In an effort to differentiate themselves in the luxury product market, Australian independent publisher D’Marge is turning its weekly blog Shut Up & Take My Money into a 160-page print magazine.
“The magazine will be published twice a year and will showcase luxury products and brands, as well as the innovators behind them,” explained Abigail Dawson writing in Mumbrella.
Luc Wiesman, founder and editor-in-chief at D’Marge, told Mumbrella: “We had always been perceived as a blog and it wouldn’t matter how much bigger we got, people would always refer to us as a blog, so we said we need to do a bit of a shift here.”
“We speak to a lot of brands and we work with a lot of luxury brands and the feedback we get from them is that digital is still experimental whereas print is what they do, it is what they got,” Wiesman continues.
Print is indeed what luxury brands do, and what luxury brands know about print ads is making this whole project a rather easy sell.
“As soon as you say you have a print title all of a sudden all people say is ‘Oh cool, how much is it paid, when can we be in it?’ So we found it was a much easier sell,” he said. With advertisers in their first issue that include Gucci, Omega, Cartier and Alfa Romeo, the magazine is certainly pulling in the heavyweights.
Aside from big name advertisers, the magazine will sport a hefty price tag at $14.95. But judging from what I see so far, yeah, they can shut up and take my money. I’m in.