From 2008
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| illustration by Masaki Ryo, CWC International |
“Who would want a giant Rubik’s Cube for a bag?” scoffs wife, mother, and international blogosphere icon Tina Craig in one of her recent posts on Bagsnob.com, a wildly popular fashion blog featuring “selective editorial” about designer handbags. Craig, 38, and best friend Kelly Cook, 37, entertain with honest and sometimes scathing reviews, like the one of Celine’s “Watch Me Dance” bag in which Craig retorts in her post title, “Do I have to?”
But the site isn’t all snide remarks. There are interviews with designers, firsthand reports from the runways, and scoop on who is carrying what at glam events such as movie premieres. All of this keeps Bagsnob traffic skyrocketing and the advertisers courting. The response has been so great that the two have expanded their empire to include four additional sites: Beautysnob, Totsnob, Jewelsnob, and Couturesnob, along with a blossoming Internet TV presence. The two fashionistas can also be seen in the pages of Us Weekly, where they weigh in as top cops in the mag’s Fashion Police feature.
All of this is pretty impressive for a business started by two young fashion-obsessed stay-at-home moms who admit they originally created Bagsnob merely as a way to entertain themselves while they were adjusting to the daily grind of mommyhood.
Craig, who was born in Taiwan and moved to Maryland with her family at age 8, attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and then lived the glamorous international jet-set life as she worked as a veejay for MTV Asia. She eventually returned to L.A. and settled down with real estate developer David Craig, who promptly relocated the newlyweds to McKinney to develop Craig Ranch, a high-end business, entertainment, and residential complex. Their first child, son Collin, soon followed, and Craig found herself at home with nothing to talk about other than diapers and baby sleeping habits.
Meanwhile Cook, former right-hand woman to designer Mark Eisen, had also relocated from her native L.A. to Cambridge, Massachusetts. She shared a similar plight: staying home to raise her baby daughter. But she had an additional hardship—no good shopping. So when Craig would make the rounds through Dallas’ many luxury shopping destinations, she’d also shop for Cook.
“I was leaving her messages all the time,” Craig says, “and eventually her husband, who is a software engineer, suggested we set up a blog and communicate about fashion that way instead.”
Cook adds, “I think he was just tired of hearing me on the phone with Tina going on and on about yet another bag.” The two chose Bagsnob as the title because, as consumers, designer bags were their specialty. Both had been collecting Chanels (Craig) and Pradas (Cook) for years.
“The first year, Bagsnob really didn’t have many visitors,” Craig says. “It was just us commenting to each other.” Then a woman in the United Kingdom who called herself “Furla Girl”—after Furla handbags—discovered the blog and would often e-mail the duo for advice on potential bag purchases. Furla Girl turned out to be Linda Grant, an award-winning writer with an editor friend at British Vogue.
At Grant’s suggestion, British Vogue ran a story about Bagsnob, and the article has now appeared in many of the Vogue editions worldwide. It was this article and its reprints that began the surge in readership of Bagsnob. Other media attention has followed, with glowing reviews in publications such as Women’s Wear Daily, Paris Vogue, New York Sun, and The Guardian. In the three years since they launched the site, The Snobs, as the two are often called, have never issued a press release or hired a publicist.
Another lucky twist of fate also helped fuel their success. Craig says that originally they were posting—without permission— pictures of handbags from luxury online shopping site Net-a-Porter.com. They soon received a letter from Net-a-Porter asking them to cease using the pictures—unless the site could be an affiliate advertiser with a click-through commission to Bagsnob on any purchases originating from the ads. This arrangement has become Bagsnob’s biggest source of income.
The blog now has between five and 10 additional monthly advertisers, including Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and eLuxury.com. Most of these companies pay a flat monthly fee and an additional bonus when traffic to the blog surpasses a certain level. Currently Bagsnob gets about 287,000 page views per month (with approximately 78,000 unique visitors from around the globe), and yearly revenues are well into the six figures.
The popularity of Bagsnob led Craig and Cook to add the four other Snob sites. “Our obsession obviously did not end with bags,” Cook says. “It was a business decision to do Beautysnob next because we saw a need for a beauty site that gave full and honest reviews from regular girls who want to look pretty. Now with the newest site, Couturesnob, we can finally share our love of everything fashion related.”
Even with five active blogs, Craig and Cook (who is now back in L.A. and has since had another daughter) have remained mostly stay-at-home moms, balancing family life with blogging and invitations to fashion shows and A-list events. To help with the workload, they’ve hired a handful of employees and freelancers, including Cook’s husband. “Now he is a bag expert himself,” Cook says, “and our CFO.” While some of the employees post on the other Snob sites, Craig and Cook remain the only Bagsnobs. “Readers were used to our opinions, so when other people blogged on Bagsnob, we got complaints,” Craig says.
What sets them apart from other bloggers may be the key to the future for the two entrepreneurs. “Instead of just sitting at home behind our laptops, we actually go to the fashion shows and meet designers and other people in the industry,” Craig says. This fresh content and The Snobs’ big personalities led reps at Creative Artists Agency to see potential in Craig and Cook as Internet TV stars, and the two just signed with the agency. Internet TV webisodes of The Snobs’ interviews with fashion designers will soon air on their sites and will then get pitched to TV networks.
Soon the duo will be household names. “We certainly didn’t think that ranting about bags could turn into a full-blown career,” Cook says, “especially not one that is the most rewarding of our lives.”
