Editor's note: An ex-banker who grew up in a startup city and with entrepreneurial drive gave up the "golden handcuff" - a plush job in the financial sector - to take the plunge in business, harnessing a platform linking top fashion lifestyle brands with key players in the social media scene.

Kim Leitzes is many things - a mother of a 2-year-old, an ex-banker-turned-entrepreneur, a fashionista and, lately, a runway model at Shanghai Fashion Week for a New York label.

However, petite, slender and fresh-faced Leitzes was not cast for her look, but as an inspirational and powerful female businesswoman. She founded ParkLU - a platform linking top fashion lifestyle brands with social media influencers in China to make use of the marketing value of the vigorous social media scene.

With tens of thousands, or even millions, of followers on social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat, influencers are highly engaged personalities with a strong following.

"With the voice and reach they have, they have a lot of opportunities to create cool contents and tell stories in collaboration with brands," she says, adding that ParkLU works at the intersection of brands and influencers.

Leitzes grew up in the startup city of Austin, Texas, and the city's entrepreneurial spirits got under her skin even throughout her successful career in finance.

A graduate of Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Leitzes spent years working on mergers and acquisitions for top fashion retail brands in New York and Los Angeles, and later began investing in retail. At that time, she started traveling to China where she saw vast possibilities.

"I had the good fortune of working for some of the great female leaders. I was inspired and I felt that it was possible for me," she recalls. Eventually, she decided to remove the "golden handcuff" to become an entrepreneur.

Leitzes founded ParkLU in 2011 in Shanghai. She named her venture after Park Avenue in New York that celebrates fashion and style.

ParkLU started as a content site for creating and sharing contents on fashion, shopping, bloggers and other lifestyle topics. However, as she started working with brands for sponsored contents on the site, she was constantly asked two questions: "Do you have a list of bloggers? Do you have someone who can do my social media?"

Leitzes spotted an opportunity in this space and decided to pivot. "When a lot of brands go into the China market, they first focus on the first-tier cities, but then they have to adapt their stories to second- and third-tier cities. That's where grassroots influencers come into play," Leitzes tells China Daily.

For instance, one of the influencers ParkLU works with is Shenzhen-based blogger Magic Yang. Yang is a fashion phenomenon active on multiple platforms, including Weibo, China's biggest microblogging site, where she can easily reach and interact with more than 320,000 of her followers across the country.

Marketers, therefore, see conspicuous value in social media influencers, not only in the size of the audience they're able to reach, but also in dollar value.

On average, an influencer marketing program could yield a return of $6.85 from free publicity, for every dollar spent on paid media, according to a report by New York-based digital advertising agency Burst Media last year.

Good return leaves marketers more bullish in investing in influencer marketing. A survey in March by Minnesota-based Tomoson revealed that six out of 10 marketers planned to increase their influencer marketing budgets in future.

Nevertheless, to tap into the pulse of consumers, marketers need to understand that an influencer with a million followers was not necessarily valuable if the crowd was not relevant to the brand, Leitzes points out.

Using data mining to link brands with the right influencers, ParkLU puts great emphasis on relevancy rather than function merely as a database of the influencers.

Apart from curated and relevant matching, ParkLU analyzes and tracks the campaigns to help brands measure and evaluate the effectiveness.

It also facilitates direct communication between the brand and the influencers, which could be misrepresented, or even lacking, when dealt through an agency.

Using networks with bloggers cultivated through the first few years of ParkLU, Leitzes was off to a solid start. ParkLU released the private beta in July and, by far, the platform has 15 brands on board before its official launch next month. It's also constantly adding new influencers and expects the number to hit 3,000 by the end of the year.

Currently, the company of 11 staff works from both Shanghai that usually houses the China headquarters for international lifestyle brands, and Hong Kong, where they joined the region's leading accelerator blueprint.

Blueprint is a co-working space run by Swire Properties, which took in a second batch of 10 startups for its six-month acceleration program in July.

ParkLU was chosen from hundreds of other applicants "for their market knowledge of Greater China and their concept, which responds to the need for brands to speak to their consumers in a more creative way", says Michelle Buultjens, brand strategy and communications manager at blueprint.

With a growing presence in China, Swire Properties also seeks to leverage ParkLU's insights for its own brands, to engage influencers and bring about personalized awareness of their brands through the expansive reach of the blogger sphere, Buultjens says.

iris@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 10/29/2015 page10)