Not your typical snag-a-man women's magazine

By Jennifer Cox

     In a recent magazine article, a woman calling herself Buffy talks about her job as a maid. Her uniform for scrubbing floors and washing windows: a black lace garter belt, sheer black stockings and high heels. That's it.
    The story is titled "Dick and Span: Confessions of a Topless Housecleaner." You might expect to find it in this month’s Playboy, or maybe in Maxim or Gear.
    You’d be wrong. The article is from the pages of Bust.
    Started seven years ago, the quirky feminist magazine is aimed at women who would rather celebrate their breasts than read about how to make them appear bigger or perkier.
    Haven't heard of Bust? 
    That's no surprise. As an underground 'zine, Bust has for most of its life been known only to a small but hip readership.
    All that is changing fast. The title was acquired last spring by an independent media company that has major expansion plans for the magazine, including pumping up its distribution and circulation and bringing in national advertisers.
    If America was ready for Playboy in the fifties, the thinking goes, perhaps it's finally ready for a women's magazine that talks about sex as something beyond bait for snagging a man.
    "We want to be a viable alternative to the women’s magazines out there," says Debbie Stoller, editor in chief and co-founder of Bust. "To show that the lives of women are more complicated, and frankly funnier, than those magazines would have you believe."
     With a tag line that reads "For Women With Something to Get Off Their Chests," Bust is a spirited celebration of all things womanly.
     A typical article in the current issue tells readers how to buy a TitPillow, an anatomically-inspired pillowcase for those who wish to "sleep between a pair of breasts every night."
     Other products featured include Nobleworks, a line of dirty greeting cards, and the book "Gynomite: Fearless, Feminist Porn."
     As in other women’s magazines, you’ll find how-to style service journalism, but with a twist. "A Bad Girl’s Guide to Good Housekeeping" is a how-to feature about cooking, cleaning and crafting for less-domesticated gals—not exactly what you’d find in Ladies Home Journal.
     Bust was born in 1993, when Stoller, while working at Nickelodeon Television, met co-founders Laurie Henzel and Marcelle Karp.
     All three women were huge fans of Jane Pratt’s teen magazine Sassy and wanted to create a similar cutting-edge title for women.
     "Sassy was a magazine about pleasure, not paranoia," explains Stoller. "It was celebrating girl culture."
     So, Stoller, Henzel and Karp, none of whom had magazine experience, put together a makeshift publication. They xeroxed 500 copies of the magazine and distributed it to local newsstands specializing in underground "zines."
    The women quickly learned they needed money to continue putting out the magazine, so they started selling ads and subscriptions to keep Bust, which was published twice a year, alive.
    Friends and fans wrote articles for free for the magazine, and eventually a web site and online store were established to further promote the Bust brand. The founders also published a book of articles from the magazine titled "The Bust Guide to The New Girl Order."
Still, Stoller knew they needed backing to make the magazine a viable publication.
     "We put a business plan together and shopped it around to several big media companies," she says, "but they didn’t understand."
     Most of the media companies wanted to alter the magazine considerably by changing it into a typical women’s fashion magazine.
     Enter Razorfish Studios, a small company whose holdings include www.disinfo.com, a conspiracy theory web site, and Self Timer Films, R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe’s production company.
    "It took a lot of soft stroking to convince them that we didn’t want to change their vision," says Razorfish co-founder Craig Kanarick. But in May of last year Bust agreed to be acquired by Razorfish, and Kanarick became the magazine’s publisher. Bust’s creators finally quit their day jobs, set up shop in a small New York City office and hired a staff of seven.
    Since the magazine has been published by Razorfish, its circulation has already tripled. The upcoming summer issue, which will hit newsstands on June 1, will have a circulation of nearly 120,000.
    The magazine’s content has remained fairly unchanged except for a few structural changes, says Stoller.
    "It used to have 20 two-page articles, which was fine when it only came out twice a year and people were passing it along to all their friends," says Stoller. "But now we have fewer but longer stories." 
    The magazine has also added more art and blurbs to its format and upped its frequency to quarterly.
    The next stage of development, says Stoller, will be making the magazine known in the media buying community. The quarterly publication currently fills only 10 percent of its pages with ads, many of which are for other Razorfish ventures.
    "We have to prove our audience is there first," says Kanarick about attracting advertisers. "We realize we haven’t had the strongest distribution platform and that’s something we’re working on." 
     There’s also the title’s racy content, which can make some advertisers uneasy.
     Still, both Stoller and Kanarick say that if they can increase Bust’s visibility, they’ll be in the clear.
     "Getting people to see it is the challenge," says Kanarick. "But once people read it, they become so incredibly passionate about the magazine, that we got ‘em."

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