T he London offices of iVillage UK - the US import, Tesco-backed women's network - are bereft of the usual luxuries associated with dot.coms. There are no inflatable meeting rooms, ergonomic furniture, or silk-stream air sculptures. Instead, the network that hopes to be the place where British women "find answers" is housed in cramped, albeit temporary, offices in a Mayfair business centre.
Here, 25 staff slave away at 23 screens, and the walls are decorated with mission statements on photocopied A4: "The voice of women in the UK," screams the first. "It does what it says on the tin," instructs the second. And finally: "Community is a group of people, being in one place with shared ownership" (a line straight out of a Californian management consultant's manual). These precepts, explains the newly appointed editorial director, Tina Gaudoin, are at the heart of iVillage UK and how it defines itself.
Arguably, Gaudoin herself and not the product strategy is iVillage's best-kept secret weapon. Rival UK women's portals scoff and say the Yanks - despite having launched the largest women's network in the world, last valued at £150m - will never get inside the head of the British public. But with Gaudoin - former deputy editor of Tatler, Times writer and founding editor of high- brow fashion magazine Frank - iVillage has bought in a piece of the British establishment and ensured an experienced editorial team, from print, TV and radio journalism.
Gaudoin has the added attraction for her US employers of having worked in the States for several years (writing for the New York Times, Mirabella, American Vogue and Harper's Bazaar); indeed she met iVillage's CEO, Candice Carpenter, while working on an upmarket home-shopping channel. The story goes that Carpenter, who has been seeking an editorial captain since January, brought in Gaudoin as a consultant, and in the middle of a meeting clicked her fingers and said, "Heck, Tina , why don't you do it?" Or something like that.
It must have been a tempting pay packet (pushing six figures) to lure her away from Triyoga, the yoga centre she has set up, her two young children and an easy freelance writing gig. "It was the community model that attracted me," says Gaudoin, who admits she had no experience of online editing. "It's completely different from a women's magazine: this is a bottom-up medium. You look at what members want and provide programming around it. It's about providing a place where people can share experiences - where you can get advice on getting your figure back into shape from, say, a mum in Cornwall. Real women providing real advice."
She cites a case history from the US site where one woman posted a desperate plea: "Help, someone! I want to murder my three-year-old!" This stimulated a huge Samaritan-style response and an online debate about child abuse which went on for weeks. The parenting channel, with chatroom, message boards and online experts, is one of the first to be developed on the UK site (still at demo stage) along with others devoted to beauty, careers, relationships, diet and fitness and computers and the internet.
iVillage US now claims 9m unique visitors a month (1m more than women.com, its main competitor). When it launched five years ago, it was hailed as a political movement: a network for women by women, to improve their lives, counteract ignorance and promote solidarity and "speaking out". Its UK sibling tried out its political wings at last week's Labour conference with a debate hosted by Cherie Blair. It is also working to promote affordable childcare and fairer deals for mothers. Whether British women will embrace this right-on variety of US community en masse remains to be seen.
Gaudoin faced a similar challenge in 1997 with Frank, when she attempted to break the glossy mould by combining politics with attitude and frocks. It didn't sell well enough, however, and was pulled last year. Apart from the "tell it like it is" approach, Gaudoin insists, the comparison ends there. Fashion comes way down the agenda with iVillage. "It's not about being glossy and glamorous," she says. "It's about providing answers for women. I don't think it needs 'an identity' in the same way a glossy magazine does. But I think we can assume women don't just want to know about lipsticks and frocks."
Unlike Associated New Media's Charlotte Street and IPC's Beme - which one year on are consolidating into niched areas - iVillage intends to stay broad spectrum, aiming at ages 24 to 55. It has the advantage over its competitors of having five years of market research to justify its decision and has built up a detailed profile of its already existing UK visitors from their marital status to their cornflakes. No UK publisher can claim that. "Women don't have a lot of time. They come to iVillage to find answers. Once they've got them, they leave," says the US head of marketing, Hilary Graves.
"It's a bit like the Tesco philosophy: why go anywhere else when you can get the information all in one place?" says Gaudoin (hence "what it says on the tin"). The content, she says, is already "pretty deep" (the parenting channel has 800 articles), but it will take at least 18 months before it has the girth of the mother site. High-profile writers she can confirm include Sally Ann Lasson (famous for having a high-society affair) on dating, Annabel Heseltine (political and news analysis) and Christine Hill (leading ante- and postnatal expert).
Both iVillage and its fellow US émigrée, women.com, differentiate themselves from the current market leader, Handbag.com (which has just announced 312,158 unique users for July), by being "deeper and richer in content" and providing "more interactive tools". For some reason these tools - which include everything from a prenatal calendar, to a self- explanatory Make over O-matic and the more elusive Keyboard Yoga - are seen as unique selling points.
Unlike other UK women's sites, however, which are desperate for commerce, Gaudoin is keen to distance iVillage from the online shopping mall experience. So what does Tesco get for the £12m plus £25m marketing budget it has pledged over three years - apart from its 50% stake? Ostensibly, it's satisfied with being the exclusive online grocer and having tie-in promotions and click-to-buys on the parenting and food channels.
On advertising and sponsorship revenue alone, iVillage UK will have to stretch the Tesco cash for three years, when it is calculated it will break even. Whether or not Gaudoin will be around to witness the red figures turning to black - with a young family and ambitions still to get back into print journalism it seems unlikely - she wants to make it "the market leader". "In the US, we know what works", she says, rather incongruously.
