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.'"

The Flip Squad

And so Condé Nast turned to the experts -- a think-tank called the Flip Squad made up of eight high school girls. For the past 10 months, these young women met with editors, brainstormed ideas, test-drove the Web site, and proved valuable assets in developing a popular Web site in an already crowded online community.

"It's not that we don't know the audience. We know them very well, but why not involve them directly with us," said Gonzalez of the Flip squad. "Why not have the audience be a part of the conversation with us? Let's get their ideas directly from them."

So Flip.com as it exists today, is largely a product of its audience. Everything from the advertisements to the background decoration, the font, and the color scheme were approved by girls who would actually use and enjoy the site.

The defining feature of Flip.com, as its name suggests, is its "flipbook," a collagelike element where girls can create online scrapbooks about whatever strikes their fancy -- be it photography, Barack Obama, fashion, rubber duckies. Members are encouraged to showcase their creativity and personalities through their flipbooks.

"We all felt that there needed to be a place like this, a place where especially teen girls could just go and create something and not just absorb different things, but really make some kind of output," said Abigail, a high school senior and member of the Flip Squad.

Phillipa, also a senior and Flip Squad member, said, "I think that going to Web sites, such as Myspace and Facebook, get kind of boring after a while, because you are just looking at pictures and making comments on people's pages and Flip really allows you to share the type of person that you are and the things you like to do."

While some girls do create flipbooks and profiles centered on topics like shopping and boys, they can now express themselves in their own way that reflects their personality. "Maybe a poem that you like and a picture or maybe music that you like, that's not just lists and photos slapped on a page," said Phillipa.

In the end, Flip.com serves as a reminder to us all that you really can't judge a (flip) book by its cover.