Maura McManus is the Chief Operating Officer of Lauren Conrad’s newest upscale fashion line, Paper Crown. According to the web site, Paper Crown is “a collection for those who like to play dress up in a grown up world.”
In this podcast, Maura shares with us the vision behind the brand, the marketability of 1.5 million Twitter followers and the downside to starting a label with a celebrity.
orange: Where did the name Paper Crown come from?
Paper Crown came from—we spent months and months trying to think of the perfect name. We probably went through 10 serious options and Paper Crown stuck. I think a lot of people think of Burger King’s paper crown, but the idea behind it is that Lauren [Conrad] first learned to sew from her grandmother and she used to spend a lot of time at her grandmother’s house growing up and they didn’t have a lot of dress-up clothes. They didn’t have a lot of resources that they were playing with so the grandma always had little odds and ends around—fabric, buttons, whatever it was—and they would end up making these really beautiful, intricate paper crowns and that’s where the name came from.
orange: How did you get involved with Paper Crown?
Well, Lauren and I have grown up together since elementary school and played sports together, went through high school together, and then when I went to college at USC we went our separate routes. Obviously, Lauren had a very celebrity-career-driven opportunity and that was fantastic and when I graduated from school I went to work for a designer by the name of Rachel Pally.
From there, at this point [Lauren and I] actually live together, we started brainstorming and thinking of all these ideas like ‘Well, I’m in the fashion industry and wouldn’t it be so fun if we could have a clothing line together.’ So it started about three years ago—the ideas and brainstorming—and finally last spring we came together and decided this was the time. I left my job at Rachel Pally and we started from the ground up and that’s where we’re at now.
orange: What’s different about Paper Crown from Lauren Conrad’s other clothing line sold exclusively at Kohl’s?
Well first, we have to be very careful that we don’t go anywhere near Kohl’s in terms of design or price point because we are catering to a
different demographic that is a little bit older and has more money to spend on clothing. There’s definitely a difference between the two lines, but Lauren works very closely with Kohl’s and they do all kinds of trend research and have different ideas even on the construction of the garment so her knowledge there is definitely helpful for us. We distance ourselves in terms of who we are trying to target. Hopefully they support each other. There is Vera Wang who makes designer clothes and wedding dresses but she had a line at Kohl’s, so it’s like you can go get a t-shirt that says Vera Wang but then a beautiful $1,000 dress at the same time. It fills two different places.
orange: What is your social media strategy for promoting Paper Crown and how will you leverage Lauren’s 1.5 million Twitter followers to help spread the word?
I don’t know who did the research but we were going into website meetings so we can get our website up and moving and they did some kind of research where they were able to tell when Lauren posts an ad on her Twitter account—even though she is not Kim Kardashian who has 5 million followers, I think she has 1.5 million [followers], which is outstanding—but when she posts something
people will click on the link and follow it through to see what she posts rather than somebody who just posts these things time and time again. She won’t put something up there that she doesn’t believe in and the Twitter account is not something for her to be making money. That’s really powerful and we intend to tap into that number.
At the current moment, she is not really tapping into those numbers. It’s not connected to her website. So we are working with a website company and they want to do something along the lines of making an opening splash page. Right now it’s just going to be clean and simple, just “Coming Soon,” but then there will be a little place where you can put in your information. If you type your cell phone number we could text you when the line comes out. If it’s your email, if it’s your Twitter account or whatever it is, we will give a behind-the-scenes video. Maybe that will be the behind-the-scenes photo shoot but by [users] putting in their information and getting a sneak peak, it drives them to our website and we will start developing a database that we can start getting a pulse and when we need to get the information out, it can go out to 2 million people very quickly.
A start-up company is usually not this fortunate but we will definitely take advantage of those numbers and I think it’s really going to be driven from first, Lauren personally on Twitter. We will also have one for Paper Crown. Then it will all need to be linked to the website where we can start to collect a database. The website company we work with has explained to me that, in essence, you own that information once we give you it. So then we can send emails out that say: Lauren [is] doing an appearance at a department store and it’s something where it kind of helps that Lauren is Lauren so people might go there and buy something, that’s really something that we need to take advantage of and I think it will be driven from the website where we can start to collect information on the demographic, in addition to Lauren’s personal account.
I know last time we talked we were talking about sales and [tweeting promotions on sale merchandise] but I don’t think we will be doing anything like that because stores will have that power but we can say “we just sent a shipment of this dress to a department store and you can find it here.” I think that’s going to be very valuable.
orange: How do relationships with department stores influence a brand?
Eventually, once you get moving with a department store, you usually go exclusive with one or two and a lot of times they will ask you to remake the dress you are offering, say in blue, but you want it to be in a print that is yellow and red. So you give them some options and they’ll agree or they won’t like it and they actually have quite a bit of say in something that they want. [For] something that’s exclusive in the store, they have the right to say it’s exclusive to Nordstrom or Bloomingdale’s or something along those lines. And we’ll, of course, work with those offers and it makes you catapult to the next level.
orange: Do their suggestions ever go counter to your vision for Paper Crown or Lauren’s vision for Paper Crown?
Sure, it’s one of those things where you are obviously making a garment that is spot-on and it’s your design and you don’t want to see it change, but at the end of the day, they know their customer, they know who’s buying what and in what color, of course you’re
going to change it to meet the needs of the customer. But at the end of the day… sometimes they will even take a long dress and make it a short dress, so that’s completely changed the design integrity, but that’s something where they know the customer and they might also buy the long dress, but they know the short dress will sell exponentially.
orange: Which other designers are promoting their lines in interesting ways using social media?
There are definitely a lot of them. One that sticks out is Rebecca Minkoff. She originally started out as a handbag designer and I was just looking at her website, she does shoes now and clothing, and she really takes social media and puts it all together which is fantastic. She has a blog that’s tied to the website, Twitter and Facebook. They also have a guest blogger which is kind of fun and it keeps the website new with other people’s opinions always coming in. She even does things like photograph people she sees wearing her bags or people send in like “how to wear this bag” and there’s other options where she puts sketches of what she thought the bag
was going to look like and then the actual product. People who are actually going to by the bag appreciate [it] and I think that’s fun.
She integrates everything and she even does little, fun videos on her website that keeps it fresh and new and people keep coming back.
orange: Paper Crown and MTV have been working on a new show. How does MTV help you reach your demographic?
First of all, the show that we were originally signed up to do, they’re going to scale it back. We were going to do a very straightforward, documentary style show that really just showcased what we’re doing here and also all of Lauren’s other priorities with Kohl’s photo shoots and publicity. So it was really gathering all of that but the primary focus was on Paper Crown. But now we’re scaling it back and going to do more of a two-hour special because, at the end of the day, it’s really a little dry to be going on for episode after episode. MTV caters more to the dramatic and that’s not something Lauren or I want to be involved with. Lauren has been there and had great success but didn’t want that to be part of this company at all. The
MTV special will still be shown there… All of Lauren’s followers are still very true to her, they’ve grown with her and a lot of people will tune in for it especially if it’s a one-time deal. The demographic that we’re aiming at is probably 18-35. That sounds silly for an MTV viewer to be older than 20 but it seems to work and she has a strong following.
orange: Are there any downsides to starting a label with a celebrity?
Yes. Obviously I don’t feel it’s a downside, she’s one of my best friends. In the world of being taken seriously, it’s an uphill battle. We time and time again stress that this is her career project, this is what she has always wanted to do, and every other opportunity she’s been given over the past six years has led up to this, to finance her own clothing line. There is definitely second guessing and people who are testing us to see if we know what we’re doing and if we are taking the necessary steps to get the ball rolling and have a company.
Last week I met with Hilldun, a financing company for the financing industry, and he let me have it. He said basically ‘Look, I think Lauren’s great, I think she could have a really successful career, something along the lines of the Olsen twins who have really taken their celebrity away from their clothing line and it’s been successful,’ but he said, ‘It’s not going to happen if there’s not hard work, if there’s not a good team behind Lauren.’ I assured him that we are doing everything necessary to be taken seriously but his comment puts it out there that there are a lot of celebrity clothing lines that don’t do well. They’re there for 15 minutes and then they go away. That’s not what we’re trying to do here.
orange: When can we expect to see more of Paper Crown?
Clothing will be in stores in summer of 2011, probably at the end of July and we’ll get things started at the end of July.