and damaging the tone of voice and community engagement with her audience.
Being involved with various fashion projects, next to her influencer brand, Lot had been working with a Bulgarian family business that specializes in apparel prototyping and production, and it was on one of the trips to Bulgaria that she and the owners of the Bulgarian company, Elly and Mike Hennessy, came up with a novel idea: why not produce custom-designed collections for influencers, tailored after their style, taste, and preferences?
And so the idea of STCCHD was born, which is pronounced as “Stitched”. The premise is simple: target micro-and macro-influencers, in the 50,000 to 500,000 followers range, who have a clearly defined style, with the offer of a branded webshop where the followers can order items that are designed according to the style of the influencer, while STCCHD takes care of everything from setting up and managing the webshop, to the designs and creative materials, followed by production and order fulfillment.
STCCHD was launched in 2023, and with Vitosha we invested at the very beginning of the journey. The company is owned and run by Lot, her husband and business partner Philip, and Mike and Elly, who are joining STCCHD with a 30-year background in outsourced fashion design and production for leading brands worldwide, based out of Bulgaria. The company has a developer team in charge of the webshop backend, and an operations and design team in Bulgaria who take care of the client-focused collections, and their production and delivery.
In 2024, STCCHD is aiming to launch the first collections with the first group of influencers it is currently onboarding, with the goal of bringing a new edge to influencer marketing, where people who have a leading online voice and following can monetize their brand independently of vendors and endorsements. If STCCHD is successful in this, it will not only become a profitable venture, but can make the social media business more equitable and sustainable. Something we’re very much excited about at Vitosha.