My friend Richard MacManus recently posted several links to his internet history site, Cybercultural, on the subject of 2004. And now seemed a good time to follow suit, since Lucire turns 27 on Sunday (Monday in New Zealand). It is an anniversary with a difference, as it also marks 20 years since we first launched a print edition.
Other than Word files going to Microsoft copy shops from the team at Slate for sale at Starbucks, no one had ever attempted to turn a website into a print magazine before.
In 2002, we had created a PDF booklet covering L’Oréal New Zealand Fashion Week: the French giant was into its second year being the naming rights’ sponsor for the event. It was distributed online and on CD-ROM. We included our own shoots, the chief one by Briar Shaw, and the small publication looked like it could be in print.
We were coming from a high in 2003, with a successful stint at L’Oréal New Zealand Fashion Week, where the managing director of McCann–Erickson here, Glenda Wynyard, was favourable to the idea of a print edition of Lucire.
We prototyped two issues (which ultimately were distributed online) before doing the real thing for an October 4, 2004 on-sale date.
There were a number of forces at work: a personal will to see Lucire exist in more than one medium, and the ever-decreasing price of online advertising (which was obvious even then). New Zealand was riding a high with Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films, so I felt the country was being really noticed. I thought we believed, as a nation, that we could do anything world-class, and that the Zeitgeist was in our favour. Magazines such as Idealog and Dish showed that Kiwi magazines finally offered up quality that surpassed what was found abroad.
I also could not see us truly living up to our ‘global fashion magazine’ tagline if we could not get Lucire literally into people’s hands. The original New Zealand edition was a proof of concept, as it was always my intent to go beyond our shores, with print editions.
I was ahead of my time as the software certainly wasn’t as up to snuff as it could be, nor were fibre connections, but we made those first forays into international licensing in 2005, with Lucire Romania.
Internally, the team was not cohesive and that took several years to get right—but once we did, we formed a loyal core that remains in place.
I look back now—I was less than half my age today—and it certainly took cojones. Pioneering regular online fashion publishing in one country was not hard, since others had done it in their countries; being the first to take a website into print in a substantial way, with the intent of growing the brand internationally, was unprecedented. Lucire wasn’t Word docs going to the local copy shop to be sold at Starbucks.
Also looking back, 2004 perhaps marked the end of the first wave of the World Wide Web, as blogging started to become more mainstream, and those of us who were still doing custom layouts to suit each article were labouring too much in comparison. The great phase of experimental design, figuring out just how the web medium would work for publishing, was coming to an end. It had been a wonderful time.
So something had to shift. It just so happened that I chose the road untravelled, with plenty of heartache first, before the triumphs came.
One of the heartaches was unexpected. We enjoyed a wave of publicity from the New Zealand media. Everyone from TV1 and TV3 to the new Herald on Sunday ran stories, so the country knew something was coming, and it was Kiwi-owned. Yet the public did not seem to comprehend that this was a local product for the world, despite the media being very good at pushing this core message. Maybe they could accept this in film, but not in magazines? Surveys kept showing that people perceived Lucire as a foreign title being exported to New Zealand with yours truly as licensee. Feedback included ‘It’s so European,’ when even the typefaces were locally designed.
I did not discover till quite recently that we are the only company operating as a magazine licensor in this country.
It proved harder to shift than the first time I encountered our country’s lack of confidence in itself away from sporting endeavours. As the first digital typeface designer in New Zealand, and the first to publish fonts from here for worldwide sale in the 1990s, I confronted similar thinking from design professionals, even the design press. ‘No one makes fonts here.’ ‘Joe Churchward? Yes, he designs, but the drawings are sent offshore to be digitalized.’ It was beyond mainstream thought—and this is after many Australians got into type design, and Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko had founded the independent typefoundry Emigre—that anyone in New Zealand could publish fonts. (Happily, this backward thinking has since shifted, but not without at least five years of fighting perceptions—and making it easier for those who followed.)
Here I was again, up against a national self-doubt that saw Lucire grow in print far more offshore than in its homeland, and a core website that continued to be frequented more by Americans than any other nationality. Putting a New Zealand flag in the corner of the print magazine did nothing to change perceptions. Thank goodness, I say, that the Kiwi formula worked as an export. And thank goodness for an international readership—which happily includes an outsize number of Kiwis—that stood by us for over two decades, regardless of medium.
Jack Yan is founder and publisher of Lucire.
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