Taking advantage of booming interest in online shopping, Fairfax Media has revamped its current ecommerce offering, merging its existing digital malls into a single space dubbed The Store by Fairfax. The new offering is a combination of the company’s current shopping outlets The Sydney Morning Herald Shop and The Age Shop.
Leading the new debut is Trudi Jenkins, the former Delicious magazine editor-in-chief who more recently enjoyed stints in ecommerce at RedBalloon Australia, as well as strategy company editd.com.au. Jenkins tells Mumbrella of her role as digital commerce editor, which she accepted in May: “I was brought on board to look at the existing SMH and The Age Shops and how we could refresh them. We’ve come up with the slightly brand agnostic The Store by Fairfax so that we can market it as a destination and send all the traffic to one URL.”
She continues of the concept of The Store: “It’s a curated marketplace, drop ship model. So we don’t buy or warehouse any stock. It’s basically a marketing platform for our various sellers. The product mix is a bit different from what was on the previous shops, it’s much more highly curated. I felt the existing mix was a little bit random. I wanted it to have a little bit more design-focus. It’s very much in that boutique, artisan, Australian-design space. It’s supporting Australian designers and artists.”
Current curators for the site include former Vogue Living editor-in-chief David Clark, art consultant Nadine Bush and chef Neil Perry.
The Store will also not host any advertising, with Jenkins explaining: “It needs to function first and foremost as a good ecommerce experience and it needs to feel premium and like a beautiful experience. I want people to get lost in the site, there will be videos they can watch and stories about the brands.”
