Becoming a Fashion Blogger Entrepreneur: The Case of Chiara Ferragni

The increasing presence of social media and digital technology in consumers’ lives has changed the way fashion brands work and communicate with their customers. In a consumer-driven market, a new genre of marketing has been created, where influencers and fashion bloggers act as mediators in the relationship between the customer and the brand. Bloggers gain more power as intermediaries than fashion brands have directly to influence consumers. Therefore, fashion companies seek to collaborate with bloggers to co-create and promote their products and set trends for the future. From a fashion consumer’s perspective, blogging is increasingly seen as an opportunity to join the fashion industry and build a personal brand. This chapter focuses on Chiara Ferragni, a successful fashion blogger and entrepreneur who started her career as a fashion amateur and is now a fashion empress. Indeed, 13 years since it was launched, Ferragni’s blog has more than 27,2 million followers today through Instagram and has evolved into a successful lifestyle magazine. The brand Chiara Ferragni, which launched in 2013 as a fashion shoe brand, has now successfully extended to several other product categories including clothes, accessories and jewellery, leading a new fast-growing sector of fashion-blogger entrepreneur brands. This chapter explores how Ferragni was able to disrupt the traditional model of the fashion industry and become an integral part of it. The chapter examines the essential skills, strategies and capital that enabled Ferragni to transform from a fashion amateur to a fashion icon and a successful fashion entrepreneur.