Opinion: How Style.com’s Future Is Really About Contextual Commerce
When Conde Nast announced earlier this week that they were transforming Style.com into an e-commerce operation and moving editorial content to a new URL – voguerunway.com – the news was greeted with surprise, skepticism and a general sense of nostalgia about a beloved industry standard meeting its end.
“To see one of the industry’s most valuable resources become a casualty is nothing short of heartbreaking,” wrote veteran fashion reporter and former Style.com contributor Lauren Sherman at Fashionista.
And while the news is certainly sad – particularly for the talented staffers who are now without a job – it also makes me wonder if there could have been a way to fully integrate e-commerce into Style.com without shuttering the site as we know it.
I wasn’t in on the internal decision making process at Conde, and can never know the full extent of their reasoning for the changes – and I also have no reason to believe that all options weren’t considered. But, it’s worth it to note that in today’s climate, it is possible to have your cake and eat it, too. As we’ve seen with successful contextual commerce sites – like Goop and Brit + Co, two participants in this year’s FTF Conference – the lines between editorial and sales are not drawn as clearly as they once were.
“There’s always been in traditional media this idea of church and state – that content ideas are generated organically and not driven by product,” Goop CEO Lisa Gersh told FTF. “That tension between the content world and the commerce world is really pervasive in traditional media. But, as technology has evolved, consumer behavior has evolved as a result of that. If there’s a brand out there that is trusted, because the brand has authority and the brand is authentic, then the audience will naturally accept contextual commerce as a legitimate form of doing business and a legitimate form of both content and commerce.”
Style.com is one of the most trusted names in fashion media today; Sherman noted in her piece that its reputation is so well-regarded, that “direct competitors happily reference it.” There are certainly differences between sites like Goop and Style.com – namely the idea of journalistic neutrality, which Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow has never needed nor professed to have.
But, Style.com had been experimenting with a “buy it now” option within select stories. And let’s not forget that Conde is already very much in the business of selling product; not too long ago, they mounted a transformation at Lucky, merging the brand with retailer Beachmint to form Lucky Group, a content-meets-commerce operation. Perhaps, since Lucky was always positioned as a shopping guide, the powers that be felt that the transition to full throttle contextual commerce would be smoother than what could be accomplished with Style.com’s current iteration.
Still, I can’t help but wonder how much of a progressive move – and a potential paradigm shift – it could have represented had Conde Nast been able to fully integrate robust e-commerce into a brand as respected as Style.com, while maintaining its trademark strong content and point of view.
After all, as Gersh told us, “Five years from now, all commerce businesses will be contextual commerce businesses.”
