How a British Magazine Became One Chinese Businessman's Lifestyle "IP"

Five years on, Monocle's founder is back in China, and the people who run lifestyle brands are flocking to him. They all want to hear what the mentor has to say.

Tyler Brûlé, the founder of Monocle, who rarely talks about China, has come to Beijing.

Brûlé is not yet 50, and his legend has been retold many times over: shot twice in Afghanistan while reporting for the BBC; founded Wallpaper*, the design world's authoritative magazine, in 1998, and saw Time Warner buy it a year later; walked out, taking with him Winkreative, the advertising agency he had started around the same time, and launched Monocle, which promptly became required reading for the global elite.

Monocle, founded in 2007, began as a magazine aimed at the "global elite," 10 issues a year, sold in boutiques and at airports in big cities around the world. But what made it famous was not the beautiful magazine — it was that it "successfully turned itself into a lifestyle brand." Besides the magazine, the same unified Monocle aesthetic now covers a website that sells things, the radio station Monocle 24, Monocle Shop, Monocle Cafe, and the Monocle Conference, which started last year.

In nine years one name spread into all these channels, and all of them carry the same strong Monocle traits: refined, playful, global-minded. It is the original magazine that looks negligible next to the enormous operating numbers Chinese companies throw around — 150,000 copies distributed across 60 countries, 80,000 buyers a month, and 98% of the business coming from outside Britain. Even so, stacking a few copies on a shelf has long been standard practice for stores at home and abroad that want to signal a lifestyle.

And the crowd that Brûlé and Monocle stand for has become a success formula of its own. It draws in everyone whose business rests on the idea of "lifestyle."

On the evening of August 5, Brûlé turned up in a triangular building at the corner of Hongjie in Beijing's Sanlitun. He wore black-framed glasses, a black casual blazer and a pale green shirt — he looked as if he had just walked out of the pages of Monocle.

His host was CHAO, a lifestyle brand founded by three investors with backgrounds in architecture, art and design. It is a lot like the Chelsea club of the 1990s: membership costs 3,999 yuan a year, but you essentially have to be invited, and the total is capped at 500 people for now.

The salon space, which opened only in July, packs in a hotel, apartments, an arts center, a co-working space and a members' club. Winkreative, the advertising and design firm Brûlé runs, designed its logo. CHAO is Winkreative's newest Chinese client.

This was meant to be a closed event for 60 to 70 people, but the organizers announced at the last minute that Brûlé was coming to Beijing and opened registration to the public, pushing attendance to 300. They included Brûlé's devoted fans, reporters, and well over 100 people running lifestyle brands who had come from Shanghai, Taiwan and elsewhere to "learn from the master."

Everyone held an invitation that read: "A group of highly educated, highly perceptive consumers with an international outlook are defining what quality living means." The salon's theme was "Why Quality Living Matters So Much."

Maurice, one of CHAO's founders, told QDaily that the salon was held in Beijing rather than somewhere with a more developed lifestyle scene, such as Shanghai, because Shanghai is "already saturated." "Shanghai's demand is regional… Beijing really does radiate across the whole country; from here you can reach many more places. Take second-tier cities — look at Dalian, Qingdao, they already have a strong sense of lifestyle. China learns so fast. I believe that in five years this market will be talking about nothing but lifestyle."

Maurice may be underestimating how eagerly this market chases concepts. The word "lifestyle" is already everywhere. In the business plans of investors and startups it goes by another name: "consumption upgrade."

Boston Consulting Group's 2012 report The 10 Trillion Dollar Prize predicted that by 2020 the middle class in China and India together would number 1 billion people, with annual consumer spending in China reaching $6.2 trillion.

Changing consumption has created enormous business opportunities, and it has also killed off those who could not keep up faster. According to a 2012 McKinsey report, as consumers trade up, they demand a better quality of life more insistently. Whether the object is a basic necessity, a semi-necessity or a luxury good, consumers want it to show their taste, their outlook and their social standing. A nutritious, healthy meal, for instance, is what trading up looks like when the product is food, a basic necessity.

All of this closely resembles what Brûlé ran into when he started Wallpaper* in 1998. He caught the wave of entrepreneurs born between the 1960s and the early 1970s who grew rich quickly in the boom of the 1990s. In a New York Times profile of the time headlined "Mr. Zeitgeist", he called them "global nomads" and "the Wallpaper* generation."

"It could be a skier on the West Coast, an ad man in Stockholm, or a poor kid working in an independent record store who suddenly gets offered a film… In any case, there were suddenly a lot more rich people. They needed someone to tell them how to live a refined life."

This is the usual way the media builds a wave. The only question is whether the person building it can turn the promise into a product.

In a 2014 survey by the media agency MEC, 53% of Chinese consumers said they were willing to pay for original, distinctive brands. Maurice counts himself as one of them: "What's interesting about China is that it may have gone through 30 years of development in 10. A few years ago everyone was still chasing luxury goods; now they are starting to look for better quality and more story in what they buy."

Against this backdrop, niche brands are looking for an opening — and so are the people who can coach niche brands, Winkreative among them.

"Beijing has a lot of commercial districts, and each one has its own crowd. Guomao is white-collar and business people; Shin Kong Place is the newly rich who love luxury; Sanlitun is more mixed, younger, more about everyday life. We want to bring interesting ideas into young people's lives." Artemis, a Sanlitun boutique that carries independent European designer labels, was also at the salon; this is how it described its target customers to us two months earlier.

On the question of how to build a niche lifestyle brand, Brûlé is treated as a mentor. He knows exactly how to create a sense of belonging among the customers he wants, and how to make partner brands pay for the approval of that group. Monocle likes to write about small brands hidden in the corners of cities around the world, and that niche angle happens to serve a growing number of people who have been abroad, have money to spare, and need both something to talk about and a way to display taste.

Linghu Lei, creative director of the monthly Life (《生活》), is clearly a fan too. He puts it this way: "Take the nine things Tyler loves: John Smedley knitwear, the Japanese travel-bag brand Porter, Swissair, Copenhagen as the most livable city, the French scented candles of Cire Trudon, the island of Pantelleria off Sicily, bicycles, and of course his own magazine, radio station and podcast. These brands, and the taste and way of living they stand for, get pushed out to a much larger audience by the publisher's own momentum — and that is exactly how a magazine makes its living in this new era."

Monocle has therefore become a magazine whose advertising partnerships cost a great deal: a single brand deal can reach $200,000 to $300,000. Brûlé has told the press that this is Monocle's core source of profit.

A promotional video Winkreative made for The Flynn apartments

On the question of how to do lifestyle in China, though, Brûlé has no very good answer. About China's fast changes and its complicated mix of people, he does not know much more than the audience in front of him.

Brûlé's B2B advertising business, Winkreative, started working in China long ago. The rebranding of "Taikoo Li" and the design of China Daily's print and digital editions are both its work. But the business has grown slowly: CHAO, this latest collaboration, is only Winkreative's third Chinese client since 1998.

That number looks far too small beside the list of 130 clients on Winkreative's homepage. The list is sorted into five categories — lifestyle, property and landscape, financial services, media and culture, and transport — and includes LV, American Express, Brûlé's old employer the BBC, and his beloved Swissair. The work comes in three parts: business strategy consulting, brand visual systems, and content marketing.

In his 30-minute opening talk at the salon, Brûlé spent about 20 minutes on four property projects Winkreative had worked on: the Tokyo property group's Toranomon Hills; the American hotel group Le Méridien Hotels & Resorts; The Flynn, a mixed residential and commercial building in Chelsea backed by America's IGI Group; and Francesc Macià 10, a luxury commercial property in Barcelona.

Most of what Winkreative makes is visual native advertising — video, illustration, standalone publications and the like. Because Monocle's visual style is also Winkreative's work, all of it probably strikes consumers as heavily Monocle-flavored.

It is not that Monocle never tried its luck here. In September 2011 a Monocle Shop opened in Beijing, in the small building at the east gate of No. 12 Dongzhimen Outer Street, Chaoyang District — a shop inside the Danish dessert brand Royal Smushi Café. It was only 15 square meters, mostly black and white, and besides Monocle magazine and the special Mediterraneo newspaper (a thin paper made for people on Mediterranean holidays to read and to shade themselves with), it sold products Monocle had developed with various independent brands. Those products contributed about 15% of profit.

The design-brand area on Royal Smushi Café's ground floor originally held two brands: Monocle Shop and the Danish jeweler Georg Jensen. Within six months Monocle quietly closed its shop; Georg Jensen has since moved to Di'anmen.

Why the arrangement ended is unclear. One rumor says the landlord put too many limits on what categories of goods the brand could sell. Brûlé answered the question at the salon: "It's simple — we couldn't sell Monocle anymore. Regulatory restrictions."

A foreign publication normally has only two ways into the Chinese market. One is "localization": partner with a domestic magazine publisher, operate under its publication license and use its distribution, as Kinfolk does under Jingpin Gouwu Zhinan (《精品购物指南》). The other is through a book import-export company, brought in as an original-language book that any bookstore can order.

"Of course we'd like to sell Monocle directly in China, but we'll only sell the English edition, because a global outlook is our core strength," Brûlé told QDaily. But selling it like a book clearly cannot widen the advertiser base, and sales would be small — it does not help win clients either.

Five years on, Monocle's founder is back in China, and a salon held with a client looks rather like a pitch to investors and partners.

Judging by what he wants this time, Brûlé seems to be looking for a platform that connects him with Chinese consumers and local brands, lets him control the customer experience, and attracts more brand partnerships.

He has ruled out e-commerce. People cannot really connect with each other over the internet, he believes: "Google and Facebook are overrated because of bad urban planning." As he said it, he was still holding a BlackBerry.

"We plan 60 to 70 events around the world every year. That is our social media, and it has worked this way for thousands of years — people going out, looking each other in the eye and talking… The shops are an extension of the events… they also turn into networks that collect informal news." In the five cities where Monocle Shop now operates — Tokyo, London, New York, Hong Kong and Zurich — every shop is laid out at under 70 square meters, in order to "build a sense of intimacy."

China is far more complicated by comparison, and one small shop in a busy district may not do much. Brûlé told QDaily: "China is huge — Guangzhou, Shanghai… different regional markets have all kinds of forces meeting in them, and they move at different speeds. Even luxury spending has different tiers, and each tier has its own consumers. It's hard to sum up what they have in common with a single standard."

It is precisely because the Chinese market is this complicated that Winkreative's work with CHAO looks unlike its earlier projects.

CHAO plainly wants to do something with Monocle's name, and it has the room for it. In its building in Sanlitun, the ground floor and the basement hold two art spaces, a screening room and a small theater. The second floor has an auditorium and banquet hall for rent. The third floor has a library, a restaurant and a salon open only to members. Floors 4 to 18 are hotel rooms priced from 1,850 to 2,850 yuan; floors 19 to 28 are apartments still being renovated.

All of it gives off a whiff of "elite" — and in China today that word carries a good deal more than its traditional meaning.

"Monocle coming to China… we can be a good host, let it meet its fans, and also introduce some Chinese independent brands for it to write about and work with," Maurice said. That may explain why a private salon for a few dozen people turned into a lecture for 300.

Brûlé was plainly happy to talk up his new client. "This is our first large property project in China. Tonight we made contact with quite a few of the brands that came, and we hope to work more with some of them. Property, aviation and media are the fields we're most interested in. I have to say, the flights on Chinese airlines look as if they're frozen in the 1970s."

Asked about what comes next, his language suggested he treats Snapchat and Instagram — currently the favorites of advertisers everywhere — as competitors.

"The language around media right now has become very narrow, and very negative. Everybody says the future is digital, always Snapchat, Instagram. Who cares about them? There are so many more interesting things to talk about. So what Winkreative and Monocle will keep doing is challenge all of that."

Brûlé said it with a smile, and politely rolled his eyes at the same time.

Cover image from nytimes.com, photograph by Danny Ghitis; other images from nonzen.com, CHAO, on-site photography, the Winkreative website, the Monocle website, and blog.davidsykes.com