Lauren Mann – Editor of Wellington Woman Magazine
This week we were inspired by a talk by Lauren Mann, Editor and owner of Wellington Woman magazine. She talked about how she got to be the owner and producer of the magazine and some of the lessons she has learned on the journey.
What is Wellington Woman magazine? It’s a magazine to support, to celebrate and to entertain women by running stories on women from all walks of life plus with a healthy mix of fashion, lifestyle and culture content. Current print runs are between 7-10 thousand copies per issue with 5-6 issues per year. Readers are 25-65 year old women working and living in the city.
After studying Business at Victoria, Lauren took on the role and became the self-proclaimed worlds worst PA. Realising that there was little future in this, she undertook post grad studies in journalism and worked on Wellington Woman for one issue. Then, in 2015 at just 26, Lauren bought the magazine from its previous owner and had aspirations of lifting the quality and achieving a better balance of articles and advertorial. She saw the business as an opportunity to bring together her creativity, her love of design and to put her Business Studies degree into practice. She believed that by doing so, in 6 months she would turn it into a highly profitable business producing the perfect product. With the benefit of hindsight, she acknowledges that she was optimistically naive but after two and a half years she feels she is getting there. So what has she learned?
- Cash flow is key! Ideas are fine but you can’t make them happen without the cash;
- Sometimes people don’t pay their invoices – and to stay afloat you have to chase up outstanding payments;
- Her idealism, thinking she was going to be creative and write great stories, was soon replaced by the harsh reality that for 90% of her time she must focus on the business;
- Many will take an interest and want to help but few will actually be there for the hard yards and no one will love it as much as you do;
- She currently does 6am-midnight days and on the last issue, worked 50 hours in a row. A consequence of this is mistakes are made. She just can’t do everything;
- As a millennial, her generation is all about personal branding. Fortunately she has had some great mentors and has learnt that the magazine is a product and it is who she is professionally. Separating the professional from the personal has been critical;
- Her network of self employed friend’s support and help each other to understand and learn how to cope with the stress and pressure of building a business.
Lauren acknowledged her parents - the tremendous help and support they have offered and how they incorporated education into everything they did and made it exciting. She only realizes now how important that was.
The magazine has a project to interview all head girls from Wellington secondary schools. This has been a real eye opener – highlighting inequities in access to education, facilities and resources. For example, they found that there were girls who couldn’t to go to their school ball because they couldn’t afford a dress so this year they did a ball-dress drive using social media to attract support. They thought they might get 100 dresses but they got 600 ball dresses! One young woman commented that this was the only time in her life that she had been able to afford something she really liked.
And the future? Wellington Woman is about to launch all their digital platforms – an online version of the magazine, with interactive content and a web series at the start of next year.
So where can you pick up your copy of Wellington Woman? There are 16 stands around the city. Look out for them, but you can try Willis Street New World or Moore Wilson. You might have to be quick. They go pretty fast.
Brenda Lazelle
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