Unique viewpoint
Raised in Calgary at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Amed’s only access to the fashion world was the weekly glimpses he caught on Tim Blanks’ television show, Fashion File. Growing up, he explored drama, public speaking and music but remained acutely aware that the creative industries were businesses. “I was always interested in the concept of entrepreneurship and starting my own company. But I always had a thing for fashion. For some reason, family and friends always came to me; should I buy this? Does it look good on me? But I never imagined there was a career in it for me,” says the man with a penchant for bespoke English tailors Thom Sweeney and “classic brogues and boots by British brand Grenson”.
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aining access to the notoriously factious world of fashion proved surprisingly easy for Amed, who rode on a wave of natural ingenuity. “At first I was always very shy about approaching people,” he says. “It’s not really my style to be a hustler, so I’d take the chance to create editorial when I had the opportunity to meet people organically, through the natural course of my work. I never went out and chased stories. I let the content speak for itself and it just brought people towards the website.” This humility earned him respect amongst his peers and, ultimately, cult adoration within industry circles. “Early on during fashion week nobody really invited me so I would have to work my personal connections and contacts to see if I could get a standing ticket. One day, I mysteriously got an email from Oscar de la Renta inviting me to their show, which I found really puzzling because I did not have an existing relationship there. I got there late and couldn’t even take my seat – they’d given me a seat, which was kind of amazing – so after the show, I went to find the PR to apologise and she asked if I’d met Alex [Bolen] yet. I asked, who’s Alex? And she said, ‘Alex is our CEO and he’s the one who invited you.’ So she introduced me and he said, ‘I read your newsletter every day on my Blackberry while I’m walking my dog in Central Park and I think it’s amazing. I’m really sorry you weren’t here on time because I saved you a seat in the front row next to me.’ Things like that would happen.” Even Karl Lagerfeld? “I didn’t even ask for that interview,” laughs Amed, recalling his interaction with a media representative who offered him the last-minute interview while at the 2010 International Herald Tribune Luxury conference in London. “I said, ‘Excuse me?’ And she said, ‘Well, we have access to everyone speaking today and it just strikes me that you’re the right person to interview Karl.’ I had an hour’s notice!” Sometimes, Amed feels it’s “the universe offering things up” but he also credits such fortuitous interactions directly back to the website and its community of supporters, many of whom, such as 3.1 Phillip Lim CEO, Wen Zhou; publisher and editor of London-based Tank magazine, Caroline Issa; and Mesh Chibber, managing partner of Europe’s leading communications agency RelativeMO PR, have become firm friends. Indisputably now considered the industry’s leading digital authority, BoF is an indispensable resource for creatives, executives and entrepreneurs, frequently
Imran Amed is fashion’s consummate digital cognoscente, the man whose daily blog brings together the commercial and editorial sides of a multi-billion-dollar industry Story Carli Philips I Portrait Scott Trindle
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n April 2007, Business of Fashion blogger Imran Amed was invited to his alma mater, Harvard Business School, to be a panellist in the third Annual Retail & Luxury Goods conference. His blog, based around the intersection of fashion and commerce amid a changing digital landscape, although provoking comment within the online self-publishing community, was barely enough to capture the mainstream fashion industry’s attention, let alone threaten it. Amed was getting around 190 hits to his website per month, most of which he suspects were from friends. So sitting among executives from Lacoste, Lehman Brothers, Neiman Marcus and Holt Renfrew, it’s a safe bet he felt out of his depth. When the controversial topic of social media platforms (in particular, a new little website called Facebook) and harnessing the web to benefit the luxury sector arose, Amed recalls his ideas “were at best politely dismissed, at worst publicly ridiculed”. When the panel concluded, moderator Milton Pedraza (from the Luxury Institute and countless Fortune 500 companies) leaned over and whispered to Amed, “I think you’re onto something. Stick with it.” Fast forward to 2012, and the 36-year old Canadianborn entrepreneur’s $100 sofa start-up has been branded a “power player” by Britain’s The Independent, an “industry authority” by Vogue Italy and “the most respected fashion blog on the net” by Elle.com. Industrie magazine’s Media A-List called Amed one of the most important people and media brands in fashion today and he was named on GQ’s 100 Most Influential Men in Britain list. His expertise is regularly quoted by fashion and business media, including CNN, BBC, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. BoF’s website traffic now surpasses 250,000 hits monthly and daily email subscribers are in excess of 20,000. That equates to more than 700,000 page views a month. A keen multi-tasker, Amed is also a founding member of private community network, Luxurysociety.com, on the board of the digital committee of the British Fashion Council, and head of strategic advisory firm Amed & Company, where he consults for some of the world’s biggest luxury brands and private equity clients. Last year, he added accessories designer to his growing list of credentials, courtesy of a hugely successful collaboration with up-market British leather goods designer Bill Amberg. “I’m having a breather in between the madness,” 38 wish June 2012
Amed confesses, after a whirlwind month in which he visited five countries, including Qatar where he reported on a boutique opening. “I started BoF out as a little fun, side project,” he recalls, on the phone from his home base in London. An active fixture on the show circuit and VIP events, he devotedly updates the website’s Facebook and Instagram, compiles complimentary Daily Digest newsletter, takes Tumblr photos and frequently tweets to his combined social media community, which numbers in excess of half a million people in more than 200 countries and territories. This topical information deluge is something his hard-earned, yet loyal, followers have come to expect from the man who has emerged as fashion’s consummate digital cognoscente. When Amed turned 30, he quit his successful management consultancy career at McKinsey and Co in favour of an alternative that “exercised the creative, right side of my brain”. After an unsuccessful stint in venture capitalism, he began researching the nascent blogosphere. Voices like street style photographer Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, French visual artist Garance Dore and fashion film doyen Diane Pernet were just starting out, but Amed identified a lack of fashion commerce commentary. “As it turned out, the timing couldn’t have been better,” reflects Amed in a 2012 website entry. “The fashion industry would soon find itself navigating unprecedented change driven by the forces of economic crisis, rapid globalisation, and, of course, the digital revolution.” Unconstrained by the models, rules and ideas that had governed and defined fashion up until then, and as unaware as everyone else about the power of digital technology, he used the unknown to his advantage. BoF’s unique perspective was born out of Amed’s desire to bridge the chasm between the commercial and editorial sides of fashion, a gap destined to widen with the ubiquity of the web and user-generated content. Based on the emerging activity at the junction of fashion, technology and entrepreneurship, BoF served as a digital stage for news, observations, commentary and opinionated analysis. “It was simply an outlet for me,” says the site’s founder and editor, who didn’t have any goals, let alone an expectation it would find an audience. “I had no professional agenda, no marketing strategy. It was just ideas, writing things down.” But his site soon reached international audiences, building up a strong following. While new to both the technology and fashion arena,
the whip-smart impresario had degrees from two Ivy League institutions, Harvard Business School and McGill University. This, coupled with his professional corporate experience and personable voice, filtered into BoF in a credible and inclusive format. “As Imran joined the fashion industry ‘later’, after a career change, he has maintained a fresh and unbiased point of view that is totally reflected on BoF,” commends Wallpaper* fashion director Sebastien Clivaz, who reads BoF daily. “He has maintained the critical analysis experience gained in his previous career and applied it to fashion industry.”
“It’s not really my style to be a hustler ... I never went out and chased stories”
referenced in books, boardrooms, studios and classroom worldwide. Issa checks BoF daily and says the site’s democratic online platform has become “a valuable resource for the wider audiences who do not get the inside scoops or don’t have access to industry opinion. Amed has created a site that people who are interested in behind-the-scenes billion-dollar fashion industry machinations can use and check often … therefore creat[ing] value and an accessible perspective into what has typically been the domain of fashion and celebrity magazines or possibly more factual reporting in say, the FT.” BoF provides insight into three core elements; creativity and design processes, business structures and strategies, and the disruption around technology. This plays out in a series of regular analyses, updates on luxury markets, fashion news headlines, opinion pieces and exclusive interviews. Curated articles from major news outlets are hyperlinked but BoF also produces its own content with a growing international troupe of about 10 contributors, including legendary British fashion writer Colin McDowell, prominent corporate fashion finance expert Pierre Mallevays, and Bandana Tewari, fashion features director of Vogue India. The site also spotlights emerging talents and e-commerce innovation – a passion of Amed’s, who is an associate lecturer at London’s Central St Martins College of Art and Design. Charismatic and perspicacious, Amed’s engaging livestreamed videos feature in-depth conversations with pioneering subjects such as photographer Nick Knight, founder and executive chairman of luxury e-tailer Net-aPorter, Natalie Massenet, and independent publisher of Dazed Group, Jefferson Hack. His interviewing capabilities have afforded him external hosting opportunities such as the moderating position he undertook on behalf of Miu Miu for its round-table discussion last year. He also sits on the Board of Dasra, India’s leading strategic philanthropy foundation, and has judged competitions at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Austrian Fashion Awards in Vienna. Most recently, he accepted an honorary invitation on the British Fashion Council’s Menswear 2012 committee alongside industry luminaries such as Tom Ford, Christopher Bailey, Paul Smith and Harold Tillman. Not bad for a man who had to break into his first Zac Posen show only five years ago. With BoF’s valued global community of followers, Amed regularly “visits some of the most unbelievable places where one would never imagine there’s a local fashion industry”. While he celebrates domestic creativity, he has written extensively about the challenges facing Australia, along with Brazil and India, positing that if designers want to build worldwide audiences they need a presence in the fashion capitals. “The fact is there’s only so much time available for people to trade and interact, so those tertiary fashion weeks end up being explored by the local industry because international editors and buyers, who wield all the clout and influence, still go to see fashion weeks in Paris, New York, London and Milan.” To celebrate BoF’s fifth birthday this year, Amed hosted parties during the London and New York fashion weeks. The stellar crowd drew a broad cross-section of the BoF community; friends and followers of the website, fashion business, media, design and digital innovators, celebrities, and invaluable family, friends and coworkers. “Even though I’m a busy person, it’s a very symbiotic, virtuous cycle of activity that has organically developed over time. So I could be in a meeting with a young fashion designer and that will help me in my consulting work, it may help me with my editorial work, there may be lessons I can draw from that conversation that I can teach to my students. “When you have a following and a voice people take seriously, it’s a great sense of responsibility. My focus is to continue to be as innovative, groundbreaking and thoughtprovoking as we’ve been, without losing our integrity. I hope BoF is just the foundation for something that will w continue long into the future.” June 2012 wish 39