Trend: Aberdeen and North East Scotland's Glossy Lifestyle Magazine

Trend is the glossy lifestyle magazine for Aberdeen and North East Scotland, a complimentary, full-colour magazine produced bi-monthly by Trend Productions Ltd in Aberdeen. Each issue mixes articles and reviews from local businesses and people in and around the city — travel, entertainment, food and drink, interiors, design, shopping, cars, art, music, beauty and fashion, all with an emphasis on style and luxury — and it has been a fixture of the Granite City's social and business life for well over a decade, with digital editions archived on Issuu back to at least 2010.

Aberdeen is a distinctive market for a lifestyle glossy: a compact city made prosperous by the North Sea oil and gas industry, surrounded by Aberdeenshire's castles, whisky country and coastline, with an affluent professional readership that regional publishers have long prized. Trend was built for exactly that audience, and its survival as a free, print-first glossy makes it a notable survivor in Scottish regional publishing.

Overview

Trend is published six times a year — its issues are dated by paired months, January/February through November/December — and is complimentary: readers pick it up free at distribution points around Aberdeen and the surrounding area, and the title describes itself as a local guide to modern life in Aberdeen. The publisher, Trend Productions Ltd, presents the magazine as the city's lifestyle title, with each issue offering a rich mix of articles and reviews from local and surrounding businesses and people in and around Aberdeen.

In addition to the main magazine, Trend Productions has published Trend Weddings, an annual publication, and upBEAT, a quarterly title described as the official magazine for Aberdeen International Airport — evidence of a small publishing house using its lifestyle formula across the city's key audiences.

Publisher: Trend Productions Ltd

The magazine is produced by Trend Productions Ltd, an Aberdeen-based independent publisher. Its presence on the Issuu digital publishing platform dates from 2010, and the archive there runs to well over a hundred publications, charting the magazine's bi-monthly rhythm across the 2010s and 2020s. The company's model is the established free-glossy one: an advertising-funded magazine, distributed without charge to a defined affluent readership, with magazine subscriptions also sold through its digital app editions for readers who prefer guaranteed delivery.

That model depends on local advertiser loyalty, and Trend's content structure — in which local businesses, venues and professionals are featured editorially as well as in advertising — is designed to bind the city's business community to the title. The Weddings annual and the airport magazine extend the same relationships into two of the region's most valuable advertising markets: weddings and travel.

Editorial Content

Trend's content promise, as set out when the magazine appointed a new editor in the late 2000s, covers travel, entertainment, food and drink, interiors, design, shopping, cars, art, music, beauty and fashion, with an emphasis on style and luxury. In practice each issue combines local people profiles and business features with restaurant and bar coverage, homes and interiors stories, motoring, fashion and beauty pages, cultural coverage of the city's arts and music, and travel features looking both at Aberdeenshire and the North East — castles, coast and countryside — and at destinations reachable from Aberdeen's airport and port.

The emphasis on local faces is central: the magazine describes its mix as articles and reviews from businesses and people in and around Aberdeen, and its features are built around named local restaurateurs, designers, retailers and professionals, giving the title the quality of a city magazine of record for Aberdeen's social and commercial life.

Editorial Leadership

In a widely carried industry announcement, Alison Daniels was appointed editor of Trend, with press material describing the title as Aberdeen and North East Scotland's glossy lifestyle magazine and giving its distribution at that time as 18,500 copies to an affluent ABC1 readership. The announcement directed press releases and competition and press-trip offers to the editor — a small detail that captures the working life of a lifestyle editor, whose postbag of launches, openings and trips becomes the raw material of the magazine's pages.

As with most small independent glossies, the editor's role at Trend spans commissioning, writing, social coverage and advertiser relationships, and the title's consistent bi-monthly appearance over many years points to a compact, stable team rather than a large staff.

Audience and Distribution

Trend targets Aberdeen's ABC1 readers: the professionals, managers and business owners of the energy industry and the services around it, together with the wider affluent population of the city and Aberdeenshire. Distribution of 18,500 copies was quoted at the time of Daniels's appointment, and free distribution through the city's hotels, restaurants, salons, retailers and business locations is the mechanism that puts a complimentary glossy in front of that audience.

Aberdeen's economic character shapes the readership. The oil and gas economy gave the city one of Britain's highest concentrations of affluent households, an international business-traveller traffic through its airport — served by the publisher's own airport magazine — and a social calendar of charity balls, business awards and cultural events that a lifestyle magazine exists to chronicle. Even as the energy industry has evolved towards renewables and decommissioning, that audience of decision-makers and high earners remains the commercial foundation of the title.

Print and Digital Editions

Trend is a print-first, complimentary magazine, and its digital life has been built around replica editions. The full archive on Issuu, published under Trend Productions Ltd, lets readers page through issues from across the years, and the archive's regularity — every two months, year after year, with the September/October 2026 issue listed in the autumn of 2026 — demonstrates an unbroken publishing rhythm. App editions of Trend (Magazine) were also distributed, offering in-app subscriptions, described in the app listings with the same formula: a complimentary, full-colour, glossy magazine produced bi-monthly, with a rich mix of articles and reviews from local businesses and people.

The website, trendmagazine.co.uk, supports the print title, and the magazine maintains the social presence expected of a lifestyle brand, carrying its coverage to readers between issues.

Sister Publications: Trend Weddings and upBEAT

Trend Productions' portfolio gives the business three distinct routes to the Aberdeen market. Trend Weddings, published annually, serves the region's wedding industry — venues, photographers, dress shops and planners — in a dedicated publication that a bi-monthly's pages could only sample. upBEAT, published quarterly as the official magazine for Aberdeen International Airport, reaches the travelling audience at the airport itself, a valuable captive readership for travel, retail and business advertisers, and one that aligns naturally with the main magazine's travel and lifestyle content.

Together the three titles let a small Aberdeen publisher offer advertisers the city's lifestyle readers at home, its couples planning weddings, and its business and leisure travellers at the airport — a portfolio strategy far larger publishers use, executed at city scale.

Trend and Aberdeen Life

A city lifestyle magazine's real subject is the city's sense of itself. Aberdeen, sometimes characterised from outside by grey granite and grey skies, has a counter-narrative of castles, coastline, food, culture and money, and Trend's pages — style, luxury, food and drink, interiors — have consistently told that counter-narrative to its own residents and businesses. The magazine records who is opening what, who is being seen where, and what the city is buying, eating and wearing: the social documentation that makes local glossies valued by their readers and their archives valuable in turn.

Recent Years and Continuing Publication

Trend has maintained its bi-monthly schedule into the mid-2020s, with Issuu editions continuing through 2024, 2025 and 2026 in the established paired-month pattern. In a Scottish media landscape where many free titles and regional glossies have closed, that continuity — an independent, advertising-funded, complimentary magazine still appearing six times a year from an Aberdeen base — is the magazine's principal distinction. For Aberdeen and the North East, Trend remains the glossy lifestyle title of record: free to pick up, rooted in the city's businesses and people, and still chronicling modern life in the Granite City.