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Luxury magazines seeking new avenues

High-end publications compete for country's rising and aspiring rich

By Victor Velek
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
December 26th, 2007 issue

Bourgeois luxury is back.
Top shelf

H.O.M.i.E. is the latest luxury lifestyle magazine to enter the Czech Republic

Publisher: Ahead Media (Austria)
Focus: Design, architecture, technology, travel
Target audience: Design lovers with cosmopolitan outlooks
Content: Mostly translations, from Ahead's German edition of H.O.M.E.
Competition: Dolce Vita, Elle, Proč ne?!

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Less than two decades since the reintroduction of capitalism Czechs are now able to purchase from a wide selection of luxury goods most visibly seen on Prague’s Pařížská street which has turned into a hub for high-end brands like Cartier and Burberry.
Shopping on streets such as Pařížská is becoming more popular with an increasing number of Czechs who qualify as millionaires by the standard of the American dollar. Last year the country boasted nearly 15000 millionaires a 12.6 percent increase from 2005 — one of the Top 10 fastest growing clubs of millionaires in the world according to the World Wealth Report by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini.
Capitalizing on the rising rich and more critically those who envisage themselves as wealthy one day is a new niche in the Czech Republic’s publishing market: upper-class lifestyle magazines.
In November the Austrian publishing house Ahead Media expanded to the Czech Republic Slovakia Hungary and Slovenia with localized versions of its H.O.M.E. magazine a title already established in Germany and Austria.
Called H.O.M.i.E. in the Czech Republic the magazine focuses on modern lifestyle design architecture technology and travel. The first issue has been on newsstands since the end of November the first of six scheduled for 2008.
According to Alexander Geringer the owner of Ahead Media the magazine is a unisex title targeting “urban globalizers with an international open mind” between 30 and 50 years of age.
Geringer is convinced that the pool of Czech design lovers paying great attention to the cultivation of their urban lifestyle is large enough to support H.O.M.i.E.
“This wealthy target group is already large enough — this is shown by the success of design brands like Vitra or high-end retailers like Konsepti — and it is growing incredibly fast” Geringer said.
He believes that the Czech edition’s circulation will reach 15000 copies by the end of 2008.
One of the strategies Ahead is using to reach this objective is the magazine’s unusually low price: it sells for 50 Kč ($2.80) on the newsstands and annual subscriptions run at 171 Kč.
H.O.M.i.E’s newsstand rate is half the price of existing magazines targeting a similar demographic and advertisers like the lifestyle magazine Dolce Vita and the local edition of women’s fashion magazine Elle. The interior design magazine Marianne Bydlení matches it for affordability.
The lure of high-end advertisers has reached the Czech Republic’s newspapers as well. Economia a publisher of business periodicals started to distribute a luxury magazine as a supplement of its daily Hospodářské noviny in 2005.
The supplement — called Proč ne?! (Why not?) — beats the country’s other lifestyle titles both in price and volume of readership said Economia executive director Michal Klíma.
“The uniqueness of the supplement derives from the fact that it is distributed for free with Hospodářské noviny allowing it to reach the best possible target group” Klíma said adding that advertiser demand was one main reason for launching the magazine.
Increased purchasing power is not the sole reason for the success of luxury magazines. The aspirations of customers who couple fashion and design awareness with more modest means are equally important.
People — especially young people around their 30s — are now more informed about modern trends and more sensitive to the quality of things they buy to decorate and furnish their homes said Silvie Luběnová PR manager at Profil Media the publisher of design magazine Blok.
“Design items don’t necessarily cost big money” Luběnová said. “Lots of smart functional and quality products can be bought for 100 Kč.”

Victor Velek can be reached at vvelek@praguepost.com


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