Daily Front Row

2012 February 17

Titans of Industrie

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Jens Grede and Erik Torstensson
Richard Bush View Gallery

(NEW YORK) A cushy London-based PR and marketing firm churning out a quarterly yearbook for, and about, style’s most intriguing figures? Meet Erik Torstensson and Jens Grede, the co-editors behind Saturday Group’s “love project.”  One thing’s for sure: church and state have never been so closely intertwined!
BY ALEXANDRA ILYASHOV

What’s the deal with a PR agency doing an editorial product?
Jens Grede: Where are the lines drawn today, anyway? You have editors working for commercial brands, and marketing people like us and Fabien Baron working editorially. Industrie is not just aware of the crossover projects between commercial and editorial work—it embraces it. We wanted a neutral space for real stories. People should view us with the utmost integrity.
Erik Torstensson: Saturday Group is a fashion marketing group—it’s much more than a PR agency. Our day-to-day business involves building digital and e-commerce platforms for our clients, and populating everything with branded content. Doing trade media made sense. Erik and I knew a lot of people, obviously, so we didn’t go into this opportunity cold. We knew our competitors as well as our collaborators. We wouldn’t do a consumer publication with fashion credits—that would’ve taken it too far.

Do you have any other editorial experience?
JG: Before Industrie, we founded and were editors of a men’s magazine, Man About Town. Then we realized there were plenty of titles around, and lots of people who did what we were trying to do better than us. We thought, ‘Can we do this better? Probably not!’ We wanted to tell a slower, more niche story.

What’s your policy on covering designers on the Saturday Group roster in Industrie’s pages?
ET: We’re not in the publishing business—Industrie is a love project, and we’re fortunate to be able to do it because we have day jobs. But we keep things very separate. Saturday Group has 140 clients within the fashion industry, so it’s impossible to not include some of those people in our magazine. When we’re working on the magazine, we step out of our roles as consultants and feature who we think is relevant and good. And we never have any pressure from our clients to be part of Industrie.

Interesting. How do you juggle the two?
ET: It’s a lot! I remember speaking to Fabien Baron about this long ago. He said it’s all about training yourself. Industrie is very independent and not democratic, so Jens and I can make decisions quickly because we don’t answer to anyone. A lot of ideas come to us on airplane rides. Sometimes that’s how an entire issue comes together!

What’s the point of publishing Industrie?
JG: It’s a glorified high school yearbook for the fashion industry.
ET: As the Internet was booming, we wanted to create something really slow.
JG: I don’t think Industrie could have existed 10 years ago. We started the magazine as the fashion industry was opening up. It felt very closed before.

What changed?
ET: People behind the scenes have become stars in their own right. That’s mainly happened through the Internet.
JG: The success of The September Issue is a good symptom of that effect.

How would you describe the mag’s aesthetic?
ET: We want readers to pick up an issue in two years’ time and not feel like it’s dated. The paper stock was selected because we only come out twice a year, so we needed the magazine to feel more substantial than a monthly.
JG: It’s very straightforward. The look is about having as little design as possible—always classic and timeless, never too trendy. We’re basically designing it like a book. We created our own typeface uniquely for Industrie, so we have ownership of the font. The magazine is in a slightly bigger format than most titles because we don’t want the magazine to fit in a scanner.

Why not?
JG: So the pages can remain as print! We wanted to stand out by being harder to find online.

Seems pretty earnest.
JG: The voice is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and very direct. We want the tone to be really, really frank and friendly. The interviews should feel like they’re between two people who actually like, and are genuinely interested in, each other—which they are! We don’t want it to come across as press release journalism. We take care to not do stories you’ve read somewhere else. If there’s something that comes out of the PR world because it’s ‘important,’ we don’t write about it.

Such as?
JG: No, I don’t want to name names! A traditional magazine has to do certain things that we’re lucky enough to not have to do—they have to do certain things just to exist and to meet their targets. We have that luxury. It doesn’t make us better. It just makes us different. Comparing ourselves to consumer-facing fashion media would only come across as arrogant.

Who’s your competition?
ET: We’re not really competing with anyone, which is a big deal. We’re actually supporting this industry with Industrie—they help us, if we help them.

If you don’t have competitors, who are your peers?
ET: A lot of magazines out there have been doing what Industrie does for a long time, alongside other elements. There’s nothing completely new in that—just look at, say, Purple. But we are only doing that. Plus, we’ll cover someone that Vogue covers, too—but they won’t be able to give 12 pages to someone who’s not a superstar.
JG: I’d say Dazed Digital, or Imran Amed’s ‘Business of Fashion.’ There are fragments of what we do in what they do, and vice versa.

Are those peers jealous of Industrie?
ET: I have no idea. You’d have to ask them. But there’s been many more before us—we’re by no means the first.
JG: We’re true followers in this space! We’re definitely not early to this concept. Interview is quite like us, but it came way before and is an iconic, independently-owned magazine. If you talk to Fabien Baron, I don’t think he’d be jealous of us!

Is Tyler Brule truly ‘Mr. Zeitgeist,’ as The New York Times crowned him last year?
ET: I don’t think we want to talk about Tyler.
JG: I think Tyler does a great job with Monocle. I read it, I enjoy it, and he has a very specific tone of voice that is appreciated by a very important audience.

Why did you enter the publishing world, anyway?
ET: It’s our hobby! There’s nothing serious about Industrie. If we stop loving it eventually, we won’t make it—there are other things besides the magazine that matter more.
JG: We have to be careful not to take this whole thing too seriously. Erik and I thought this was a fun idea, and we’re lucky enough to be able to have a go of it. It actually worked out, we got kind of popular, and we’re still having fun! If we don’t have fun making Industrie in, say, a year’s time, we won’t do it anymore. It’s corny, but we just love it. These are our contemporaries and the business we work in. When Man About Town wasn’t fun anymore, we stopped being the editors, though the magazine is still around.

Do you miss Man About Town?
ET: We did stories at Man About Town about men we were simply fascinated by, beyond fashion, and we can’t do that anymore. 
JG: The editor in me misses the ability to cover anything that excites me. There’s lots more than just the fashion industry that does that. Erik and I would love to do what we did for Man About Town and apply it to a much broader consumer audience. We’d love to do that, but we’ve never been offered the opportunity. Yet.

What’s been the biggest breakthrough moment since launching the mag?
JG: When Marc Jacobs agreed to be featured in the magazine wearing his own clothes, styled by Katie Grand and shot by Patrick Demarchelier. When Erik and I popped by that shoot, it dawned on me that we must be doing something right because those three people were there, together, doing something for us. Realizing people wanted to be a part of Industrie was the best acknowledgement of all—working with people you admire is the best feeling in the world.

How did you get Miranda Kerr to pose naked?
ET: That shoot didn’t involve any clothes because it wasn’t about fashion. It was about Miranda, and we wanted to keep it as pure as possible. Because of the great trust between Miranda and the photographer, Willy Vanderperre, it was possible to create those great images.