Bluefly comes to Bravo with 'Closet Confessions'

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Bluefly Inc, the e-commerce fashion site, is bringing its online reality series 'Closet Confessions' to Bravo TV, 45 seconds at a time, hoping to create extra brand awareness with shoppers in advance of the holidays.

Closet Confessions, which launched this spring on Bluefly.com, is a roughly two-minute look inside celebrities' closets and does not itself endorse specific product to sell.

"It really is a piece of entertainment in an ad slot," said Bluefly chief marketing officer Bradford Matson. "We resisted saying, 'You can get all this at Bluefly', because that's not the point."

The series of 45-second ads, which began airing on Bravo Tuesday and will continue this fall and spring, feature celebrities such as socialite Nicky Hilton, figure skater Johnny Weir and "Real Housewives of New York" star Bethenny Frankel.

Bluefly, which sells designer fashions on its website at a discount and says it was the first online fashion site to include a style blog, still focuses on new marketing to appeal to fashion-hounds.

Most famously, the company partnered with Bravo's "Project Runway," allowing contestants of that fashion designer competition to use a Bluefly accessories wall.

The company also ran television ads beginning in 2006 that featured a woman with no clothes on lamenting the fact that she had nothing in her closet to wear.

Matson declined to disclose the cost of the advertising with Bravo, but said the Closet Confessions ads represent the bulk of the company's offline marketing.

Previous television ads have corresponded to spikes in Bluefly.com page views, he said.

"The reason we like television is we can measure the impact of television better than we can print," Matson said.

Last month, Bluefly posted a 4 percent rise in revenue to $20.5 million and turned to an operating loss of $669,000 from year-ago income of $161,000.

It said then that online and offline marketing expense would increase by $1.1 million from the prior year.