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This is Connecting the Dots, a series in which writer José Criales-Unzueta looks at how fashion, pop culture, the internet and society are all interconnected.
Is this the year of the gift guide? There certainly have been bigger fashion headlines in 2024, but as the industry and shoppers all around the world get into the holiday spirit, it seems like everywhere I look there’s a gift guide to peruse — or a take about them to get into.
Here’s mine. Since September, I’ve received over 100 pitches for gift guides, ranging from holiday season-ready Uggs and puffer jackets to splurgy luxury handbags and high jewellery. Dear dot-connecting reader, I don’t write gift guides and I rarely read them, but I am curious about one thing: do luxury items have a place in the gift guide world?
The way gift guides work is straightforward enough. A writer, be that via a reputable magazine or a buzzy Substack — which we’ll get into later — recommends an item. The reader sees it and presumably shops it. The source gets some traffic and makes commission via those nifty affiliate links, the brand gets a sale and the reader’s loved one gets an expertly recommended gift. Everybody wins.
But the thing about gift guides is that they work best when offering immediacy. Meaning, as one gift guide-reading editor says, “you read them because the edit fits the person you’re hunting for, and the best ones are those that have you buy something straight away because it’s well priced and the best choice”. The ideal gift guides are those that lead to actual gifting, she says — those that make you check out as opposed to closing the tab and continuing your search. This is why I’ve become sceptical about whether luxury gift guides are meant for us regular-degular folks. I get picking up a good book, a scented candle, or even a pricey but nice wallet off a gift guide, but is anyone buying a £2,500 handbag in this same way?
“If you have a really great halo product like a Schiaparelli hero bag, it’s ideal to push for those to be included in gift guides,” says a friend who is a communications executive at a mid-size luxury label, and who we’ll call Executive Friend. “But at that point, the push may be more about awareness than about a one-to-one conversion into selling thousands of units.” What she’s getting at is that, when it comes to luxury labels pushing top-line hero products for the holidays, in some cases it’s less about selling the exact item and more about generating buzz to lead the shopper to a secondary — and more accessible — holiday offering, or even about creating clout by way of exposure around the first item to generate desirability for those who can afford it, even if not off the gift guide itself.
“These products don’t work for everyone, and that’s also why it’s equally important to place something on the other end of that, like, say, a small leather good that sells at an entry-level price point that will convert at a higher rate when placed somewhere like a Vogue or T Magazine gift guide,” Executive Friend continues. “You’re obviously not going to do lots of units on a multi-thousand-dollar bag but if you place it right in certain publications, you will get high traffic [to your website].”
Perhaps this is why, when I received a holiday gifting deck from a certain luxury maison, it featured multiple pages of products — from uber-luxury trunks priced in the tens of thousands of dollars to fragrances and small leather goods in the couple of hundreds, and even a handful of books and city guides under $100. The range was healthy, which seemed more practical than offering only the kinds of products you’d find in a Goop luxury gift guide (which are outrageously fun to read, but make me wonder if anyone would buy something like the 14-karat gold-plated vibrator ring featured last year).
Many years ago, before I started at Vogue, I was a designer at an ‘aspirational luxury’ label in New York. I worked, among other things, on our gifting offering. I bring this up because much of what we placed emphasis on was the kind of gifts you pick up while checking out at a store: a wallet and matching belt box set, a leather valet tray for your nightstand, a his-and-hers set of shiny lurex logo socks. These were items designed to be the sort of purchase you make that is nice but not too nice to be extravagant, particularly if you’re on a budget — like pretty much everyone at the moment. They were also designed to sit, in most cases, on the outlet floors. While we would also create top-line shiny versions of some of our most popular items to be presented as opulent gifting alternatives, which we’d often think of as emotional purchases one makes for oneself or maybe a significant other, the expectation seemed to be that these lower end items would drive the most units. It’s also why we’d make sure that our core offerings were top notch for the gifting season.
“Brands are certainly pushing us to place these ‘hero products’ in our gift guides, but we also have a responsibility to our readers to show them things they will, and can, actually buy,” says another friend who is a commerce editor at a popular fashion dot-com. We’ll call them Editor Friend. “What I’ve noticed most is that if we offer the hero holiday product next to a classic iteration of the same bag, it’s usually the most classic one that sells.”
That may be because it’s cheaper, but also, she argues, because these kind of items are investments for the demographic who buys them off gift guides (say, a fashion aficionado as opposed to a seasoned luxury shopper who may have a sales associate at a boutique on speed dial), so it makes more sense to buy a black handbag than a gold crinkled-leather iteration that feels more holiday specific.
The gift guide game has also changed this year. Magazines used to work on gifting edits as part of a holiday content push, but now they’re in competition with freelance writers on Substack, which has gained significant traction in 2024, and influencers who offer edits on their socials. “Everyone now has to do their little edit,” jokes a third friend who leads PR for a few popular labels on the agency side. Publicist Friend continues: “It’s not just shopping editors anymore. Everyone is now more competitive and specific with their content so it stands out, which means that writers have started to request more specific items for their guides in addition to what we’ll push on the brand side.”
Another friend, this time with a name, the freelance writer and fabulous Substacker Emilia Petrarca, puts it simply: “Substack allows everyone to publish their writing, so, in turn, it’s allowed everyone to publish a gift guide. But in its more basic form, a gift guide is a listicle, and lists are fun to write and easy to read.”
Brands, too, are pushing their publicists to pitch non-traditionally: “All of our clients now want to be featured in these guides by popular writers and social media It-girls,” says Publicist Friend.
This is aligned to what Executive Friend says about their gifting push this year. “This season is a good example of how we’ve gone outside the box of just pitching magazine editors,” she says. “The landscape for editorial and shopping guides is more convoluted and specific than it’s ever been, so we have become a lot more niche and specific with our own pitches.”
She explains that they’ve been working closer with their in-house retail and wholesale teams to “understand what product was bought, how many units and where”, in order to place the items in front of the right audiences. “We’ve been very regional this year,” Executive Friend tells me, “so instead of trying to get into a ‘Best 25 Wallets for Men’ guide, we’re focusing on pitching items for more niche guides.”
This shift in strategy, she argues, has a lot to do with the rise of Substackers whose audiences subscribe to their specific tastes as opposed to more general round-ups. “We’ve noticed a higher conversion rate in the newsletter world because we found that’s what drives the most conversion — when something goes straight into a person’s inbox,” she says. “We’ve found that shoppers find Substack guides and some of these more editor-specific guides by publications to be more personal, which makes them more successful.”
The added layer here is that when it comes to gift guides signed by, say, a Vogue editor on the website or by a popular Substacker, there is context on who the reader may or may not be. “This allows us to understand who the audiences are and pitch with more intention,” says Executive Friend.
But here’s the caveat: “We’re now, for the most part, leaning towards the kind of item you can buy off the guide as opposed to a pricier item that will make the shopper do a double take and ultimately move on,” she says. “We have social media to push the awareness of our products, or we could even gift them to influencers or editors; though with Substack gifting is less popular, now that everyone’s watching, we need to use these guides to convert into actual sales.”
Petrarca, who also wrote a thorough explainer on the affiliate links of it all, did not really include any of the items she was pitched in her gift guide this year, opting instead for curating a personal list of desirables. “In my experience as a full-time writer for a magazine, gift guides are naturally where you insert advertisers,” she says. “A luxury label is going to get the shoutout in the ‘over $1000’ edit, not because they think anyone’s going to buy it — even though there are definitely those shoppers out there — but because it’s also an advertising play.”
To summarise, a well-balanced gift guide would have range. “They should provide a balance with the sort of stocking stuffers that are fun and less expensive, the middle-ground stuff that you would buy for yourself, a nice treat for someone, and then the objects that are wild and existing for the sake of existing,” explains Petrarca. “A gift guide traditionalist may scoff at spotting a Loro Piana pizza cutting board, but as someone who enjoys looking at objects, I really love it when I see these wild things.”
Comments, questions or feedback? Email us at feedback@voguebusiness.com.
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