Huge congratulations to #legend’s 7^th anniversary! How did you mark this major milestone? 
Thank you! We threw our annual #legend100 party at the beginning of the year with friends of the magazine, including celebrities and influencers that we work with as well as clients and brands. It was a huge turnout and we managed to garner something like 22 million views and impressions on social media for it. Instagram stories last 24 hours but our party was being posted and reposted for a week afterwards, which was a wonderful surprise and a very fitting way to end our sixth year and head into our seventh. 

The magazine has launched the latest issue with a redesign. Please tell us the reason behind the decision. 
We launched our March anniversary issue with a redesign, which we’re really proud of. When I pitched the idea of a redesign to our CEO & Publisher Steve Rockowitz, it was really with the intent of finding a way to celebrate both the end of the pandemic as well as #legend's the seventh anniversary. And what better way to do so than a little facelift to greet a world where it’s no longer mandatory to wear a mask and it’s kosher once more to give your friends hugs? 

The first change I really wanted to make was to our cover. If you run our fingers over the cover of our physical magazine, you’ll find it to be textured. We’ve had a lot of great feedback on our textured cover. What’s the point of a print magazine these days if we don’t make an effort to celebrate its physicality and play with the fact that it’s an object in a world that’s being taken over by AI and cyborgs? 
 
I also think after so many years of recoiling from touch, this is my way of reigniting – if not everyone, at least my own senses. And I suppose I just want everyone to feel up our magazine. My rationale is, if it feels good, you’ll want to take a look at what’s inside, right? 

In terms of the pages, we spent months re-engineering the book to achieve a magazine that lies flat because when re-thinking what luxury really means, the first thing that comes to mind, is ease. So we want to give our readers that laid-back reading experience that our physical magazine didn’t have before.  

In terms of the design of the pages, our senior art director Carol Chan and I spent hours and days making moodboards, poring through magazines and revising mock-ups to create what we hope to be a more dynamic and invigorating layout. We wanted to rethink the concept that luxury lifestyle magazines have to always mean big pictures and layouts. #legend is luxury fast-forward and we’re very digital friendly.

We speak to a demographic and crowd that is young and our interns are digital natives so we looked at the pixelated space of online and tried to integrate elements of that into our print design. There’s a mix of fonts and a lot of colour and we think that will draw even the shortest of attention spans to our pages and our words. 

Can you share the future editorial focus or strategy of the magazine? 
First things first, everyone is going to have an easier time finding our magazine around town. We’re increasing our circulation across the city now that the world is back in action so please keep your eyes peeled for copies. 

Because our editorial focus has always been around the lifestyles of very cool, very interesting people around town and across the world, we’ve been focusing on our events to really bring our crowd together. I mentioned above that we held our #legend100 party earlier in the year to celebrate our #legend100 list, but we’re about to host our anniversary party to celebrate our seventh anniversary properly.  

We’ve introduced smaller get-togethers that we like to call #legendchats where we invite different creatives that we work with for a panel discussion and invite our readers, clients, partners, celebrities and influencers for a night of interesting conversation between groups of people who are all interested in creativity in one form or another. 

How do you and your team determine what to feature in #legend? 
We look at relevance and timeliness when it comes to what we feature. Of course, the crux of the magazine is still founded on elements of luxury lifestyle so that in and of itself determines a lot of what we feature.  

We’re also very much celebrity and influencer focused, given our annual #legend100 list, and we look to what’s new and happening with movers and shakers at home, across Asia and globally. Among the many movers and shakers, many actually read our magazine so we have content both about them and for them. 

How can PRs work with the magazine? 
Reach out and have a chat! It’s easier to be top of mind, if we actually meet in person and have real conversations about what accounts and clients you’re looking after if you’re at an agency or what plans your brand has next year, so we can talk about what is relevant for the magazine and what coverage we can best provide for a key event or happening. 

One thing I’d note is that it’s hard for luxury lifestyle magazines to interview CEOs because we’re not a news or business title. Offering us the creative arm of the business is much more plausible than trying to get someone from the C-suite to talk about the creative process behind a project.