What Katie did next
Why is Katie Grand, the ultra-cool editor of Pop, leaving the title she founded to launch a new magazine for Condé Nast? Asks Alice Wignall
Katie Grand is on the phone from Paris, where, as an in-demand stylist, she's working at fashion week. "It can be a bit glamorous," she concedes, "but by 3am it's usually just quite a lot of work and eating sausage rolls and drinking coffee." Things are a little more exciting away from the catwalk: Grand is shortly to leave her day job editing the ultra-cool fashion mag Pop for Bauer, and decamp to Condé Nast with her entire team to launch a new title.
Her new project? A twice-yearly, as-yet-unnamed style magazine that, according to the official announcement, is going to be "edgy", "experimental" and "high-end". Which doesn't sound a million miles away from Pop, which Grand founded in 2000. Condé Nast was in fact initially keen to buy Pop lock, stock and barrel - but Bauer declined. "We have been considering having a magazine in this very edgy style sector for some time," says Nicholas Coleridge, the managing director of Condé Nast in the UK. "We kept hearing that they [Bauer] weren't very committed to Pop but eventually they decided it was no dice, they didn't want to sell it. But by that time Katie had come into our lives. I guess we've been flirting, in a career sense."
For her part, Grand says she was happy either way. "I kind of knew that Condé Nast had put in bids for Pop. I thought, if it happens, great. If not, it would also be great to do something new ... Maybe it's better just to do something that's completely a fresh start."
According to Bauer, the changing of the guard at Pop is just a regular bit of staff turnover. "We publish many magazines," says David Davies, managing director of Bauer's women's magazines division, "editors do change and we're used to that." Except this is an editor who has invented and defined the title she works on, and who is taking her whole team with her. It's hardly run-of-the-mill HR.
Bauer insists there is no doubt that Pop will continue to exist. "Of course," says Davies, "why would it not?" He argues that Condé Nast is "copying" a Bauer idea. "We'll continue in the more maverick role," he adds. "Katie has probably achieved what she's going to with the title. Pop will be very different going forward and it's very exciting for us. Condé Nast is more of an institution, and that's not our role."
As Coleridge puts it, Bauer has a "centre of gravity" weighted towards its weekly titles: Heat, Closer and Grazia. According to industry gossip, Bauer wasn't especially interested in Pop and failed to look after the title or the team. "There was a definite feeling of being a square peg in a round hole," Grand agrees. The magazine had been moved back into Bauer's main office, from its old home in Clerkenwell. "We were acutely aware of doing something different from everyone else," says Grand. "By the end, to be walking through radio advertising or whatever and be openly called 'the weirdos', it was just unpleasant."
But, she says, "those things are pretty insignificant compared to all the great times I had there." She calls Davies a "super-enthusiastic" publisher and singles out Mark Frith, the ex-editor of Heat, who "behind the scenes, has been very supportive over the last few months".
And, clearly, Condé Nast is hardly an any-port-in-a-storm bolthole. Coleridge is openly gleeful about having secured Grand and the team. That despite Condé Nast's last foray into edgy style territory, Trash magazine - a joint venture with Ministry of Sound in 2003 - being a failure. But there's a sense it's not the launch that's important, it's having Grand. "We are more interested in the talent joining the company," says Coleridge.
Grand's fashion acumen is legendary. She has worked as a stylist for Bottega Veneta and Miu Miu, and currently works for Louis Vuitton, Loewe and Giles Deacon. Her fashion reach has led the London Evening Standard to say, "What Katie does - and Katie says - is as influential as it gets." But she can, however, do commercial as well as cool: Pop has a circulation of 125,000 and - as Grand points out - has been one of Bauer's 10 most successful titles in business terms. She seems eager to keep focused on commercial realities. "It's really important to have a large circulation and following," she says.
It's also a canny attitude in what is hardly a friendly economic atmosphere ("It's not an ideal time to launch a new magazine," Grand admits). "We've launched magazines in many difficult, turbulent times," says Coleridge, who (perhaps unsurprisingly) thinks the signs for high-end titles are good: "We're feeling pretty confident."
Plans are still in very early stages, partly because Grand didn't want to start working on the new title - which will launch in March - before it became official. "There was something about starting to commission for the new title ... I couldn't do it," she says. There were all these rumours flying around before I had resigned. It was a bit like having an affair. I was getting like: 'Can we just announce it? Can I resign now?'" She is still working on the December issue of Pop.
It demonstrates, if nothing else, that after eight years as an editor, after enjoying commercial and critical success in the job, the siren call of lucrative styling gigs around the world (small-hours sausage rolls thrown in for free) isn't strong enough to tempt Grand away from magazines completely. "I still think of myself as an editor before a stylist," she says. "I like that thing of going into an office and being bossy, saying, 'Let's do this'. It's what I've always wanted to do."
