This was published 4 years ago
Anine Bing on turning Instagram influence into a viable business
By Annie Brown
Anine Bing, fashion designer, former model and, before she got too busy, singer in a band called Kill Your Darlings, has the kind of style women want to emulate.
Indeed, she’s built a global business around it.
Anine Bing in her recently opened boutique in Sydney's Paddington.Credit: Louise Kennerley
Bing, who was born in Denmark, raised in Sweden and now resides in Los Angeles with her husband and two children, was in Sydney this week to launch the latest boutique under her namesake label.
The Sydney boutique, in Paddington’s Fiveways, is the brand’s 15th store.
It’s Bing’s first time in Australia and she sees an affinity between the “effortless” way Australian woman dress and her brand. Australia is one of its top ecommerce markets.
Anine Bing fuses chic wardrobe workhorse type pieces - think oversized blazers and crisp white shirts - with a rock & roll twist in flashes of animal print, studded boots and printed tees.
She says her customer age varies anywhere from 20 to the woman she spotted near the boutique who must have been 75 and “looked amazing”.
“It's a mix, but I think our typical customer is a working woman and she might have kids, and she likes to travel. She's very active, so she just needs a wardrobe to make her life easy. She might drop off her kids [to school] in the morning and then go into a board meeting and then go out to drinks at night, without having to change her outfit,” she says.
“I talk about it like the modern uniform.”
Bing was an early adopter of blogging and Instagram (she now has 744,000 followers on her personal account and 181 thousand on her brand’s official account).
In the beginning, Bing and her husband, Nicolai Nielsen (now her CEO), were packing orders in their LA garage.
The brand started as a direct-to-consumer ecommerce business seven years ago. Two years later Bing opened a store in LA, followed by New York and Paris because her customers were asking for it.
Bing believes in bricks and mortar retail, despite its notorious toughness, because she says her customer wants to touch and feel and “play” with the pieces.
That said, she pays close attention to what she calls her Instagram “community”.
“[I think] a key to the success is that we have a really strong community … we really listen to them ... I think maybe a lot of brands don't have that closeness,” she says.
In 2018 the brand completed a $US15 million ($22 million) round of venture capital funding to expand the business and improve its systems.
As for transforming Instagram influence into a business, Bing says, like with most things on the grid, it’s not always what it seems.
“It's not as easy as it might look on Instagram. We work very hard, it's hard to build a business,” she says.
Bing sees her brand’s success as part good timing, she launched when brands weren’t really on Instagram, putting out the right products and understanding how people want to shop, i.e. immediately.
Bing works on a "see now, buy now" approach and does six collections a year, with weekly drops of product. She still tries on every product herself to ensure the fit is perfect.
As for where the world of Instagram influencing is headed, Bing says it’s become especially important “to find your own thing” in a saturated market.
“I think some of them will kind of fade out, but the ones that really have something special to offer, they will continue thriving,” she says.