The list of shuttered shelter publications is long but illustrious: Gourmet, House & Garden, Domino. But the appetite for home-body information is, if anything, greater. The nesting impulse that led to the boom in do-it-yourself home improvement and the birth of HGTV, among others, continues unabated and may be even stronger given the recession’s impact on home sales and consumer penny pinching.
The disconnect is, of course, the cost of producing glossy, image-filled magazines. The cost of putting words on a page is miniscule compared to the cost of photo shoots, especially those for high-end consumables.
When Imagination has published shelter magazines over the years (Design Concepts for Pier 1 Imports, Perspective for the Interior Design Association, among others), designers and consumers say that they are looking for the same thing: ideas they can tear sheet. In other words, they want it to be actionable. Readers want to take the page from the magazine to a retailer and match the color, find the rug; they want to buy what they see.
Marry all those things together—the size of the audience, the readers’ propensity to buy, their love of the format and the need to do it in a cost-effective way—and you have fertile ground for reinventing the shelter magazine category.
Lonny, an online magazine launched last October by two Domino magazine refugees, combines the graphic-rich format readers love with Web-only capabilities. The digi-mag technology they employ, from Issuu, replicates a print magazine experience—page turning, table of contents, etc.—but also allows readers to zoom and to click through and buy items from the pages.
Lonny’s real revolution, however, is in attracting advertisers. Shelter retailers were looking for something without the high CPM of a House & Garden but with its design sensibilities. Shelter magazines and the ads that run in them need to make the reader want what they see. Their pages are merchandised like a Crate & Barrel, for instance, to make readers want the whole room, from paint color to carpet, furniture to lighting, the art on the wall to the flowers in the vase. Lonny proved that the online medium could do that and, potentially, make the sale immediate. It brings the gotta-have-it mindset of shelter readers to the immediate gratification of e-commerce—actionability that advertisers love.
Digital magazines like Lonny are, for many, an interim step, mimicking the format of the past as a step into an as-yet-undiscovered future. Graphic-rich publications are hoping that the iPad will lead to greater reader engagement and, eventually, pave the way to what comes next. Already, now-shuttered publication brands are launching themselves in iPad versions. Gourmet, for instance, will relaunch as Gourmet Live later this year in a free iPad-only version. Executives at Condé Nast say that it will be neither a magazine nor a digital publication but an entirely new way for readers to access and interact with content.
The Non-Publication
Ava Living is not a publication. It is a social network dedicated to interior design launched in January 2008. The opportunity that CEO David Bassett-Parkins saw was to solve two significant problems for interior design, neither of them things that a traditional shelter magazine could solve.
First, interior designers were limited by geography. You can’t design a room for someone on the other side of the country. This reduced the growth potential for design firms, most of which are small, especially on the residential side of the business.
Second, designers thought they were selling concepts while what the consumer wanted was a new couch. Consumers wanted the professional advice but not the attitude, and they weren’t sure how much the “concept” might cost.
Bassett-Parkins decided to start a web business that would “give consumers the power to find a designer,” he says. “Design should not be local, it’s perfectly portable. And it should be able to be bought in pieces.”
On Ava Living, a user can post images of a room and choose designers to critique it. This starts a conversation that leads to a few designers bidding for however much of the job the consumer wants done. Working together online, they come up with a design, including a 3-D room plan, everything with specs and prices displayed.
“Designers can specify online,” Bassett-Perkins says, “and make that delivery directly to the consumer.”
The Money
As with all the rest of publishing, the problem is not the information and the way it is created, and it is not the finding an audience that wants the information, it is the money. Shelter magazines need to find new business models, things that readers and advertisers and, as in the case of Ava Living, “members” will pay for. And then they need a way to control the cost, to give readers/users what they want without employing legions of stylists, photo retouchers and assistants. It all needs to be leaner but the result needs to be just as fat.
Read A Fresh, Ferocious Wave, our multi-media book about the reinvention of publishing.
