Brianne Garcia

Condé Nast lads $20MM investment in e-commerce site Farfetch.com.

Farfetch, founded by Mr. Neves in 2008, puts its e-customers in touch with 250 boutiques globally, seeing itself as a curator of the 82,000 chosen products. It said that its 150,000 customers in 140 countries spent $680 on average per order.

Note: would be interesting to see comparison of number of Farfetch customers vs number of Condé magazine subscribers, and the customer lifetime value of each. This is likely a case in which loyalty > volume. 

James Bilefield, President of Condé Nast International digital said 

that he was seeing a global convergence in three different areas: content; the community that surrounds that content; and commerce, or the desire to purchase what you are reading about.

I bold the last phrase, because that was a major goal of Parceld, to close the gap between inspiration/input and purchasing/output. 

‘’The merging of e-commerce and media is still not cracked by any company, although I think there are businesses with e-commerce that have great editorial content and Net-a-Porter is an amazing example,” he said. “But in essence they are in e-commerce.

“Then there are great magazines and media businesses, digital on and off line, that have tried and not cracked e-commerce. To be honest, we don’t know what the formula is and it will take a couple of years before anyone comes up with the right one.”

Ding ding ding ding ding.