Meet the Flip Squad
Feb. 15, 2007— -- Caught somewhere between Oscar the Grouch and Oscar de la Renta, today's young women are experimenting with everything from their bedroom wall color to their hair color, trying on friends the same way they would a pair of jeans, and learning who they are in the process.
Hollywood has made a mint off these years, portraying teenage girls as little more than catty, superficial and clueless. But clueless they are not. And Condé Nast, the venerable parent of Vogue and its kid sister, Teen Vogue, knows it.
Bringing its glossy magazine savvy to the Internet, Condé Nast is capitalizing on this niche of creative, ambitious young women with a Web site called Flip.com. The site is being described as a cross between the social networking site Myspace and the photo-sharing site Flickr -- aimed at the high school set.
"We went into this with the precept, 'We really need to be relevant with teen girls.' It wasn't necessarily about just creating a social network online," said Chris Gonzalez, the executive editor of Flip.com, in an interview with ABC News. "We felt that if it was relevant in their lives, be it a magazine or a Web site, that they were going to go to it and it would succeed."
But Condé Nast was looking to go beyond the typical social networking and photo-sharing sites for teenage girls. The company wanted to create a site that would allow these young women to express themselves freely and share their creativity and passions with other teenagers from across the country or around the world.
"If I could consolidate Flip into a few words it would probably be facilitating girls' creativity and self-expression," said Gonzalez. "No big surprise teen girls are creative and have always been creative. They just happen to be doing it online right now, in a much more public forum. We looked around at the sites, what they were doing, and found that their creativity was expressed mostly through lists of things that they like and posting a couple of photos, and we just thought, 'There has to be a better way to do this.'"
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