• by Christine Champagne , February 2, 2009

HoneyShed oozes into online shopping By Christine Champagne

After tons of buzz and a lengthy beta run, honeyshed.com officially opened for business last November. An independent venture backed by Publicis Groupe, Droga5 and production company Smuggler, the site employs hundreds of videos ranging in tone from silly to sexy to very sexy to sell cool products ranging from Shu Uemura false eyelashes to Puma sneakers designed by Alexander McQueen to a Volvo c30. (Wait, since when are Volvos cool?)

Aimed at 17- to 27-year-olds and widely touted as "MTC meets QVC" when it was announced, HoneyShed, which makes shopping an actively social experience, has gone through a lot of changes from beta to launch: It now has a slicker look, simplified navigation, a search function, reviews capability and more product channels, including one hawking the wares of up-and-coming designers and artists. This section is important in that it gives HoneyShed street cred, says the company's CEO Steve Greifer, noting, "It can't be just all major, brand-name products. One of the promises of HoneyShed is that we are tastemakers and curators. We find cool stuff."

Additionally, HoneyShed, initially envisioned as a site-centric enterprise, now distributes its videos across the Glam Media and Heavy networks, among other sites. "I think maybe we were being ignorant to think it could all be self-contained," concedes Droga5 founder-creative chairman David Droga.

Self-contained or not, are folks going to spend money on HoneyShed right now? Yes, according to Droga, who contends that while luxury purchases might suffer, young people will spend their disposable income on extras like new shoes. "Fortunately, they don't have mortgages yet," he notes.

And now on to the big question: Will the mortgage-free members of the Net Generation make HoneyShed the next big thing - or the next big flop? omma invited David Title, director of new media at Crossroads Films, and Heidi Skinner, director of emerging media at Critical Mass, which happens to count qvc, the granddaddy of home shopping, as a client, to enter the hive and share their thoughts. We also sought the opinions of perhaps the ultimate authority - a 19-year-old college student and avid online shopper named Amanda, who hails from New York and attends school in Boston.


OMMA: Does HoneyShed succeed in - as it says on the site - "reinventing shopping for the digital generation"?

Title: I guess we'll see. It certainly looks really pretty and seems to function, which is nice because with a lot of launches things don't work.... but it is so light on content right now that it still feels like a beta site.

Skinner: I appreciate a lot of the improvements made since it was in beta, and how can you not love some of the best practices they employed around social media and sharing? But really those types of pieces of content are so niche, and shoppers are ultimately still looking for that Amazon-like experience - some additional content that speaks to you and how you want to use specific products. That's something that could be layered on.

OMMA: Amanda, would you shop at HoneyShed?

Amanda: Honestly, not me particularly. It's kind of like a giant Web site of infomercials mixed with MTV. But they don't really list anything about all the products. They just kind of tell it to you. I'd rather just go to Amazon and read the description for myself. I hate to say it, but no one, especially college students, is going to sit there watching videos trying to figure out if they are going to buy a product or not.

OMMA: What did you think of the videos? Do they do a good job of selling the products?

Title: Everyone who is appearing in the videos has some personality and I think they're all appealing in their own way. I think they are cast well, but why would I sit through a two-minute ad? I Tivo through them on television.

OMMA: The site has been criticized for the way women are portrayed. Did you find anything offensive?

Amanda: Yeah, there was an advertisement on there for a woman's T-shirt. The video for it was these three girls wearing the T-shirt and licking ice cream cones, and at the end they were like, "Ice cream is just so innocent, but not to guys," and they're sitting there licking the cones, and they're like, "Guys' minds wander everywhere!" And I was just like, Oh my God. It was cheesy and a little bit trashy at the same time. I thought, Are you really trying to sell this to girls? because it isn't going to work.

Skinner: When I looked at the makeup, there were two girls on a couch, and the way that one girl was positioning herself to help the other girl apply makeup to her eye was very uncomfortable to me. I have nothing against being a lesbian, but that isn't speaking to me. I feel like the women who are selling the products have been trained to act this way. It's not coming naturally to them. It feels calculated, and it doesn't resonate with me as a woman shopper.

OMMA: There are social components to the site. For instance, you can post your shopping cart, called a Stash on HoneyShed, on sites like Facebook and MySpace so everyone can see what you covet.

Amanda: That's kind of cool that you can post it on Facebook because everyone has a Facebook page, and if friends don't know what to get you, then it's right there.

Skinner: Portability in this context is key, and that's one thing that they've done well.

OMMA: So what do you make of HoneyShed overall?

Skinner: I really wanted it to work. I love it when things shake up current models, but I just don't feel like this hit the mark. They're positioning themselves as, "This is the newest, most cutting-edge way to shop!" But they really didn't employ things for video shopping that could have been a differentiator like hot spotting in the videos.

Title: I wish them luck. If they can figure it out, that's great. But I just don't know who shops this way.

Amanda: When I'm going to buy something, it's not about the look of the Web site or anything like that. It's about what I'm buying. Anything straightforward and easy to follow is better than something that's trying to be hip and cool.