Louboutin: User-Generated E-Gallery Fuels Gen Y Self-Promo

In a bid to boost brand engagement among its sizeable social media following, French luxury shoe brand Christian Louboutin – which has 3.5 million followers on Instagram, almost 3 million on Facebook and more than 1.5 million on Twitter – has unveiled a user-generated image gallery on its e-commerce site.

Dubbed #LouboutinWorld, the gallery was created in collaboration with UK/US-based visual commerce strategy experts Olapic, and pulls imagery selected by the brand from its plethora of social media directly to a dedicated section of its e-commerce site. All users have to do for the chance to appear in the gallery is upload pictures of themselves wearing Louboutin products with the hashtag #LouboutinWorld, or simply upload an image directly to the site. The gallery also displays usernames alongside each image – playing to the millennial desire for self-promotion and peer-group validation.

For more on how brands can tap into the selfie-era consumer's predilection for self-promotion, especially those in the Gen Y demographic, see Muppies: Celebration of Self Beats Traditional Rewards in Luxury Online for Millennials and FOCI 2014: Demystifying Millennials.

While #LouboutinWorld is presently a content-only image gallery, the brand is planning to add a crucial shoppable aspect in the next phase of the project. All images will be embedded with shoppable links that will redirect users to individual product pages within the brand's e-commerce store.

For more examples of how brands are monetising social media engagement, see Instagram for Retail Brands and Social Commerce for the Luxury Sector. See also Shoppable Content: Publishing, Shoppable Content: Entertainment, Social Media Seduction and Marc Jacobs Monetises Instagram, as well as The Social Sell, part of the Anywhere Retailing Industry Trend.

For a similar project, see Saks' Social Style Icons, where the US department store invited fans of the brand to submit posts of themselves across a string of social media channels for the chance to become a 'Saks Style Icon'.