Brand Rank Methodology
Brand Rank is a data-driven index of the top trending fashion brands surging in real time across Magasin platforms.
This report uses a weighted scoring system that assesses Magasin’s coverage radar and reader behavior in four categories: Chat Mentions, Post Mentions, Clicks, and Orders.
While these metrics have historically been culled manually—picture us combing through the chat and tallying up clicks for dozens of combined hours—our process has been exponentially up-leveled thanks to recent technological advances. Where before there was only the sweat, blood, and tears of painstaking data entry, now we have The Tool, an elegant (and proprietary!) suite of functions that analyzes our bulk .txt and .csv files and turns out a ranking with a degree of precision not previously possible. Thank you to friend of the newsletter Kate Curran for building us this powerful piece of machinery.
Here’s how The Tool is crunching numbers:
Chat Score
Every brand mentioned in the highly active Magasin Chat (which you can find and participate in here) throughout the month earned 1 point. In 2024, we analyzed 47,000 lines of chat text to extract over 10,000 brand mentions.
Post Score
Also tallied were brands mentioned in newsletter sends coming directly from Magasin. In 2024, we published 195,322 words. Over 1,000 of those were brand names. These inclusions also carry a weight of one point each, equal to that of chat mentions.
Click Score
Every link that received over 10 clicks from newsletters is broken out, awarding the brand associated with the link .01 points per click. So, if a link receives 2,488 clicks, it earns 24.88 points. (For those who are curious, 2024 saw 9,500+ links combined drive nearly two million clicks.)
Note: A quirk of counting clicks is that many of the links are “packaged” within redirecting URLs that hide the name of the brand that would otherwise be readable by The Tool. This presented a huge roadblock to automation, that is, until we had The Unpacker, a fix that unfurls links into legible formats, developed by our friend Steven Huynh. A million thanks, Steven.
Order Score
Lastly, as you are aware, we use affiliate linking for some of our content, and as such have access to stats including the number of orders driven through a specific URL. From this data, we’ve identified the brand behind every link that drove an order—there were 600+ different brands represented in 2024’s data—and assigned a weight of .5 points per order. So, if a link to an Eres bikini drove 12 orders, the brand is credited with 6 points. (For clarity, it’s not apparent in the data whether those 12 orders placed were all for Eres bikinis, or even other Eres products, just that clicks that arrived to a site through that Eres link led to a certain number of orders in total—are you still with me?)
If you have any questions or ideas about the way we compile Brand Rank, or you’re curious to hear how a seafood tower is somehow involved in its making (it is), we’d love to hear from you. Email me directly at laura@magasin.ltd to share your thoughts.
See every past edition of Brand Rank here:
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