About Chic Magazine

Chic Magazine

Chic was a British women's lifestyle magazine for ABC1 women aged 40 to 55, published first by Hamerville Magazines of Watford and later by Northern and Shell. Its first issue was dated November/December 1993, and its history fell into two distinct acts: an original bimonthly run that was suspended in June 1996 as circulation slid to around 40,000, and a brief monthly relaunch in May 1998 that closed within months, in July 1998. Unusually well documented in the trade press of the day, including launch, review, relaunch and closure reports in The Media Leader and the Magforum history of women's glossies, Chic offers a complete case study of 1990s magazine economics.

The magazine's proposition was summed up in its strapline, For women who can choose. Chic addressed affluent, educated women in their forties and early fifties at a time when most women's glossies chased readers in their twenties and thirties, betting that advertisers would pay to reach older women with money to spend. The bet was plausible, the editor distinguished and the launch substantial, yet the title never settled at the circulation its publishers needed. Its story is therefore about the market as much as the magazine.

Hamerville of Watford and a Second Consumer Title

Chic was launched by Hamerville Magazines, based in Watford in Hertfordshire, and it was only the publisher's second consumer title, following Homeflair, launched in 1990. A small, specialist publisher entering the women's glossy market was taking on some of the largest companies in British media, whose titles had decades of reader loyalty and advertiser relationships behind them. Hamerville's background in homes publishing was, however, relevant: Chic's reader, prosperous and home-owning, overlapped with the audience Hamerville already knew how to reach.

The launch was announced for 21 October 1993, with the first issue dated November/December 1993. Trade coverage treated the launch seriously, because the demographic logic was strong and the editorial appointment was notable. For a Watford publisher to mount a glossy with a 200,000-copy initial print run was a declaration that Chic was not a tentative experiment but a bid for a permanent place on the women's magazine fixture, alongside titles from London's major houses.

Joyce Hopkirk: From Cosmopolitan and Elle to Chic

Chic's launch editor was Joyce Hopkirk, who had worked on the launches of Cosmopolitan and British Elle, two of the most successful women's magazine launches in British history. Appointing an editor with that pedigree signalled that Hamerville understood what a glossy launch required: a clear reader identity, confident design and features that gave a new title instant authority. Hopkirk's experience was in creating magazines for women whose tastes were underserved, and Chic's forty-plus reader was underserved almost by definition.

The first issue embodied the pitch. Its cover star was Patricia Routledge, the actress then at the height of her popularity in Keeping Up Appearances, a choice that spoke directly to the target reader rather than to youth culture. Inside, the first issue carried an interview with Eve Pollard, then editor of the Daily Express, a woman of the reader's own generation exercising power in media. A regular homes feature, Home Front, drew on Hamerville's homes expertise, and a 1996 cover featuring Twiggy, the 1960s model who had grown older alongside her audience, repeated the founding insight that glamour did not expire at forty.

The Product: Glossy, Perfect-Bound and Priced at £1.70

As launched, Chic was a bimonthly, appearing every two months, in A4 format, glossy and perfect-bound, running to 130 pages at a cover price reported between £1.70 and £1.75. Those specifications placed it squarely in glossy territory: perfect binding and 130 pages made a substantial object that could sit on a coffee table rather than be read and discarded. The advertising-to-editorial ratio was 25:75, meaning three quarters of the magazine was editorial content, a reader-friendly balance intended to establish trust and habit before advertising volume was pursued.

Bimonthly frequency was itself a strategic choice. It lowered the cost of establishing the title and matched a reader presumed to savour a magazine over weeks, but it also slowed the formation of buying habit and gave advertisers fewer opportunities than monthly rivals offered. Much of Chic's later history, including the decision to relaunch it as a monthly in 1998, can be read as a continuing negotiation with frequency: how often an older, affluent reader could be asked to buy, and how often advertisers needed her to be reachable.

Launch Numbers and the First ABC Figure

Hamerville printed 200,000 copies of the first issue and predicted a settle-down circulation of 120,000, the level at which a glossy of Chic's kind could expect to interest major advertisers. The publisher reported that more than half of the first print run had sold within two weeks, an encouraging launch performance suggesting genuine curiosity at the newsstand. Launch sales, however, are inflated by novelty and promotion, and the industry waited for the audited figure that would show the title's settled strength.

Chic's first ABC figure, for January to March 1994, was 76,037. That was a respectable sale for a new niche glossy but well short of the 120,000 predicted, and it set the pattern for the title's first life: a loyal audience smaller than the business plan required. In magazine publishing the gap between predicted and actual circulation matters twice over, because advertising rates and newsstand terms are both built on expectations. Chic's task from 1994 onwards was to close a gap of some 44,000 copies against monthly competitors with deeper pockets.

Sale to Northern and Shell and Suspension in 1996

In 1995 Chic was bought by Northern and Shell, the publisher of OK! magazine, owned by Richard Desmond. The sale moved the title from an independent Watford publisher into a group with national newspaper and magazine interests and a reputation for aggressive commercial management. For a struggling glossy, acquisition could mean investment and cross-promotion; it could also mean a harder-headed view of losses. Chic's new owners initially kept the title going, but its circulation continued to drift downwards.

In June 1996 Chic was suspended, with circulation around 40,000, roughly half its first audited figure and a third of the level predicted at launch. Suspension, in magazine language, leaves the door open to return while stopping the losses of regular publication. The first life of Chic had lasted less than three years. Its failure to grow was not a failure of concept, since rivals and later publishers repeatedly returned to the affluent older woman reader, but of scale: the audience existed, yet not in the numbers, or not reachable at the cost, that Chic's economics demanded.

The Relaunch of May 1998

Chic returned in May 1998, relaunched as a monthly under editor Ruth Corbett, identified in trade reports as the only survivor of the original team. The relaunch raised the cover price to £2.25 and set a target of 60,000 sales a month, a notably more modest ambition than the 120,000 predicted in 1993, reflecting both experience and the economics of a monthly that needed frequency as much as volume. A monthly schedule answered the habit problem of the bimonthly years and gave advertisers twelve opportunities a year instead of six.

The new strapline presented the reader as a woman who was not born yesterday, a witty acknowledgement of age and experience that sharpened the magazine's identity. Eve Pollard, interviewed in the first-ever issue, was appointed editor-in-chief for the relaunch, lending senior authority, and the contributor list was built for the target reader: Edwina Currie, Eve Pollard herself, Libby Purves and Fay Weldon were among the named writers. The relaunch's closest competitors were identified as She and Good Housekeeping, the established titles for the same affluent, mature audience, which defined both the opportunity and the difficulty.

Closure in July 1998 and the WH Smith News Dispute

The relaunch lasted only months. Chic closed in July 1998, and Northern and Shell blamed the terms imposed by WH Smith News, the dominant magazine wholesaler. Chairman Richard Desmond publicly attacked the news-trade terms, and six Northern and Shell adult titles were closed at the same time, indicating a wider dispute between the publisher and the wholesale trade rather than a judgement on Chic alone. Distribution terms, the share of the cover price retained by wholesalers and retailers, could decide whether a small-circulation title made money at all.

That ending complicates any simple verdict on Chic. Its second life was cut short by a trade dispute in which the magazine was one casualty among several, not by a further collapse in its readership. At the same time, a title selling towards its 60,000 target with stronger margins might have been defended rather than sacrificed. Chic's history thus sits at the intersection of editorial proposition and distribution economics: the magazine found its reader twice, and twice the numbers around the reader, in audit figures and in wholesale terms, worked against it.

Chic and the Older Woman Reader

Chic's enduring interest lies in how early and how clearly it identified a reader the industry neglected. ABC1 women aged 40 to 55 controlled substantial household spending, yet women's glossies overwhelmingly addressed younger women, on the assumption that older readers would read down in age while younger readers would never read up. Chic rejected that assumption, putting Patricia Routledge and Twiggy on its covers, commissioning writers of the reader's own generation and using straplines that treated experience as the reader's distinction rather than her problem.

Later decades vindicated the demographic argument while repeatedly proving the commercial difficulty. The mature women's market in Britain remained dominated by heritage titles such as Good Housekeeping, the very competitor named at Chic's relaunch, whose longevity and trust were hard for any newcomer to assail. Chic's five-year, two-life experiment, documented issue by issue in the trade press, remains one of the clearest records of a publisher trying, with a distinguished editor and a serious launch, to build a new glossy for women over forty, and of the structural reasons the attempt was so hard to sustain.