KATHMANDU, Nepal — I write to you this week from Kathmandu, the chaotic but beautiful capital of Nepal. But my thoughts are still back with the BoF team in our London offices, where the buzziest news of the week was our nomination for a prestigious Webby Award in the business blog category, alongside globally recognised digital heavyweights Mashable, Business Insider, The Atlantic Business and All Things Digital.

According to our internal statistics, more than 2500 of you clicked on bit.ly.com/VoteBoF to show your support in the public vote, helping us surge into second place position with 33 percent of the vote, just behind Mashable, a site that gets 20 million unique visitors per month. In recent days, we have maintained our second place position, but our share of overall votes has dropped back a bit to 23 percent. In order to help us win what is truly a 'David and Goliath' battle of the business blogs, please click and vote to show that the fashion industry means business. It takes 2 minutes and with your support we can win this thing!

Elsewhere this week, we published a story on Maiyet, a brand which, in only 18 months, has managed to beautifully fuse a distinct luxury sensibility with ethical credentials. It remains to be seen whether the business can be scaled, however. As Polly pointed out in the comments on the piece, not every brand needs to grow into a behemoth, but healthy businesses do need to expand. At BoF, we're very interested to see where this one goes.

Jeremy Langmead's provocative Op-Ed piece, which argued that it's time to dispense with the pretense of "church and state" divisions between the commercial and editorial sides of a traditional fashion media business, sparked a flurry of comments and conversation on social media. But while Mr Langmead is advocating the continued integration of commerce and content, one of the world's biggest fashion media conglomerates has its sights set on brand extensions into bars, clubs, cafés — and even a fashion school. We spoke to Jonathan Newhouse and other senior executives from Condé Nast International to learn more about the strategy. Based on their comments — and some hard numbers from Condé Nast — it seems these kinds of extensions are really picking up steam, particularly in emerging markets, and can provide meaningful supplementary revenue to the company's core publishing business.

And, finally, in our on-going, groundbreaking coverage of the Fashion 2.0 sector, we explored the rapidly expanding fashion e-commerce sector in the Middle East and social marketplace The Cools' new strategy, examples that both show that e-commerce innovation continues to grow across geographies and business models.

That's all for the week in the business of fashion. Don't forget to vote for BoF in the Webby Awards!

Imran Amed, Founder and & Editor-in-Chief

Links:

Let's Show the World that Fashion is Serious Business (Editor's Letter)

The Luxurious Goodness of Maiyet (Intelligence)

Op-Ed | Is Church and State Obsolete? (Opinion)

Drinks at GQ? (Intelligence)

Fashion E-Commerce Flowers in the Middle East (Fashion 2.0)

Following Strategy Shift, The Cools Opens to the Public (Fashion 2.0)