“Other social medias come and go, but Zoella.co.uk will always be here,” wrote digital mogul Zoe Sugg in her November 2019 editor’s letter. So far, she’s not wrong. Zoella was created a decade earlier as a personal blog for the Wiltshire-born influencer to share her favourite fashion and beauty products. Since then, the website has exploded into a full-blown digital and editorial empire.
Today, Zoella is a brand staffed by a team of six women. This includes Maddie Chester, Sugg’s former manager at talent agency Gleam Futures, who was appointed managing director in September 2021. Sugg remains as CEO.
Few influencers have been able to achieve this transition.Tavi Gevinson’s Rookie Mag and Leandra Medine Cohen’s Man Repeller (later renamed Repeller) evolved from blogs to editorial publications but both have closed in recent years. However, Sugg isn’t just a content creator: in addition to vlogging, she’s a best-selling author and an entrepreneur. An OG YouTuber, she began creating videos in her bedroom long before influencing was a viable career and in the process gained a loyal following who have stuck. Only now her audience isn’t reading personal blog posts by her – they’re reading articles inspired by her hugely successful personal content. Now that’s clever.
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Chester tells CORQ this has been a strategic evolution to ensure there are multiple voices and opinions on Zoella, presumably so that it can survive when its founder is busy working on numerous other projects. “It isn’t just Zoe in her bedroom talking about her favourite products,” she says.
In November 2019, Zoella underwent a revamp, which means you’ll no longer find Sugg’s old blog posts such as “I LOVE LUSH!” or gushing details about her favourite coffee shop. This refresh was a deliberate attempt to separate Zoe Sugg the person from Zoella the business. “There’s a grey area where people haven’t quite caught onto that distinction,” says Chester. “But it’s very much what we’re trying to create – this clear divide between the two.”
The website had changed in layout and design in the past, but it was always under the brand Zoella, with the name shown in a Tumblr-esque cursive font. Scrolling through the Zoella website now, the logo has now been replaced with a bold Z and articles are written by “Team Zoella” rather than Sugg. The content spans beauty, sex and health, books, lifestyle, recipes and style. Articles are in the form of listicles, shopping and gift guides, the Zoella book club, Q&As, interviews with experts, how-tos and a Between You and Me agony aunt-like column. It’s still developing but add an ambitious product strategy and its not a million miles away from Goop. And let’s not forget, Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness juggernaut is worth $250 million.
Sugg’s maturing audience has led to shifts in what Zoella will cover. “Team Zoe” has published work on miscarriages, breast cancer awareness, menopause and sex, although the latter hasn’t always been well received. In January 2021, an article titled The Best Sex Toys to Spice Up Your Life in 2021 led to Zoella being removed from the AQA GCSE syllabus for being “unsuitable” for students. The story went viral but rather than damage the brand, Chester revealed this led to Zoella having a record month. Reacting to the news on her Instagram Stories, Sugg revealed said the piece “was our most clicked on article, most swiped up & most ordered items through links EVER!”
The backlash highlighted two major misconceptions about Zoella. Firstly, that people believe Sugg personally writes all the articles, and secondly, they think the majority of her audience is teenagers. “It was quite funny for us that everyone assumed it was Zoe talking about her top 15 vibrators,” says Chester.
Interestingly, the media storm has actually shaped Zoella’s future content. “Off the back of that article doing so well, we have grown the women’s health and sexual wellness side of the business and actually created a whole new tab for it,” she reveals. The sex and health section is now one of the biggest verticals for Zoella and according to Chester, it “does incredibly well.”
As Zoella covers everything from sexual health to festive recipes, who is the target audience? The majority demographic is 25- to 35-year-olds, with 75% of readers being between 18- and 35-years-old, and 90% of its audience identifying as female. The content reflects Sugg’s growth, but Chester reveals its readers are not necessarily fans who have followed her since the beginning. “Her biggest category used to be the 17-to-25 age group, and now it has drifted up the category. Obviously, she’s a woman in her thirties now, so it would be odd if it hadn’t done that.”
In addition to being managing director of Zoella, Chester works with Sugg on her personal brand, which includes projects such as the Filmm and Template editing apps, created in collaboration with bloggers Elsie Larson and Emma Chapman of A Beautiful Mess. She says these are a “good example of the types of projects that we want to undergo in the future”.
For brands hoping to work with Zoella, Chester says the process “is very similar to way that I would operate with Zoe and brands”. She adds: “We’re always trying to make sure that it works for us first and foremost, and we’re not doing anything that would be jarring and that our audience wouldn’t appreciate.”
The team also thinks about how a brand partnership would benefit the Zoella audience and whether it’s in line with their values. Like most digital media brands, Zoella currently works with brands editorially, through adverts on the website and affiliate programmes. “A lot of it is proactive,” says Chester.
So what’s next for Zoella in 2022? “There are a lot of irons in the fire in terms of the types of projects that we’re working on,” Chester says. She wants to continue doing partnerships with brands that “feel relevant to us” such as the Zoella x Etsy lifestyle and homeware collection, in which the brand worked with independent sellers. She also notes she wants to grow and make the book club more tangible. “I’m really excited about the future and the things we’ve got up our sleeves.”
By Louise Whitbread, editor of CORQ. Picture credit: Zoë Sugg via Instagram.
The evolution of Zoella: A timeline of how the OG influencer has remained relevant for over a decade