Reminder: Join us tomorrow at 1pmET for a live interactive conversation I’m having with TechCrunch vp of digital initiatives Matt Gross and Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk. We’ll discuss how TechCrunch, under new ownership, overhauled its email strategy. Matt will break down how TechCrunch relaunched its email portfolio and cut newsletter production time from hours to minutes. Join us tomorrow.
If you cannot make it to the live recording – we’re doing this in a studio, which is a first – we’ll send you a link to a replay. Thanks to Beehiiv for sponsoring this conversation – and to Morning Brew for hosting us.
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“Our subscribers are part of a club”
I’ve long admired Monocle for its consistency and point of view as a brand.
Monocle’s an idiosyncratic brand that marries foreign affairs reporting from far-flung “bureaux” with a penchant for Mitteleuropa coziness, Japanese denim, Eurovision affairs and what’s flying off the shelves in Helsinki. It has maintained an affection for high-quality print and skipped social media altogether. The snobbishness acts as a filter.
“I think of our subscribers as part of a club, even if we don’t call it that,” Monocle founder Tyler Brûlé told me at Monocle’s Paris cafe, where we recorded a conversation over a civilized glass of wine. “There’s a real sense of fraternity among our readers.”
The key to making this work, he told me, is achieving “proximity” with the audience by actually talking to them rather than looking at dashboards. For Monocle’s luxury advertisers, that kind of proximity is far more attractive than dull performance marketing on Instagram where their brands are in a feed with all kinds of riffraff.
“We wanted to have this proximity with our reader,” Tyler said. “They could come in and buy back issues, buy nice bags from Japan, and have real conversations. We know who they are, not because of big data but because they walk through the door.”
Monocle has established a template that marries well-designed, high-quality print products with a multifaceted brand that makes money in many ways far beyond the core product. Monocle’s business lines include cafes and shops, a digital radio station/podcast network, books, events and plenty of brand activations. That’s the key these days. Being a magazine business is a losing proposition in 2025; being a brand is not.
“From the very beginning there was retail, and not long after a café in Tokyo. It just built from there,” Tyler told me. “We wanted people to come in, talk to us, and experience the brand in person.”
My other takeaways from our discussion:
It pays to go your own way. Monocle was a slow adopter of most digital trends. It certainly never suffered from BuzzFeed envy. That stodginess turned out to pay off since there was no pivot to video to unwind. “We chose to sit on the sidelines,” Tyler said. There were a lot of corpses of pioneers on those digital trails.”
Print is a signal of craft. Much of digital media has proven to be ephemeral. Print, in contrast, communicates more permanence and embrace of craft. I don’t think there will be much of a rebound of mass-market magazines, but I do think the work that goes into making a physical piece of media is tremendous brand leverage. “The role of the magazine is that it's craft and there is a scarcity to print,” Tyler said. “99% of content is going to be synthetic very soon. And that’s going to lead to a counter-reaction.”
Retail matters. Media is a hard enough business without retail. But being face-to-face with your audience every day is a benefit. Not to mention proving to advertising partners that there’s heft to the brand. “They want to see what we have in an environment that isn’t on a backlit screen,” Tyler said.
Community beats impressions. Many publishers talked about their ComScore numbers. Monocle sells instead access to those who share the Monocle worldview. “They want to know that that person exists,” Tyler said. “Not just will they come to an event, but will they engage, ask questions, maybe inquire about that watch or that resort?”
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