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In a pairing made in teenage-girls-are-our-primary-demographic heaven, Wanelo CEO Deena Varshavskaya has joined the board of directors of the publicly traded clothing company Wet Seal.
It’s part of a larger tech infusion for Wet Seal, which also appointed DoSomething.org CEO Nancy Lublin (a speaker at last year’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference) and investor Adam Rothstein to its board.
Wet Seal, which has 480 stores, recently revamped its website but still only has six percent of its total business online. Meanwhile, it has 218,000 followers on the social shopping community Wanelo, who have added 61,000 Wet Seal products, each of which are saved an average of 281 times. Wanelo is now Wet Seal’s second-biggest social network referrer, after Facebook.
Wet Seal CEO John Goodman said in an interview that his company is trying to better address the 16-year-old girls who shop at Wet Seal by meeting them where they already live — mostly on their phones. The company is one of the early brands to experiment with Snapchat, and it wants to also address “pre-shopping” (a.k.a. online research) and co-creating (a.k.a. having customers contribute to clothing design).
“From our perspective, we’re a platform for retailers,” Varshavskaya said of the board appointment, which is her first outside of her own. “It’s a really great opportunity to contribute to a company that could benefit from this technology.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
