The Downfall of Dote: Where is the Multi-Million Dollar Influencer Focused, Shopping App Now?

Dote Shopping App

In 2014, Lauren Farleigh, CEO, and founder of Dote officially launched her company. Farleigh gained experience in mobile technology as a Bain consultant and at the mobile games studio Pocket Gems before creating Dote, a shopping app. The app began with a six-month process of Farleigh developing it, bringing on a team of talented engineers, designers, and creatives who provided her with fresh perspectives. Looking back on her journey of launching Dote, Farleigh prides herself in hiring thoughtful people that helped Dote become the company it once was, attributing the team to be one that values inclusiveness, positivity, and open communication. “A diversity of opinions and perspectives leads to the best decision making and we have a very diverse team,” says Farleigh. However, it seemed like this was not the case during the final months of Dote as a company. Farleigh had Gwyneth Paltrow as an advisor for Dote and others such as Will.i.am, Jessica Alba, Gary Vaynerchuk, sharing their expertise and advice. All things pointed to a promising future for the company.

Dote was designed “as a destination for Gen Z shoppers to discover, save and shop styles from their favorite brands, including Asos, Brandy Melville, Zara, Urban Outfitters, and Princess Polly.” The Dote app hosted 150 retailers on its platform. Not only did the public seem to love Dote, with the average user returning to the app 15 times per month, but investors also seemed to have faith in it as well, with the company acquiring $23 million in funding since its launch. They not only believed in the platform they believed in the vision. On top of Dote preaching inclusiveness within the workplace, they also promoted it as the vision for its consumers, which eventually led to their downfall.

Message Doesn’t Match the Actions

From the beginning of Dote's existence, the company’s marketing efforts have been targeted at Generation Z. They used some of the biggest influencers that catered to this generation to cultivate their brand identity. The company would use these influencers in social media posts, incentivize them to create their own content both on the app and on their own social media platforms, and take them on influencer trips to build this culture around their brand. They took these young influencers to Fiji, the Coachella Music Festival, and a multitude of other destinations. Dote quickly gained popularity from the exposure in utilizing these influencers that catered to millions of young girls in their target demographic. However this popularity came with adhering to the demands of the generation, diversity being one of them. Because Dote prided itself on inclusiveness and diversity from the very beginning they were expected to meet these requests with ease.

Although Dote began to incorporate more young women of color in their social media content and eventually influencer trips, the disconnect was soon revealed to the public. The minority influencers that were invited on these Dote trips began revealing their experiences and how they greatly differed from that of the white influencers who were invited. One influencer, in particular, Kianna Naomi, spoke about the company’s photographers not wanting to take photos of her on an influencer trip to Fiji while the other non-minority influencers were being constantly photographed on the trip. Naomi went on to say that Dote would circulate the few photos that she did take on the trip for the sake of diversity, hinting at the tokenism Dote uses to be deemed acceptable in today’s society. This was back when Naomi was the only woman of color who was invited to these dote influencer trips. Although this altercation occurred in August 2018, the public exposure of Dote’s ethical issue of discrimination took off in April 2019.

For Coachella 2019, Dote decided to invite a group of influencers, yet again, to promote the ‘dote lifestyle’. This time, however, they adhered to the customer’s request to have more diversity, including about six women of color. Although this seemed like a step in the right direction for the company, it was what unraveled their tokenism and surface-level diversity. On April 19, 2020, one of their invited influencers, Danielle Perkins, posted their Coachella vlog which unintentionally began to reveal Dote’s discrimination and mistreatment of minority influencers. Perkins had a portion of the vlog when she spoke about the conditions of the house that all the girls stayed during the trips in which it was revealed that it was obviously segregated in a way that every minority girl was on one side of the house and had couches to sleep on and all of the non-minority influencers were on the other. Whether intentional or not, this was enough for many customers to stop supporting the app. Shortly after Perkins’ video was uploaded many of the other women of color who were invited on these Dote trips began to speak about their own experiences, slowly painting the picture that this was not a one-off experience and that Dote had a discrimination problem. Another influencer, Penny Tovar, commented on one of the girls’ videos about the Coachella trip pointing out her own experience with dote being one of the two women of color on the trip. Tovar wrote, “Our room was an office in the attic while everyone else had gorgeous victorian bedrooms. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, but seeing this… There is a problem.”

There was no hiding it, Dote had a racism problem, and the generation that they depended on widely stopped supporting them. People began speaking about their discrimination across social media and making YouTube videos about it, reassuring the voices of the girls who had been mistreated. Although Dote was given accolades for having a distinctive approach to strategy, informed by theories of culture, society, and politics. They failed to rectify their standing with generation Z, whose moral expectations are higher than most for modern companies. The crowd culture that Dote was dependent on went hand in hand with the fallback they encountered after the ethical dilemma was exposed.

The Dote Response

After the Coachella trip riddled with problems and backlash encountered thereafter, Dote CEO, Lauren Farleigh posted a statement saying, “There is no excuse for anyone in our community — whether on the app or on a trip — to feel excluded or undervalued. We’re devastated to hear that girls on one of our trips felt that they were treated differently because of their race…It’s clear we should have done more to ensure the environment represented who we are and what we believe and for that, I’m extremely sorry…We are committed to doing better.”

This statement, however, came after a string of missteps by the company. The company’s first response to the girls sharing their experience was to deny. “To address the rumors about a recent Dote trip, the claim that one side of the house was designated to women of color is simply untrue,” the company stated. “Young women of all backgrounds were assigned to rooms throughout the house and everyone had beds to sleep in.” This went poorly for the company because the video blogs uploaded by the invited influencers clearly showed the sleeping arrangements. The claim from the company that it was happenstance and purely incidental also began to unravel when more influencers of color told their experiences with Dote and the influencers on the Coachella trip revealed that they would take photos of all the minority girls and then separate photos of all the white girls.

This was when Dote began to attempt to completely switch their response to the situation. “We let logistical challenges of coordinating trips distract us from what we should have been focused on: realizing our vision of facilitating experiences where young women of all backgrounds feel included and comfortable expressing themselves,” a spokesperson said. Shortly after, Dote posted on Instagram promising to improve diversity. They began to post photos from their archive that had women of color in it. Dote even went so far as to have a small trip for ‘non-influencers’ that included more diversity and women of color from all backgrounds. However, the damage was already done and people were not buying it. Their social media was filled with people critiquing their ways in the comment section. Customers stopped using their platform and the influencers that they once relied on to keep bringing their product to new audiences were no longer backing them. Their brand identity was no more.

The Affect

When Dote began losing their support, people also began to express their distaste for CEO Lauren Farleigh even amidst their attempts to fix diversity, others claimed that she had a disregard for it and did not have much to say. The team and investors behind Dote slowly began to go quiet until Dote suddenly announced that their app would no longer support IOS and the company deleted their Instagram account, then ghosted their customers, ending their time as a company.

How It Could’ve Gone

The first mistake Dote made was denying the situation occurred. Because their target has much more respect and trust in the influencers as opposed to the company itself, they automatically burned a bridge by denying. I believe that the appropriate next step would have been reaching out to the influencers and apologizing directly and asking them how Dote would be able to reconcile the situation. This should be followed by an effort to publicly acknowledge where they went wrong and what they will do to prevent this from happening.

The second thing that Dote did wrong was deleting some of the photos of the white women on their Instagram and immediately posting from their archive of photos of women of color from their past events/trips to make their social media seem more diverse. This only validated people’s claims of tokenism and surface-level diversity. Efforts to immediately rectify an ethical issue like racism seem forced and will not be well received.

A more appropriate response would have been one: to acknowledge all the girls’ videos and reach out to them to see if they would be willing to have an open honest conversation with them for their viewers so they could continue the conversation of racism in the influencer world and fashion industry. This way people see how the affected party is responding to the situation and the company can be publicly held accountable in the eyes of their target audience. Or two: that the company hires women of color to oversee these trips or even a new CEO who is a woman of color that then holds sessions for the customers to explain what they would like to see change. Different leadership would have changed the public response because in consumers' minds, same team, same old ways.

In The End

The way Dote responded clearly led to the company’s downfall and the public disdain. Generation Z was not looking for surface-level changes and the consumer departure made sure of this. Dote was the perfect example of the new generation's expectations of companies or public figures to either evolve or be left behind. It is assumed that this is what also caused the team and investors to back away from the company because a clear message was not delivered to the stakeholders of the company.

References

Powers, D. (2018, January 26). “Where you start doesn’t matter.” by Lauren Farleigh of Dote Shopping. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from Medium website: https://medium.com/the-hum/where-you-start-doesnt-matter-6e2d7735ed7a

Dote, a promising Gen-Z shopping app, is ghosting its users, influencers and brands — Glossy. (2020, March 2). Retrieved November 16, 2020, from Glossy website: https://www.glossy.co/fashion/dote-a-promising-gen-z-shopping-app-is-ghosting-its-users-influencers-and-brands/#:~:text=Launched%20in%202014%20by%20Lauren,housing%20150%20retailers%20in%2Dapp.

‌Zoellner, D. (2019, May 15). YouTuber accuses fashion app of racism on Fiji brand trip that Olivia Jade infamously took. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from Mail Online website: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7032805/YouTuber-accuses-fashion-app-racism-Fiji-brand-trip-Olivia-Jade-infamously-took.html

Perkins, D. (2019). the truth about Coachella ft. mental breakdown [YouTube Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-dlcP2mZOE

‌Vereena. (2019). Diversity on Youtube (there is none) [YouTube Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0C9CoTNEAY

Chen, T. (2019, May 10). YouTubers Of Color Are Accusing Fashion App Dote Of Segregating Them From White Influencers On A Coachella Trip. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from BuzzFeed News website: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/youtubers-accusing-fashion-brand-dote-of-segregating