Creator Deck — How Influencer Partnerships Helped Us Grow

The birth of Creator Deck has been a long road. It started back in 2008 with our first company, Chictopia.

The three of us (Ricky Ho, Co-Founder; Corinne Chan, COO; and myself, CEO) decided that instead of working mid-level tech jobs where we had little impact on business, we wanted to start a company. We were in our late twenties and desired larger roles. It felt like the right time to take a risk.

When deciding on our company’s focus, we narrowed it down to a few options. We considered the pet sector, but that market was too small. Travel was another thing we were interested in, but that market was too crowded.

Then we had the idea to start a fashion company.

While we weren’t fashion experts, the industry seemed to lack innovation the most and we found an opportunity to really shake things up and make an impact.

When we launched Chictopia, we didn’t know much of anything about fashion publications or designers. (Side note: we hadn’t heard of Women’s Wear Daily until a friend who had gone to a fashion business school in Paris told us about it. We never knew who Alexander Wang was until our first Chictopia intern told us about him either.) We really didn’t know what we had started or what we had gotten ourselves into, but we were excited to take on the challenge.

We went to fashion events in San Francisco, reached out to friends and asked for referrals until eventually we created Chictopia, the online fashion community for the people. We reached out to fashion bloggers (who back then were considered “weirdos” for posting #OOTD’s on the Internet) and asked them to join our community. It only took a few weeks to get Rumi of Fashion Toast, Camille of Childhood Flames and Karla of Karla’s Closet to post on our site and talk about it to their friends. It was the wild wild west and there were so few companies approaching fashion bloggers. Back then it was just us, ModCloth and Nasty Gal who were making an impression through word of mouth alone.

Fast forward seven years and Chictopia has come a long way. We started as a small, niche fashion community to an ever-growing online hub of 5 million members and fans across media platforms. Chictopia even inspired some of today’s biggest fashion bloggers to launch their own channels, including local beauty Jessica Ricks of Hapa Time and grunge queen Luanna Perez of LE HAPPY. Chictopia was and to this day is regarded as “the OG in the online fashion community.”

In 2015, we launched NoviCreator, a full-service platform to help our brand partners start influencer campaigns from end to end. Whether it’s sending fashion bloggers to fashion week or showing the personal and intimate sides of influencers and the brands they love, we helped develop beautiful and moving stories that would be shared on the Internet.

For brand partners who would like to have a more personal relationship with influencers, we developed Creator Deck, a self-service tool that serves as the backbone of scalable and effective influencer marketing.

Creator Deck has three main components:

• A centralized database to help you keep track of all your partnerships in one place.
• A communication dashboard so you can easily manage and organize your influencer pipeline.
• An analytics tool so you can track the reach and engagement of your influencer campaigns.

Our friends in fashion can benefit from having more personal and direct relationships with brands, while our brand partners can easily and efficiently establish long-term relationships with influencers.

This November, we were fortunate to sign with PacSun, Kipling, WILDFOX and Julien Farel as our launch partners. We’ll be continuing to grow and enhance our features with them and we hope to see Creator Deck become an essential tool for the masses. I’ll be sharing our success stories along the way, and I hope you’ll join me as we continue to go on this journey.