When Sarah Zurell came on board as CELS Brands’ CMO in 2022, one of her goals was to make fashion footwear brand Chinese Laundry cool again. But like, really cool.
“I want it to be cool enough for Taylor Swift to wear our shoes,” she told her PR partner CLD at the time. Admittedly, it was a “stretch goal” for the brand, whose style first became popular in the 1980s. (Zurell herself wore a pair to prom.)
But then, it actually happened. Swift was spotted wearing the brand’s butter yellow Tai Dress Sandal in an Instagram photo posted by Brittany Mahomes, wife of NFL Super Bowl star Patrick Mahomes. Swift had been gifted the shoes—a low-budget marketing tactic the brand relies on frequently—but Zurell wasn’t sure if she’d wear them and post a photo, much less tag the brand. (Spoiler alert: The brand was not tagged.)
Then there was the issue of promoting Swift’s fashion choice within the restrictions imposed by online advertising, which inspired some creative marketing on the team’s part. In the end, Chinese Laundry saw a 1,200% sales spike following the post and sold out of the sandal completely.
We spoke with Zurell about how the brand capitalized on the “Taylor Swift Effect,” her small budget marketing solutions, lessons learned from co-founding two companies, and innovations in retail she envisions for the brand moving forward.
Chief Marketer: How did the Taylor Swift sandal sighting come about? Was it completely coincidental? And if so, how did you leverage that type of mega celebrity for your marketing purposes?
Sarah Zurell, CMO at CELS Brands, Parent Company of Chinese Laundry: It was such a coordinated effort with a lot of moving pieces… In some ways, I set it as this stretch goal. And CLD then worked their magic in, gifting and getting the shoes to her stylist and getting the product over to her. And then I just kept saying it over and over and over again, and then finally it hit. We were all so shocked that she actually did go ahead and wear our shoes.
But on the back end of how we then leveraged it: We tried to get as much earned media as we possibly could from it. When you have that moment as a marketer that comes and is organic(ish)… You’ve gifted, but whenever you’re gifting, you never know if they’re actually going to wear the product or if they’re going to post it or if it’s going to get tagged—or if it’s going to get picked up. So then, it’s a matter of, if they do wear it, then how can you tie back to it? Because they often don’t tag. In this case, the shoes were not tagged. Taylor didn’t tag them, Brittany didn’t tag them… nobody tagged them.
Then, how do you work with your PR agency to try to get as much press about it and to get somebody to organically call out that it’s your product? There, I went really deep, even putting ads out. You have to be so careful with how you’re doing ad strategy because you can’t use the likeness and image. But I could say, “Chinese Laundry is in our butter yellow era.” And then with Google, if you use the right keywords on the backend and get really nerdy with it, then you can target Swifties. So, it’s this mix of manifestation, a total fluke and a highly coordinated effort.
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CM: Can you talk a little bit about the gifting process? What’s your strategy there and the steps to take when you’re aiming so high?
SZ: I work with really small budgets. As a result, I don’t have budget to pay influencers. But I can gift ad nauseam. So in that way, the strategy is, if people will wear our shoes or people want our shoes, I want them to have them. We work really closely with our PR firm to do that gifting. They have an incredible roster and we sync up on who’s the right influencer or celebrity for our audience—because it’s really important when you’re building out a gifting strategy. Even though you can gift as much as you like from a budget point of view, it’s also matching the influencer to the audience of your product.
For example, we are accessible, trendy footwear. A Taylor Swift audience is hitting our target demographic. That’s one of the reasons why I kept saying that would be a perfect audience for us. That’s the archetype who buys our product.
And the process in doing that is, on our side internally, we reach out to people directly on Instagram or through their managers and build relationships. And CLD does the same thing there.
CM: You mentioned facing restrictions with online advertising. Can you discuss that?
SZ: I actually sat down with legal on this to make sure that I was buttoned up on it. Even though it might feel like fair use because it was on Instagram, that photo’s still owned by Brittany. And you can’t license it. So I couldn’t put that photo in ads, even though it had been in organic press. And that, I think, is a misconception. And it’s an area where people can get in trouble. They think, oh, if it’s in the press, then I can use it. But that’s not true because of the way that it was posted. It wasn’t a Getty image. It wasn’t fair use, so you can’t use her image or likeness.
And that’s where I had to get creative with copy. I can use the shoe—which I did—in the paid advertising. And on the backend, I could use keywords. So on Facebook, I could put “Swifties,” I could put “Taylor Swift,” I could target those audiences and get specific building out the segments. But in the ad itself, the ad copy that I wrote was, “She wore them in London on a date, and now you can be in your butter yellow era, too.”
CM: I’m guessing Swifties loved the solving the mystery as well.
SZ: A hundred percent. That’s part of the cultural aspect of her as an icon and phenomenon. Being able to speak to those audiences is really important when you’re leveraging influencer partnerships or celebrities or these organic events as well. If you’re going to maximize it, you need to be talking to the audience of that celebrity the way they need to be talked to… which I think is one of the most important things with marketing in general. You have to meet your customer where they are and get really specific, because if you’re trying to market to everybody, you’re marketing to no one.
CM: Are there other ways that you had to get scrappy? Given that you have no budget for influencers.
SZ: My background is in startups; I’ve founded a couple of companies. So, budgets have always been… an issue. [Laughs] I like to lean on any area where I can do a surprise and delight campaign, or bring value to a community. For a nail polish brand called Fuse Gelnamel, owned by Pacific World Cosmetics, we had a very small budget. We did on-the-street manicures on Hollywood Boulevard.
We gave manicures and started communities on Facebook talking about nail art, and essentially started those first initial conversations on Twitter and Instagram back in the day. [It’s about] looking at ways that you can make an impact and reach people without spending much money. We just paid a model to give manicures and then we had the product. And then we gifted it, too. Then that created organic social press because people were Instagramming it, posting it, tweeting about it and starting conversation.
Another thing that I’ve done in my career: When I was launching my parking app called Pavement, an Airbnb for parking, we also didn’t have much budget. And I wanted to use the budget that we had as thoughtfully as possible. A lot of folks said you should do billboards. And I would say, well, we can’t afford billboards because that’s wildly expensive. But I can negotiate with business owners and people who own properties that are going to be demolished in the next year. And I can pay an artist to paint a mural on the wall of the side of this building, and I can create virality around it. So we did the camouflage print in our brand colors, and then just wrote, “Hiding in plain sight.”
Then we pitched that to press and created conversation online, on Reddit and Twitter specifically. [We posed the question], “What’s hiding in plain sight?” People would post pictures of what [they thought was] hiding in plain sight and would add their word. Then a month later, we went in and added, “Parking is hiding in plain sight. Download the app to book your parking space in advance or on demand.” It really didn’t take much budget. That was a $30K spend and we did over 20 murals throughout Los Angeles, and the impact on that converted to over 10,000 downloads.
CM: What other marketing strategies and tactics have you learned from previous gigs?
SZ: That’s a good question. I think the blend of experience is how all problems are solved now. I wouldn’t be making the choices that I’m making now or thinking about things the way I am now if I didn’t have that experience… I’m constantly thinking of, how can we move the needle both at the top of funnel and at the bottom, thoughtfully, for the least amount of amount of money with the highest impact?
At the end of the day, marketing is like throwing spaghetti on the wall. You’re just trying different things and sometimes it sticks and sometimes it doesn’t. And then when you have that moment, it’s about going back in and having that coordinated effort and team to be able to pick up the pieces and maximize it, and try to create as much of a halo effect as you can. And know that the dollars that you’re spending in those moments, if you are spending, are going to ultimately help your bottom line and improve your ROAS. But they need to be attributed to your brand budget and not your attributed budget.
CM: You’re also behind Chinese Laundry’s virtual reality shopping experience this past spring. What was behind that choice?
SZ: There was so much surrealist virtual reality that companies were doing. Maybelline did the eyelashes on the London subway, for instance. So what can we do that would be meaningful? Because I don’t have budgets to do something like that. And then, how can I partner with an artist or partner in a way that feels authentic and is doing good, which are always principles I try to follow. It was also to solve a problem for us, which was that we were having issues with our sample department, and I wasn’t going to have the samples in time to shoot them, but I needed to have the content ready.
I ended up partnering with a female artist out of the Ukraine and asked her to build out a 3D rendering that we could then use to implement and build out additional products using AI. With footwear specifically, it’s so intricate. When you’re walking in a retail experience and through a shoe department, you pick up the shoe. You’re turning it over, you’re feeling it. Online, that’s a flat experience. So the idea was, if they could spin [it around] with this 360 view, then you would be able to have a more tactile experience, though it was virtual. And for the shoes that we did [it for], we actually sold out of them.
The virtual shopping experience is something that I’m working on building out more. I don’t think it’s just a fad. I think that it’s the direction of online, retail and ecommerce, so the companies that get ahead of it are going to go further and have a larger reach than the ones that are sticking to the normal shopping experience. There’s so much choice online. How are you going to set yourself apart?