Nordstrom uses influencers to promote safety, draw shoppers

Wendy Nguyen, a fashionable Instagram personality with 1.1 million followers, is regularly tapped by retailers such as Macy’s and Banana Republic to promote their wares on social media. They typically want her to take a stylish photo in their apparel and enthuse about their brand and any upcoming sale or product line.

But Nguyen recently fielded what she considered an unusual and “very careful” inquiry from Nordstrom. It wanted to gauge her interest in a campaign that would require visiting the company’s seven-story flagship store in New York to highlight Nordstrom’s new safety measures and “encourage people to experience what they built,” she said.

The subsequent Instagram posts from Nguyen and a handful of other influencers were shared in the last two weeks and offer a glimpse into pandemic-era retailing and the ways stores are trying to bring shoppers back in person. The women, clad in trendy clothing and masks, were photographed in unusual and notably spacious parts of the store such as the Nordstrom x Nike sneaker boutique, the so-called personalization studio and a section dubbed the “Beauty Haven.” (There also was one on an escalator.) The posts all praised Nordstrom’s safety measures, such as mandatory masks, abundant hand sanitizer and adherence to social distancing.

Multiple posts mentioned being able to shop “with peace of mind.” One poster urged her followers to “come explore an escape from the city,” while Nguyen, who is known on Instagram as @wendyslookbook, wrote that she hadn’t been out in months and that the visit “was so refreshing.”

“In times of uncertainty, people are going to find the people that they trust the most to provide validation for the things that they’ve loved doing in the past,” said Krishna Subramanian, a founder of the influencer marketing firm Captiv8. He oversaw the Nordstrom campaign and said that other companies are also planning influencer campaigns focused on store safety.

By hiring influencers to highlight safety measures, retailers, especially those that sell apparel and other discretionary goods, are trying to restore a sense of normalcy to activities like in-store shopping that were utterly banal six months ago but now may seem dangerous to many customers. Influencers are offering a reintroduction of sorts with their posts, Subramanian said.