Sugar on Wednesday announced a deal it hopes will get a celebrity-obsessed culture and its credit cards to collide. The San Francisco-based company, formerly known as Sugar Publishing, said it will acquire social-shopping site ShopStyle and incorporate that company’s technology into its pop culture blogging empire.
Sugar operates a network of celebrity photo blogs, all bearing the sweet moniker. PopSugar focuses on gossip; BellaSugar tracks beauty trends; DearSugar looks at love and sex; GeekSugar updates readers on tech; and on and on. That puts the Sugar kingdom in competition with the likes of such sites as TMZ, Defamer, Perez Hilton, Jossip, Nerve, and tech blogs of CNET.
The goal of the ShopStyle acquisition is to combine the ability to buy and promote products with editorial content across the Sugar sites. The acquisition “gives us the opportunity to merge content, community, and commerce,” Sugar founder and CEO Brian Sugar said.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Wednesday’s acquisition follows an also undisclosed sum paid in June to Sequoia Capital-backed Sugar by NBC for a minority investment in the company. That deal gave NBC control over Sugar’s ad sales, which bring in 5 million unique visitors each month, according to Sugar. The NBC investment also included a content-sharing deal between Sugar and NBC-owned iVillage.
Los Altos, California-based startup ShopStyle offers features now de rigueur for social-shopping sites. ShopStyle users can browse images of clothing and accessories and create personalized stylebooks, which they can embed as widgets on third-party sites. From the company’s web site or through the widgets, users can click on product images to make purchases directly from Banana Republic, Bluefly, or Nordstrom, for example.
Social-shopping sites have been growing in popularity across the web in the past year. Sites such as StyleHive and Kaboodle include features similar to ShopStyle.
Early last month San Francisco-based StyleMob hopped on the trend when it built a social network around so-called street fashion, which brings together a variety of unexpected and eclectic styles in a single outfit. Unlike most of the other fashion sites that focus on specific products and e-commerce, StyleMob works on an ad-based and affiliate relationship model.
The first step of the Sugar-ShopStyle partnership will focus on the distribution of the ShopStyle widgets. Already on Wednesday several of the Sugar sites had begun advertising the embeddable tools.