It’s been just over one year since I re-launched FashioNZ with a new team, a new look, a modernised point of view, a good dollop of relevance, some excellent contributors, and far fewer competitions offering a month’s worth of free shampoo and movie tickets. So far, so good.
August 14, 2023. It was a busy day. My then Editor Phoebe Watt, Digital Editor Bella Wright and I had gathered at 8am to put the finishing touches on our very first EDM, having written a bunch of new content and received submissions from fashion journalist juggernauts like Tim Blanks and Patty Huntington. We launched at 9am on the dot. Everyone was excited and anxious, but I didn’t have time to celebrate and by 10am I was out the door attending to other things. By midday I was leaving a meeting with the New Zealand Fashion Week stakeholders when I checked my phone and saw that I’d received a wave of congratulatory texts, DMs and e-mails, mostly saying positive things. The most memorable of all was a message from a PR agent saying that the site “was now somewhere she actually wanted to see her client’s news again.”
In the days and weeks that followed, there was plenty more chatter (one very upset lady sent me a very long, very sad e-mail, and then called me for half an hour about how she thought I’d ruined the website) and even The NZ Herald’s Shayne Currie received an ‘insider tip’ that led to him writing this article about our takeover of the site, but it all made me double-down on my strategy: Burn it to the ground. You may think that sounds extreme, but hear me out.
No one knows what happens when we die. Space has no edge. There are 2 billion websites active on the World Wide Web, 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, and Jack The Ripper was never identified. So why should I care about whether or not my website’s background is white or black?
I tried to clear the air at one stage with this Op-Ed which clearly stated that FashioNZ was, before I acquired it, wanted by absolutely nobody. There were over 7,000 articles on here from over 25 years, yet no one thought it had any value. Except me. Our media industry was on its knees, magazine advertising was down by 16% in New Zealand, and Kate Sylvester was probably already considering closing down. However, being an eternal optimist in a world full of pessimists and bad news, here I was with this weird, misshapen, old fashioned, frumpy website. Probably not my best business decision, but here we are.
What followed was, and has been, a pretty fun year (with the odd hiccup). We’ve tried new things, weeded out a few bad ideas, got told the website was “F*cking awful”, fumbled through Australian fashion week, got into an easy and dependable rhythm, celebrated a weekly traffic record in April 2024, and the site is bubbling along like a jolly baby who’s starting to learn how to smile but hasn’t started teething yet. There have been some amazing milestones, like our Creators’ Power List 2023 which set a new daily traffic record, and this 2024 trends article by Lucy Slight which has been read by 12,000 people (as of Saturday 17th August, 2024). To give you a comparison, the most popular piece of editorial content published in the 12 months before I took over the site had 983 reads).
Am I allowed to brag? Yes. Do you have to agree? No. Does anyone care? Not really. Should you exercise more? Absolutely. Will you go shopping in the next 30 days? Probably. Is tomorrow a new day? You bet.
Every once in a while we have to take a risk, throw caution to the wind, and try new things. They don’t always work, but sometimes they’re great. I once heard a very simple piece of advice that said “Be kind, and ask for what you want.” Granted, sometimes you need to just take what you want, but only do that if it’s legal and no one else gets hurt (remember the “be kind” bit).
Let’s hope the world starts to be a bit lighter in the next 12 months, and if you can find the time and energy to change something in your life, might I suggest burning it to the ground and starting again.