Crafts, 

Clothes, 

and 

Clout; 

Small 

Designers 

Reach 

Larger 

Audience 

with 

Growth 

of 

Web 

and 

TV 

Showcases 

Crafts, Clothes, and Clout; Small Designers Reach Larger Audience with Growth of Web and TV Showcases

WSJ.com, June 17, 2010 – Towering brands like Gucci and Louis Vuitton may dominate ad pages and storefronts, but small designers are gaining a bigger foothold in fashion.

What Sundance did for indie film—showcasing it for a bigger audience—Web sites like Etsy are doing for the little guys of design. And starting this week, you can turn on your television and tune into IndieShop, which aims to take independent designs into living rooms across America. Running on various cable channels all over the country, the show is available in 40 million homes.

On IndieShop, Etsy meets Home Shopping Network. Consumers can watch independent fashion designers discuss their work in a talk-show format while a host coos over the styles. If viewers like what they see, they can text an order by cellphone or go to Indieshop.com.

In recent years, technology and the Internet have given what was once a local endeavor—a seamstress, a jewelry maker, a cobbler working at home—a broader reach than ever. Etsy sold $180 million of merchandise last year and recently opened a European outpost in Berlin. Sites selling indie designs, like Starsandinfinitedarkness.com, SmashingDarling.com and Senseofashion.com, pop up with increasing regularity.

At the same time, consumers are increasingly hungry for independent designs. In part, brand fatigue is to blame. Big fashion labels sell the same products the world over, diminishing their logos’ cachet. Their designers work on collections a year or more in advance of the clothes’ appearance in stores and rarely—if ever—meet the people who eventually buy them. Moreover, many consumers lost faith in luxury brands after watching prices soar during the boom, then plummet during the crash in the fall of 2008. The slashed sales prices raised questions about the true value of branded goods.

Indie designers offer pieces that not everyone has, allowing consumers to create their own style. I’ve noticed that the clothes and jewelry of mine that garner the most compliments are those that come from indie designers. They’re not the same old trendy looks. Plus it doesn’t hurt your reputation for shopping savvy to admit that you bought something from a young, up-and-coming designer. These days, the “buy local” movement has whetted shoppers’ appetite for a greater sense of connection with their goods’ creators.

Now, even the huge brands are striving to establish authenticity—sometimes trying a bit too hard. British authorities recently banned Louis Vuitton ads that showed an artisan laboring on a bag, saying the ads suggested, falsely, that its bags are handmade.

Buying indie does have its shortcomings. Without the guidance of a familiar brand, it’s harder to suss out the quality of goods that you can’t see up close or try on. Some websites, IndieShop included, don’t have highly detailed descriptions, photos, or enough data on size, materials, workmanship and fit to help shoppers make informed decisions. IndieShop’s founder, Melissa Perrucci, says she is working to improve the information on the site.

Additionally, IndieShop’s marriage of independent marketplace and cable audience is untested. Are indie-minded people really sitting around watching cable television at all hours?

Marc Krigsman, chief executive of Cross MediaWorks, IndieShop’s parent company, is betting that there is an unplumbed market here. “We fully believe that television is the major driver of traffic to the website,” he says. Mr. Krigsman believes that despite its hipster image, the indie demographic is broader than people think. The target demographic for the program is women between 18 and 54 years old, he says. Other indie design sites, such as SmashingDarling, say their customers tend to be female, professional, and older than 30.

Trish Ginter, co-founder of SmashingDarling, which sells products from nearly 700 indie designers, identifies the site’s typical shopper as “a very professional woman,” she says. “They’re purchasing things that set them apart.”

Ms. Ginter, who is also a designer, recently opened a clothing boutique called Frock in her town of Chester, Conn., along with a partner. The two of them make the dresses, tops, pants and other clothes they sell in the store, using a 8-foot-by-4-foot cutting table and sewing machines in the same building. “This is the slow fashion movement,” says Ms. Ginter. Open only six weeks, the store can’t keep its racks filled, she says: “People want to know and see the people who design their clothes.”

IndieShop is the brainchild of Ms. Perrucci, a 42-year-old former Time Warner and big-media executive who faced corporate burnout at about the time of the financial crisis. She quit her job and traveled the world for a year. “I convinced my husband to join me on my ‘eat, pray, love’ adventure,” she says. She was taken by the artisanal designs they stumbled upon in places like Asia and Argentina. “Then when I came back to New York, I saw the same thing was going on here,” she says.

Ms. Perrucci reached out to Mr. Krigsman, with whom she’d worked at Time Warner, and says she proposed a pitch for consumers “who’d rather have their money go to a person, a face, rather than a big company.”

She began assembling indie designers by attending flea markets and craft shows. There, she discovered people like Dan Dorfman, founder of Artisan Emporia, who imports fair-trade designs from around the world and sells them wholesale and at ArtisanEmporia.com. He now sells products on IndieShop at 10% to 20% discounts in return for the chance to reach TV viewers. “It’s important to be featured on national television,” he says.

At the Brooklyn flea market’s holiday market last year, Ms. Perrucci stumbled upon Jessica DeCarlo, a jewelry designer whose specialty is a “Swirl” earring that coils through the pierced ear like a snail.

Ms. DeCarlo makes jewelry at her Brooklyn studio during the week and sells online and on weekends at flea markets. Now she is featured on one of Indieshop’s video segments and says she hopes the television program and Web market “is going to reach a mass audience that I can’t reach myself from here.”

“I work really hard. I work a lot,” Ms. DeCarlo says. “But I’ll tell you, it’s better than working for someone else.