Jared Robin's fashion magazine initially chased Vogue by covering Givenchy and Balmain, but realized they couldn't out-write the incumbents. A visit to an avant-garde shop in the West Village showed him a better path: cover obscure, cutting-edge designers that bigger publications ignored.
We launched a fashion magazine, and at first we were talking about what all the brands that everybody out there was talking about. At the time it was Givenchy and Balmain, and we're like, we love these. And I'm like, our writing is good. My writing is fine. His writing was less than fine. And we're spending all this time editing, and I'm like, we're writing about the same shit everybody else is writing about. Our quality is lower. that they're writing about. If we put our all in, I think one day we could get to the same level, not above them like Vogue and all of them. If we crush it, we get to the same level. And I'm like, that's our top end? That sounds really hard. By happenstance, I walked into this avant-garde fashion shop in the West Village, New York, and I saw all these brands that I had never heard of before, and they looked so much cooler than anything I had seen. So I start Googling them at night and I go to small boutique shops I find with more of these brands that I hadn't heard of and more of these brands that looked more interesting that the Vogues and all of them weren't covering. So I'm like, aha, I don't have to be better than them at the same shit. I just need to talk about what they don't see.
Breaking the Sea of Sameness: Building Community and Redefining Revenue Creation
