Influencers Are the Retailers of the 2020s

Influencers are the future of discovery-driven, brand-centric commerce. This means that they’re juxtaposed to Amazon and search-driven, brand-agnostic commerce. Picks and shovels like Shopify and Stripe enable influencer commerce.

Firstly, people will increasingly identify with and trust other people rather than starting with a specific type of product or impersonal brand. We're putting the individual’s brand and their company’s brand forward. We compare Shopify and Etsy—there’s a difference in how overwhelming it is to go to somebody's Shopify store that you trust, vs. goin... See more

Influencers, in turn, have realized that it’s more lucrative and meaningful to promote their own products rather than someone else’s.

In short, with democratized access, the web became more saturated than ever before, and as consumers, we began to spend more and more time trying to sort through it all. In a state of analysis paralysis, how do we disaggregate signal from noise?

This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increas... See more

Because working with influencers allows brands to continue to tell stories and move product (albeit indirectly) through an external voice while remaining mindful of the pandemic context.

Now-established players have learned that Instagram advertisements and influencer campaigns only scale to a point: they can net no more than a few hundred thousand of a brand’s “first best” customers. This has driven a shift toward physical retail and prompted founders to agonize over if and when to peddle their wares on Amazon, making direct to co... See more

When we look back over the past 100 years, traditional commerce (and the culture it indirectly endorsed) was primarily curated by a single person’s point-of-view. Even when commerce moved online, to places like Amazon or Farfetch, retailers still controlled the types of things consumers purchased. Online commerce didn’t innovate a new shopping expe... See more

"Gen Zers will have a favorite influencer or set of influencers who they essentially outsource their trust to, and then they're incredibly loyal to everything that influencer is saying," says Beth Goldberg, Jigsaw's head of research. "It becomes extremely costly to fall out of that influencer's group, because they're getting all their information f... See more