Style.com’s Failure and What Condé Nast Should Have Done Instead

I am the founder of Wheretoget, a fashion platform that bridges the gap between inspiration and commerce. I have been working in this sector for nearly 10 years now, and my experiences began with Hypeed (which I have since sold), an online fashion magazine composed of real pictures, from real people. Currently, I work hard with the team at Wheretoget to close the gap between inspiration and commerce.

A week ago, The New York Times broke the news that Condé Nast was shutting down Style.com, effective immediately. It was a highly awaited project they announced in 2014 and that they finally launched in October 2016. I was keeping an eye on it but after a few months, I was wondering what their next step would be, seeing as their site did not take off. I had a range of expectations, but did not anticipate an abrupt shutdown. But after 8 months of business, they did just that: fired the whole team and discontinued style.com (which is now redirecting to Farfetch.com), in an attempt to save face.

Let’s Try to Explain What Went Wrong

Beyond the huge staff and slow operational pace, the $100M funded company’s failure comes from one main issue: the execution of their vision.

Back in 2014, industry talk was all about “marketplaces.” If you were not doing a marketplace, you were not cool. Everyone wanted to create a marketplace, from media outlets to ecommerce sites. At that time, it seemed it was the only sustainable business model on the web. It was overhyped.

In fashion, plenty of marketplaces emerged: Thredup, Poshmark, Vestiaire, The RealReal, Vide Dressing, Threadflip, Vinted, etc. Some are now doing exceptionally well, others fold — such are the risks of the game.

Condé Nast wanted to follow the trend and launch its own marketplace with a clear vision that constituted building a bridge between inspiration (i.e. the content they produce for their print/online magazines) and commerce.

The vision was great, but the way it was executed was not: the company started to build an ecommerce platform from scratch, without considering all the issues that come with that, and especially the pressing question of, “how do we get the inventory?”

We can imagine the thought process of style.com as it sought to develop itself:

“We want a marketplace, so let’s find partners for the inventory. Oh, we can’t? Let’s focus on making deals with brands. Yet, brands don’t want to work with us on a marketplace basis (the brand would keep the stock, and Style.com would just give orders) so we have to buy the inventory. At the end of the day, we’re no longer a marketplace.”

In short, it was a long ride to convince brands to get on board, and this effort must have required a lot of the company’s focus, perhaps even too much. Indeed, this is one of the aspects that pushed them away from an essential part of their vision: inspiration.

Style.com had to close deals with Vogue, Glamour, GQ, etc. in order to make their content shoppable. Even though some of the aforementioned publications were in the same company, this still proved to be a difficult task — and things moved slowly. I can just imagine how difficult it was for the style.com team to convince the editorial, and even the digital editorial team of each publication to implement a bridge between themselves and style.com. Personally, I still wonder about how such a bridge was built, as I do not recall style.com having a presence in any of Vogue.com or Glamour.com’s articles.

An illustration of the above can be found in this Similarweb chart: the top referring site to style.com is Refinery29! Conde Nast’s own websites are not even present on the list. Inevitably, the lack of synergy between Condé Nast entities worked against style.com.

But style.com’s failure is due to far more than a mere lack of synergy with Condé Nast’s publications

I think the most important reason behind style.com’s failure is simply that no one is getting their inspiration from magazines anymore! It’s over!

Instead, everyone is getting inspired by real people through social media outlets like Instagram, Snapchat, etc.

This isn’t earth-shattering news — the entire fashion industry already knows, and capitalizes on the power of social media. Style.com’s story demonstrates the growing prevalence of this reality yet again. Teens and millennials don’t get their fashion inspiration from glossy photoshoots that speak for fashion elitism. They do, however get inspired by the “girl next door” with all of her ostensibly natural and relatable photos (ex. A blogger who posts images from what she did the night before, where she went with her friends, etc.). Millennials see themselves in that blogger, and when they do, they also see themselves in the clothes she or he is wearing or praising — clothes that they will then buy.

Again, the industry has been in the know for a long time regarding this shift. But style.com has offered us a brilliant case study and a strong reminder of what not to do in this new social media era.

Condé Nast had the right vision. They just shouldn’t have used the content from their own publications and shouldn’t have created a marketplace.

At the company I founded a few years ago, Wheretoget, we have that exact mission: building a bridge between inspiration and commerce, because people see things on Instagram, for example, and want to live their lives in it immediately. And guess what? Out of the millions of pictures we received in the past years, less than 0.1% came from magazines. We receive thousands of pictures everyday and a vast majority of them come from Instagram, Pinterest, or Snapchat. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a picture from a magazine on our platform.

But let’s circle back to style.com, and how they also got “commerce” wrong.

Next-gen media outlets will almost certainly have commerce, because millennials want to buy now what they see now. A lot of brands have acknowledged this reality, and this is why we are noticing a “see now, buy now” trend.

But you can’t follow that trend with a marketplace, because new brands emerge and die all the time. If a brand goes from zero to millions of followers within a few months (like Triangl Swimwear, or Reformation), how could you get that brand on the marketplace? It’s impossible. Especially when you consider the fact that those emerging brands don’t want to sell on marketplaces because they have better margins selling on their own website. Moreover, they don’t do wholesale. That means buying inventory from them to run a classic ecommerce site is impossible, even if your name is Condé Nast.

Basically, with a marketplace or retailer model, you won’t be able to sell to your users what they want. The only way not to disappoint your users is to redirect traffic to those sites. You certainly won’t earn a penny for that. But your users will thank you, and will be loyal to you because you will have helped them in finding the right information at the right moment.

With that recipe consisting of content from social media and an gateway to ecommerce, one will be able to build media that is relevant to the millennial consumer: media with content from social media, media that is shoppable, media that is see-now-buy-now.

Thus, if Condé Nast wants to stay relevant, it ought to focus on aggressively pursuing such a strategy in order to truly bridge the gap between inspiration and commerce.

To those at style.com who have taken the time to read my piece, and agree with or are intrigued by what I wrote, please do not hesitate to contact me at romain@wheretoget.it. It would be my pleasure to exchange ideas about how we can work together to build the next-gen media outlet for fashion!