A Home for Fashion Nerds Gets a New Look Imran Amed started his blog The Business of Fashion about five years ago on his sofa. "I had no idea where it would lead," he said the other day in London. Mr. Amed, a Harvard Business School graduate and a former McKinsey consultant, had decided to turn his career in another direction, or rather, perhaps, expand it. He is one for taking on several hats, including writer and teacher, at Central Saint Martins. He just happened to like fashion. He mentally kicked the can around but, as he said, "I kept coming back to fashion. I was fascinated by the people in the industry - they're really hard-working and talented. The idea of a fashion blog was fairly new then. I started On the Runway maybe a year before BoF, when there weren't that many such blogs. You could, essentially, do what you wanted - find the voice and the community. Mr. Amed's choice of a business-attuned blog about our frilly industry set him apart right away. As you may have noticed, The Business of Fashion has a new look. About a year ago Mr. Amed decided that the blog's future needed investment, so he raised about $2 million, which allowed him to create a much more versatile platform and to actually have a real staff of correspondents and editors. More than one million people - or "fashion nerds," he calls them - visit the BoF regularly. Being able to generate more original content is going to raise the site's profile significantly. "It's really about building a team now - we've had no one full-time," Mr. Amed said. About 60 percent of his readers are from the industry, 30 percent "are just fascinated by fashion," and the rest are students. That combined 40 percent seems worth developing as an audience. The site now has more of a news look, with dedicated channels for features like Fashion 2.0 and Global Currents. The news digest has always been popular - a quick snapshot of the latest news and features articles from other publications. There is also a new App that adapts the site to mobile and tablet devices.