About Us

The Strategist is a site for helping people shop the internet smartly. Our team of journalists are obsessively testing new products, collecting first-hand experience, and interviewing those whose taste and expertise we trust to find the products that are actually worth buying. Our guiding principles are to be trustworthy and persuasive about what is worth spending your money on, so every product that is featured on the Strategist is endorsed and vetted by editors. Think of us as your shopaholic friends who care equally about function, value, innovation, and good taste.

We also hope to turn you on to the weird but delightful things you never knew you needed and take a Woodward and Bernstein-like approach to mapping shopping trends; whether it’s spending months finding the next status handsoap or figuring out why a certain $140 Amazon coat took over the Upper East Side.

Taking its name from New York’s National Magazine Award–winning print service section, The Strategist builds on the magazine’s decades-long legacy of intelligent shopping coverage and applies that rigorous service journalism to online shopping. The Strategist launched online in 2016, as a pop-up blog for the holiday season. In 2017, the blog became a permanent site that covers year-round gifting, sales, beauty, home, kitchen and dining, kids and babies, style, tech and electronics, travel, and wellness. In 2020, we launched Best in Class, the Strategist’s carefully curated and rigorously vetted flagship shopping guides across all product categories.

If you click through to purchase a product, affiliate links often (but not always) provide a commission to the site. Everything we feature is something we’ve chosen ourselves, and we always give our independent opinions. In 2022, we launched an editorial badging program to make it even easier for readers to identify the things we love and that meet our very particular standards.

The Strategist was named Hottest in Ecommerce on Adweek’s 2021 Hot List, which noted: “Clever, stylish and with just a touch of lip, The Strategist has elevated the tedious world of product recommendations into high art.” The Strategist has won several Commerce Awards for Publishers, including Best Editorial Brand in 2019 and Best BIPOC-Owned Business Article in 2021. New York Magazine, including The Strategist, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for General Excellence (News, Sports, and Entertainment) in 2019, 2020, and 2022.

Since 2019, New York has been a part of Vox Media, the leading modern media company, whose portfolio features nearly 20 popular and influential editorial properties, including (in addition to the New York brands) Vox, Eater, NowThis, SB Nation, The Dodo, and The Verge. The Vox Media Podcast Network is one of the largest collections of popular podcasts, spanning technology, news, pop culture, emerging trends, and more. Vox Media Studios is the award-winning nonfiction production and distribution studio for multiple TV and streaming partners.

Subscribe to New York here. Sign up for our newsletters and follow the Strategist on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Every product that appears on the Strategist has been independently selected by our rather obsessive staff — and you can learn more about them here.