Hef, the Great Lifestyle Entreprenuer
It is hard to believe that Hugh Hefner is already 83. Time flies when you are having fun. NYT did a profile of Hef, where it discusses his “legacy”. The article sums it up this way
As a magazine publisher, he essentially did for sex what Ray Kroc did for roadside food: clean it up for a rising middle class.
That is true up to a point. But I think there is a more interesting side to the story.
Hef championed a new style of entrepreneurship. For him, business was not something you did at the office. Nor was it something boring like a spread sheet. It was more about finding the good life and selling “access” to it. The logic was simple. The better the life that Hef actually lived, the more money he would make showing how much fun he was having. He was not selling sex as the other girlie magazine publishers did. He was selling himself as a person who enjoyed his sexuality and other things.
He took the idea of connoisseurship off its pedestal, and delivered it to the masses. In this sense, he was a contemporary of Julia Child, and a precursor to Martha Stewart. So, whether we admire Hef as a person, we should be thankful for his business genius. He blazed a trail for lifestyle entrepreneurs.
FOLLOW - Another example — Peter Mayle has been selling his lifestyle for years. This very recent article for NYT gives a flavor for how he does it.
2d FOLLOW - Joseph Duveen was an earlier practitioner of this style of entrepreneurship. To say that Duveen sold paintings misses the reason why he was so good at it.