With Latina, Christy Haubegger Aims for Women Like Her--Bilingual, Bicultural and Underrated
Christy Haubegger--in a low-cut lavender dress by Sylvia Heisel and stylish Jimmy Choo high heels--plows through a throng of 850 well-wishers on the dance floor at the midtown Supper Club.
“I’ll be back! I promise!” she shouts as dancers, including an Amazonian drag queen, try to coax her to join in. Right now, the 28-year-old president, publisher and founder of 1-year-old Latina magazine, is in hot pursuit of the most gorgeous man in Manhattan, daytime soap actor Kamar de los Reyes.
“But he’s not for me,” Haubegger says at this $50,000 fiesta in June celebrating her magazine’s milestone of going from quarterly to monthly. “He’s for another woman,” she adds above the din of Latin music. “She is just dying to meet him, so you know, I want to keep my advertisers happy.”
Haubegger spots her towering hunk. She locks her hand in his and sweeps him away to the VIP room upstairs. Within minutes the diminutive dynamo from Houston is presenting de los Reyes to a giddy Diane Giaccone of Revlon, a “One Life to Live” fan who melts before el papi chulo.
“I love connecting people,” Haubegger says the next morning, now behind her desk in her Times Square office. “And if I have the possibility of making things happen, of connecting people to each other, then why not?
“That’s what I’m doing with Latina--connecting with our readers in a way that no other mainstream magazine has been able to do.”
And how.
* This summer, the Library Journal named Latina one of the 10 best new titles launched in 1996, lauding the magazine for going after an “underserved audience.”
* A multimillion dollar promotional campaign with TV commercials in key Latino markets has begun.
* Circulation is on the rise, and now, with a monthly offering, is expected to grow beyond its current 200,000 subscriber and newsstand sales.
* And advertiser support--though still a tough sale among many unfamiliar to the Latino market--appears to be solid.
Haubegger, herself a Latina role model throughout the country, is in constant demand. She recently was named Business Woman of the Year by the New York State Federation of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce and was chosen one of the Most Inspirational Women of the year by NBC Nightly News. She has been honored by numerous groups, including the Hispanic Public Relations Assn., the National Assn. of Sunday and Features Editors and Crain’s New York Business.
Her publicist, Gabriel Reyes, delivers a stack of party photos: Christy with singer Jon Secada; with actors Lauren Velez, Liz Torres and Esai Morales; with the musical group DLG (Dark, Latin Groove); with New York City media celebs; and with Latinas--and their men--who came to support Haubegger’s vision.
“Lauren and I had this discussion about young Latinos,” she says, “about how this is our time. About how this is really a good time to be where we are,” she says, looking up from the photos, pausing. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now. Not anywhere.”
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Judging from reader response, neither would the 200,000 Latinas (including 4% Latino subscribers) who buy her magazine with its coveted cover girls Velez, Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, Daisy Fuentes and Patricia Velasquez.
All this from an idea Haubegger has been nurturing since she was a 10-year-old kid, the adopted Mexican American daughter of white parents, David and Ann Haubegger, who always stressed the importance of her heritage and emphasized a bicultural, bilingual lifestyle for her.
“I remember going to the grocery store with my mother and how I’d wait for her at the big magazine racks near the checkout. Later, in high school I always wondered, ‘Why hasn’t anyone done a magazine for Hispanic women?’ I also remember thinking how I didn’t see any images of myself. But I really think I was probably wondering, ‘Why don’t they include us? Why don’t they ever show anyone with brown eyes or brown skin tones on these pages?’ ”
Her idea took flight at Stanford Law School, which she attended after getting a philosophy degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1989.
She recalls a professor who told the class, “ ‘If you’re ever going to start a business, you have to start something you feel really passionate about.’ ”
The notion of one day starting a magazine for Latinas had, after all, been a passion of hers, she says.
So after graduation in 1992 with her juris doctor from Stanford, where she was class president and senior editor of the Stanford Law Review, Haubegger and another classmate decided to give it a try.
“If it doesn’t work, we can always be lawyers,” Haubegger recalls they said. Her friend bailed after three months.
But Haubegger stuck it out because “I felt it could really change the community.” She did freelance legal research to pay the rent on her San Francisco apartment. And what she thought would be a six-month business experiment turned into two years of late-night homework and hitting up possible investors.
The dedication paid off.
Haubegger had raised about $250,000, formed her own company--Alegre Enterprises Inc.--and completed a 200-page comprehensive business plan (“I was such a lawyer about it,” she says). It was packed with U.S. Census Bureau statistics, marketing surveys, analysis and media studies that clearly said there was a hunger among Latinas for a high-gloss, bilingual lifestyle magazine.
Her blueprint caught the attention of Ed Lewis, chief of Essence Communications Inc., who discussed the idea with her over coffee while in San Francisco. Coffee turned into lunch and lunch into dinner with an invitation for Haubegger to speak to Essence’s board of directors, who later agreed Haubegger’s pitch was a business opportunity too good to pass up.
“I think it kind of clicked with Ed when I took him for a walk in my neighborhood,” she says. As they strolled through the Mission district, a largely Latino community, Haubegger pointed to young Latinas stepping off the bus and coming out of the subway station. “They were carrying McCall’s, Glamour and Mademoiselle. I pointed to the women and said to Ed, ‘You see that, they’re supposed to be reading this magazine--Latina.’ ”
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Last summer, after several prototypes and 21 focus groups in cities with major Latino populations, Haubegger launched the quarterly Latina as a joint venture with Essence Communications, which publishes Essence, the largest circulation magazine for African American women. This summer, way ahead of schedule--and with the backing of advertisers like Revlon, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Clinique, Estee Lauder, Toyota, JCPenney, Gerber Products Co., Procter & Gamble and others--Latina went monthly.
Everything is not perfect. “For all the hype and the excitement about the Hispanic market, the spending from advertisers sometimes is just not there,” Haubegger says. “Sometimes there is a fear among advertisers that if we do something ethnic it might be sort of second class. That’s why it’s important for us to have a high-quality magazine, it’s one way to defy the stereotypes.”
Haubegger credits her staff, which has doubled in size, for producing a slick magazine that both readers and advertisers like.
Michael Feuling, vice president of marketing for Ralph Lauren Fragrances, says Latina is “filling a gap mainstream magazines tend to ignore”--the untapped niche of 8 million Latinas in the United States.
Says Revlon’s Giaccone: “Five to 10 years from now, the Latina population is going to explode. We don’t want to wait until then, we want to jump on the bandwagon now.”
Haubegger says she couldn’t wait either. “Something just kept gnawing at me to do this,” she says. Her parents and 26-year-old brother, David, supported her decision.
“They convinced me that I was capable of doing anything, no matter what anybody said. My parents recognized early on that in this world I was going to have a different experience than theirs.
“They were very aware of the fact that people’s expectations of me were in some ways going to be artificially lowered. Or that I would confront stereotypes like being followed in a department store because I wasn’t blond and blue-eyed.
“They made me aware that I am a Latina living in two cultures, in two worlds. And it’s nice being able to have a passport that lets you traverse this cultural divide easily. The greatest gift they gave me was a real strong sense of who I was.”
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That topic--one of identity and of acculturating without shedding one’s affection for the Latino culture--is one Haubegger’s magazine hits upon with every issue, in stories not just about how to rear bilingual kids or how to stay healthy, but also in features on beauty, fashion and self-esteem.
Haubegger says readers are upwardly mobile, college-educated Latinas in their 20s, 30s and 40s (nearly half are single). They are overwhelmingly bilingual, employed full time and earn anywhere from $27,000 to $60,000.
“They are also Latina like me--with one foot in each culture,” Haubegger says. “Some live with their mothers who don’t speak English, others have kids who don’t speak Spanish. These readers are caught between the two worlds. They’re trying to navigate those worlds, and every now and then they’d love to have some kind of road map that says we’re here to support you, to affirm you.
“Latinas are trendsetters,” she says. “Latin women set makeup trends and fashion trends long before they happen elsewhere. And we’re such a potent and viable consumer and marketing force that it’s absolutely thrilling to me to be in this business.”
An assistant walks in with a piece of special delivery mail.
Haubegger’s face lights up. “This is it! This is it! I know this is it!” she says, opening the package, which is followed by uncontrollable hopping in place.
She proudly shows off a two-page ad from the Gap, a first for Latina.
“I don’t think anybody at Glamour is like, you know, doing the touchdown dance we do when we get an ad like this. I guess that’s because we’re the underdog every single day. But one thing I do know, I’m not going to be the underdog always.”
How does she know?
“I think it has something to do with being adopted and thus being sort of untethered to this world which has given me ganas or the determination to build a great magazine, to know the importance of creating something.
“That’s how I know,” she says and does the touchdown dance once more.
* The annual subscription price for Latina is $14.97; $2.50 per newsstand issue. For information, call (800) 274-1521.