Refinery29

Refinery29 is an American-based fashion, style and beauty website that follows a newsletter format. The website is broken down into six sections, with an additional section that offers content geared toward specific, metropolitan cities in the United States. The site expanded to include its first European city in 2012 with the inclusion of London. The overall website sections include "Fashion", "Beauty", "Living", "Entertainment", "How To" and "News". Since its launch in 2005, Refinery29 has grown to draw one billion pageviews per year.^[1] The website has also been ranked as #179 on the Inc. 500 list of "America's Fastest Growing Private Companies".^[2] In 2011, Refinery29 was positioned to make $8 million in revenue.^[3] Despite having 600,000 subscribers as of September 2011, the website is mostly monetized through advertising.^[4]

Website Origins

Founders Justin Stefano and Philippe von Borries co-founded Refinery29 in 2005 as a fashion focused city guide, emphasizing unique fashion discoveries that were local to New York City. The name of the website alludes to the website distilling information into its essence.^[5] The company headquarters is located in the Financial District, Manhattan neighborhood of New York City.^[6]

Metropolitan City Guides

The metropolitan city guide portion of Refinery29 includes five American cities: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. This list originally included Miami, which was dropped from the list in 2012. Each city guide includes localized information across five sections titled "Events", "Store Guides", "Dining and Nightlife", "Best Of" and "Sales and Deals". Each city also features a "Trending" topics section on the front page of its website that indicates current topics of conversation. Local bloggers are often cited to provide their perspectives on each city's happenings.

In 2012, Refinery29 edited its City Guides section to include London, citing British model and designer, Alexa Chung, as one of the style icons leading to the expansion.^[7]

R29 Shops

R29 Shops is an e-commerce portion of the website that allows readers to purchase a variety of products sponsored by Refinery29. Periodically, R29 features vouchers that allow shoppers to redeem sales at specific stores or designers' collections. The R29 Shops account for 20 percent of the website's revenue.^[8]

In December 2012, Refinery29 hosted a three-day pop-up shop called Tinseltown Bazaar in New York City. Philippe von Borries stated the purpose of this event was to promote an "inspiration-based shopping" experience for the holidays.^[9]

The Rig

The Rig is a blog that chronicles Refinery29's technology developments, as well as the company's daily happenings.

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