LesMads

» see lesmads.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Jessica Weiß and Julia Knolle put up LesMads in April 2007. It was a fashion blog in the original sense of the format, meaning two people writing about clothes on a page they controlled, with roughly 240 readers a day. The name was a pun on mademoiselle that only worked if you said it out loud.

Hubert Burda Media noticed. The house gave the two of them a two-month trial, then started paying for the site design and the travel to shows, and did not take the writing away from them. That arrangement is the whole reason the thing worked. A publisher funded a blog and let the bloggers keep being bloggers, and within three years LesMads was pulling up to 700,000 visitors a month and had grown correspondents in the other fashion cities. It took the LeadAward for Weblog of the Year in 2010 and a Grimme Online Award nomination in 2011.

Both founders left while it was still climbing. Knolle went to Condé Nast in July 2010 to work on German Vogue's online side, and Weiß followed in September 2011 to run the web edition of Interview. Katja Schweitzberger inherited the blog and kept it running for four more years, then announced in December 2015 that it would stop in January 2016. No reason has ever been given for it.

German-language fashion writing was never going to reach me in Ankara, and I would not have read it if it had. What makes this one worth writing down is the ownership shape rather than the clothes.

~ the dossier ~

~ what burda actually bought ~

Most of the blog-to-publisher deals of that era ended the same way: the house buys the audience and installs a template, and the voice that produced the audience goes flat inside a year. Burda did the opposite thing here, at least at the start. It paid the costs a blog cannot pay for itself. In fashion that means flights and hotel rooms in four cities twice a year, and the bylines stayed in charge of what went up.

That is why the traffic curve looks the way it does. Two hundred and forty readers a day is a personal project. Seven hundred thousand a month is a publication. The distance between those two numbers was covered in about three years and cost Burda very little by magazine standards.

~ the founders leaving ~

A blog built on two named people has a structural problem the moment either of them gets a better offer, and in this case both did, fifteen months apart. Knolle and Weiß both moved into the traditional publishing world their blog had been an alternative to. Vogue and Interview were exactly the kind of masthead LesMads had spent three years reading against.

Schweitzberger held it together until the end of 2015, which is longer than most inherited blogs last. But a personality site with new personalities is a different site wearing the old name, and the readers can tell even when they cannot say what changed.

~ what happened to the url ~

The domain lesmads.de is still resolving. It redirects to youngfashionstore.de/lesmads, which is a clothing retailer using the word as a shop category with a short page attached explaining that this was once Germany's largest fashion blog. So the domain now sells the thing the blog used to write about, which is a tidier ending than most dead blogs get and a worse one.

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