Minkoff recently announced she was joining the show solely to promote her brand. She thinks it was a sound decision—and now she has the numbers to prove it.
When Rebecca Minkoff told a reporter recently that her decision to open her life to Bravo’s cameras on Season 15 of The Real Housewives of New York City was a sound strategy for promoting her brand, she ignited a small internet firestorm.
“Some fans’ reactions were like, ‘Ah, how dare she do this for business?’” Minkoff said, laughing, at the Inc. 5000 Conference in Palm Desert, California, on Friday. “I’m like, why would anyone come on this show? For the betterment of society?”
Minkoff founded her eponymous fashion and handbag label in 2005, alongside her startup-veteran brother, Uri Minkoff, in New York City. She’s come to be seen as a retail innovator, driving her brand onto social media early (she says in the early days of Snapchat the platform was a lonely place, just Taco Bell and Rebecca Minkoff) and bringing customer-facing technology into her retail stores. In April 2024, Bravo announced that it would be adding Minkoff to the cast of Season 15 of RHONY.
Minkoff says her decision has already paid off: The publicity associated with the show has already brought a lot of customer exposure, from a significant feature about her in Elle magazine to visibility for the brand and her name through the airing of the show itself.
At the Inc. 5000 Conference, Minkoff seemed eager to bust open the reality-show trope of doing it “for the right reasons”—the right reasons being hazy aside from their diametric opposition to the desire to increase one’s own exposure or, gasp, sell more product. Minkoff is wise to call out the hypocrisy of disguising self-promotion. Heck, more than half of Season 15’s cast are founders. And even going back to the early days of RHONY, entrepreneurship by housewives helped build the franchise and expand its reach, with the rise of Bethenny Frankel’s star hitched both to RHONY and her Skinnygirl Cocktail brand.
“Everyone on here is doing it for business!” Minkoff said. “And then you’re a liar if you’re not admitting that. So I just came out and said it. I said, ‘It’s good for business, it’s good for brand building.’”
Minkoff says the proof is in the search-referral traffic. Her retail website has seen an increase in traffic of more than 40 percent since the show began airing on October 1. “Now we’re getting these new eyeballs,” Minkoff said. But that took a lot of prep work by her and her teams, in terms of social media, styling, and retail planning. She wanted to ensure that any Rebecca Minkoff-designed items she wore on camera or presented as gifts to her RHONY “friends” would be available for purchase months later at an episode’s actual airing.
“I was very thoughtful about what I wore. I tried to wear the season for the show airing now,” Minkoff said. “My bag was on the table in every scene, because you are going to like that bag and buy it, dammit!”
As for her persona on the show–that’s still a work in progress, Minkoff says. “They’ve captured all these things that I’ve said and they’re like, ‘Oh, this is a gold mine! This girl’s very unedited!’” she said, adding that she might become “more edited” in the future.
But Minkoff is not taking her oversharing too seriously, she says: “I don’t know if it’s good for business yet, but it’s definitely fun for the internet to have its headlines.”
