How Fashion Can Leverage the Audio Appeal of Clubhouse

The Business of Fashion Podcast

The Business of Fashion

Fashion & Beauty, Business, Arts

4.6 • 770 Ratings

🗓️ 2 February 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At VOICES 2020. Paul Davison and Virgil Abloh discussed the audio-only social network’s potential impact in the fashion industry with BoF’s Imran Amed.

While the influence of Clubhouse has been growing in the power corridors of Silicon Valley for almost one year, the audio-only social network officially hit the mainstream this month, having grown to more than 2 million users and closed a funding round valuing the business at $1.4 billion. Then, on Monday, none other than Elon Musk made a surprise appearance on Clubhouse, driving global news coverage of his impromptu conversation with Robinhood’s co-founder, Vladimir Tenev, about the remarkable rise in value of Gamestop shares driven by passionate Reddit users.

But what could the rise of Clubhouse mean for fashion? In December, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer Paul Davison made his first public speaking appearance at BoF VOICES alongside Virgil Abloh to discuss the power of creating a space to listen and learn — and how the fashion industry can get involved.

“All the conversations that I’ve hosted or been a part of on Clubhouse related to fashion in a weird way have been more in-depth than interviews or regular-format media,” Abloh said. “It’s an interesting case study making sure brands have something to say when you can’t escape to creating an image.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Connection is an inherently human thing. We're wired to connect. And voice is a very different
0:10.1	medium. We were talking long before we were writing or taking photos or shooting videos.
0:14.9	But in the world of social media, it's a new thing. And we find that it allows people to connect
0:19.4	in a different way. How does a fashion company communicate through sound?
0:23.8	I, for one, think it's a new landscape to hear what a brand's about,
0:27.9	without the use of image or without the adjacency to say a product within that image.
0:33.4	It's like, what do you have to say?
0:34.9	That becomes compelling as a fashion industry when we can use our voice to create engagement.
0:45.0	Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, and welcome to the BOF podcast.
0:51.1	This week, you may have heard that Elon Musk, who is now the richest man in the world,
0:55.7	appeared on a social media app called Clubhouse. The media and venture capital worlds have been
1:01.5	talking about Clubhouse now for quite some time, but Elon Musk's appearance on the app has given
1:07.6	Clubhouse a new currency and visibility beyond the halls of Silicon Valley.
1:13.3	Well, back at Voices 2020, I had the opportunity to sit down with the co-founder and CEO of
1:19.1	Clubhouse, Paul Davison, who was speaking in public for the first time about the app alongside
1:25.4	Virgil Ablo, one of the app's super users from the fashion industry.
1:29.7	Given all the news about Clubhouse this week, we thought it was a good opportunity to share that
1:33.9	on the BOF podcast. So here are Paul Davison and Virgil Ablo at Voices 2020. Following the explosion in podcasting, many entrepreneurs see the ear as the next piece of human real estate to go after in the fight for people's time and attention.
2:00.4	Earlier this year, Silicon Valley became
2:02.8	obsessed with a new app called Clubhouse, an audio-based social network where people can spontaneously
2:09.8	jump into different chat rooms to talk together. Launched amid the pandemic, since day one, the app has
2:16.9	attracted the kind of funding, controversy,
	...

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