Who Reads Cookie?
The Cookie reader is a busy and discerning parent who is interested first and foremost in her family's well-being, but also in maintaining her sense of style and her interests in adult, pre-baby pursuits. The first lifestyle magazine for families, Cookie understands that parenting is a study in extremes—equal parts unbridled joy and abject terror, exhilaration and exhaustion, unconditional love and moments of resentment. As the modern parents' guide to travel, food, fashion, health, home, and more, Cookie breaks the mold. With a voice that's as candid as it is celebratory, its mission is to offer inspiration and information to a generation of moms and dads whose balancing acts between work and family is ever more challenging—and in so doing, to give them enough confidence in their instincts (which can be hard to make out, amid the deafening chorus of parenting advice). Through a unique combination of reporting and first-person observation and a visual language that is whimsical yet sophisticated, Cookie reminds parents that taking care of themselves—their relationships, their minds, and their bodies—and being a good parent are by no means mutually exclusive.
What You Can Expect in Each Issue:
Regular Departments include:
- Smart Cookie: The place for tips, tricks, and products that help readers save time, money, and space while doing it in style.
- Dressing: The best of clothing and accessories for moms and kids.
- Taking Care: Beauty tips for mom and health advice for the whole family.
- Traveling: Road trips and city guides to make any destination family-friendly.
- Eating: Recipes and strategies to help readers create easy, delicious, and healthful meals.
- Celebrating: Kids' birthday-party ideas.
- Nesting: The best stuff for the home and nursery, as well as storage and organization strategies.
- Gearing Up: Road tests of baby gear and kids' toys.
- Figuring it Out: Essays on subjects ranging from loss and nannies to how to deal with the grandparents and competitive mothering.
- Reviews: The best of kids' books, TV, movies, music, games, toys, and DVDs.
- Features: As a lifestyle magazine, Cookie covers many subjects in its well: home, food, fashion, beauty, travel, how other families live, relationships, health, books, and shopping. Cookie is especially proud of its packages, which include its Best of Family Travel; Underrated, Under-the-Radar Children's Books; Developmental Toys; and Home Storage.
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Contributors:
Cookie has purposefully sought out writers who do not usually cover the subject of parenting and family, but are best known for thoughtful prose on subjects ranging from politics to sex. Regular contributors include Eleanor Casey, Heidi Julavits, and Lori Leibovich. Cookie is also proud to have tastemakers in its corner like Veronica Webb, Mary Alice Stephenson, Helen Schifter, and Lucy Sykes. To round out the mix, Cookies has parenting experts who offer relief for the anxiety and questioning of parenthood.
Magazine Layout:
Breaking from the parenting category's familiar tropes, such as pastel colors and cutesy, childlike design elements, Cookie's pages combine clean, structural elements with traditional typographics and fresh motifs, with the express purpose of appealing to moms—not kids. With a highly original mix of lifestyle, travel, fashion, and still-life photographic styles, the magazine offers a well-paced design experience that feels comfortable yet fresh. The logo, display type, and folios are custom fonts created by Cookie's art department. Unique type treatments on feature stories provide visual commentaries, complementing the mood of the editorial content. And hand-drawn illustrations infuse the pages with warmth and whimsy. The magazine's overall design delivers a healthy balance of white space on information-packed text and visuals, while bold colors and oversize numerals serve as clear, convenient navigational cues throughout.
Comparisons to Other Magazines:
Cookie has no direct competitors. Cookie is not a parenting magazine, although it addresses parenting issues and is targeted to moms. As a lifestyle magazine for parents, it alone populates its niche. The mom filter that Cookie applies to the subjects it covers (food, fashion, travel, home, health, and relationships) speaks to the woman within the mother, and makes her feel chic, in-the-know, and part of a community of caring, unjudging peers sharing the same experience.
Advertising:
Cookie aims to get a range of advertisers as diverse as the editorial content. And from pantry staples to high-end fashion brands, it has been successful at getting all types of ad pages. The Cookie ad team has even broken into such lucrative categories as automotive and beauty.
Awards:
In 2007, after Cookie's first full year of publication, it was nominated for General Excellence by its peers at the American Society of the Magazine Editors (it's comparable to being nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award). In 2008, Cookie was again nominated in the same category. In 2007, Cookie was named Ad Age's Launch of the Year. In 2008, Cookie made Adweek's Hot List. Also, in 2008, editor-in-chief Pilar Guzman was named one of the Crain's "40 Under 40"—the only publishing executive to make the prestigious list this year.
