Interview: Gillian de Bono, Financial Times (Evening Standard)
By David Rowan
LIFE can be tough for today's hyper-wealthy elite - never quite knowing which executive jet to buy, or where to send the servants to shop for caviar. That's where Gillian de Bono comes in.
For the past decade, her How To Spend It magazine, in the Financial Times, has been discreetly advising bloated plutocrats everywhere ... well, how to spend serious money. Whether it's a £500,000 tiara you're after, or a top-of-the-range Ferrari, de Bono's unashamedly elitist magazine will let you bypass the whole tedious business of choosing. So she was surprised, to say the least, when the journalistic establishment last night celebrated it as newspaper supplement of the year.
"I was truly shocked to win," de Bono admitted after collecting her trophy at the British Press Awards.
"I've always considered How To Spend It a bit of a cult magazine, and was up against colour supplements with a far more universal appeal." Besides, she added, there was generally "a slight feeling that it's not quite right for people to have that much money, and for a magazine to exist to cater for their needs".
In fact, favouring the section over magazines such as Guardian Weekend and Observer Food Monthly, the judges praised How To Spend It for doing "exactly what it says on the tin" with originality and verve.
De Bono's bosses also have good reason to praise her. As the FT's most consistently profitable section, How To Spend It is a goldmine for a paper whose overall losses last year rose from £9 million to £32 million.
Aimed at "active, aff luent men and women of distinguished tastes", the supplement promises to deliver "the best of the world's best" to readers with an average personal income of £116,000. Advertisers of luxury goods certainly seem to think it worth spending up to £25,000 a page to reach them. "That," says de Bono, "is because the FT doesn't have any wannabes who will simply look at an object featured in the pages and think how much they'd like one.
Our readers look at something, love it and buy it." Extreme affluence, she says, is often tempered by a highly pressured lifestyle. "These people have money, but not the time to luxuriate in the process of spending it," she explains. "So we just short-circuit the system and - how can you put this elegantly - help them spend what they've earned." But not in the obvious ways favoured by other consumer magazines, she insists: the very rich do not care what celebrities are buying, they simply want advice they can trust.
"It's the sort of information that discerning friends might give you - a niche optician where you can get wonderful glasses specially imported from Italy, or a jeweller who only sells from her home.
We're not dictating to readers what to buy, but simply sourcing beautiful products for them." De Bono, 52, displays the elegant charm that perfectly matches such an upmarket publication.
Cautiously discreet in avoiding answers that might cause any offence - even refusing general comments about the women's magazine market - she also glides gracefully over the surface of her personal life, saying only that she lives "in London with a partner" and that she has an 18-year-old daughter. She is wearing a black Ben de Lisi dress and vintage jewellery bought not, as one might expect, from Asprey or Tiffany, but from a street market.
Style, she says, is about individuality. Why, then, should the wealthy need to rely on a magazine to dictate what is stylish? "I don't consider it a style magazine," she replies. "Most of our features are trend led, but we're very selective about which trends we write up." How To Spend It does not simply feature items because they are expensive, she insists. "They get in because they're beautiful or unique." And unlike some other glossy magazines, she says, advertisers receive no "tacit understandings" that their products will be mentioned favourably in editorial pages. The readers, it seems, are intensely grateful for de Bono's guidance.
"We know from the shops we feature that a husband will see a beautiful £10,000 dress in our pages and will straight away order one over the phone in his wife's size.
"There aren't many magazines that happens with. I remember we featured a Hermès watch one Saturday, and, much to our shame, two of our readers virtually came to blows over the last one left in the shop." Another shop, selling luxury leather goods, had to close the day it was profiled "because of crowds".
She joined the magazine on its second issue almost 10 years ago, having launched Essentials in 1986 and been a consultant editor on She. Lucia van der Post had launched How To Spend It; de Bono was quickly brought in as " editorial controller of magazines" to work independently alongside her.
It was, she admits, a battle to convince some of the FT's more serious-minded writers that there was a role for such frivolity. "It took some time for the financial journalists to understand the section's relevance to the paper," she says.
"They do now. Profits and pagination have been up every year." There are also those outside the FT uncomfortable with the magazine's ethos - epitomised in the £250,000 necklace which the magazine photographed around a dog's neck, or the £1.4 million diamond and emerald jewellery set featured in its Christmas shopping guide.
"We get maybe two letters a year from people who tend to find the price tags of many items in the magazine obscene," de Bono says.
She points out that she spent eight years at Which?, helping ordinary shoppers find value for money. "Just as the average consumer is entitled to a magazine that champions its needs and concerns, one shouldn't say that the rich are not entitled to their own magazine," she says. "They are." So does de Bono share the lifestyle she celebrates so effectively? "Sadly not," she giggles, champagne glass in hand. "I'm just a working mother." ?
(Evening Standard, March 17 2004)
LIFE can be tough for today's hyper-wealthy elite - never quite knowing which executive jet to buy, or where to send the servants to shop for caviar. That's where Gillian de Bono comes in.
For the past decade, her How To Spend It magazine, in the Financial Times, has been discreetly advising bloated plutocrats everywhere ... well, how to spend serious money. Whether it's a £500,000 tiara you're after, or a top-of-the-range Ferrari, de Bono's unashamedly elitist magazine will let you bypass the whole tedious business of choosing. So she was surprised, to say the least, when the journalistic establishment last night celebrated it as newspaper supplement of the year.
"I was truly shocked to win," de Bono admitted after collecting her trophy at the British Press Awards.
"I've always considered How To Spend It a bit of a cult magazine, and was up against colour supplements with a far more universal appeal." Besides, she added, there was generally "a slight feeling that it's not quite right for people to have that much money, and for a magazine to exist to cater for their needs".
In fact, favouring the section over magazines such as Guardian Weekend and Observer Food Monthly, the judges praised How To Spend It for doing "exactly what it says on the tin" with originality and verve.
De Bono's bosses also have good reason to praise her. As the FT's most consistently profitable section, How To Spend It is a goldmine for a paper whose overall losses last year rose from £9 million to £32 million.
Aimed at "active, aff luent men and women of distinguished tastes", the supplement promises to deliver "the best of the world's best" to readers with an average personal income of £116,000. Advertisers of luxury goods certainly seem to think it worth spending up to £25,000 a page to reach them. "That," says de Bono, "is because the FT doesn't have any wannabes who will simply look at an object featured in the pages and think how much they'd like one.
Our readers look at something, love it and buy it." Extreme affluence, she says, is often tempered by a highly pressured lifestyle. "These people have money, but not the time to luxuriate in the process of spending it," she explains. "So we just short-circuit the system and - how can you put this elegantly - help them spend what they've earned." But not in the obvious ways favoured by other consumer magazines, she insists: the very rich do not care what celebrities are buying, they simply want advice they can trust.
"It's the sort of information that discerning friends might give you - a niche optician where you can get wonderful glasses specially imported from Italy, or a jeweller who only sells from her home.
We're not dictating to readers what to buy, but simply sourcing beautiful products for them." De Bono, 52, displays the elegant charm that perfectly matches such an upmarket publication.
Cautiously discreet in avoiding answers that might cause any offence - even refusing general comments about the women's magazine market - she also glides gracefully over the surface of her personal life, saying only that she lives "in London with a partner" and that she has an 18-year-old daughter. She is wearing a black Ben de Lisi dress and vintage jewellery bought not, as one might expect, from Asprey or Tiffany, but from a street market.
Style, she says, is about individuality. Why, then, should the wealthy need to rely on a magazine to dictate what is stylish? "I don't consider it a style magazine," she replies. "Most of our features are trend led, but we're very selective about which trends we write up." How To Spend It does not simply feature items because they are expensive, she insists. "They get in because they're beautiful or unique." And unlike some other glossy magazines, she says, advertisers receive no "tacit understandings" that their products will be mentioned favourably in editorial pages. The readers, it seems, are intensely grateful for de Bono's guidance.
"We know from the shops we feature that a husband will see a beautiful £10,000 dress in our pages and will straight away order one over the phone in his wife's size.
"There aren't many magazines that happens with. I remember we featured a Hermès watch one Saturday, and, much to our shame, two of our readers virtually came to blows over the last one left in the shop." Another shop, selling luxury leather goods, had to close the day it was profiled "because of crowds".
She joined the magazine on its second issue almost 10 years ago, having launched Essentials in 1986 and been a consultant editor on She. Lucia van der Post had launched How To Spend It; de Bono was quickly brought in as " editorial controller of magazines" to work independently alongside her.
It was, she admits, a battle to convince some of the FT's more serious-minded writers that there was a role for such frivolity. "It took some time for the financial journalists to understand the section's relevance to the paper," she says.
"They do now. Profits and pagination have been up every year." There are also those outside the FT uncomfortable with the magazine's ethos - epitomised in the £250,000 necklace which the magazine photographed around a dog's neck, or the £1.4 million diamond and emerald jewellery set featured in its Christmas shopping guide.
"We get maybe two letters a year from people who tend to find the price tags of many items in the magazine obscene," de Bono says.
She points out that she spent eight years at Which?, helping ordinary shoppers find value for money. "Just as the average consumer is entitled to a magazine that champions its needs and concerns, one shouldn't say that the rich are not entitled to their own magazine," she says. "They are." So does de Bono share the lifestyle she celebrates so effectively? "Sadly not," she giggles, champagne glass in hand. "I'm just a working mother." ?
(Evening Standard, March 17 2004)
posted by David Rowan at Wednesday, March 17, 2004
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