On the day of Burberry’s SS26 show in London, news travels that attendees will have to trek through a muddy field. Fashion group chats explode with emojis — mostly umbrellas, crying cats, and a few middle fingers — but Katy Lubin isn’t worried. The vice president of brand for the shopping tech platform Lyst shrugs when I ask her if she’s going to the show, or if she’ll be anywhere at all for fashion month. She gestures across her office — a glass-walled perch in the spiral-shaped interior of London’s Minster Building with an estimated monthly rent of £50,000 — with the satisfied exhaustion of someone with better things to do. “I’m here,” she says, “where I need to be.”

Lubin, 38, is the creator of the Lyst Index, the famed quarterly ranking of the “hotness” of brands such as Miu Miu, Jacquemus, and, yes, Burberry. First created in 2017, Lyst’s “brand barometer” determines rankings through a “proprietary algorithm” that combines data from its own shopping app with Google search rankings, social media metrics, and reported sales, according to the company. 

Because of its creative use of hard data, the Lyst Index has come to represent something rare in fashion: an authentic snapshot of what people actually like. It’s no secret the industry is choked with celebrity brand deals and red carpet contracts that swap taste for direct deposits. TikTok creates “cores” faster than the Katseye girls do body rolls. With hollowed-out editorial departments, newbie writers are given titles like “senior fashion editor” to crank out “news” like “ballet trench jeans are having a moment.” Fashion’s fundamental concept — that changing clothes signifies shifting identities, and that this change fuels commerce — now has a trust problem. 

Lyst says it solves that very problem with hard numbers. And the fashion world has fallen hard for it. Industry watchdogs such as Women’s Wear Daily and The Impression report the guide’s results like horse races — Loewe has overtaken Gucci! — while commercial outlets such as InStyle and Vogue build out shopping pages based on the company’s data. Apparel brands like adidas and On issue press releases when they’re mentioned. When Tory Burch’s pierced flat shoes made the Index in 2023, the billion-dollar label posted a delighted TikTok to celebrate. “We hear a lot from founders that being named as a ‘top brand’ on Lyst Index is a vision-board moment for them,” Lubin says. 

The obsession with Lyst’s list is warranted. High-ranking products are featured on Lyst’s highly trafficked shopping platform, which can result in a sales and publicity boost. The data analytics platform Keywords Everywhere says that nearly half a million times a month, someone googles the term “Lyst Index.” That means that every minute, 11 people are looking for this thing online. No wonder Tory Burch’s Instagram ingenues were freaking out.

As the Lyst Index steadily gains power, the very suspicions that made it so popular are now being turned on the company itself. Many outlets treat it as gospel — just look at the hubbub over The Row’s flip-flops — but its inner workings remain mysterious. How is it compiled? Where does the data come from? What do the rankings actually mean? 

Not everyone is eager to speculate. Among the 46 people asked about the Lyst Index for this story — including three major creative directors in America, Europe, and Japan, a dozen retail consultants, and several C-suite leaders at mass market apparel companies — more than 30 requested anonymity. “You don’t want to piss off a platform with the power to sway public opinion and to sell some of your things,” says one LVMH prize winner, a cult-cool designer who met me in a London back alley for a cigarette between retail appointments. “But the only numbers that matter are sales numbers. How do you know if I’m a ‘hot’ brand if you don’t see the lines out the door at my store? Come buy my clothes and then we’ll talk.” 

Lyst recently got a sales number of its own: In April, it was acquired by the Japanese online platform Zozo for $154 million. 

Lyst is a 15-year-old shopping aggregator, meaning it sells inventory from many different sites across the internet. You can search for anything — Cecilie Bahnsen ASICS sneakers, Simone Rocha barrettes — and somewhere in the far reaches of the Lyst galaxy, it will emerge. The virtual, curated shopping mall lives as a website and an app; according to the company, it currently has 160 million active users and up to 10 million active product listings on its site per day. “The Lyst Index is actually a very small part of what we do,” Lubin says, explaining that the company’s primary focus is still creating “the best, easiest shopping interface in the world.”

Still, the Index looms large in the minds of Lyst’s fashion followers, who tune in every three months to see who has been humbled and who exalted. “If you’re inside many luxury fashion houses, the morning that the Lyst Index comes out is the worst,” says Camilla Morton, a Vogue runway reporter turned creative director whisperer who began her career with John Galliano at Dior and now advises top luxury runway brands and emerging designers. Morton recalls being woken up at 5 a.m. by a client distraught that they weren’t on top of the nappa leather heap. “People take the news that they’ve fallen a place on that index very, very badly.” 

A former creative manager at Kering, which owns Balenciaga, Gucci, and Valentino, notes that around “Lyst Day,” the marketing and branding departments were especially tense. In the weeks leading up to the Index’s release, “they would study our social media and take down any posts they thought brought down our Lyst ranking. It reminded me of wrestling and trying to cut weight before the ring.” 

Lubin admits that the weight of turning SEO into cultural insights is a practice that can leave designers and marketing directors losing sleep — and that she herself is mindful of this while ranking them. “It would be terrifying to put yourself out there in the position of responsibility that this index carries — to try and be the market-maker — without unimpeachable data. And actually, one of the things that I find comforting about the Lyst Index is that it’s grounded in objective data. It’s not, you know, a personal choice. I’m not like, ‘Oh, I love you. Be on the Lyst.’ That’s not possible. Numbers are numbers.” 

But which numbers get prioritized by Lyst’s proprietary algorithm have ruffled some feathers, especially with brick-and-mortar stores that rely on IRL sales instead of ecommerce. “I love the utility of it, but the secrecy drives me a little nuts,” says Ruthie Friedlander, the founder of the luxury consulting agency At Large, who has worked at the famously offline labels Chanel and The Row, as well as for Elle and InStyle. “For one thing, it can’t track in-store data, at least not yet… And if this is such a definitive ranking, why can’t the math be more transparent?” 

When venture capitalist Chris Morton and web developer Sebastjan Trepca created Lyst in 2010, luxury online shopping was a boom town with a big problem: faux shopping — i.e., when you load up your online shopping cart with great stuff, then leave the site. “We were conscious that users were effectively creating rich content and expressing their style, but then destroying it,” Morton told The Business of Fashion in 2011. “We wanted to build a service where users could keep those items for as long as they liked.” 

Lubin says she was employee number 11. “I’d just come from MR PORTER, and so I understood the emerging tech space was very hot. But startup culture was new to me… We had a room in our old office that we used to call ‘The Surgery’ because there were so many doctorates and Ph.D. data scientists working in there building the algorithms from scratch.”

Lyst’s initial goal was to create a personalized online shopping mall where one user could click through thousands of stores. As the shopper saved items to their profile, Lyst’s algorithms would recommend products aligned with their taste. The company took an affiliate cut of everything it sold and supplemented the shopping experience with articles from British Vogue veterans, including writer Katherine Ormerod and art director Lucy Gatland. The stories helped bring authority to Lyst but also boosted its SEO ranking through trusted authors with bylines in Google-approved outlets.

Lyst scaled fast. In 2012, it reported a 400% surge in revenue, according to a press release, securing $60 million in yearly sales for its retail partners by 2014. Meanwhile, founder Morton was refining his brand story. In 2011, he told The Business of Fashion the site was inspired by music discovery platforms Pandora and Last.fm. By 2014, Morton had swapped those platforms for Spotify in his analogy while speaking with Business Insider. This type of “stick with the winners” awareness is reflected in the game-day feel of the Lyst Index, which Lubin says she suggested to Morton as a left-field PR play.  

“We don’t hold any inventory. I can’t do discounts or vouchers because we don’t control shipping or pricing. There’s no samples and no gifting,” Lubin says. “So it was like, ‘How the hell do I get people to talk about this company and what we’re doing?’” Lubin soon realized she did have one thing that other online fashion platforms weren’t hyping: a massive data set that could be gamified into editorial content that appealed to fashion’s relentlessly competitive spirit.

The Lyst index was easy to follow, plus it pit luxury gladiators like Prada and Balenciaga against each other. Of course it was a hit, and it helped propel the shopping company to nearly double its revenue — from about $12 million to $21 million, according to Glossy — in a little less than a year. Ten months after the Index debuted on The Business of Fashion’s homepage, the French luxury firm LVMH invested a reported $60 million into Lyst.

Meanwhile, Lyst was strategizing to encourage other brands — in fact, all the brands represented on its shopping network, from Madewell to Givenchy — to make an investment of their own. Shortly after LVMH’s public investment, Lyst’s chief partnerships officer, Jenny Cossons, told Glossy that Lyst generates “both sales and awareness” by offering increased visibility to companies that pay Lyst a higher affiliate fee. According to Glossy, the more commission a brand paid to Lyst, the more likely it was that their item would appear quickly in a user’s search — a move that Glossy called “surge pricing for fashion.” As searches for trendy items like barn jackets spike, the affiliate fee for the category gets higher. “Things have evolved a lot since [Glossy’s story in] 2018,” Lubin concedes. “We now give partners bespoke advice — with a lot more depth, per channel, per market — in a way that we couldn’t back then.”

Does this fee-to-see structure influence the Lyst Index? Indirectly, absolutely — and Lubin is candid about it. “Our whole model is affiliate-link shopping,” she says. Lyst’s algorithm weighs a factor Lubin calls demand, which includes “clicks, views, likes, adding things to your basket, wish-listing an item, and generated affiliate revenue.” If your pair of $300 low-profile sneakers appears on page one, there’s a better chance they’ll get clicked on than the sneakers on page 11 — which indicates a better chance they’ll end up as a “hot” commodity on the Lyst Index. Still, Lubin is careful to explain it “is not a pay-to-play opportunity for partners,” noting the Index itself is not shoppable and any click-to-browse features are on a separate part of the site and app. 

Lubin says the Index algorithm is also loaded with “off-platform metrics” — Google and Bing searches for items and brands, social media posts and comments — but can’t tell me to what degree those factors count toward rankings. (Fair enough.) Still, she makes it clear that items bought through Lyst will always be prioritized. “It has to go through our lens, which is our platform. There was always a hope that people would understand that what we are saying is hot is what’s on our platform. And if people interpret it as, you know, the Lyst element isn’t important to the ranking, then that is incorrect. Because it absolutely does matter.” 

In the Q3 2025 Lyst Index, out today, Saint Laurent, Miu Miu, The Row, Coach, and Prada all earned top spots. If the index is indeed weighted toward actual sales, Lyst’s most active users are, to quote your mom driving through the McMansion neighborhoods during Christmas lights season, “rich-rich.” Lubin laughs when I ask. “We have 160 million shoppers across all these different markets. It’s so spread out across every demographic,” Lubin says. “The one commonality is that they really want shopping to be easier and more fun.” 

The Lyst Index turned the commerce content model inside-out by making data itself a status symbol. It also amassed serious industry access — which, in fashion, is often considered more valuable than money. Lyst has hosted IRL events like the Fashion Intelligence Forum, a spring gathering in New York City featuring panels with stylists like Britt Theodora and influencers like Jessica Wang, who gamely talk about “consumer authority” and “trend rebellions” while an audience of fans snacks on tiny slices of avocado toast. In October, Lyst hosted its first Los Angeles event with Puck’s fashion head, Lauren Sherman, who frequently uses Lyst data in her reporting. 

The pipeline from data capture to content capture has inspired a wave of other formula-driven platforms. The most notable is Tagwalk, the nine-year-old fashion search engine that added a “real-time data dashboard” in 2024 with homepage brand rankings. At the time of this writing, Tom Ford and Dries Van Noten are taking top spots; neither appear in the Lyst Index at all. There is also @DataButMakeItFashion, a clever meme account about trends that computer science engineer Madé Lapuerta started in 2019. Even Vogue Runway now reports its most-viewed catwalk collections. “We call it the attention economy,” Camilla Morton says. “And now you can get your own attention from tracking who’s getting attention.” 

The newest Lyst Index is already creating buzz. But as fashion begins chafing at algorithmic trends, luxury seers like Friedlander wonder whether data sets can capture the stealthier trajectories of IYKYK brands like Attersee or Bode, which make the majority of their sales at real-life retail counters. Ditto heritage houses like Charvet, Chanel, and Goyard — labels with a strong luxury presence at boutiques that don’t use affiliate links at all. “Brand value and online clicks aren’t always the same thing,” Friedlander says. “In fact, especially now, the brand value is often seen as higher if not everybody knows to click on it.”

Still, Lubin is optimistic that the next phase of Lyst’s growth will appeal to hardcore fashion acolytes and just-need-a-good-jacket shoppers alike. “Being good at shopping has become a new goal. It’s become like a new wellness routine; it’s become this totally other area of flex. This is where Lyst becomes really useful, because fashion right now is very good but shopping is very bad. The actual product discovery angle — how you find exactly what you want — that’s the biggest change that’s coming to Lyst. We’re aiming to revolutionize that part of the shopping experience. To make you the best at it.”

And when shoppers go nuts for Loewe’s new Joey Tribbiani shirt piles and Collina Strada’s massive Mariposa sunglasses on Lyst, will those brands get an extra boost on the Index? Lubin says you can count on it. “Every three months we’re going to release this list, and the data is going to come out, and we’re going to put our head up and say, ‘Hey, this is what we’re seeing.’ We’ve committed to the bit here.”