Southern Living / Time Inc.
Launching a new editorial pillar that made fashion and beauty feel native to Southern Living—while helping unlock $5M+ in annual beauty advertising revenue.
Context
Southern Living had enormous trust with its audience—and an opportunity to extend that relationship into new commercial categories. Beauty represented a particularly valuable advertising market, with brands such as L'Oréal, Maybelline and CoverGirl seeking meaningful ways to reach the magazine's readers.
But simply adding conventional beauty content would have risked feeling disconnected from what readers already loved about the brand. I helped launch the Style pillar around a different premise:
Style and beauty should be interpreted through the Southern Living reader, not imported from another magazine.
The objective was to build editorial inventory advertisers could meaningfully participate in while keeping the content culturally specific, useful and emotionally resonant.
The Editorial Strategy
Every new content idea began with the same question: why would a Southern Living reader care? Beauty became a story about mothers, sisters, memory and ritual. Fashion intersected with Southern traditions, regional culture, personal history and the social occasions that shape everyday life. The subject matter could be new to the magazine while the emotional language remained unmistakably Southern Living.
I focused on editorial concepts that could extend beyond a single issue. Recurring formats such as Beauty Icon, Instant Classic, Southern Vanity and Signature Color created recognizable editorial IP while generating consistent inventory for readers and advertisers. The goal was not simply to fill pages. It was to build ideas strong enough to return.
I worked closely with advertising and sales partners to deliberately build editorial inventory around emerging beauty and style opportunities, develop advertiser-friendly packages and create native programs. The commercial opportunity influenced the category strategy—but not the editorial point of view. The audience relationship remained the filter for what belonged in Southern Living and how it should be expressed.
The Work
For Southern Living's first Beauty Awards, I developed a package that broadened the definition of beauty. Alongside editor-tested beauty products, we profiled Southern women creating meaningful impact in their communities.
The result allowed the magazine to build authority in the beauty category while grounding the idea of beauty in character, purpose and real lives.
College football is one of the South's defining cultural rituals. Rather than approach game day through conventional sports coverage, we profiled the women whose work shaped the experience—from athletics and broadcasting to one of Auburn's most iconic traditions.
Fashion became a way into a larger story about ambition, culture and the people operating behind familiar Southern institutions.
Beauty products became memory triggers rather than isolated recommendations. Readers shared vintage photographs of their mothers and remembered the perfume they wore, the lipstick they loved, the beauty rituals they passed down and the ways those small details became part of family identity.
The concept created an emotionally natural place for beauty products inside Southern Living—and evolved into a recurring franchise.
Instant Classic translated fashion into useful, approachable service journalism. Each installment centered on one highly wearable idea and showed readers why it worked and how to use it in real life.
The format became a repeatable franchise rather than a one-off story.
For Southern Living's 50th anniversary, I returned to an unexpected chapter of the magazine's history: its original sewing-pattern department. We invited contemporary Southern designers to reinterpret patterns first published decades earlier.
The feature connected institutional memory, personal history, Southern craft and contemporary design—turning nostalgia into something new rather than simply reproducing the past.
My Creative Role
My role extended beyond story ideation and writing. I helped establish the editorial strategy and idea pipeline for the Style pillar, conceived and developed the recurring franchises, wrote and edited features, and commissioned and collaborated with contributors.
I regularly styled fashion shoots and props, and partnered closely with Southern Living's art and photography directors on art direction and photographic direction. I shaped the editorial calendar around both reader relevance and commercial opportunity, and worked with advertising and sales partners on advertiser-friendly packages and native programs.
Photography, design and production were collaborative efforts with Southern Living's art, photo and editorial teams.
What It Unlocked
The new Style pillar created more than content. It gave Southern Living a credible editorial platform for competing in fashion and beauty, expanded the opportunities available to advertisers and created recurring franchises that could continue serving readers across issues and channels.
The commercial opportunity worked because the content still felt like Southern Living.
The Archive
The features, franchises and service journalism behind the pillar.
Slide 1 of 73: Dress for the Occasion
More Work
