Monday
Start the week with a 9am finance meeting with our finance director Gary Pickett and Fad Jamal, ad director of Stylist. We have to reforecast the revenue figures for the magazine as Stylist has been so successful.
In fact, we were scheduled to break through our first £1m in ad revenue in March 2010 but achieved this on 9 December last year. I then catch up from the previous week's magazine ABCs, when we spent time out of the office seeing agencies and clients.
On ABC morning we celebrated our debut ABC of 410,674 – above our target of 400,000 – with a champagne breakfast in the office. I also progress our plans for an event with a major beauty retailer, and check our PR strategy for our London Fashion Week special issue is on track.
Tuesday
Our 68-page fashion special arrives in the office to great excitement. Our first job is to get a bundle of 50 copies sent off to Vivienne Westwood, who designed one of the issue's three alternative covers, alongside Giles Deacon and Manolo Blahnik.
This is only our seventeenth issue so we are very pleased to have advertisers such as Escada, Hugo Boss, Reiss and LK Bennett on board. We are distributing the issue at London Fashion Week, so I finalise the brief for the promotional agency with our circulation manager Ken Moreton – we want to make sure they target our key clients.
Wednesday
Meet Stylist's editor Lisa Smosarski at 8am to travel together to Hammersmith for a 9am meeting with Joanne Bletz, marketing director for Lancome. Watching women reading the new issue on the tube is a great feeling – I still get a buzz out of seeing people enjoying the magazine.
Rush back for Stylist's brand meeting, chaired by Shortlist Media's chief executive Mike Soutar and attended by Lisa Smosarski, managing director Karl Marsden, editorial director Phil Hilton and circulation director Ken Moreton. Really interesting meeting where we come up with plans for the brand – for example, we are looking at an exciting project that involves the beauty industry. Then it's off to the Soho Hotel for tea with William Woodhams, the new marketing director of French Connection, which distributes 4% of Stylist's circulation.
Thursday
Start the day chatting to the Shortlist team about the piece in the Daily Mail picking up on their interview with David Cameron before returning emails from clients, including Jaeger's marketing director Yvonne Kirk.
Claudine Collins, head of investment at MediaCom, emails to say she loved the Fashion Week issue and asks me to guess which cover she liked best. Get it wrong when I say Manolo Blahnik - she liked the Giles Deacon design because it had diamonds on it. In the afternoon, our strategy and development director Tim Ewington presents the findings from the reader focus groups we ran two weeks ago – and the results are fascinating. Delighted that readers say Stylist sits alongside Marie Claire and Grazia, and that they give it an average rating of eight out of ten for overall enjoyment.
Finish the day with a "media Thursday" night out in Covent Garden with former colleagues from IPC, where we catch up over several glasses of rose.
Friday
To Somerset House at 8.15am for the start of London Fashion Week, where I check up on the two glamorous girls handing out Stylist – pleased to see that all 2,000 copies go like hot cakes.
Rush back for a meeting with Mike Soutar about a few highly confidential projects we are working on, including an initiative with a key beauty company, a potential tie-up with Graduate Fashion Week and reader events. We are also currently recruiting our first overseas sales representative, so I catch up on finding the right person to work with the major fashion advertisers in Milan.
Weekend
Get to the DAKS fashion show at 9am, where there are a lot of bleary-eyed fashion editors drinking coffee. Really interesting, surprising show, with unusual capes and some beautiful coats – I am sorted for next winter.
On Sunday evening I attend the Vivienne Westwood show at the Royal Courts of Justice, which is very atmospheric and beautiful, with Pixie Geldof modelling and Naomi Campbell and Janet Jackson watching from the ringside seats. The show is an hour late but the wait is made bearable by the sight of people reading the copies of Stylist that Vivienne Westwood asked us to lay out on the front row.
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