Condé Nast’s Style.com officially launches

Style.com, Condé Nast’s e-commerce and omnichannel shopping platform, has officially launched in the UK, offering brands including Gucci, Aspinal of London, Erdem, Hill and Friends, J.W. Anderson and Valentino.

The long awaited website combines a luxury shopping experience across womenswear, menswear, accessories, beauty and grooming, alongside curated stoppable options from magazines including Vogue, GQ and Condé Nast Traveller, as well as editorial content.

The site itself is minimal in design, just highlighting key categories using slick Vogue-like imagery. It offers a consistent feel across all of the brands, with shopping edits mixed in with quotes from Condé Nast editors and related editorials, as well as a description of the brand itself.

A key feature of the site is the ‘Stylecloud’ that enables shoppers to save items to their wish list, and in the future, it adds that the section will soon allow shoppers to also follow their favourite brands and receive updates when new collections arrive.

Style.com isn’t like Net-a-Porter though as it is a marketplace for these luxury brands, each item ordered is dispatched from the individual brands, meaning delivery times and costs vary across the site.

There are a number of featured designers, in womenswear, it is Gucci, J.W. Anderson, and Sies Marjan, which the site is calling “this season’s break-out brand”, as well as Valentino, Roksanda, and Être Cécile. In menswear, Paul Smith is the highlighted designer, along with Raf Simons, Junya Watanabe, and E.Tautz.

Style.com launches e-commerce platform

The site is initially available in the UK, with a Continental European and American rollout to follow later this year. In addition, the site will eventually encompass all Condé Nast titles internationally. Allowing users to order from magazine-branded websites and digitised magazine editions in app form, as well as the Style.com website itself.

Condé Nast International chairman and chief executive, Jonathan Newhouse, said: “In the past, reading about fashion was one activity and buying the items was something completely different. Today, readers want to buy at the moment they feel inspired and Style.com will make this desire a reality.

“Style.com is designed to meet the needs to fit modern fashion consumer - corresponding to the way she or he lives, gets information and shops today.”

Style.com has a number of high-profile people behind it, including Franck Zayan as president, who was brought in to head up the project from French department store group Galeries Lafayette, while Yasmin Sewell was hired in 2015 as the e-commerce’s fashion director, and former Asos.com editorial director Melissa Dick joined last April to head up the site’s editorial content.

Zayan added: “Style.com is writing a new chapter in Condé Nast’s history by bringing together the world’s most trusted content, the most relevant range of brands and a unique customer journey built on an artificial intelligence-powered technology.

“From the initial idea of bringing commerce to Condé Nast, to now being able to announce a completely new lifestyle designation to discover and own style, is incredibly exciting.”

Images: courtesy of Style.com