Hello, Magnolia, You’ll Fit Right in Here

the-magnolia-journal-cover-imageThe Magnolia Journal, Meredith’s new lifestyle magazine with HGTV stars Joanna and Chip Gaines, hit newsstands across the country last week.

What do you do with your brand when you’ve got 4.7 million followers on Instagram, half a million Twitter followers and a hit TV show on HGTV?

You launch a print magazine, notes Becky Peterson in Folio:.

“The magazine, which is ‘bookazine’ style with thick paper, few advertisements, and a $7.99 cover price to match, is the most recent in the publisher’s efforts to repurpose an existing brand audience into a print magazine following,” Peterson notes.

“It was really a natural thing for them to want to launch that in a printed product,” Chris Guilfoyle, group publisher of Meredith’s women’s group, tells Folio:. “They have a tremendous social media following for both Magnolia Market, as well as each of their individual social media accounts, but I think what a magazine did for them is that it allowed them not only to have something that is permanent — a keep sake if you will — but it also expanded their voice and their footprint into that whole lifestyle arena that they feel that they have to share.”

At least for the near future, the magazine will come out four times a year, and the first two issues will run about 400,000 newsstand copies.

“Where we want to grow it is based upon consumer demand,” Guilfoyle says. “That is why for the first and second issue, it is only newsstand distribution, because we really want to see what the consumer response is to the product.”

Judging from their Millennial-heavy audience and the fact that this generation is wild for good print magazines, we imagine this will be another success story for the brand, and makes a good addition to their growing media empire.