Playboy to Bring Back Print Magazine After Covid Shutdown
PLBY Group says that it’s relaunching Playboy Magazine with an annual edition that will be released in February 2025
Playboy magazine is making a comeback.
Its owner PLBY Group PLBY 2.10%increase; green up pointing triangle on Thursday said that it was relaunching Playboy magazine with an annual edition to be released in February 2025. The decision comes over four years after the company said it would shut down the magazine, known for its mix of glossy nude photos and high-brow fiction and journalism, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The highly anticipated return of these Playboy franchises marks a new chapter in the brand’s storied legacy and celebrates 70 years of the company’s flagship property,” the Los Angeles company said.
In March 2020, Chief Executive Ben Kohn said in a post on Medium that the Covid-19 pandemic sped up the company’s plans regarding for the magazine. Before that, the magazine had steadily cut its print frequency since the death of its founder, Hugh Hefner, in 2017.
“We were forced to accelerate a conversation we’ve been having internally: the question of how to transform our U.S. print product to better suit what consumers want today,” Kohn wrote in the Medium post.
The company said Thursday it named Mark Healy as the editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine’s first print edition since 2020. Healy has held senior positions at GQ and Rolling Stone, and served as editor-in-chief of Men’s Journal.
Despite the news about the relaunch of the magazine, Playboy faces a challenging environment.
In recent years, the company had primarily become a licensing business, making money by placing the Playboy name and its distinctive bunny-ear logo on clothing lines, casinos, fragrances, wallets and more.
The company Thursday said its second-quarter revenue fell 29% to $24.9 million, in part because of the termination of two licensing agreements in China. Digital-subscription and content revenue were flat.
Significant cost cuts narrowed the company’s loss to $16.7 million, or 23 cents a share, compared with a loss of $131.8 million, or $1.77 a share, a year earlier, when it recorded a large impairment charge.
Playboy also said its lenders agreed to give it more time to repay its debt at a significant discount to reduce its total leverage, and that it hired an investment bank to secure new financing.