Zoom-tail (Z-tail): An interview with Fashion Innovator Yildiz Blackstone
I recently sat down with Yildiz Blackstone on The UNCAGED Show to talk about her career from her days as President of Luca Luca to her latest enterprise Yildiz Aylin that re-invents the fashion re-tail/e-tail experience. This is an edited excerpt from our discussion.
Bant Breen: I’d love to talk to you a little bit about your background. Certainly, you were the president of one of the great fashion retailers Luca, Luca, and now you’ve gone on to disrupt the model with your present business. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your career.
Yildiz Blackstone: Sure, where shall I start? I was folding sweaters at Benetton when I was thirteen if I want to start from the beginning. I grew up in Izmir, Turkey and I come from a line of women in fashion in my family from my great grandmother, my grandmother, my mother… so I grew up in fashion. I came to the US to study in New York at FIT. It was a wonderful experience.
After doing a few jobs after graduation, I met an Italian fashion designer who wanted to start a company together. We started the Luca Luca brand. Over a couple of decades, we created a beautiful fashion brand. We dressed celebrities and were a staple at fashion week. I learned a lot about brand building and retail through that experience.
When Luca Luca got sold, it was an interesting moment for me. My sister was, at the time working with me and together we decided to create a new company where we could guide and mentor designers, creative directors, and bring them together with our customers without the traditional brick and mortar retail model. We started bringing together designers together with our clients and it was a fun environment, invitation-only and word of mouth.
Bant Breen: Tell me a little bit about how the Yildiz Aylin model actually works.
Yildiz Blackstone: Okay, so we thought that our potential customers want beauty, elegance, gorgeous cloth, but not necessarily everything has to be an investment piece. We wanted to create collections with an elegant chic style…quality at an affordable price point. So we quickly decided to eliminate the brick-and-mortar model. There is, there is no way we can be very competitively priced if we were paying the Madison Avenue rents. So it started at my apartment where I invited a couple of designers. Aylin and I created this styled, curated show. And our clients loved it because they could buy the, let’s say, high-end pieces at an almost wholesale price point. Over time we expanded it to an ambassador model where we started traveling around the country with the collections and to homes of different friends who wanted to host us. We expanded our business in that way.
Bant Breen: In the context of what we’ve all lived through over the last year with COVID, I know that you launched Zoom experiences. Tell me more about how that works.
Yildiz Blackstone: When the pandemic hit, you can imagine, it was difficult. Our business was high touch with customers trying on clothes in dressing rooms. All of a sudden, there was a complete pandemic pause. And I have to say I didn’t panic because I lived through 2008 when there wasn’t a physical pause, but there was definitely an economic pause. Having gone through that, I felt like okay, we just have to figure out how to survive the moment.
I was grateful that I didn’t have the huge cost of retail stores. But we had to find a new platform which was online. I had been resisting online entry because of the experiential focus of the business, however, it was time. Within four weeks, we launched as an online shop. My sister and I had to be models and I appreciate models so much more now.
Aylin and I were also thinking, who would shop because no one is going out. No one has a reason to dress up. I knew our customers did not need the clothes that they purchased from us, but they wanted to support us, and to see that support was priceless. It kept us excited and inspired us to continue to innovate. We were like, okay, we cannot have in-person appointments, so how about we do Zoom appointments. We started taking our friends on journeys of fashion online. It became a blend of show business and fashion business.
Bant Breen: I think that is brilliant, this idea of essentially taking a bit of a trunk show type model and turning it into a zoom experience. What a great concept, and certainly something that I think has legs to scale going forward.
Yildiz Blackstone: Virtual appointments are here to stay. And we are now not only seeing our friends online from New York but also we are doing meetings internationally, with our friends in California, in Chicago… we are actually expanding the business far out of the East Coast.
Bant Breen: Let’s talk about the pandemic for a second. It’s been a challenge for everybody. I know that whenever I’ve spoken to you during the pandemic, you’ve always said, “tell me what brought you joy today?” How have you found joy over this time and stayed sane?
Yildiz Blackstone: That’s a great question. I have to say it’s easy to ask this question to others. But during the pandemic, I realized if I didn’t bring myself this question daily, I was not going to get through it because everything I knew stopped. Everything was out of control. So I had to find a way to survive. And one way to survive for me was what’s the joy of the day? What did I enjoy today? The pandemic definitely taught me to enjoy the journey.
Bant Breen: In today’s conversation we’ve talked about the reinvention of fashion retail, what it was, how one succeeded in that world, and then how that’s evolved into the new world, which is going to be much more virtual, much more digital and much more experiential. You are on to an exciting new business model.
Yildiz Blackstone: Thank you very much.
