Leading fashion magazine Marie Claire has become the latest publishing house to start leveraging its expertise and audience to sell clothes, with the launch of Marie Claire Edit.
The new venture from T1 Media, publishers of Marie Claire fashion editors will approve clothes, accessories and looks for sale via the site, turning their fashion chops into direct revenue.
Top brands already signed up to sell their wares via the new outlet include Farfetch, Selfridges, ASOS, Topshop, NET-A-PORTER and MATCHESFASHION.COM. Using the strapline ‘Shop the brands you love. Fashion Editor approved’, Marie Claire Edit offers a key endorsement angle for brands, with a Marie Claire Edit approved badge for items carefully selected by Marie Claire’s Fashion Editors.
It also offers a new point of purchase, leveraging Marie Claire’s digital reach in fashion, which delivers strong SEO by targeting all long-tail keyword shopping terms.
In addition, the site will donate 1% of sales made to the leading global children’s charity Plan International UK, a charity dedicated to promoting children’s rights and gaining equality for girls around the world.
Marie Claire is also collaborating with social discovery site Pinterest and Farfetch to offer readers a chance to win a Farfetch voucher. To qualify for a chance to win, participants will create a board on Pinterest and save their favourite looks from the Marie Claire Edit website.
This isn’t the first time Marie Claire UK has made a foray in to the retail space. Earlier this year it launched a premium beauty store – Fabled by Marie Claire and Fabled.com – and the recently announced platform extension for this business with a next.co.uk partnership.
The Marie Claire Edit project was created and led by Marie Claire’s Head of Fashion Affiliates Emily Ferguson and was developed collaboratively with the wider editorial team under the stewardship of Marie Claire Editor-in-Chief Trish Halpin and Marie Claire Managing Director Justine Southall.
“Marie Claire Edit is the natural next step in the shopping journey of our audience of influential women who want to think smart and look amazing. With informed advice and a unique curation from Marie Claire’s editors, it’s an exciting new way to experience fashion.”
– Trish Halpin, Editor-in-chief, Marie Claire
The move by Marie Claire to turn readers into buyers – and to create a whole new revenue stream for the publisher – comes after Mashable and Time Inc both did with eBay earlier this year, when they separately ran services to allow readers to shop the goods they saw in specific articles on the Mashable and Time websites.
This move is a canny one for publishers, many of whom are looking to plug the leak of advertising revenues without having to charge for content. Offering to curate and then sell things – and effectively turning publications into niche marketplaces – is a natural path and one that we shall be seeing more of in 2019.
