Online brands are changing how we shop and how fashion news is delivered.Zinkevych/Getty Images/iStockphoto
When Natalie Massenet pioneered the luxury e-commerce space with her site Net-A-Porter in the year 2000, her format was modelled on glossy fashion magazines rather than traditional brick-and-mortar stores. The site featured editorial-style images that wouldn't look out of place in an issue of Vogue alongside shoppable stories about trends, travel and tastemakers. "I think that a successful retailer thinks like an editor, certainly today when you can use the internet to shop, literally, off a page," she said in an interview with Business of Fashion. In the 17 years since Net-a-Porter's launch, its approach has radically changed the way we consume fashion, with e-commerce sites becoming a destination for discovering new designers and trends alongside highly stylized fashion shoots.
For Kate Blythe, global content director at MatchesFashion.com, credible content is crucial for the U.K.-based company to drive traffic and amplify the brand's message. "Customers should never feel that they need to go anywhere else for content whether that's a cultural review of art exhibitions or a vacation report on the best beaches to visit. It is all about offering up every area of content that we believe our customers want to see," she says. This holistic approach is also found at Montreal-based designer e-retailer Ssense, where nine per cent of weekly revenue comes from users who've read an article in the past 30 days.
Joerg Koch, Ssense's Berlin-based editor-in-chief and founder of fashion magazine 032c, says this style of digital product is a natural evolution in a social-media ecosystem that favours what he calls "cultural producers" over companies. "Creating editorial content is about building your brand and having a seat at this global conversation," he says. "Almost no one on Facebook or Twitter will share an ad for clothing or a sweater they want to buy on their feed. But they share articles and videos constantly."
To that end, a full 70 per cent of Ssense's editorial content is unrelated to its merchandise, including recent stories and videos created in collaboration with Nick Knight and Jonathan Anderson and interviews with rapper Playboi Carti and architect Ricardo Bofill. "It's really about bringing voices from across the world and different industries together," says Koch, adding that users spend an average time of 8 minutes and 31 seconds on editorial content versus the average 7 minutes and 8 seconds spent shopping. "We learned early on through data analysis that articles about things like architecture and music perform just as well, and often better, than stories about products in terms of conversion rates because they build loyalty and stimulate intellectual curiosity."
As these online retail voices become more pervasive, print media continues to struggle, with titles such as Nylon shifting to exclusively digital production. Charmaine Gooden, professor of fashion journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto, says that there's a danger of losing the nuanced, in-depth reporting and stylistic creativity found in traditional editorial. "By the very nature of these online sites, they are there to promote their own designers and their own interests." The medium is still the message.
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