Uniqlo innovates again, using Facebook Likes to spot top fashion

The Japanese fashion brand Uniqlo has often been the center of attention because of its fun and innovative interactive campaigns. One of the first retailers to launch an iPhone app back in 2008, Uniqlo has since found entertaining ways to win over our tweets and status updates via applications like Sportweet, a scoreboard that values your 140 characters as a noble sport, Twitter visualization UTweet and the more practical Lucky Counter that invited consumers to tweet about their favorite products in order to lower a product’s price.

Now Uniqlo strikes back with the mini site Uniqlooks. The Facebook integrated site is basically a fashion community that invites its members to share their personal style by uploading pictures of their favorite looks featuring Uniqlo items. The stylistas will be able to access and organize their looks through a “My Looks” page and the “Likes” they gather will also appear on their Facebook page. The visitors will be able to shop the look simply by clicking on the Uniqlo products of the photo. The looks will be ranked according to the number of Likes, highlighting the most stylish members as “look of the week”, etc. According to Asiajin, the fast fashion retailer plans to introduce an iPhone app for Uniqlooks in mid-March, as well as hold a competition for the most “Liked” look.

The project reminds me of Burberry’s much successful Art Of The Trench that also crowdsourced pictures of fans wearing its signature trench coat. But this campaign really pushes the envelope by adding an e-commerce twist, linking the Uniqlo items on the images to the Uniqlo’s online store, enabling visitors to buy the exact or similar items.

Uniqlo’s Facebook page also has a crowdsourcing spin and chooses a different picture of a fan or Uniqlo employee as a profiled picture every week. As its moto goes: “A Fan page by the fans for the fans”.

Looks like Uniqlo knows how to put an extra S in Style by making it Social. I wonder what’s next in social commerce for the innovative Japanese retailer?