Weider CEO Hopes to Shape Up Fitness Company
Weider Publications Inc. may have grown over 60 years into the fitness industry leader based on founder and muscle guru Joe Weider’s sweating-in-the-gym philosophy, but the company’s new chief executive sees its future as closer in spirit to lifestyle maven Martha Stewart.
Weider has brought in A. Douglas Peabody--best known as founder of acclaimed high-end gourmet and garden magazines Saveur and Garden Design--to run the information wing of legendary muscle guru Weider’s $500-million global empire of magazines and nutritional products.
Weider, 78, is widely credited with popularizing bodybuilding in the 1930s when he fashioned the first modern commercial barbells out of train axles and sold a mimeographed booklet of weightlifting tips. He’s still on the job--even signing off on magazine covers and new vitamin labels--but the fitness publishing field has become crowded and competitive, spurring the company to launch a three- to five-year new-media initiative to integrate its products and services into customers’ lives.
The key figure in that strategy is the newly arrived Peabody, 47, a multifaceted New York lawyer with a Wharton MBA and a background in both venture capital and e-commerce--including a stint as vice chairman of AOL.
Indeed, just before flying off last week to South Africa to attend a friend’s wedding, Peabody acknowledged that someone with his background is so novel in the fitness industry that some have been wondering if he was brought in merely to structure privately held Weider Publications for acquisition.
“I’ve been asked that question, and the answer is no,” he said.
However, he sketched a future of bold steps, including bringing in new investors to launch an Internet business and possibly even taking the company public.
And he freely admits that his prime model is Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia LLC, the magazine-book-retailing-Internet-TV lifestyle conglomerate founded upon Stewart’s cooking and entertaining ideas.
Peabody will live in New York and commute to Weider Publications’ Woodland Hills headquarters. The striking office building with a two-story indoor waterfall houses 220 editorial, sales and administrative employees who bustle amid an extensive collection of sculptures, paintings and other artwork collected by Joe Weider.
Weider’s nephew Eric Weider, 35, president and CEO of privately held corporate parent Weider Health & Fitness Inc., said the company has a vision of using Web-based interactivity and wireless technology to, in effect, project magazine content into readers’ lives by using such methods as paging them with updated workout regimens and shopping lists.
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The goal, he said, is to “create the equivalent of a full-time nutritionist or personal trainer” for readers, providing them fitness and nutritional information “when, where and how they want it.”
Weider Publications’ 325 employees produce seven magazines with a circulation totaling nearly 4 million and a readership of 25 million.
The magazines--which trace their roots to 1940, when Joe Weider first published Your Physique, which later became Muscle & Fitness--still emphasize various degrees of exercise.
But they also mix in lifestyle articles targeted at different demographics. Muscle & Fitness, for instance, is for males in their 20s and 30s who aren’t competitive body builders but who are serious about training to improve athletic performance.
The publishing group’s 1.5-million circulation leader is Shape, a women’s magazine that in a recent issue offered readers tips on building firm abdominal muscles, assembling tasty salads and impressing classmates at school reunions with their figures.
The other titles include Flex, the bible for competitive body builders, and Jump, a fitness magazine for teenage girls.
Men’s Fitness, Fit Pregnancy and Natural Health round out the group.
Weider Publications also turns out a steady stream of special editions and what it calls “one-shots” that it puts together and rolls out to test the market. A women’s special called Muscle & Fitness Hers is now on the newsstands, and the company plans to roll out a Spanish language version of Fit Pregnancy this spring.
“We’re constantly experimenting and testing,” Eric Weider said. “The population is constantly aging and changing demographics.”
Shape, which was launched in the 1980s, was at first viewed as a risky venture. Exercise was such a new mass culture phenomenon that Joan Collins had to be persuaded to pose with barbells for a cover photo, Eric Weider said.
Today, however, it’s doing better than the flagship Muscle & Fitness, where circulation has dropped from 600,000 a decade ago to 477,000 today.
“One of the problems of our niche is that in the early ‘90s it was growing 15% to 20% a year; now it’s flat,” complains John Balik, publisher of rival Iron Man magazine in Oxnard. “Each month we’re fighting for the bodies out there.”
“There are so many fitness magazines about exercise, it’s a tough marketplace,” said Patrick Taylor, a spokesman for Emmaus, Pa.-based Rodale Inc., which publishes Men’s Health and other fitness-conscious titles.
Readers who don’t want to pay for a magazine can reach for Max Sports and Fitness magazine, which is free.
“All the magazines on the newsstand are $5 or $6, and people don’t want to spend that,” said Sean Greene, president of Anaheim-based Max Muscle, a 10-year-old nationwide chain of 100 nutrition and fitness equipment stores.
The firm launched the magazine two years ago with six issues a year, stacked up as a handout on its retail counters. Now it also circulates in several hundred gyms and other retailers and is about to go monthly.
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The array of titles--like Pump and Burn--in the fitness segment is bewildering and ever-changing, which makes it quite intriguing that the father of the high-end Saveur and Garden Design has arrived in the wild and woolly segment, said Judith Langer, president of Langer Associates Inc., a New York firm specializing in qualitative magazine research.
“I don’t know if there’s a need for a status-level fitness magazine,” she said. “But on the other hand, there’s been a trend we’ve had on the up-scaling of everything. Readers are more aware; they want magazines that look good and are well-published.”
Joe Weider developed a passion for weightlifting after getting beaten up as a teenager. He fashioned the barbells to bulk up so he could face bullies in his tough Montreal neighborhood. The mimeographed booklet became Weider’s first magazine, Your Physique, in 1940.
In 1972 he and brother Ben, 76, founded their parent company, Weider Health & Fitness Inc.
The company’s two subsidiaries are Weider Publications and the publicly traded Weider Nutrition International Inc.
The Salt Lake City-based firm recorded $335.48-million in sales--mostly of vitamin tablets, fortified drink mixes, health beverages and nutrition bars--for the fiscal year ending last May 31.
Weider’s enutrition.com also sells nutritional supplements over the Web.
Weider’s publishing business began turning out new titles in the 1980s with Flex, Shape and Men’s Fitness. The three new magazines foreshadowed the magazine industry’s fragmentation into narrowly focused special interest titles.
Weider in 1991 brought in former Playboy publishing executive Michael T. Mann, who oversaw a decade of expansion through acquisition and new title start-ups, trotting out magazines that didn’t always work.
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Introducing in 1996 a new cooking magazine, Shape Cooks, Carr described for Cowles Inside Media a freewheeling philosophy. “We are testing, and if this isn’t the formula, then there will be another cooking magazine out right after this one,” he said.
Shape Cooks was suspended, along with other special interest titles introduced in the 1990s including Living Fit and Prime Health & Fitness. Weider bought and later sold yet another title, Senior Golfer.
Carr retired last May to pursue other interests, but the notion of trying new titles and new products to test what works suits the new CEO fine.
“There is a lot of room for growth in this health and fitness area, not only with the spinoffs on the publication side but also in the area of other media, and the Internet is one example,” Peabody said.
Indeed, he pointed out that the impetus for launching Saveur and Garden Design in the mid-1990s was to fill a niche.
“The competition had gotten a little bit sleepy and there was an opportunity at the high end of the market,” he said. “More and more people were becoming more and more affluent. They were at the end of the baby boom generation, and they were spending money on home, garden, food, travel and entertainment.”
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All of which are of interest to Martha Stewart fans. And what does that have to do with fitness?
“All special interest magazines are really oriented toward passionate and involved audiences,” Peabody said. “And I think Weider as a company exemplifies that in the fitness, beauty and health areas.
“And with new technology, people have an opportunity to wrap their life in a certain lifestyle. And it’s our mission to be there for them in whatever medium.”
