Shopping site Style.com shut down by Condé Nast after only 9 months

Barely nine months after it launched Style.com, Condé Nast has closed the online e-commerce site into which it is said to have invested $100 million. According to a story in the New York Times, visitors to the website are redirected to Farfetch, an online marketplace for high-end boutiques into for which Conde Nast was an early investor.

"The move is a stunning strategic backtrack by the publishing empire,"  [said the Times story] "which first announced a multimillion-dollar rebranding of Style.com, formerly the encyclopedic digital home of all Condé Nast runway coverage, in 2015. It also reflects the current turmoil in the glossy magazine industry, which has struggled to adapt to the digital age. 

“Our experience with Style.com taught us that content is a powerful driver of commerce, and the combination of great editorial with a great shopping experience creates a great user experience and revenue upside,” said Matt Starker, the general manager of digital strategy at Condé Nast. He acknowledged, however, that the skill sets required to create content and those required to run a seamless shopping site were different.

Lucky magazine becomes even more about e-shopping

When Lucky magazine launched in December 2000, it was such a fresh, original idea that the magazine soared in sales and circulation. The idea was simple: shopping was a recreation for its target audience and the combination of editorial and shopping would be (and was) irresistible. A magazine unabashedly about shopping.

It went quickly from 500,000 to more than 1.1 million circulation. Lucky was the Magazine of the Year in Advertising Age in 2003. 

It contained a sheet of "Yes" and "Maybe" stickers that readers could use to bookmark items that interested them. The focus of the magazine was to be a helpful friend to sometimes clueless shoppers who didn't know what skirt went with what top, where to buy it and what colours and styles suited them. For a good while, the Lucky formula gave it an edge in the crowded women's and fashion category.  

So successful was the idea that Rogers Publishing in 2004 launched LouLou in both French and English as a virtual Canadian clone. 

Like many hot ideas, Lucky has cooled down and the most recent evidence of this is that publisher Condé Nast has just announced its spin off into a new, joint venture with e-commerce platform BeachMint. Called The Lucky Group, it is thereby turning into a new, online shopping destination targetted at BeachMint's 8-million fashion-focussed subscribers. According to a story in Minonline (MIN). 

This decision to join Lucky’s print and digital assets with a shopping outlet is likely step one in either taking Lucky wholly digital or shutting it down completely, though nothing has been confirmed yet.

Lucky has been losing ground with advertisers. In the past year, total ad pages dropped 34.3% and in August alone, 9.8%. 

Condé Nast strikes deal to offer print and digital magazine subscriptions through Amazon

Condé Nast has struck a deal with Amazon to have the online retailer handle print and digital subscriptions for such titles as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Wired. According to a Reuters story, this is the first time a publisher has collaborated with Amazon in this way, simplifying its subscription process whereby consumers can subscribe, manage and renew using their Amazon account. The arrangement is not exclusive; subscribers may continue to go directly to Conde Nast or use other partners such as Apple and its Newsstand. But it also exposes these big, glossy magazines to new potential customers among Amazon's worldwide 200 million customers.

"We are using the partnership with Amazon to make purchasing and renewing subscriptions as easy as humanly possible," said Bob Sauerberg, president of Condé Nast  in an interview last Wednesday. "We want to go from selling print subscriptions to selling access to all our content."

“Combining Condé Nast's must-have content with Amazon's 1-Click shopping platform is a huge win," said Sauerberg [in a company release] “Our influential and loyal customers want to be the first to know, purchase and share, which is why we wanted to be the first to develop a service like 'All Access' with Amazon, the world’s most trusted and proven e-commerce platform.”

 Digital subscriptions will be made available on various mobile platform, including the iPad, Android and Kindle.

"Condé Nast will offer introductory bundled rates for $6 or less for six months for both print and digital versions of Vogue, Glamour, Bon Appetit, Lucky, Golf Digest, Vanity Fair and Wired," said the Reuters story. "It plans to roll out its other 11 consumer titles including the New Yorker later in the year. 

"Magazines have real deep value in both formats," said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content at Amazon. "A lot of consumers want to keep one foot in both camps."

Quote, unquote: Would you like editorial with that?

"Publishers today say consumers want more from them than ink on paper, and the desire to deepen their ties with readers, along with the revenue opportunity, is spurring their move toward web commerce. Meanwhile web retailers understand that consumers like having an editorial voice they can trust to help them interpret trends when they shop. " 

-- from an article in Internet Retailer magazine about the e-commerce strategy of Better Homes and Gardens. 

Quote, unquote: On publishers' struggle to make e-tailing pay

"Understanding editorial and merchandising curation is not the same. Most of these media companies don’t have a single merchandiser in the building.”

-- Ben Lerer, the co-founder of Thrillist, talking about how difficult traditional media companies are finding it to get into e-commerce; they don't want to take risks, he says in a story in Adweek.