The curation opportunity

In systems theory, a balancing feedback loop can be found wherever two mechanisms compensate each other. The classic example is a thermostat: when the temperature in the room drops below or above a certain level, your thermostat kicks in and brings the temperature back to your desired target.

Balancing feedback loops can be found everywhere, and retail is no exception.

Curation is a simple form of balancing loop: as the number of options increases in a given category, a new role emerges—the Curator. The Curator’s job is to act as a tastemaker, helping the best brands rise to the surface while everyone else falls to the bottom—at least in theory. They are the not-so-unsung heroes of this economy of overabundance, endless choice, and monopolistic competition.

The first generation of curators were macro-influencers—the Chiara Ferragni and Huda Kattan of the world, who more often than not ended up launching their own brands. With their glamorous lifestyles, millions of followers, and executive assistants, they were uniquely positioned to capitalize on the arbitrage era of DTC. For brands, this was just another marketing channel. For consumers, a mono-directional consumption opportunity.

Then came the micro-influencers. With a much smaller audience, micro-influencers can afford a more unique, authentic perspective. The net result is that while they have a smaller reach, many have much higher engagement. It turns out people would rather engage with people than semi-gods.

Brands quickly caught up to this shift: any respectable influencer marketing practitioner today will tell you not to bother with the behemoths—that is unless you’re a behemoth yourself. Instead, focus on influencers that are… well, influential, among your target audience.

What I’d like to theorize today is this: technology is enabling a new type of curator to slowly but surely enter the scene, one that didn’t even want to be a curator to begin with.

Here’s another interesting concept from systems theory: no matter how accurately you try to represent a system, your model will always remain just that—a model. It will never be an entirely accurate depiction of reality. For curators, this means that no matter how deeply connected you are to the consumer, you will never be able to account for the diversity in backgrounds, opinions, body shapes, skin conditions, and ESG stances.

But you know who can? The consumers themselves.

What if we inverted the pyramid? What if, rather than a single influencer broadcasting their opinions and recommendations to millions of consumers, a single consumer could tap into the collective brain of millions of others just like them? Combining so many data points would make for a formidable curation experience, one that can be almost perfectly tailored to every individual.

This might seem outlandish, but it’s nothing new: user reviews have been part of every e-commerce experience since the beginning of time. But reviews, especially in the DTC world, present a few challenges:

• When given the opportunity, many brands will choose to remove overly critical reviews, or at least make them very hard to find. This might improve conversion rates but makes for a subpar customer experience.
• Most reviews are unstructured, which makes it hard to find the reviews that are relevant for me and compare multiple brands across standardized criteria.
• Reviews typically live on a brand’s website—unless I’m buying from a marketplace, in which case they still only live on the PDP. There’s no way to tap into consumer knowledge as a standalone data source—it’s always restricted to a very narrow context.

As a byproduct of the above, reviews can’t be used as a curation engine. They’re a good way to evaluate a brand or product I’ve already stumbled upon but not a good way to discover that brand or product in the first place.

Thingtesting was the first company that tried to solve this problem, essentially by creating the Yelp of DTC. The problem with Thingtesting is that it only leverages its own dataset, and because the average consumer doesn’t know or care about Thingtesting, the platform turned into a niche discovery experience for DTC-aholics.

What’s more, Thingtesting does a poor job of surfacing meaningful from their reviews. A glance at Away’s Thingtesting page tells me that the brand has 962 reviews—an abysmal amount considering their popularity—most of which are positive. It tells me nothing about what people like about their luggage or which suitcase is best for frequent intercontinental travel. This isn’t curation—it’s glorified data entry.

Sourcerie, a recent discovery that we have featured in the latest issue of The Outsights, is a different beast. When I sign up, I go through an onboarding flow that asks me about my ethnicity, age, gender, and skin conditions. After completing the process, I get a list of products curated specifically for me, along with a handy compatibility percentage for each. I open the top recommendation—a 100% match—and it tells me why it’s been selected and highlights the reviews that are most relevant to me.

The whole experience feels like I’ve asked Deep Thought* to be my personal shopping assistant. I wonder what the average conversion rate is on Sourcerie—you can buy from within the platform—but I suspect it’s nothing to scoff at.

Of course, Sourcerie can afford to be so sophisticated because it’s focused on a specific category—beauty and wellness—and they’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time optimizing the shopping experience for that audience. But it’s not so wild to imagine Sourcerie expanding into other verticals and becoming the ultimate brand and product discovery experience. I also expect other similar platforms to emerge very soon—if they haven’t already.

So what’s the next step in this journey?

Wherever new interactions are enabled, economic opportunity soon follows. Platforms like Sourcerie are bound to create immense value. With the brands, Sourcerie is already positioning itself as a source of invaluable consumer intelligence. At some point, some of this value will have to start flowing into the pockets of the consumer-curators—after all, they’re the ones doing the actual heavy lifting.

Modern attribution technology makes it feasible to draw a line between curator activity and brand performance (impressions, conversions, you name it) and to split it fairly among all participants in the ecosystem, especially in a closed-loop engine such as Sourcerie. Anonymity would be the added benefit in this scenario—something impossible with influencers today.

Economic, social, and technical advancements could soon lead to an entirely new layer in the DTC economy—one that’s made of consumer-curators, the brands they’re discovering and talking about, and tech-enabled platforms that enable that value exchange.

A few years down the road, there’s a tangible opportunity for consumers to become true co-creators of their universe, pooling their knowledge, experience, and opinions to become the ultimate tastemakers.

(*) If you don’t know what Deep Thought is, look it up. Also, I’m sorry for you.