Hearst UK

Hearst UK’s story goes back to 1910, when William Randolph Hearst set up the National Magazine Company in London, bringing the American publishing model he’d already built back home across the Atlantic. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hearst Corporation from the start, a relationship that’s carried straight through to today.

For most of the twentieth century the company grew quietly inside that structure, picking up titles like Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and Harper’s Bazaar along the way. Things started moving faster from the 1990s, when Duncan Edwards, who’d joined around 1990, took over as managing director, and later Arnaud de Puyfontaine stepped in as chief. executive in 2009. In between, the company made its first real move into digital, buying the women’s portal Handbag.com in 2006 and launching Hearst Digital as an umbrella for that and its other web acquisition, Net Doctor.

The biggest structural shift came in 2011, when National Magazine Company merged with Hachette Filipacchi Médias UK to form what’s now known as Hearst Magazines UK, or Hearst UK. That merger brought together a genuinely large stable of titles, now running at around 20 magazine brands and 20 digital properties, including Elle, Esquire, Country Living, Red, Men’s Health, and Runner’s World alongside the original Good Housekeeping and Cosmopolitan.

The business today runs two joint ventures alongside its wholly owned titles: NatMag Rodale with Rodale Inc. of the US for health content and COMAG, a 65:35 partnership with Condé Nast handling magazine distribution across the UK. Hearst UK is led by CEO Katie Vanneck-Smith, who also chairs the Professional Publishers Association, the UK’s trade body for magazine and digital publishers.

The company employs over 660 people and still runs the Good Housekeeping Institute for independent consumer testing, alongside newer ventures like ELLE Collective, a membership community built around fashion and beauty, which extends the magazine brand into recurring-revenue territory more than a century after Hearst first brought his publishing model to London.