Lucky

» see luckymag.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

lucky was the kind of monthly that us shopping-hobbyist readers picked up at the supermarket checkout. i was not in that demographic. in ankara in 2000-2015 the shopping-magazine tier of the us newsstand was invisible: no turkish licensee and no imported copies at the international-magazine kiosks in bakırköy or ulus. the english-language reader base was too small to justify an air-freighted subscription. what i knew of lucky was the same fashion-industry chatter that reached me through the blogosphere in the late 2000s, mostly around eva chen's later editor run.

kim france launched lucky at condé nast in december 2000. the pitch was inside-out: rather than a fashion magazine that showed editorial spreads and mentioned prices in a back-of-book credits section, lucky put the shopping first. each garment or product had a price and a store attached to it on the page it appeared on. the magazine described itself in early press as a print rendering of a shopping portal on the web, which was a slightly weird thing to say in december 2000 but turned out to be what the audience wanted.

the timing was clean. lucky won advertising age's magazine of the year in 2003. circulation grew through the mid-2000s to the point where it was competing with the older glamour and cosmopolitan titles that condé nast and hearst had built the women's-monthly market around. the peak print number came in december 2012 at 1,109,835 copies. for whatever reason, that was already the last year the magazine grew. the next three years were the slow undoing.

brandon holley took over from kim france in 2010 and moved lucky toward a more traditional fashion-magazine cover treatment. eva chen replaced holley in 2013 and pushed the property toward the fashion-blogger world she had come out of, hiring instagram figures instead of the industry stylists lucky had used. newsstand sales dropped 15.8 percent in early 2014. by april of that year condé nast had spun the magazine into a joint venture with the los angeles e-commerce company beachmint, called the lucky group. eva chen resigned in april 2015 and the magazine went quarterly in may. the final print issue shipped in june 2015 and lucky was done.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shopping-only pitch ~

the mechanic that made lucky different was the credit line. every product photographed came with a shopping credit line built into the layout: price and store name on one side, url or phone number to actually buy it on the other. that reads normal today, on any product-review site anywhere. in 2000 it was uncommon in a print monthly. the older fashion magazines still treated the editorial pages as aspirational rather than transactional. lucky compressed the two.

kim france had come out of sassy and mirabella. she brought a more service-oriented editorial voice to the launch. the magazine assumed you were reading it because you wanted to shop, not because you wanted a fantasy version of celebrity fashion. that made lucky a magazine of clickable items before clickable items existed, and it made condé nast's later attempt to move the property to a real e-commerce operation feel logical on paper.

~ the beachmint spin-off ~

in august 2014 condé nast announced the lucky group joint venture with beachmint, an la-based e-commerce startup that had raised money for celebrity-branded fashion labels. condé nast contributed the magazine and the brand, beachmint contributed the e-commerce infrastructure and cash. eva chen became chief creative officer. the plan was to build luckyshops.com into a real transactional site and let the monthly print magazine feed the audience into it.

the plan did not convert. the lucky group moved out of the condé nast building in november 2014 into a temporary space. beachmint's own celebrity-fashion labels were losing money. eva chen announced her departure in april 2015, weeks after taking a role at instagram as head of fashion partnerships. lucky's may 2015 issue was announced as a quarterly move rather than a monthly. by june the magazine had folded entirely. the luckyshops.com transactional site went dark shortly after.

~ the long tail ~

lucky's real inheritance is not a magazine, it is a mechanic. every fashion editorial with a shoppable-item link and every product-review site that lists prices next to photos owe a small nod to what lucky was doing in print in 2001. every instagram post with a swipe-up affiliate link is downstream of the same idea. eva chen carried the sensibility to instagram and helped shape how fashion creators sell on that platform. the concept survived and the magazine did not.

condé nast's own graveyard from that window is dense. details closed six months after lucky, and gourmet had already gone in 2009. the self and teen vogue print exits followed within a few years. lucky was the shopping-catalog sibling in that group, the one that had figured out the transactional layer years before the technology was there to run it end-to-end. but the wayback machine still has issues of lucky in scanned pdf form. the price-tag-next-to-the-photo mechanic is still there in every product spread.

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