Condé Nast Gives Fairchild More Style

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Effective immediately, Style.com is being folded into Fairchild Fashion Group, parent Condé Nast said Monday. To date, Condé Nast Digital ran the popular fashion resource. "We saw a new opportunity to align the Style.com brand along with WWD/ WWD.com and move the Web site and editorial team," Maurie Perl, SVP and chief communications officer at Condé Nast, told Online Media Daily.

Jamie Pallot, editorial director of Condé Nast Digital, has been credited with growing Style.com from a niche industry resource to a mainstream media property.

Fairchild chief executive Gina Sanders herself suggested that Fairchild take over Style.com to Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend, she told Women's Wear Daily -- a unit of Fairchild. "It simply made great sense," Sanders said.

"The decision for this move was made at the executive level by Chuck Townsend, along with Bob Sauerberg, president of [Condé Nast] and his executive management team," concurred Perl. "Gina Sanders presented a business plan for the possible alignment of Style.com within her division."

The editorial team at Style.com, including editor Dirk Standen, is now reporting to Fairchild Editorial Director Peter Kaplan -- onetime editor-in-chief of The New York Observer.

Traffic at Style.com is reportedly up 6% this year, while revenue across all Condé Nast Digital properties is reportedly up 25% year-over-year.

Under pressure to create greater efficiencies of scale, Condé Nast in early 2009 replaced a scattered digital approach with a single division dubbed Condé Nast Digital. The alignment of assets came just over two years after Condé Nast seized operations and maintenance of its individual magazine sites -- including Glamour and Vanity Fair -- from what was then called CondéNet. Along with broad ad sales assistance, CondéNet had since overseen portals like Concierge and Epicurious, along with Wired Digital.

In the bigger picture, looking 15 years down the road, digital circulation and advertising revenues from new devices like the iPad will make up roughly one-third of Condé Nast's total publishing revenues, Nicholas Coleridge, the managing director of Conde Nast U.K., said last month. It was not clear, however, whether Coleridge was referring to the U.K. -- or global -- market.

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