Blogger Spotlight: Craig Landale, MENSWEAR STYLE

Award-winning men’s fashion blog and magazine MENSWEAR STYLE is a daily style essential, covering the entirety of men’s lifestyle, across fashion, motoring, sports, fitness and technology as well as podcast interviews with fashion insiders. Launched in 2012 by Editor-in-chief Craig Landale, the blog delivers style tips, menswear news, and the latest collection updates from new labels and luxury fashion brands. In this spotlight Craig Landale talks to us about retaining a loyal readership, having strong relationships with PRs, why blogging isn’t as glamorous as people think, and why being listed on our latest men’s lifestyle ranking has given him a motivational push. 

What’s new on MENSWEAR STYLE? We now have a Podcast show on iTunes hosted by Peter Brooker which is dedicated to men’s lifestyle, fashion and grooming. We have six episodes so far and have featured high profile guests such as Oliver Proudlock, Evander Holyfield, Dan Rookwood, Eric Musgrave and Joshua Kane.

How do you measure the success of your website? We measure success by daily, weekly and monthly unique website visitors. Our aims and objectives always comes down to gaining and retaining a loyal readership. Our income is also centred around and is directly affected by traffic levels .

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a blog? Start it as soon as possible. The industry gets more and more saturated each month and the longer you leave it, the harder you’ll find it to capture exposure. Start it off as a hobby and see it grow. You’ll then hopefully get to the stage where you can either go part time or quit your job entirely to focus 100% on working for yourself.

How do you work with marketers and PRs? We have many contacts and have strong relationships with people working in the PR and Marketing industries. This can range from unique global launch partnerships to small one off product reviews. We are always happy to discuss possibilities and ideas.

How do you use social media to promote and share content? What are the challenges? We have a large following of over 250k followers across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest so this has proven to be a powerful marketing tool for us. Its the where our articles first get shared and many articles go viral as a direct result of this. The main challenges come from Facebook since they’ve have changed their algorithm whereby they’ve made it harder to get your posts seen by your audience without paying for ads.

What can PRs do in working better with you? I personally work better via email correspondence. I don’t have enough hours in the day so I avoid face to face meetings. A clear project brief and a budget estimate will also streamline the process and help to avoid any confusion over what is required.

What has been your blogging highlight so far? I can get a bit geeky when it comes to blogging so it’s something not so glamorous. We had written about a brand that ended up on Dragon’s Den six month’s later. Thousands of people must have then googled the brand to find their website whilst watching the show but it crashed due to the high volume of traffic. Our website’s article about them came up 2nd in Google’s search results, so we got a ton of visitors. I was sat at home watching the TV show with Google Analytics’ ‘Real Time’ tracker on my iPad. This was very exciting to me because the traffic was the highest to our website I’d ever seen.

London Fashion Week will be starting soon, will you be attending? If so, what are you looking forward to most? No, we don’t attend or cover London Fashion Week. We do cover the men’s version, London Collections: Men though. However, Burberry has now combined their separate men’s and women’s shows so we might go to that one.

What has the Vuelio Blog rankings mean to you? For me it gives me a motivational push. It’s the pat on the back and nod of recognition that puts a smile on my face. In this industry I’m always comparing MenswearStyle to bigger and better publications, so it can feel sometimes feel like its not achieving at the level I want. But it’s things like this that makes you stop to reflect and makes you feel proud.