Meet three young ambitious women who have transformed the way women shop for fashion and beauty products online with their site, Rank & Style. Their unique algorithm generates top ten lists of the most popular fashion and beauty products on the Internet to make shopping easier.
Rank & Style consists of Chief Executive Officer Jamie Chandlee, Chief Creative and Digital Officer Beth Newill, and Chief Operating Officer Dalton Young. The women acquired the business in April of this year which was originally launched in 2013. Beth Newill adds, “We decided to maintain the website’s name, Rank & Style, as it perfectly summarizes the business. The readers have responded well to it and we did not want to alienate them by a making such a major change.”
CEO Jamie Chandlee has a background in social media from her years working at Facebook. This experience has directly influenced Rank & Style’s social growth since the new team acquired the business. Jamie includes, “Social media was one of the areas of growth potential we noticed when we acquired the business. The founding team did a great job but are excited to work in our strategies to take it to the next level. We’ve been really focused on leveraging Facebook organically and through paid activities. Pinterest is obviously great for our business, and instagram is something we’re still exploring in terms of how we can really monetize it. We plan to leverage social media to grow community engagement as well as brand awareness.”
The women’s site is more than just a bunch of lists. Beth Newill includes, “On the editorial side we have about three different writers that work to create fun, editorial content based on the lists generated from our algorithm. It’s important to incorporate that creative element even though our lists are driven by data.” COO Dalton Young jumps in adding, “We also encourage our readers to suggest lists. We want to ensure the lists we generate are relevant to our readers. Their feedback is essential to the success of the business.”
Austin was a natural fit for Rank & Style’s headquarters. CEO Jamie Chandlee splits her time between Austin and New York City. “Dalton and Beth came to me because they actually were aware of the business. I was super excited that they brought me into the mix. We all live in Austin, and we knew moving the business to this growing city would be an easy transition. Austin is known as a city that supports small businesses and startups. There is also a great amount of technical and creative talent available here. By the way, we just love Austin!”
The women have plans in the near future to get Rank & Style involved with non-profits, even though they are already heavily involved with several charities on their own. “Jamie and I actually know each other from the Elizabeth Ann Seton Board,” adds Dalton. “We are both currently working on that and Jamie is chairing the gala in April.”
Rank & Style readers can expect new changes for the future. A recent change to the site the women are proud of is Beth Newill’s work on reformatting and re-designing the Rank & Style newsletter. Jamie adds, “That’s something that’s already launched and we’ve had such great feedback from our users. Our plans when we took over the business were to start thinking about launching into new verticals or categories. Anything from bridal, maternity, men’s, and kids. I think the sky is the limit when it comes to using data to formulate top ten lists for our readers. A website re-design is also in the works.”
Another new feature to the site is a section called “Spotlight”. Dalton elaborates saying, “We have a column on our site called ‘Talking Top Tens’, where we feature women influencers and CEO’s. Each week we feature a new women and highlight their ten essentials. We’ve had such a good response from our audience that we decided to launch a similar column, ‘Spotlight’, where we feature bloggers and their their top ten lists of fashion and beauty must-haves. We really want this new feature to become a blogger discovery platform for our audience while also highlighting the great new products bloggers are currently loving.” Jamie includes, “These columns allow us to layer in a fun editorial element to our site while still maintaining our core content formula of data-driven top ten lists.”
Rank & Style would love to hear your list ideas and feedback! If you are shopping for something and want to know what ranks as the best of the best, simply visit rankandstyle.com/request_list and submit your ideas. To learn more about Rank & Style, follow them on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
