Playboy will become a quarterly magazine in 2019 — cutting back from its current six-issues-a-year format, the company announced.
The adult entertainment company has also unwrapped plans to open a new Playboy Club in New York.
The re-entry into the brick-and-mortar club business is the brainchild of chief executive Ben Kohn, who is trying to rebrand the empire founded by Hugh Hefner for the 21st century.
Toward that end, Kohn has hired Julie Uhrman as Playboy’s president of media, a newly created position. Uhrman joins Playboy from Lions Gate Entertainment, where she was executive vice president and general manager of over-the-top ventures.
“Julie brings with her a wealth of experience in media and digital focused business that will be integral to our efforts to meet the demands of our current subscriber base and expand the brand’s presence on new platforms,” Kohn said in a statement.
The new 14,000-square foot Playboy Club officially opens on 512 W. 42nd St. on Sept. 12, although it already hosted a Fashion Week party pre-opening last week.
The club is located on the same block as a building housing an NYPD emergency response group.
Kohn has been pushing the company more aggressively into licensing in recent years — with some success. Playboy’s distinctive bunny ears are now licensed on a wide array of consumer products from coffee mugs to wallets and apparel, generating roughly $1.5 billion in retail sales in 180 countries.
Playboy Enterprises receives only a sliver of those sales as a licensing fee. The Wall Street Journal pegs the company’s annual revenues at $90 million, with media still generating about half that amount.
In July, following the death of Hefner, Kohn’s Rizvi Traverse firm bought out the remaining one-third of the company that he did not already own from the Hefner family.
Rizvi Traverse had bought about two-thirds of the company in 2011, when it helped Hefner take the company private.
“We are just returning to our roots of what Hef stood for and just contemporizing it for today,” Kohn told the WSJ of the rebranding efforts.
Kohn was never a fan of the magazine that was once the cornerstone of the empire and cut its frequency in 2018 from 10 times a year to six. Despite trimming the magazine’s frequency to four times a year in 2019, Kohn has no plans to eliminate the print edition.
Hefner’s son, Cooper Hefner, is now chief creative officer of the company. When Cooper was out of the company, he had been an outspoken critic of the late 2015 plan to banish nude photos from the magazine.
However, when then-CEO Scott Flanders exited and Cooper Hefner was brought back, he quickly reversed the “no nudes” ban.
Actress Elizabeth Elam was on the cover of the March/April 2017 issue that heralded the return to nude photography.
Before the rise of the internet and 1970s-era newsstand restrictions, Playboy was selling 5 million a copies a month. It currently sells only several hundred thousand copies per issue — and is no longer tracked by the Alliance for Audited Media.
Kohn hopes the switch to a quarterly production schedule will allow Playboy to double the amount of total pages — to 220 per issue.