According to her bio, she’s still figuring out how to dress for cold weather — what a relief to know that the Editor-in-Chief of one of the hottest online fashion sites has her own wardrobe woes!— but even if Fashionista.com EIC Lauren Indvik is feeling a bit frigid this season, she’s still cranking the heat on the fashion industry’s traditional media offerings.
Just back from London Fashion Week, while still recouperating from New York’s own relentless runway rampage, the fervent fashionista took a few moments away from her non-stop editorial schedule to dish with Pursuitist on Fashionista’s site, some recent scoops, and the business of style.
“Fashionista strives to publish a new story or fashion feature every 15 minutes,” says Indvik, the clock ticking away as we’re talking. You might imagine the topic could lend itself to a girly gab session, but instead, the online curator of current fashion culture makes a determined attempt to strike an equal balance between ‘savvy shopper’ and ‘industry informant.’
“I don’t know that I love fashion,” she shocks, then, explaining, “Sometimes I’m grossed out by the materialism… So, I’m not obsessed with clothes and shopping, but since my internship with Vogue in college, I have had a consistent interest in it over the years.”
Luckily for Indvik, precisely what the site needed at the helm during a recent rebranding was a little less show and a lot more strategy. So it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t live and breathe for the latest sale at [insert to-die-for designer here]. The brand gets a major boost from her efforts in the transformation of Fashionista.com from popular blog to notable news site.
In the just over a year and a half that she’s been there (she moved from Mashable in October of 2013), Indvik has dug her heels into Fashionista.com’s stance on counterfeiting, reviewing, offerings news, and promoting the site’s disparate personalities. She describes her own role as “first and foremost, the site’s editorial strategy,” and spends her days editing, editing, editing — while simultaneously developing desktop and mobile site features and planning a growing number of branded and co-branded events.
Her ideal, a rare goal for an online site, is to plan some three months in advance — doubly difficult when you combine web news’ need for instantaneous gratification with an industry as ever-changing and fickle as fashion — but even so, Fashionista.com is increasingly gaining notoriety for its more spontaneous stories… the scoops!
Mere weeks ago, Indvik received a lot of attention — and site visitors spiked — as a result of a major industry exposé alerting the world to the ousting of the creative directors of American Apparel. Exclusives like these are among the reasons why the industry can’t ignore Fashionista.com’s growing presence, Indvik was recently named a Top Woman in Media… and style writers are flocking to freelance for her. (Good news! She dishes that the site — based and largely focused on New York — does have plans to build out its byline network in the coming years — particularly in Europe.)
“Overall, I’d say that [the new] Fashionista is fast and accurate with a voice that is personality driven. We’re not a Wire story or a Wall Street Journal story,” summarizes Indvik, but are, instead, striving to be a trusted source for fashion industry insiders and enthusiasts alike. “We’ll never stray past fashion and beauty… Our growth is about investing in features on the business side and the consumer interest side.”
That’s a fairly formidable nutshell.
So, now that we’ve been schooled on the tech-savvy future of fashion news [read: fluff is only for the faint of heart] we wonder what, for her part, Indvik has learned from her latest career change. For example, is she still stumped on that winter wardrobe? Nope. As in the switch from Mashable to Fashionista.com, this strategizer is a quick study.
“Uniqlo HEATTECH,” she quips when we ask, likely hitting publish on the next scoop as she multi-tasks. Then, adding that Fashionista.com dose of essential personality to her pitch: “It’s life changing.”
