Too Cold to Go Outside? A Startup Will Deliver Vogue to Your Door in Minutes

Too cold or lazy to visit a newsstand to buy Vogue's March issue? Well, lucky for you, cold, lazy person, a startup called Postmates will deliver the issue to your door "in minutes" if you live in New York City and, starting next week, L.A. The service is called Vogue On-Demand and runs while supplies of the March issue last. For $15, the issue, which normally costs $4.99, is delivered by hand and comes with a six-month print and digital subscription to Vogue. Subsequent issues are delivered via the U.S. Postal Service. Readers are paying a premium for the quick, personal delivery. A promotion on Vogue.com offers six issues plus digital access for $6. A Postmates spokeswoman wouldn't say how much money the company takes from each order. Vogue's circulation averaged 1.2 million through the first six months of 2014, the most recent data available, according to its report with the Alliance for Audited Media, which tracks print circulation. That was down 1% from the previous year, with the shortfall owing entirely to a drop in single-copy sales.The number of subscriptions climbed nearly 3% to 956,352. This marks the first time that Postmates, a San Francisco-based company that promises to make deliveries within an hour, has worked with a magazine publisher. Previous media partners include Oyster Books, for which Postmates delivered Harry Potter candy, and Bravo, for which it dropped off meals from the restaurants featured on the Bravo show "Best New Restaurant." Vogue's owner, Conde Nast, has experimented with digital partnerships to help boost print subscriptions. In 2013, for instance, the company struck a deal with Amazon to make it easier for readers to subscribe to Conde Nast magazines, which also include Vanity Fair, GQ, Wired, Bon Appetit and The New Yorker. The two companies share data on subscribers. It's a similar case with Postmates. The spokeswoman for the company said Postmates shares subscription information directly with Vogue after a customer signs up. The New York Times included Postmates in an article last December about services that could disrupt Amazon's dominance.

Too Cold to Go Outside? A Startup Will Deliver Vogue to Your Door in Minutes

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