The national plus-size fashion market includes at least 40 million women spending about $22 billion annually, and three of its players are in the Vancouver area.
Vancouver is home to three web-based magazines for plus-sized women, and a local non-profit of a similar vein is developing in Camas.
The cyber runway
Publishers of the three local magazines all say the web is a cost-effective way to debut a magazine and build readership.
Valery Amador is founder and CEO of Venus Imaging Education in Vancouver. She produces Venus Divas and PlusModel, and was a plus-size model before turning to web publishing.
PlusModel is a free industry publication that’s been around since July 2006. It gets 75,000 page views per month and its daily blog has 5,500 subscribers. Venus Divas is a lifestyle magazine that’s nine years old. It gets about 150,000 page views monthly, mostly from plus-size women ages 20 to 45. The blogs that accompany the magazines let Venus learn about consumers’ lifestyles and shopping habits.
Amador spends about 50 hours each week on those magazines and two others. She works with a couple of part-owners and a handful of volunteer editors and contributors. The part-owners aren’t paid, but Amador hopes to change that.
“We have a list of people wanting to work on this,” she said. “Our people are volunteering…. They want this message out there.”
Along with advertising dollars, the company gets commissions of 4 percent to 12 percent from affiliate sales on its web sites.
Just a few clicks away is Skorch Inc. Jessica Kane and Carrie Woomer founded the Vancouver-based company in September 2006. Skorch focuses on plus-size empowerment, promoting and coordinating fashion events like a nationwide model search this fall.
Skorch, the magazine, builds their brand, targeted at a youthful audience. The free web publication has won 12,000 readers in one year of existence. Kane and Woomer’s strategy is simple – create a monthly magazine that they would want to read.
They started the business with no loans and little in the bank, but said that Skorch has never been in the red and production costs are nominal.
Since Skorch started charging for ads in April, all magazine revenue has come from advertising, with monthly sales increasing from $200 to about $4,500. Revenue, including receivables from events and promotions is reinvested into Skorch.
Each month the duo spends 20 hours combined on magazine content with a paid managing editor working 20 to 30 hours. The rest of their time – at least 100 hours a week combined – goes to networking and promotions. Each Skorch issue includes work from 10 to 20 contributors. Some are paid; others get in-kind benefits.
“When they join us, they are also pioneers,” said Woomer, Skorch’s vice president.
She and Kane are seeking investors to bring Skorch to print. They have no prior publishing experience.
Woomer manages art and production and has a background in multi-media art and video production that included hiring and training talent. Kane is the web and advertising manager with a background in marketing, photography and design.
“In the end, we are the media,” said Kane, the company’s president. “We mean business. We mean what we say.”
Online retail meets demand
While the media tends to favor smaller sizes, the majority of American women – 62 percent –wear sizes 12 and up. So advancement of this unique industry requires changing perspectives.
Part of the challenge, Amador said, has been that plus-consumers often thought, “Next month I’ll be smaller,” and waited for someday to spend money on fashion. But lately she and the Skorch publishers are seeing that suppression ignite into a “fashion craving.”
As with the local magazines, the Internet is providing a means to satisfy that craving. Many major retailers offer sizes larger than 14 strictly online. While that limits consumers, their response speaks volumes, according to Michele Weston of MJWStyle Media and SellingStyle Inc. in New York City. She’s the author of “Learning Curves: Living Your Life in Full and With Style.” She’s also worked locally with Venus Imaging and Skorch on past projects.
“This boom in plus-size online retailing has reframed the entire competitive landscape,” Weston told the VBJ via e-mail. Internet retail lets businesses take advantage of viral marketing while making sales with limited capital investment.
Mainstream plus-size retail has often lacked diversity, Weston said. Stock often fails to follow trends and can have “limited and simplistic” shapes, colors and fabrics.
But that’s been changing since the late 1990s, when there were as few as 20 plus-size women’s clothing vendors in the US. Today there are more than 2,000, according to Amador.
“The plus-size woman is choosing to ‘vote with her dollars’ and (is) demanding a shift in the choices,” Weston said. “Some American retailers are seeing sales growth results and are beginning to respond to the curvy consumer, albeit in many cases very tentatively.”
New role models
To help bring about more of that change, Chandra Chase is developing a nonprofit called Reshaping Role Models.
Chase is a plus-size model and the administrative assistant at the Camas-Washougal Chamber of Commerce. She said teens are hard-pressed to find positive larger role models and wants her grassroots organization to pressure mainstream media to use more full-figured models and actors.
Chase plans to develop a base of members that choose which projects their contributions support, and will host outreach events, like a recent fashion show in Camas with Curvy Girl Clothing of Portland. She also wants to financially support larger models and actors who are developing their careers.
The industry is still figuring itself out, particularly when it comes to appealing to plus-size consumers.
“They’ll use size 2/4 models in a catalog that sells to sizes 14 and above,” said Chase.
Not only that, she said, many plus-fashion advertisers and publications focus too much on size, or come at it from a negative angle.
“Women (need) to hear, ‘Feel good about yourself’ instead of ‘do something about yourself,” Amador said of her work with Venus.
Kane agreed, adding that she and Woomer at Skorch are health conscious, but don’t buy the idea that healthy is always tiny. Instead, they want to see more women be authentic to their natural body sizes.
“There is a huge change that needs to happen in the industry and we are part of it,” Kane said.
Charity Thompson can be reached at cthompson@vbjusa.com.
