When Stylist launched sixteen years ago into a women’s media landscape that was often patronising and exploited vulnerabilities, Editorial Director Lisa Smosarski and her team set out to speak to their female audience in an intelligent way that better reflected their lives.
Fast forward to this year, and Stylist was named Media Brand of the Year at the PPA Awards for its adaptable approach, new initiatives, and leaning into a community to find new audiences.
Today the brand reaches four million women across all platforms each month. The secret, Smosarksi insists, is remaining true to a DNA established when they launched as a free premium weekly in 2009, distributed at commuter transport hubs, airports, and hotels around the UK.
“Our mission was to speak to women intelligently, to fight for equality, to call out injustices where we saw it,” she explains. When she and her team launched Stylist, they likened the weekly issue to a conversation with your friends when you might discuss politics, your career, what you’re wearing to an event at the weekend, what you’re going to cook for dinner, your relationship, and an exhibition you want to see or book you want to read.
“We thought there were very few media outlets talking to women that reflected that true richness of experience. If we’re honest, a lot of media was quite patronising, and exploited women’s vulnerabilities, made them feel worse about things rather than better,” she says.
Stylist was intended as a breath of fresh air. The team set themselves a set of rules, which were more about what they wouldn’t do than what they would do. “We wouldn’t do diets, we wouldn’t do celebrity gossip, we would make sure the content was non-patronising and didn’t talk down to women. We wouldn’t do negative paparazzi shots.”
Revenue diversification
They have remained true to that ethos over the last sixteen years, as they have launched Stylist as a website, on social media, as events, and, following the Covid lockdowns, moving from a weekly to a monthly print magazine, and, more recently, an online subscription and membership model.
At the same time as sticking to those core principles, the brand has not been afraid to adapt and diversify. Constant innovation is at the heart of what they do. Instagram didn’t even exist when they set out, but as the media landscape has changed, they have striven to evolve with it. Every year, they launch one or two new projects and they are happy to experiment and willing to admit if a venture doesn’t land as well as hoped.
Ten years ago, they launched Stylist Live at the London Business Design Centre, their first exploration into large-scale events, which quickly became an important part of the brand. Now, events are an integral part of the Stylist ecosystem, with its devoted female consumers eager to engage with the brand on a personal, real-life level.
They were early to launch into email, originally under the name Emerald Street. One of the learnings was changing the name to Stylist Loves, to make it more identifiable. Lisa explains: “What we loved about email was it was as intimate as a magazine, it came into a very personal part of your life, your inbox was sacred.”
Another learning was around the launch of the health and fitness vertical Strong Women in 2018 together with a women-only gym, Stylist Strong, at the members’ club AllBright Mayfair, tapping into the way in which women were starting to engage with the strength trend. “That was about reclaiming what were traditionally seen as male sports and spaces and making them more accessible to women. After a period, we realised we were good at creating content and not as good at running gyms, so we wanted to stick with what we do best,” Lisa admits.
Strong Women has stuck though, and as well as health and fitness content, has now transformed into live events such as an annual trek bringing together 500 women to walk a half marathon in the Surrey Hills. This year, they also launched the Stylist Adventure Trek, with 100 women abseiling, rock climbing, and kayaking in the Lake District.
“What I love about these events, which is unique to Stylist, is that women will come on their own and they will meet like-minded women. It’s a community and a connection and a chance to push themselves in ways that they haven’t before.”
The membership offer
The weekly print magazine ceased production during the first Covid lockdown of 2020, before returning as a monthly. A couple of years ago, they launched a paywall for subscriber and membership content, as well as a weekly digital magazine. They now have just under 10,000 members who pay to access premium content and additional benefits.
“That’s going to see a big pivot as to what our brand looks like for the future as we really look to have these very deep engaged audience conversations. People who love Stylist so much they want to pay for the content, they want to come back daily and as we look at different trends around AI, Google algorithm changes, having that deep, engaged audience becomes more and more important.”
As part of this evolution, last year, they launched the Stylist app, which has already had approximately 25,000 downloads. “That again is a really great way for us to have that daily conversation with our audience to make sure we’re delivering the content that they love,” says Lisa. They were also one of the first women’s brands on Apple News and have a great relationship with the team there — “It is actually quite complementary to the Stylist audience.”
It is also important to appeal to niches and in the last year, they have launched a careers email and a parenting email to appeal to different segments of their audience, which is broadly made up of 25 to 45-year-olds, although Lisa stresses that at the upper end of that age limit, they are keen to hang on to women who have grown older with the brand.
This year, they have also launched two new B2B offerings. The first of these is the Stylist Network for Business, taking a popular consumer franchise and seeing how it can work with businesses. The second is the launch of their insight agency, Think Stylist, which is about taking their deep knowledge of women and their understanding about how to communicate with them and using that to help other brands to do the same.
“I think the PPA award really does recognise that constant pursuit of how media brands can do things differently, how they can engage with new audiences, turn that into revenue opportunities as well as audience engagement opportunities. It’s that constant desire to keep moving, keep refreshing,” says Lisa.
The brand now sits within DC Thomson, and is part of a matrix structure, with approximately 25 people working across digital, print, social, email, video content, and around 60 to 70 in the wider team. Commercial partnerships still account for a significant proportion of revenues and are a valuable and critical part of the business, but from a publishing strategy perspective, there is a real focus on growing subscriptions and membership. They offer two packages: Stylist+ is digital content access with a hard paywall rather than a metered paywall on certain articles; then they have Stylist VIP which includes the print magazine delivered to their door, access to all of the digital content, member benefits such as discounts and beauty products, and free or reduced-price access to their events.
“We have those two offerings, so our strategy is to keep growing those and make sure we’re having those regular interactions with our audiences. There is a real focus on how we can grow our app audience going forwards. Print will remain strong, it’s an important part of our business, and we know that advertisers and our partners still love to be in print.”
Giving something back
Lisa recently became chair of the PPA’s Next Gen board, overseeing the second cohort of fresh industry talent voicing their views on the future of magazine publishing. AI is one of the biggest challenges facing all media, and she is reassured that different generations seem to be aligned in their views on this. She sees her role as a reverse mentoring situation, where she learns as much from new talent as they do from her, but also wants to give back to the industry that has nurtured her. “It seems a cliché to say so, but I was given so many opportunities myself and had so many brilliant mentors, I’ll always jump at the opportunity to try and pass that on.”
The overriding purpose of Stylist, she says, is to help women, whether that is practical or emotional. When she and her team are brainstorming ideas, she says it is, “the pause, the aside, the bit in between what they’re actually telling you that is the bit that you should be listening to.”
At this year’s PPA Awards, Stylist also won Cover of the Year for an eye-catching cover featuring Adam Brody, star of hit Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This, about to tuck into a cake with cherries on top, beside the words ‘Everybody wants this’. Lisa’s recipe for a winning cover is one that creates an emotional response, whether that’s happiness, curiosity, or anger, together with an unforgettable line or image, preferably both, and finally something that is unique to your brand.
“The covers you remember, you’re able to go, oh that’s a Stylist cover, that’s a New York Magazine cover, that’s a Time cover. You have your own brand identity attached to it. For us, we’ve taken a very poster like design, based on the fact we really do believe pictures make you stop, words make you stay.”
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
