to get the project off the ground, going to Kickstarter to raise $11,000. They offered a range of investment options and rewards, with investors pledging $2 getting their name listed in the first issue and investors pledging $75 getting a subscription and exclusive t-shirt. At the top of the pledge/reward tree was the $750 package, offering a year’s subscription and a personally inscribed copy of the first issue for top investors.
XI received $15,075 in pledges
from 339 individual backe rs . However, funding did not translate
into instant success. XI’s owners have had to deal with a number of problems that they never experienced as a digital- only publication, with the printed version taking longer and being more difficult to produce well than anticipated.
At press time, there has only been
one edition, with the second one sent back to printers due to quality issues, forcing subscribers to rely on a series of blog posts to gain access to the content that they paid to receive in print.
Even the virtual world of internet shopping is looking to get more physical. Net-a-Porter, an ecommerce website dedicated to showcasing luxury brands and fashion trends, confirmed in February 2013 that it will launch a print magazine.
“When I first arrived here, I really wanted 124
To whet its fans’ appetites for the print magazine, Net-a-Porter published a single 104-page “The Collections Special” (published separately in four languages — English, French, German, and Mandarin) that was sent in mid-February to 100,000 top customers of Net-a-Porter whom the company has identified as print lovers.
So, look around, magazine publishers.
Your next competitor on the newsstand could be the website that, until now, only threatened your digital readers.
to see how our customers were consuming fashion content, and I found they are heavy consumers of print magazines,” Tess Macleod Smith, Net-a-Porter’s vice president of media and publishing, told WWD.
“These are women in their mid- to
late 30s who are buying four to five magazines per month. They love print, and they love a global edit. They’re buying titles like Japanese Harper’s Bazaar along with French Vogue. And it was clear they want us to communicate with them through all platforms.”
The as-yet-nameless magazine, which
will debut in the autumn and will be sold via subscription and on newsstands, will be published four to six times a year. It will feature 300 pages of fashion news, fashion shoots, interviews, and features.