Vinted, a peer-to-peer marketplace to sell, buy and swap vintage clothing, found Mobilize while on a quest to empower and scale their brand ambassador program.
According to Ro Hensley, Community Ambassador of Vinted, Mobilize has helped Vinted create a movement full of loyal users known as “Vintees” in a brand ambassador program that has grown organically from thousands to millions.
Story snapshot:
- Vinted saw the value in ambassador programs.
- As the brand ambassador program grew, effective communication became more difficult.
- Ro, the Community Ambassador for Vinted, found Mobilize and discovered innovative tools and communication workflows that engaged her ambassadors.
- Since then, ambassadors have made a huge impact on Vinted – increasing the company’s number of active monthly users in the U.S. from 19,000 to 2.2 million.
Meet Ro Hensley.
Ro Hensley says she always had a passion for community, but it wasn’t until Vinted that her passion became her career. “Community is so much more personal – that is what took me out of the general marketing space.” she explains. “Now it’s the people who are behind this brand and make the product possible which I find fascinating and exciting.” While Ro consulted for Vinted, she quickly realized the brand had budding communities waiting to be found. Vinted already had a large global presence; her task was to bring it the United States. “It was really clear to me that we have the members that have the drive.” explains Ro. ”We just needed to set down some basics so that they could understand what the path was to accomplishing their goals.” Shortly after realizing the opportunity within the Vinted community, Ro made the switch to her full-time role – Community Ambassador.
Her Challenge:
Ro found it difficult, however, to scale in the beginning stages of growth. Emails got lost, messages between ambassadors didn’t flow as smoothly as she wanted & she found it challenging to establish routine communication.
“Email threads with community members were crazy. Some ‘Replied All’ and some didn’t ‘Reply All,’ when they needed to. It was just pure chaos.” she explains. “When you have larger scale programs, that workflow just does not work. Even if you have only 20 bloggers that you need to coordinate with – and the next thing you know at the end of the day you have 300 emails while trying to make this or that happen – it was impossible.” This chaotic approach to communications, Ro felt, held the group back from reaching its full potential.
Then She Found Mobilize.
Mobilize put an end to Ro’s challenges with scaling the ambassador program, streamlining emails, and managing internal communications.
“When we got Mobilize—it not only let me send out the information to all the people who needed to get it—but if there was some situation where a member was working with another team that was outside of the community team on a project like beta testing, for example, it always allowed them a spot where they can go and get an update,” she says.
Mobilize helped Ro organize and connect with the right people to give the ambassador program more structure. She found that after using Mobilize she had more time in her day to focus on strategizing—not wasting hours on emailing.
“The biggest thing for me is being able to communicate with everyone in one spot at one time. No longer did I have to spend seven hours of my day just responding to emails, and that was a huge game-changer for me. Planning just happened more seamlessly when I moved up to Mobilize.”
Results & Impact
Since she’s worked at Vinted, she successfully launched the first U.S. ambassador program – which became a network of 300 people. As a result of the ambassador program, the number of monthly Vinted users in the U.S. has grown from 19,000 in 2013 to 2.2 million today.
An average user spends 45 minutes browsing Vinted a day, 29 days each month.
“Every community can be gauged a little bit differently. But for us we found what really makes sense to determine whether an ambassador program is working is active users and the average time on site.” she explains. “It really shows us what stickiness is there.”
Mobilize has also helped Ro empower ambassadors to create their own community projects – such as launching a Vinted magazine.
“That community magazine wouldn’t have been possible without Mobilize. All of the girls used Mobilize in private messages to coordinate the entire thing.” she says. One of the great things with the magazine collaboration in the Mobilize group was that there was a file uploading option. So we were able to upload all of the InDesign-ed files right there.”