One of the better articles I’ve read on profiling Tyler Bruele though some parts were slightly wanky.
Tyler Brule, Media Maverick
Brûlé’s magazine embodies the lifestyle he has been describing for the last six years in his widely read and often parodied “Fast Lane” column in the Financial Times. He likes to be thought of as a man who does much of his blue-sky thinking while above cloud level; his interests catch the slightly disconnected sense of scale that overtakes you on long-haul flights: He is passionately concerned both about hygienic headrests, say, and the Google-mapped chunk of earth that is passing 27,000 feet beneath; about business class china and the business class in China. In his world view, and in his magazine, all of these interests get pretty much equal billing.
In part, Brûlé discovered his philosophy while dosed up with morphine in a hospital bed in Afghanistan in 1994. He was 25, a freelance reporter working on an assignment with Médicins Sans Frontières in Kabul, when a jeep in which he was traveling came under machine gun fire. He was shot several times in both arms—his left remains pretty much useless—and, while recovering, had time to contemplate his priorities. He distances himself from hallucinogenic visions of angels bearing style magazines, but suggests that he did, lying there, come to see what mattered most to him. The list included “friends,” “living in a great house,” and “wanting to travel and see the world.” The rest, he would argue, is magazine history.
Wallpaper helped define the tastes of the winners in the banking and technology booms. It combined an obsessive attention to the styling of household objects and hotel décor with an edge of distancing irony, a way of having it all. In 1997, after less than a year, Brûlé sold Wallpaper, begun on a shoestring budget, to Time Inc. (TWX) for a reported $1.63 million. By 2004, when he left, The New York Times could describe “the Wallpaper generation” and have people understand what it meant; Brûlé, at 33, had received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Society of Magazine Editors. After some acrimonious clashes, Brûlé says he was fired by Time over an expenses claim for a London taxi, while others recall it as a chartered plane; either of which is a little like disciplining Homer Simpson for eating a canapé.
He took with him most of his key editorial staff and Winkreative, a branding agency that had grown out of the magazine. (Wallpaper is still thriving under Brûlé’s former creative director, Tony Chambers.) At Winkreative, Brûlé had taken on the rebranding of Swissair in 2001 after its collapse—calibrating the look and feel of what became Swiss International Air Lines—and assembling a client list that ranged from BMW to designer Stella McCartney. He planned Monocle, envisioned as “a trendy Economist,” from the beginning, but competition clauses delayed its launch until 2007. The hiatus gave Brûlé a period to devise a new independent funding model. In the beginning he went to venture capitalists and private equity. They all said the same thing: If it is going to be something that drives Web numbers, then great.
“I got a bit tired of hearing from 24-year-old MBAs how the world of media was going to unfold,” Brûlé says. “We had a Spanish client at the agency, and she came into the office one day. She is the Catalan matriarch of a family business, and she asked why there was a desk downstairs but no one working there. I told her about the idea for a magazine. She took the plan away and came back to say she would take 10 percent of the business on one condition: There had to be four other investors with similar stakes, they also had to run family businesses, and they had to be geographically diverse.”
Read more here at Bloomberg Businesweek
