Meeting with Laurent Blanc

Laurent Blanc is the founder of the stylish, cosmopolitan men’s magazine The Good Life. We met him as the result of a collaborative project that led to the creation of the limited-edition The Good Boots range.

Hello Laurent, thank you for talking to us. Could you tell us a little about yourself?

I’m Laurent Blanc, and my wife and I founded the design magazine Ideat eighteen years ago. It’s been a great success, and it’s now the go-to title for contemporary French interiors. We launched it at a time when no one was talking about design, but today everyone is. There’s a whole generation of forty-somethings with the culture and resources to buy furniture by great designers like Mies van der Rohe, Philippe Starck, Patricia Urquiola, and the Bouroullec brothers.

How did The Good Life come into being?

We launched it six years ago because we saw that the men’s market had a lot of potential. Men were passive consumers for a long time, and women did a lot of their buying for them. That’s changed now: they know what they want, and they’re much more active shoppers.

You describe The Good Life as a hybrid magazine. Why is that?

Because it deals with global business and lifestyle issues. We thought it was going to be a niche magazine at first, and we started by launching a paper format at a time when digital was expanding rapidly, which was quite a bold choice. Also, its price, format and content were what you’d associate with a fairly limited circulation.

But we were pleasantly surprised. The first issue sold around 60,000 copies, and six years down the road it’s still selling more than 55,000. It appeals to men in their forties who’ve done well in life, but it’s also very popular in business schools, and women love its news and business coverage.

Where can you get The Good Boots?

They’re available in three Heschung stores: Rue du Vieux Colombier in the sixth arrondissement in Paris, the store in Lyon, and the online shop. You can also buy them at the Good Concept Store, in Printemps de l’Homme on the famous Boulevard Haussmann in Paris.

What’s the Good Concept Store?
It started off as an e-commerce site, and then Printemps de l’Homme asked us to design a space of about a hundred square metres that would convey the ethos of the magazine and the online store. So that’s how the Good Concept Store came into being. It’s an expression of myself and The Good Life: a varied mix of furniture, beautiful objects, toys, and books. I suppose you could call it “cultivated California”.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Your customers are very fortunate. If they haven’t come across The Good Life, I recommend giving it a try. I think they’ll love it, because it shares the values that have made Heschung such an exceptional brand.