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Apparel and Fashion brands are discovering the incredible potential of user-generated content (UGC) to create meaningful connections with their audience. From Instagram fashion enthusiasts to TikTok creators, customers are becoming powerful brand advocates through their personal styling showcases.
UGC statistics are clear. This content type represents a goldmine of marketing opportunities, offering fashion brands a cost-effective way to showcase their products in real-life settings. As modern shoppers increasingly seek style inspiration from peers rather than traditional advertising, this content becomes invaluable for building trust and driving engagement.
The impact of UGC in the Apparel and Fashion industry is far more meaningful than just social proof. It creates an interactive relationship between brands and their community, turning customers into active participants in the brand story.
In this article, we’ll show how top fashion and apparel brands have effectively utilised UGC to enhance their digital presence, build authentic connections, and thrive in an increasingly competitive market.
User-generated content has proven to be an exceptionally powerful and transformative tool for apparel and fashion brands, consistently demonstrating remarkable effectiveness in addressing these challenges through several key approaches.
This customer-created content format stands out as a particularly valuable solution, offering unique ways to showcase products and engage with customers:
By leveraging UGC, fashion brands can create a more inclusive, authentic, and engaging marketing strategy that resonates with modern consumers while addressing industry-specific challenges. Let’s check some real Apparel and Fashion brands’ results with UGC.
In the Apparel and Fashion sector, social shopping has a strong influence on fashion trends. Seeing an image of another user pairing one of your brand’s dresses with a jacket helps them envision how they would wear the product after purchase.
One could argue that models could do the same, but customers are aware that products don’t look the same professionally styled as they do on a normal user. Creating a feeling of authenticity around a brand’s identity can be an important step in a shopper’s process: they can see themselves reflected in the imagery and are informed about how to style the product.
Twist & Tango wanted to portray the endless range of possibilities their products offer potential customers. Read the case study on how Twist & Tango benefits from UGC.
Shoppers want to know that the people who spend money on your products love them. Customer content is the perfect way to show off your products in an authentic way.
“We definitely wanted to show off our products in a more customer-friendly way, where there are no models, no pack shots, but actually humans with different shapes and heights, and we also want to really push the female body and different sizes and curves. Flowbox on the website helps a lot to also inspire. It’s like an extra value. Also for the creative part, UGC looks very nice and it gives the website a bit more personality.”
Sofie Axhag, eCommerce Store Manager at Twist & Tango
Twist & Tango wanted to engage its customers not just through the submission of photos and video content, but also to encourage them to review their products. The brand uses the Flowbox Ratings & Reviews feature so others can get a real insight into the fabrics’ quality and the fit’s accuracy without the need to physically try them on, building community trust and decreasing online returns.
As we know, written reviews are a great format for convincing people that your products look great, fit well, and are well-produced. But when you add a visual element to it, shoppers don’t have to just imagine how people look and feel in your products: they can see it for themselves.
World-renowned fashion brand G-Star Raw realised the importance and influence of consumer-generated content and wanted to update their digital marketing strategy. Read the case study on how G-Star RAW benefits from UGC.
They wanted to change their digital advertising strategy to include UGC to make it feel alive and much more personable to prospective consumers, so they started working with Flowbox.
“Sizing and return rates are connected. UGC and actual people wearing our clothes often helps our customers better understand the fits of our products, how they look on real people’s bodies, and that can help people make better purchases and lower return rates, which leads to better conversion rates. We expected to see higher CTR, but we didn’t expect to see such an increase in overall performance on even conversion rate and ROAS.”
Bert Van Eetvelde – Paid Social Specialist at G-Star RAW
This approach led to some great results, as seen by G-Star Raw. After a period of their implementation, they saw that when customers convert through the Flowbox catalog, they spend more within the campaign itself.
With Flowbox’s User-Generated Content platform, brands can easily collect, manage, publish, and analyse their customer content. Keep up with your fashion and apparel competitors—request a demo to learn more.
Meller is a brand with an incredibly strong social media presence. While that can be important for a brand, it doesn’t necessarily mean that this converts these followers into customers. They understood that they needed to find a way to make this conversion. Read the case study on how Meller benefits from UGC.
The challenge Meller faced is common in the digital age – bridging the gap between social media engagement and eCommerce success. They understood that while their content was attracting attention and creating brand awareness, they needed to implement more direct pathways to purchase and create compelling reasons for their followers to move from casual observers to active customers.
So they implemented a UGC strategy with Flowbox:
“We use Flowbox because its service builds trust and adds a different experience to the shopping process. User Generated Content increases the engagement and gives us more visibility. Customers are more interested in buying when they visit our website and see pictures of other buyers. This makes them feel more confident.”
Bosco García Puig – Head of Digital at Meller
The success of Meller’s strategy demonstrates that brands can effectively transform social media engagement into tangible business results with the right approach. Their experience shows that while building a strong social media presence is valuable, the real success is creating meaningful ways to convert that attention into sales.
Since its inception, Dutch watch brand Cluse have focused their marketing strategy on social media, especially Instagram. The team sees this social network as the perfect medium to reach and engage with their target group. Read the case study on how Cluse benefits from UGC.
Cluse set out with the goal of paying tribute to its thousands of customers and further increasing their engagement with the brand. They partnered with Flowbox to support this strategy, launching their branded hashtags.
“For us as a brand, UGC is vital because of its authenticity. Flowbox enables us to use it in the best possible way: we pay tribute to our customers by giving them a central place on our brand site, while at the same time these pictures increase the onsite conversion rate. For us, the use and advantages of Flowbox have become a no-brainer.”
Rudyard Bekker – CEO of Cluse
Cluse implemented a UGC strategy on their homepage, community page and product pages to really show off their customers’ content. It resulted in them having collected well over 19,000 images and a 19% increase in conversion rate.
What is evident within the Apparel and Fashion industry is that customers want to see real-world applications of products. Xandres‘ team knew they needed a solution to solve this problem. Read the case study on how Xandres benefits from UGC.
The brand prides itself on providing affordable luxury, featuring high-quality pieces that look fantastic but are accessible for everyday women. It stands to reason that the brand was looking for a form of content that is equally accessible.
Xandres partnered with Flowbox to provide UGC on their homepage, community page and product pages.
“It’s very important for us that people get an accurate depiction of our products. We go to great lengths in creating lookbook images and lifestyle images. We fly to far away places to make the clothes look absolutely perfect. But it’s still really helpful for customers to also see what the clothes look like on people just like them. UGC allows us to make our online community feel complete.”
Tim Ceuppens, International eCommerce Lead at Xandres
This partnership with Flowbox has led Xandres to some encouraging results. After deploying a UGC strategy, they realised a 31.94% increase in average order value and a 23.87% increase in average order size.
The Flowbox UGC Platform has many great tools and capabilities that can help any Apparel and Fashion brand, no matter how big or small. Here is an overview of the key platform features:
Flowbox stands out with its sophisticated content collection system that automatically monitors and gathers user-generated content across social media platforms. The system springs into action whenever users mention your brand, tag you in their posts, or use your designated hashtags, ensuring no valuable content slips through the cracks.
The platform’s social media integration capabilities allow your brand to collect content from Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and other platforms, all from a single dashboard. Check out this collection of articles to see all the platforms you can connect to Flowbox as a source.
Flowbox’s content moderation tools represent a significant advancement in UGC management, combining artificial intelligence with sophisticated quality assessment capabilities. The tool offers comprehensive solutions for brands seeking to streamline their content curation process while maintaining high standards.
The great thing about using Flowbox is that you can send rights requests directly to the users and easily track their responses. Additionally, you can create templates to message the user for a request, and personalise this message however you like.
Once the request is granted, Flowbox’s auto-approve functionality automatically approves the content for use, making the whole process even easier for your team. Check out this article if you want to know more about rights requests and permissions: User Generated Content Permission, Rights, Laws & Legal Issues.
Flowbox’s Smart Tags feature leverages artificial intelligence to streamline content categorisation and moderation. The system automatically identifies key elements within posts and assigns relevant tags, significantly reducing manual moderation time while maintaining accuracy.
This AI-powered system can detect objects, scenes, colours, and even sentiment within content, making it easier to organise and filter large volumes of UGC. The technology also helps identify brand-relevant content and automatically flags potentially inappropriate material, ensuring both efficiency and brand safety.
The Quality Rate tool employs sophisticated AI algorithms to evaluate both technical and aesthetic aspects of user-generated photos. Drawing from a vast database of over 340,000 Instagram images, it assigns scores from 1-100, enabling efficient bulk moderation based on image quality standards.
This scoring system considers factors like lighting, composition, focus clarity, and overall visual appeal to ensure only the highest quality content is selected for brand campaigns.
An effective way to ensure that you’re only collecting content that you want to use is with tools like Blocked Users and Whitelisted Users. These are 2 Flowbox tools that allow your brand to block spam content while giving a green light to content that you know you’ll be interested in seeing.
From there, managing your content is easy, as you just need to approve the images and videos that you would like to appear on your eCommerce.
The advanced Publish feature enables seamless organisation and distribution of user-generated and brand content across multiple platforms. This integration helps maintain a cohesive brand presence while preserving the authentic voice that resonates with audiences.
The tool’s interface allows users to create, customise, schedule, and publish content directly to their social media accounts. Which greatly reduces the time spent by social media managers on planning and shooting content to post manually on a variety of platforms. It can all be done within the Flowbox platform.
Track UGC performance across all channels with comprehensive analytics features, helping you make data-driven decisions about your content strategy. With Flowbox’s Google Analytics 4 integration, you can send analytics events directly from your Flows.
This enables you to monitor user interactions, track conversion paths, and measure the impact of your UGC campaigns alongside your other marketing metrics in a single, unified dashboard. Find out more on Flowbox’s advanced website analytics and how you can harness data-driven marketing.
Implementing a UGC strategy has become essential for fashion brands looking to build authentic connections with their audience. The success stories of brands like Twist & Tango, G-Star Raw, Cluse, Xandres, and Meller demonstrate that leveraging customer content can significantly impact brand perception and sales performance.
A well-executed UGC strategy serves multiple purposes: it provides social proof, creates authentic brand representation, helps potential customers visualise products in real-world settings, and builds a sense of community around the brand. In addition, it generates conversions, order value and size uplifts, and higher engagement rates.
Book a demo with Flowbox and we’ll show you how a UGC platform can boost your brand sales.
