How to Blend Content and Commerce with Semaine

Michelle Lu and Georgina Harding are the co-founders of Semaine, an immersive e-commerce platform that thrusts the role of ‘influencer’ front and centre. The content-led experience allows customers to shop not just ‘the look’ but the entire lifestyle of figures both inspirational and aspirational from around the world.

Blame it on living and working in the east end of London if you will, but finding oneself face to face with the founder(s) of a new digital startup feels like an increasingly common occurrence. Inevitably, there's an awkward moment when they attempt to distil their USP and business model down into an elevator pitch of sorts, often failing to illuminate what makes their idea so special. Michelle Lu and Georgina Harding, the founders of Semaine, suffer from no such lack of clarity when it comes to their own ascendent business. From the moment we begin talking, their ideas are searingly clear and thoughtful enough to make you genuinely want to hear more; their relationship is so finely honed that their ability to bounce off one another’s train of thoughts is almost uncanny.

We felt like the customer wanted more, they didn’t only want to see an image on a page, or even in moving content, they wanted to understand who you are in the world This is no doubt partly down to the fact that they spent almost two years carefully perfecting their idea, before launching Semainein September of 2015. Their ‘eureka’ moment came about while both working for Mario Testino’s creative agency, as his creative travelling producer (Michelle) and as a trend forecaster (Georgina). “We were creating these amazing aspirational worlds for the likes of Vogue, numerous fashion brands…” says Michelle, before Georgina takes over: “…but something was getting lost between creating these immersive worlds and then distilling them all the way down to, say, one billboard shot.” Michelle concludes, “We really felt like the customer wanted more, they didn’t only want to see an image on a page, or even in moving content, they wanted to understand who you are in the world.”

The ambiguous ‘you’ would ultimately become the Semaine weekly influencer, (or ‘tastemaker’ to use their in-house parlance), icons drawn from an eclectic but prescient field that to date has included the likes of Quentin Jones and Jemima Kirke; Carlos Motta and Skye Gyngell. The ‘world’ of these Michelin-starred chefs and infamous actresses is then manifested in fully shoppable form: from the art that adorns their walls, to the places they love to visit, right down to the brand of cigarettes they smoke. “For it to be truly ‘lifestyle,’ we had to [take that shop-the-look idea and make it] not only about fashion, but about art, music, the experience…” says Michelle. This is also where the emphasis on noticeably high quality, original content comes in to play, setting Semaine apart from other more cynically enacted content-driven e-commerce platforms. Every seven days, with stubborn (and somewhat miraculous) regularity they launch their latest tastemaker selection with irreverent yet slickly produced video and image-led content, alongside an in-depth written profile on that week’s subject.

The pair acknowledge that, in 2016 at least, content-driven commerce might not necessarily be ‘super-pioneering,’ and there’s a slight, understandable sense of frustration at the time it took for Semaine to come to market. Georgina half-jokes: “The fact that we were relatively young and slightly naive was one of our biggest assets in a way, because if you were to know just how hard it’s going to be then, well, most people just wouldn’t do it.” Looking around at their Shoreditch office though, where brightly coloured boards stuffed with schedules and ideas form a backdrop to the small, driven team they have assembled, Georgina continues in earnest. “It’s the people around us that have been the most amazing thing, and that is an important part of our journey. Yes, it’s Michelle and I, but it’s also the people - the people who believe in you from the beginning, the people who surprise you, the people that will just help you out no questions asked.

The idea of content and commerce coming together has been a term thrown around the [fashion] industry for years. Everyone wanted to figure out how to create rich content, but also: how can we sell at the same time?

“People ‘got it’ as soon as we started talking about it,” says Michelle when the subject of raising investment comes up. “The idea of content and commerce coming together has been a term thrown around the [fashion] industry for years. Everyone wanted to figure out how to create rich content, but also: how can we sell at the same time?” Finding investors who understood the idea on a conceptual level wasn’t an issue, but finding those who understood the challenges and costs involved in actually producing rich, engaging content in a format that could be monetised proved slightly more challenging.

After "a long journey" as Michelle puts it, Semaine is in the enviable position of being able to build richly-realised worlds on their own uncompromising terms, where everything that goes into those worlds (and subsequently out into the wider one) is a considered choice - right down to choosing specific fonts for each new tastemaker. The end result drives straight to the heart of resonant shopping for the millennial generation, and in this respect both founders are keen to stress the importance of context in any transactional decision-making. We’re an incredibly spoilt generation, and I think that we became pretty obsessed with the fact that you could buy everything for a while. [Now though] we’re becoming a lot more meaningful, everyone is becoming more conscious.” Georgina gets to the crux of it: “Because we can have everything, we need to know why we want it. What we’re doing at Semaine is creating the context so that they can understand the reason."

We’d love to create this mutually beneficial community for everyone, where nobody is getting ripped off

The more we explore this idea over the course of our conversation, the more apparent it becomes that what we’re talking about is authenticity. It’s a concept that is more often applied to brands and products with a strong (often artisanal or pastoral) heritage behind them in an effort to elevate them above the fast-fashion and disposable commodities that we have become increasingly numb to. In the case of Semaine however, authenticity comes to be defined by both the subjectivity and undeniable truth of an individual’s story, made real (and viable from a business point of view) by the commercial reaction to it. When Georgina talks about “transacting at the point of inspiration,” it sounds less like the meaningless catchphrase of some anonymous LinkedIn post and more like the genuine, inevitable conclusion to the content they bring to life each week.

Whilst there is undoubtedly a singular, entrepreneurial mindset shared by Michelle and Georgina, it is refreshing (and somewhat surprising) to hear that their plans for the future are imbued with a desire for democratisation. They talk passionately about all the tiny brands and stores they’ve boosted via their affiliate shopping set-up and how they’d love to bring more exposure to these increasingly marginalised independents. Georgina describes it as an ‘ecosystem’ and Michelle agrees: “It’s really true. We’d love to create this mutually beneficial community for everyone, where nobody is getting ripped off.” At this point they themselves begin to echo the chief quality that they look for in their own Semaine tastemakers: have they been disruptive in their industry, whatever that industry might be? Michelle and Georgie both pale at the mention of the ‘D’ word, however. “‘Disrupt’ is a good word but it bears a heavy weight nowadays…” She thinks about it for a second before settling on an alternative that better fits their ethos: “…At Semaine we don’t want to disrupt, we want to surprise and delight!”