Organize the Site Around Revenue, Not the Calendar

Published 2020-10-20 · Updated 2026-06-29 · By Alan Wizemann

Topics: Digital Marketing, E-commerce, User Experience, Growth Leadership

goop started as a newsletter, and that origin quietly ran everything long after the company had grown into something much larger. When I came in to author the first unified digital strategy, the thing I kept noticing was not a broken site so much as a site that was faithfully serving a model nobody had stopped to question. The whole experience was organized around the editorial calendar, content first, with commerce bolted alongside it like a guest who had shown up to someone else's party. That was not an accident or a failure of execution. It was the founding logic of the business, expressed in software, and it had worked well enough for long enough that almost no one inside the building experienced it as a problem at all.

I want to be honest about that tension up front, because it is the whole story. The editorial structure was not a mistake the company had been too slow to fix. It was the reason goop existed, the thing that had built the audience and the trust and the voice in the first place, and you do not get to wave any of that away because it has become inconvenient for the part of the business you are now trying to grow. The discomfort of the work was precisely that it meant confronting the model the company was founded on, the one that had genuinely succeeded, and saying out loud that the way we organized the experience was now optimizing for the wrong thing. People came to the site for a reason. The site was arranged around when we had published, not around why they had arrived.

The strategy I wrote to address this, which we codenamed "Mosaic," sequenced the work into five capability phases rather than treating it as one big bet. The phases moved in a deliberate order – Identify Users, then Understand Intent, then Social Proof, then Drive Revenue, and finally Personalize – and each one was tied to concrete features and a real test-and-learn cadence rather than a slide that said we believed in personalization. The order mattered more than any single phase. You cannot meaningfully drive revenue from people whose intent you do not understand, and you cannot understand intent before you can even identify who is in front of you, so the sequence was less a roadmap of features than an argument about what has to be true before the next thing is worth attempting.

The flagship move inside all of that was what we called the Revenue-Based Redesign, which reorganized the homepage and the core browse experience around revenue contribution instead of the legacy editorial calendar. Said plainly, the most valuable real estate on the site stopped being allocated by what we had most recently published and started being allocated by what people actually came to do and what actually contributed to the business. That is a simple sentence to write and a genuinely hard thing to do inside a company whose identity is editorial, because every page you touch carries an implicit argument about what the company is for.

So we did not ship it on faith, and I think that is the part most worth passing on. We ran a test-first prototyping program (the team nicknamed it the "Quest for Revenue") that validated the reorganization before we committed to it, rather than redesigning on conviction and hoping the numbers caught up later. This matters most exactly when you are touching something sacred. When you are confronting the founding model of a company, the temptation is to argue about it in the abstract, in conference rooms, where the loudest opinion or the most senior one tends to win. A test moves the argument out of the room and onto the actual behavior of actual people, and it lets you reorganize around revenue without asking anyone to simply trust that you are right, which, when you are proposing to rearrange the thing that built the company, is not a small gift to be able to offer.

Underneath the redesign was a broader shift in how I wanted the experience to behave, which was to push it toward discovery-based search and contextual commerce. The old model asked a person to navigate an editorial structure to find what they wanted, which is to say it asked them to learn how we had organized ourselves before we would help them. The better model meets intent where it already lives, surfacing the right thing in the right context so that the experience bends toward the visitor rather than making the visitor bend toward the publishing schedule. That is the difference between a site that reflects how a company thinks about itself and a site that reflects what its customers are trying to accomplish, and they are not the same site even when the content on them is identical.

What I took away from the work, and what I would say to anyone sitting where I was, is that the most dangerous structure in a business is usually the one that used to work. The editorial calendar was not the villain of this story – it was the hero of an earlier chapter, which is exactly why it was so hard to set down. Organizing around intent and revenue rather than the calendar was less a redesign than a quiet admission that the company had become something its own software had not yet caught up to. The honest, uncomfortable lesson is that the things worth reorganizing are rarely the things that failed. They are the things that succeeded so completely that you stopped noticing you were still organized around them.