Glamour magazine is branching out into the big bad world of beauty by launching Lipstick.com, which happens to be a domain that's just been lying around Condé Nast since 1999.
If you go to glamour.com now and click their "Beauty" header, you'll be redirected to glamour.com/lipstick, which is where all their makeup, hair, etc. coverage lives. The site was designed specifically for mobile and is new extension of the brand – which has been "a year in the making," according to editor Beth Shapouri – will host all the beauty content Glamour had before, just more of it. As the publication indicated with the rebrand of the magazine in March, they've been amping up their fashion coverage; Lipstick is just a natural progression of that move.
But as Michael Hofman, Glamour's executive digital director, told Women's Wear Daily, just as decision to increase fashion coverage in the pages of the magazine was about money, so is the creation of this new site for beauty:
Glamour drives roughly 7.5 million unique visitors a month, with a large, undisclosed portion going to the beauty section of the site, he said. A separate site would not only maximize how beauty content will be displayed — for example, Glamour can right-size beauty images and utilize special zoom-in tools for viewers to see makeup — but it also opens a larger revenue stream for the brand.
"The newest thing is that we have a whole array of native [advertising] placements," Hofman said. "We have those on glamour.com as well, but we have them more elegantly integrated on Lipstick."
FYI "Native advertising" posts = "clearly labeled" sponsored posts.
A section on Lipstick devoted to Editor's Picks allows readers to, with a simple click, buy that product for themselves. While some of the links take readers to sites like Sephora or Nordstrom, others point them in the direction of Shop Glamour, which is, as previously reported, Glamour's website that allows readers to become consumers. A reader/consumer can purchase the products editors have recommended through Glamour's site and not an outside source, providing Glamour with an unidentified amount of revenue.
Featured content on the site right now includes a video with Coco Rocha and Chanel Iman (who are Glamour contributors) and an interview with Beyoncé's makeup artist. The offshoot's logo is very 1970s, which seems to be a type face and style that's coming back (no complaints here). And to celebrate the launch, Glamour is asking readers to submit lipstick kisses in an homage to said logo – regardless of whether you bought your lipstick via their site or not.