For a while now, rumors have been swirling about the future of Lucky magazine. Just this April, Page Six reported that the magazine was fixing to shut down — a rumor Editor-in-Chief Eva Chen quickly came out to deny. Today, more news about the Condé Nast title, or rather the soon to be ex-Condé Nast title: Lucky is set to combine its editorial content with an e-commerce site in partnership with BeachMint (the kind folks who bring you JewelMint, ShoeMint and StyleMint) called The Lucky Group, which will be headed by BeachMint co-founder Josh Berman. Chen will stay on as chief creative officer and Anna Wintour will still work in an advisory role for the site.
This makes a lot of sense for Lucky. It’s a shopping magazine after all and to have all the products you’ll see in the issue in one online space seems like a natural progression for the title. “If you pick up a copy of Lucky, there’s probably 200-plus different brands that Eva and her team are talking about, but they all linked to other sites,” Berman told Adweek. “We realized that there’s a gap there. If we created our own e-commerce site and brought the women all the way from discovery to purchase, that could be an incredible opportunity.”
The new platform is set to launch in early 2015. “Start saving now because it’s going to be dangerously good,” Chen warned her 76,000 followers on Twitter this afternoon. Lucky will keep its editorial staff, but will be looking for merchandisers once the new site gets working. As a result of this new move, The Lucky Group is now on the hunt for new offices, and won’t be joining the rest of Condé Nast at the World Trade Center.
According to WWD, Lucky magazine’s September issue pages were down 34.3 percent, so this is some much-needed good news for the magazine, which has continued to struggle since Condé Nast tapped Chen to revitalize the title.
[via Adweek]
