Cottages & Gardens Expands Regional Footprint

Publisher rolls out New York edition beginning next month.

By T. J. Raphael
Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Cottages & Gardens Publications, publisher of luxury interior design magazines, is enhancing content offerings with the launch of a new regional publication: New York Cottages & Gardens. The new magazine will fill a gap for design enthusiasts living in affluent New York communities.

“The success of our existing titles, that do so well in their local areas, brought our attention to the New York market,” says CEO and Publication Director Marianne Howatson. “We looked at the New York market [and saw] it’s an area that is number one in the remodeling industry and is expected to grow 3.5 percent in the next five years. We felt the strength of the NewYork market, and its importance in the design and decorating industry, showed us that this would be the time to get in there. Designers have been asking us to come into New York for a long time—with all of these things in our favor, we decided this was the time to do it.”

Howatson says that the opportunity to launch this publication did not only come from the anticipated increases of regional remodeling but from existing print advertisers—the publisher had reached out to that base, asking for input and was greeted with intense enthusiasm.

“They were the first people we went to when we told them we were going into New York,” she says. “We were just thrilled with the reaction and we were surprised about how many of them were interested in the New York market. Although they’re in our current markets, New York was still very relevant to them. We have a New York metro super-buy combining all of our titles, which gets them, we think, the most upscale people in the New York metro area.”

Cottages & Gardens Publications [C&GP] also produces Connecticut Cottages & Gardens and Hamptons Cottages & Gardens. In this new New York edition, the Hamptons will not be covered; instead upscale neighborhoods of New York City, Westchester County, NY and parts of Long Island will take the content’s focus.

The primary audience of this new magazine, which is similar to its other titles, will be upscale consumers passionate about their homes with household incomes of over $750,000. The initial rate base of the publication, which will debut next month and be printed five times annually, will be 40,000.

The CEO anticipates that 20 to 30 percent of the reader base will not be a consumer but trade professionals from the interior design, architectural and decorating industries. The magazine is mostly place based, being distributed at architectural offices, interior design shops and upscale jewelry boutiques, among other places. In addition to accessing online content, readers have the option to subscribe and the publisher is considering selling some copies at select New York newsstands.

“We’ll be creating content [for the web] that isn’t available in the magazine—back stories, recipes, photographs, videos,” says Howatson. “By and large, the overall content is sort of global and universal, making it relevant to whoever is looking at it. We have bloggers and internal writers producing extra pieces [for the web].”

There will be dedicated social channels for the New York edition to create a presence on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Cottages & Gardens’ other publications currently have independent social media presences. Each publication, including the new New York edition, have individual web presences with channels built into sites to drive readers to each of the magazines.

“The most important thing we provide as a magazine is an intimacy with the marketplace that we’re in,” says Howatson. “If you’re reading the Hamptons [the content is] infused with the essence of the Hamptons—this magazine, too, will have its sense of place.”