Sports Illustrated is stripping off its swimwear to see if see if its bikinis and scanty one-piecers can float on their own, perhaps offering something it and parent Time Inc., can cling to in rough waters ahead.
Time Inc., this week announced it's establishing Sports Illustrated Swimwear Enterprises (SISE) as its own division.
Chris Stone, senior vice president and editorial director for the Sports Illustrated Group, called SI Swimsuit "a phenomenal brand for us to extend into new businesses."
It's a bid to wring as much revenue as possible from something that began as a bit of a lark in 1964 but quickly proved enough of a cash cow that editors overlooked the fact it never really meshed all that well with the magazine's journalism.
(Ask the school librarians who once could be counted on to write letters each year questioning whether barely dressed supermodels on exotic beaches were appropriate for young impressionable sports fans.)
SISE looks to up the ante on the multimedia efforts already exploiting the appeal of the swimsuit issue in print, online, through video and sales of merchandise such as calendars.
A previously announced Sports Illustrated Swim and Active apparel line, produced with RAJ Swim, is set to debut early next year. It was introduced last month at an industry event in Miami, where it gained attention for seeking to appeal to a range of women with sizes up to 20.
SISE also will represent models and has signed 15 women from its open casting call competition earlier this year. They participated in Miami and will continue to gain exposure as the division promotes itself and its wares.
"We're thrilled to work directly with our current models and emerging models to build new businesses," said Bruce Gersh, who's Time Inc.'s senior vice president of strategy and business development.
Time Inc., has been doing this sort of thing with several of its titles lately. There are, for example, Southern Living retail stores and there is now a Southern Living-branded home collection of products. There's a Real Simple of cleaning products.
After deciding this spring not to sell itself, despite interest from at least five potential buyers, the media giant has been restructuring, cutting hundreds of jobs and weighing the sale of some of its magazines, including Golf, Sunset and Coastal Living.
With advertising and circulation revenue down, Time Inc., is looking for savings and new money wherever it can find it. In that spirit, Sports Illustrated recently launched SI Eats, a food site for tailgaters, people fascinated or horrified by stadium food options and anyone interested in what athletes eat.
Even with an inordinate amount of space in Sports Illustrated turned over recently to evaluating which sports stars have the best fashion sense, there does seem to be a commitment to continuing to do the sort of long-form storytelling for which the magazine once hung its helmet.
This is a huge challenge. Beyond staff cuts and talk of reducing the once-weekly magazine to fewer than the current 38 issues per year, there are people who will argue no one wants to read anything longer than an alert on their phone. Never mind algorithms for sites such as Facebook that feed readers almost exclusively the same sort of stories and subjects they have read before, making it hard to sell anything more of the same old, same old.
The Aug. 7 issue of Sports Illustrated includes a feature of more than 3,700 words on the late Yankees pitcher Hideki Irabu and a nearly 7,500-word story (in conjunction with Golf) on President Donald Trump's relationship with golf.
The former is a touching recollection of a "complicated life and death." The latter is fascinating examination of "questions and complications" that go well beyond the first golfer's review of his public accommodations (rhymes with "Trump") in D.C.
More complicated than either may be the future of Sports Illustrated itself, and whether initiatives such as SISE and SI Eats will help sustain it or subsume the brand that launched them.
