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CHICTOPIA
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REFINE YOUR PERSONAL STYLE



A glimpse into the history of the blogosphere. Check out some stars from our
Hall of Fame!




REFINE YOUR PERSONAL STYLE



A glimpse into the history of the blogosphere. Check out some stars from our
Hall of Fame!


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@CHICTOPIA


Dear Chictopia fans,

We would like to share an important change with you today. Throughout our eleven
years in business, we’ve had many ups and downs, and we are excited to announce
the next journey of Chictopia.

As of now, Chictopia will no longer be a fashion social network, but instead
will be kept as a content archive for the history of this fashion community. Our
mission has always been rooted in finding the best way we can provide value to
our community. As part of our evolution, we have transitioned into a technology
based service company, where we help influencers and brands collaborate better
to create the most engaging stories.

Below is a brief history of our journey on how we become what we are today:

2008
In 2008, three engineers and roomates named Ricky, Corinne, and Helen, sat down
at our home in the Mission district of San Francisco, and decided that we wanted
to create a startup of our own. We bought a book called Starting a Business for
Dummies and read through the chapters. We had weekly meetings to go over our
learnings and discuss ideas on what we could do together. In the book, one piece
of advice stood out for us, that is, if we were to do a startup, we should do it
in a space that would hold our interest for a long time, regardless of whether
or not it made any money.

We then made a list of our hobbies and came up with the top three - pets, food
and fashion. When we researched the three spaces, we found that fashion was the
one industry that lacked technology innovation. Musicians had Myspace, and video
makers had Youtube, but in 2008, fashion style icons had no place to showcase
their talent. So, we started building.

Chictopia.com launched in April of 2008, and we grew to 1 million monthly page
views in three months.


Read More
2009
The first year was such a wild ride. We were featured in Teen Vogue, Techcrunch,
Women’s Wear Daily, amongst a handful of influential publications. Chictopia
democratized fashion, allowing street style bloggers to have a platform to
showcase their style and network amongst themselves. In 2009, fashion bloggers
were still considered weirdos who posted photos of their outfits on the
internet, but we appreciated them for their audacity, their authenticity, and
their passion to put themselves out there. We reached out to each one
personally, shared our admiration, and offered our service and support. Modern
day style icons like Song of Style and Hapatime all had Chictopia profiles and
grew with us along the way. The authentic bond we formed with our community of
not-yet-known influencers paid off.

We also moved to a new office in the Hearst Building in downtown San Francisco.
We felt like grown ups.

2010
We hosted our first Chictopia conference- Chictopia10 in NY during fashion week,
and Chictopia10 drew hundreds of attendees all over. At our conference, speakers
included Modcloth founder Susan, Polyvore founder Jess, amongst other fashion
industry OGs. We continued to be covered by fashion publications like WWD and
attracted a lot of inbound advertisers like Target, Victoria’s Secret,
Forever21, amongst many others. We were also quoted as “The next Big Thing”.

We thought we were invincible.

2011
When we first launched Chictopia.com, we found much success with advertisers
that would reach out to us weekly to seek advertisement spots on our website.
However, as time passed, this was the first year we saw those “inbound leads”
slow down a bit. We asked ourselves why, and started to realize that the
customers stayed with us, we showed care, responded to them quickly, and focused
on listening. The ones that didn’t come back, we didn’t treat them with as much
high touch. We laugh about how naive we behaved then when we reflect on our
journey. The result of our poor customer care taught us some learning lessons
that has transformed to the highest values we hold with the company today.


2012
We started to see trends in the influencer space shift in the following ways:
Instagram became the new platform where fashion bloggers went and posted
People started using mobile phones instead of web to consume media
Our traffic plateaued

For survival, we treated our clients with even more critical care, humility, and
dedication. We also realized that in many brands’ eyes, we were influencers, and
while it was a cool factor to work with us, we had to figure out ways to provide
long term value to them to create a sustainable business.

2013
It was a tough year for us as we watched our traffic on Google Analytics taking
a sharp plunge. To salvage our business, we hired sales rep after sales rep to
knock on people’s doors to sell what was remaining of our banner ad inventory.
Our revenue from ads dipped by 70% that year.

One of our existing clients asked us to run a small test campaign to research,
manage, and report on influencer programs. We took it as an add-on buy to help
out one of our partners, even though the deal made us no money. Through running
this campaign, we had our first real exposure to influencer marketing
management. After learning so much from this experience, we realized
productizing this as a service was our next step.

2014
We started to shift responsibilities within our founding team, and our four
person staff. Two out of three technical founders started doing account
management and sales, while one continued coding. Through running X influencer
campaigns, we realized that the amount of manual work it took to run a campaign
was so time consuming. To stay competitive as an agency, we needed to be more
productive.

2015
We started building an in-house tool called Creator Deck to help better manage
our own campaigns more efficiently and effectively. It saved us magnitudes of
time, and when our brand partners showed strong interest in using this tool too,
we started licensing this to other partners and thus the start of our Saas
Creator Deck tool was formed. Two of our early clients were Crossroads Trading
Co. and Revolve.

2016
We started to build up a solid client base with the agency business, the
majority of which came from referrals. From our early experiences in losing
sustainable revenue from not putting customer service first, we learned and
remembered that high service to our existing customers was the most important
emphasis. This really paid off.

Biossance, JCPenney, Victoria’s Secret Pink, Michaels, amongst others, made up
our agency client roster.

2017
As our team grew, while we as founders were successful at running the company to
a profitable and sustainable state, were were entering new territory when it
came to knowing how to scale a business to a larger size. We realized we needed
more outside expertise and knowledge. We started forming an advisory board of
talented people who cared about us, were passionate about what we were doing,
and were aligned with our core values. We reached out to them when we had
questions and they gave us many enlightening answers.

Our SaaS Creator Deck business started to gain some traction.

2018
We doubled in size that year and officially opened an office in Brooklyn, NY.
Through hiring and scaling, we also realized that our people are everything. We
needed to distill our core values into our hiring process:

Be credible
Be caring
Be authentic
Have a sense of purpose

2019
As we continue on our journey, we have reflected on what we’ve learned and how
this affects our Chictopia community. What we have realized is that Chictopia’s
value to our community today is really a fashion history archive of the best
photos since the birth of fashion blogs. We are showcasing them here on the home
page and will continue to do so in the coming years, changing out photos
seasonally. As a website, the changes that impact our community will be the
following:

Existing Chictopia member photos will be preserved, but there is an option to
set to private if you wish to not have it be searchable via Google.
Chictopia will no longer run banner ads.
If you’d like to be featured on Chictopia’s home page, you can tag us @chictopia
on Instagram!


We are still here for our community. And without you, we would not be here
still. Thank you for being with us through our journey and we hope to have
impacted your life in some positive way too. Our lives vibrant and amazing
because of our #chictopiahistory.

https://www.facebook.com/Chictopia


The Chictopia Team


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