Barnato | Brand & Editorial
We’re in the business of expanding horizons.
The automotive media landscape is a mile wide, but it’s generally just an inch deep at best. That was the genesis of Barnato, a premium online editorial platform founded by myself and my partners, with me as editorial and content lead. Barnato reimagined car culture as something elevated, literate and expansive, where the automobile wasn’t the endpoint, but rather a vehicle (literal and figurative) to a broader world of style, art, music, and travel. With curated commerce seamlessly integrated into the platform, the result was part Neiman Marcus catalog, part Vanity Fair. Unfortunately we had to sunset the venture after our A-series funding failed to raise the $15,000,000 (Zimbabwean) required for our next phase of growth, but the spirit lives on in our broken cars and unshakable fantasies.
The biggest Babe of them all.
Before we could launch our plucky little website, we needed a name. And it didn’t take long for us to zero in on Woolf Barnato as inspiration. Born rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, Woolf “Babe” Barnato had a yen for action. He was a swimmer, a boxer, a first-class cricketer, and when WWI broke out he left Cambridge to join the Royal Field Artillery.
After the war, Barnato took up motor racing, becoming one of the fabulous Bentley Boys, winning Le Mans three out of three times. And because he could, he commissioned a special Bentley—complete with crystal bar set—just so he could win a bet that he could drive from the French Riviera to Calais faster than the Blue Train. (Spoiler: he was already back at his London apartment by the time the train hit Calais.) And, incidentally, he also saved Bentley from insolvency. But whatever he did, it was always with panache and joie de vivre.
Thus, we had our name.
Make dollars and make sense.
If there’s one thing Barnato wouldn’t make us, it was the first car blog on the internet. But we were the first to recognize that existing sites which had started as commentary now had to awkwardly back themselves into a profit model of some kind. The result: a never-ending scroll of disparate content interspersed with Amazon affiliate links to jumper cables. That’s not premium, and it’s not good business.
But it is, however, why we built Barnato as an e-comm site wrapped in an editorial layer. Referral links supported the site financially, which funded editorial. Editorial then established the site’s POV and built its credibility, driving traffic. Traffic then clicked on the referral links. It might not have been a virtuous cycle, but it was definitely a cashflow positive one.
We’d rather show you than tell you.
In a sense, Barnato was a style blog. But as the Earl of Chesterfield said, “style is the dress of thoughts.” And Barnato was not in the business of telling people what to think. When we spoke about watches, shoes, home decor or anything that fell into our editorial crosshairs, our filter was quality and point of view, not price. That’s why we never explained things the audience should already know, nor did we condescend to those who didn’t. If you didn’t know what we were talking about off the bat, you’d figure it out shortly. Our job was to make our readers feel at ease and welcome them into a world of possibilities. Where those readers started their journey wasn’t important. Only that they wanted to push further. That’s what Barnato was for.
