Glow, the Shoppers Drug Mart custom magazine, will reveal its new look and feel in its May 2012 issue.
Now published by St. Joseph Media (which won the publishing contract from Rogers Publishing last fall), the beauty magazine has an enhanced emphasis on storytelling . It is also bringing back fashion coverage.
Editor-in-chief Juliette Baxter and art director Daniel Mackinnon gave Marketing an exclusive sneak peek of the issue this week. The pair, who worked together previously on custom content publishing at Totem, presented their idea for the new visual identity of the magazine to the Shoppers team in December and were excited that Shoppers gave it the thumbs up.
While Baxter said custom publication clients often have a “sell-our-stuff” mentality, the Shoppers team was very open-minded and supportive. “We’re not a shopping magazine,” said Baxter.
Baxter said the storytelling in the magazine, which has a circulation of 360,000, comes from its collection of varied writeres’ voices. She is mindful to let writers’ “quirks come alive” in their articles so the writing isn’t tethered to a singular tone or house style.
Moving forward, she will be mining social media for bloggers and new writers to ensure different editorial styles are represented.
Baxter said the St. Joseph team wants the magazine to feel “chic, clean and breezy.” Half of the magazine is beauty content and 35% is related to health and wellness.
Mackinnon said many magazines today put tons of information on the page with lots of layering, but Glow’s design team wanted to give readers “a sense of ease when reading the pages” with lots of entry points. The team drew inspiration from 1990s design, which Mackinnon said is cleaner and includes more white space. The layouts include elements such as pull quotes and visual timelines, but there is a lot of ‘air’ on the page. “We don’t want people to feel overwhelmed,” said Mackinnon.
Readers of the magazine are style and beauty conscious women, said Baxter, and, according to PMB Spring 2011 data, their average age is 33.
The magazine’s previous positioning as “Canada’s beauty and health expert” has been simplified to “Canada’s beauty expert.”
“We want to own the beauty space,” said Baxter.
Glow is also aiming for a synergy between its print and digital offerings to “seduce” digitally savvy readers. The magazine is set to launch a redesigned website on April 11. The product will also continue to appear on the Shoppers Drug Mart website as a digital magazine to take advantage of its impressive online audience, said Baxter.
Further down the road Glow will also offer apps. Baxter also likes the idea of making the most of the real-time nature of Twitter by tweeting to Glow readers when products that have sold out in Shoppers locations have been restocked.
Glow will continue to publish eight times a year. Its Quebec sister publication, Pure Magazine, for which St. Joseph also won the publishing contract, will increase its frequency to eight times per year from six. Baxter said that 80% of Pure’s content will be translated with the remaining 20% being original, local content.
