The UK-based managing editor of fashion website Who What Wear has shared her insights into how publishers can mimic the success of retailers who are seeing booming ad sales.
While this is money spent with retailers themselves, such as Amazon and Tesco, in store and online – Future-owned lifestyle brand Who What Wear is an example of a publisher that has cashed in on this trend.
Speaking at the PPA Festival in London on Wednesday, Poppy Nash said editorial integrity was at the heart of Who What Wear’s commercial success.
She said: “Over the last ten years, we have built a brand that really comes down to one very key principle, and that is that we are a brand with editorial integrity.
“We are journalists. We are experts. Every single person in my team is trained. They know what they’re doing.
“So that’s meant that we have built a relationship with our audience that is solely built on trust. And that’s when I think the conversation about commerce and shopping really comes to the fore for us, because we have never, ever pushed a product that we don’t believe in, that we haven’t tested, or that we wouldn’t spend our own money on.
“We’ve done that for ten years, and that’s meant that we’re now in a position where our audience does come to us for that premium editorial content, the long-form reports, the trend analysis, the opinion pieces and everything you get from a traditional magazine publisher, but they are also coming to us as if we are a retailer.”
Who What Wear launched in the US in 2006 as a daily email that offered shopping advice based on the latest celebrity and fashion industry styles. In 2016 it launched its own fashion range with Target in the US and in 2015, it launched a UK edition.
Future acquired Who What Wear for $127.2m in May 2022.
Today it continues to make its money from commission on affiliate links to the clothes it writes about, and marketing partnerships with fashion brands.
The content is a mixture of fashion trends reporting and personal recommendations from journalists.
According to Similarweb, Who What Wear had over 12 million website visits in April with 58% coming from the US and 19% from the UK.
Bishop said the brand converts sales worth over £200m every quarter but emphasised that sales are not the overriding editorial aim.
She said: “It’s very easy to think that we are just pushing product. That’s not what we are doing. It’s a well-rounded strategy. It’s content and it’s maintaining a level of trust with the reader.”
Asked what metrics her team focused on, Bishop said: “We’re looking at clickthrough rate. We’re looking at sales order value, so how much people are spending at each go, average order value, all of those really basic kind of retailer metrics that you might be more familiar with if you were to work for John Lewis, for example, because our audience comes to us as if we’re a retailer. We have to consider all of those from a kind of more publishing side… we negotiate our commission rates, so that’s a big piece of it, too.”
But she added: “We cannot grow with any of that if we alienate our audience on the way.
“We check things like engagement rates on content, open rates on newsletters, all of that, but it’s almost immeasurable in the sense that we cannot put ourselves in a position where the year-on-year revenue growth goals overshadow the fact we have to protect our audience and the relationship we have with them.”
Asked for her biggest lesson about succeeding in the world of e-commerce, Bishop said: “The biggest learning has been to really become very data literate. I didn’t realise when I stepped into this role five years ago that data was going to play such a big part in everything we do, but especially how we make money…
“As this industry changes, an editorial team member is more than just a writer and an editor.
“They need to know data. They need to have a commercial head on them. We are asking a lot.”
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