Conde Naste's Lucky: "The magazine about shopping"
Conde Naste's new magazine has rapidly surpassed its guaranteed readership. Paid circulation grew to an average if 780,000/month. Of that 207,095 copies were sold at newsstands which this New York Times story says is "a telling indicator of consumer interest, outperforming fashion stalwarts like Harper's Bazaar and W."
Internal company figures indicate that Lucky has brought in about $16 million in advertising revenue this year through the October issue, compared with $7.6 million in the period a year ago. And the magazine is on track for about $20 million in ad revenue for its second full year, although it is still no threat to the likes of Glamour, its Condé Nast sibling, which is expected to bring in almost $100 million this year
..And Lucky does break a few rules of the fashion and beauty publishing niche. While magazines like InStyle and Marie Claire have introduced ad-like elements, with Lucky the catalog is all there is. Historically, women's magazines have encouraged aspiration, but Lucky is all about acquisition. And celebrities, the clotheshorses for much of the last decade of fashion coverage, are nowhere to be found in Lucky.
...[Lucky editor, Kim] France said: "I don't know how serious a person I am. Maybe I am a serious person with a seriously superficial side. I think that Lucky is a really smart magazine. I'm using my brain a lot more rigorously than I was when I was writing 1,000-word profiles of 23-year-old rock stars."
Many in the advertising community appreciate the mental effort. "What Lucky does, because of its simplicity, is provide a very different magazine experience," said Avery Baker, vice president of marketing at Tommy Hilfiger. "It makes the fashion experience very turnkey."
..."The magazine about shopping," as Lucky proudly announces, is as much a declaration of principles as the tag line of "Sex, sports, beer, gadgets, clothes and fitness." that adorns the cover of Dennis Publishing's Maxim. The plainspoken fealty to common, some would say base, reader needs, seems to be catching on.
"I take that as a compliment," Ms. France said. "The people at Dennis have done a great job of giving the readers what they want."
And Malcolm Gladwell, the author of "The Tipping Point" and a contributor to The New Yorker who is a longtime friend of Ms. France, does not have a problem with the editorial populism, either. "Reading a magazine is a habit," he said. "Anything that makes that habit more pleasurable rebounds to all magazines, and I think Kim's magazine is a pleasure to look at."