After ceasing production five years ago this month, the printed Playboy magazine is back, representing company PLBY Group Inc.’s latest step to revitalize the iconic brand.

The magazine hit mailboxes and racks in about mid-February, coinciding with a launch party in New Orleans ahead of the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, PLBY Group plans to continue supporting its content creation platform and potentially incorporate cryptocurrency as a vehicle for fan involvement. After initially intending the magazine to be annual, the Westwood-based media and wellness company is already planning a second issue for the year and plans to establish a quarterly publication schedule.

“I think with this first issue, we had no idea how people were going to react,” said Smiley Stevens, creative director of the magazine. “I think that the reaction has been amazing and super positive. We were kind of testing the waters a little bit, seeing, you know, what the appetite was like. It definitely feels like there is an appetite for Playboy to come back and push boundaries again.”

PLBY Chief Executive Ben Kohn characterized the return of the magazine as “the brand bible” for the company, a platform to capture the best of what it offers and highlight its aspirations as a media outlet and content platform. That’s why the conversation about bringing the printed magazine back was always more about complementing the rest of the company than it was hanging its fortunes by it.

“Print by itself doesn’t make any economic sense anymore, right? That’s why you continue to see more and more publications shutter,” he said. “We’re so lucky that we have the rabbit head, one of the most recognized brands in the world. It doesn’t matter where you go in the world: people know what the rabbit head stands for.

“With that, and the majority of our revenue today coming from licensing,” Kohn continued, “what print allows us the opportunity to do is to take an editorial lens to working with some of the biggest influencers and celebrities around the world.”

Bringing back the classics

For much of the company’s history, Playboy was largely defined by its magazine.

It was best known, of course, for its glamorous cover models and its nude centerfold photoshoots. To be highlighted as a “Playmate” was considered by some an achievement, and fashion was also a main component of the platform. The issues and centerfolds became collectibles and seared into pop culture iconography, even being used as throwaway plot devices in film and TV.

These characteristics certainly remain true with the newest edition, which arrives just about five years after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic forced the company to shelve the publication. Model Lori Harvey holds the cover, all sourced from a photoshoot in Pasadena, while Gillian Nation holds the centerpiece as the 2025 Playmate of the Year. Another pictorial series takes place on a Hawaiian beach, with a variety of shells adorning the models.

Stevens, who first started working on Playboy content in 2021, said she sought to call back to the brand’s flywheel in planning and composing this edition’s shoots. Stevens also continued the tradition of hiding a bunny logo on the cover.

“For me, when I look back on it, it’s always stunning – stunning photography, the most gorgeous women, and the best styling and photographers. I really wanted that feeling to come through,” she added. “We shot a lot of it on film as well. The centerfold is on film, and then some of the Hawaii pictorial was on film. We wanted to bring in that grainy, textural feeling as well. That was one thing, one element that felt really good to bring in.”

How to make it current

However, Kohn has aspirations to modernize the experience as well. Drawing from programs like “Dancing with the Stars” and “The Voice,” he said he wants to incorporate fan voting into some of these decisions. One way to make that happen, he said, might be to incorporate cryptocurrency or a utility coin into Playboy.

“We’re going to make a big investment bringing back the Playmate franchise, but we have bigger aspirations,” Kohn said. “I think that in this digital age we live in, and based on other things we have at the company, why can’t we have the Playmate be a global competition? And are there ways to even open it up to fan voting, where it’s a panel of judges from Playboy, they get X percent of the vote, and fans get Y percent of the vote?”

And while the tongue-in-cheek refrain is that people read Playboy “for the articles,” there is something to it. The magazine famously served as a platform for journalists, essayists and fiction writers such as David Foster Wallace, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson and Margaret Atwood, as well as cartoonists like Shel Silverstein and Harvey Kurtzman.

Stevens said it was a combination of the lifestyle photography and oft-subversive journalistic work that made the magazine and brand so endearing and everlasting to fans.

“That’s one of the most fun parts, is putting together the teams that you know are going to execute the vision,” she said. “There’s no shortage of amazing people that want to work with Playboy, because I think a lot of people feel like they have a strong connection to the brand. It being around for 70 years, it’s relevant to my parents and younger people and everywhere in between.”

With a swath of critical, analytical essays – on “beta male” internet culture, on a Los Angeles sex club, on exploring antisemitism – as well as interviews with figures like comedians J.B. Smoove and Nikki Glaser – and a revisited interview with Donald Trump – editor-in-chief Mike Guy wrote that bringing back the magazine was meant to slow down and listen in a time when the internet moves faster and faster, to “reject poisonous, meme-driven narratives” that proliferate so on social media.

“Just as Playboy was frustrated with the conservative norms of the ’50s, we want to challenge them now, too,” Guy wrote in his editor’s letter. “The internet – OnlyFans, TikTok, and the rest – has stolen sexuality and fed it into the meat grinder of the attention economy. We’re doing our part to steal it back.”

Diversified products and revenue streams

Licensing – ranging from branding a product with the bunny logo or lending the Playboy name to nation-specific magazines – remains the largest source of revenue for PLBY Group.

For the third quarter, licensing brought in $7.4 million to the company. (This was a 32% decline from the prior year, largely on account of the termination of two Chinese licensees.)

Revenue from website subscriptions, as well as those to Playboy Club – a content creator app models and influencers use – was about $5.5 million in the third quarter, an increase by 5% from the prior year.

On the clothing side, PLBY Group in 2021 acquired Australian lingerie maker Honey Birdette – a transaction whose timing “couldn’t have been worse,” Kohn admitted, because it immediately preceded a major Covid-19-related lockdown in Australia. Flush with a backlog of inventory and hit with discounted sales, the division underperformed and PLBY Group mulled offloading it altogether. The subsidiary was listed as a “discontinued operation” as recently as the third-quarter earnings report.

However, the company announced last month it would retain Honey Birdette after all, thanks to improved sales and the striking of a long-term licensing agreement with European content platform Byborg Enterprises.

“We had to work that through,” Kohn said, “but we’ve made a bunch of operational improvements in conjunction with the management team, and the company is cash flow positive today. Sales are actually looking good, especially on full price items.”

PLBY Group now seeks to launch additional Honey Birdette stores in the United States and European markets.

Additional retail revenues come from Playboy’s own branded clothing, lifestyle and gaming products, sexual wellness items and grooming tools. Although declining to cite specific sales or order figures, Kohn did note a 30% sell-through rate at Barnes & Noble, which is the magazine’s exclusive third-party retailer.

Founded in Chicago by Hugh Hefner in 1953 as Playboy Enterprises Inc., the media company went public in 1971. Hefner partnered with private equity firm Rizvi Traverse – where Kohn was managing partner – to take it private in 2011. Shortly after this, the company sold off its Chicago headquarters and relocated to L.A.

The company went public again in 2021 as PLBY Group following a reverse-merger with special purpose acquisition company Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp.

Though PLBY Group spent a good chunk of last year in delisting risk, it climbed back into compliance shortly before the third-quarter earnings call. At around that time, Byborg Enterprises took out a private placement of 14.9 million shares for nearly $22.4 million.

Share prices reached a peak of $2.10 on the cusp of the magazine’s launch, representing a nearly two-year high. It has since dipped slightly, closing out at $1.59 per share on Thursday.