Telegraph Fashion and Beauty

The fashion channel is the Telegraph’s most commercially successfully channel, with demand for advertising and sponsorship partnerships often outpacing supply. Yet it was facing competition from online-only magazines, social shopping and online stores broadening their appeal and growing their market share with their own content and collections.

The Telegraph approached us to look at the future of fashion online and establish where they and their audience fit into this changing landscape.

We were asked to develop a new commercial proposition that would help the Telegraph take advantage of these market changes, and at the same time leverage their brand and content to create a beautiful, luxurious space for fashion editorial and premium advertising.

Our approach

Fashion is all about product: this was the bedrock of the new commercial proposition. We saw an opportunity to redesign the site so users could seamlessly read about products, browse through them, and buy them. 

We created a new section of the site called I•SPIED, the best fashion and beauty products as chosen by the Telegraph’s experts. These products are distributed throughout the site and embedded into articles and galleries; individual photos can also be hot spotted so readers can discover what a model is wearing and then buy it online.

The new Telegraph Fashion & Beauty equals the attractiveness of its print cousins whilst delivering a complete online experience of reading, browsing and buying.

Visually, the site needed to transform as well. It used the same content management system as the rest of the news site, which worked well for breaking news and text-heavy content, but it didn’t suit the emotive language of fashion. We reinvented the site to feel richer and more visual, like a glossy fashion magazine. This gave the audience a more immersive experience.

Together, these changes have turned the experience around, from being solely about content to being about a mix of premium content and products recommended by experts that the Telegraph audience knows and trusts. All of this is presented in a beautiful, luxurious environment.

How it all went

The site launched in September 2010. The new design created new opportunities for sponsorship and brand partnerships, and the first quarter’s commercial objectives were met even before launch.

The site delivers a completely different experience, one built on products, beautiful oversized images, serendipitous discovery, great content and high-quality advertising. It’s also engaging: users are invited to ‘love’ products and images, the first step in realtime trend-watching. 

One of our biggest successes was getting huge buy-in from the editorial team, who we worked with for the entirety of the project. Together, we have created a site that curates the best of the high street, haute couture and timeless classics, all presented as a collection of catwalk videos, editorial content, high-gloss images and covetable products.