Stuff’s house and garden magazines on top

The cost of living may be biting but magazines and home renovations are still topping Kiwis’ shopping lists

Stuff’s premium title NZ House & Garden remains the country’s market leading monthly lifestyle magazine and its stablemate NZ Gardener maintains its position as New Zealand’s number one gardening magazine.

NZ House & Garden is up 8% year-on-year, according to the latest Nielsen National Readership Survey for the year-ending Q2 2022, released last week. This is an increase of 29,000 new readers and means the title is reaching 394,000, or 9.5% of all people aged 15+.

Editor Naomi Larkin says the increase is testament to the role magazines continue to play in people’s lives and the brand’s commitment to quality with every issue.

‘‘People are prepared to pay for excellent writing, . beautiful images, lifestyle ideas and for experiences that mentally transport them outside their everyday lives. This can come from reading a travel story or looking at a house they admire or a garden they’d like to create. NZ House & Garden consistently caters to these points,’’ Larkin says.

Compared with other magazine titles within the home and lifestyle sector, including Your Home And Garden at 101,000, Home at 105,000 and Homestyle at 87,000 readers respectively, NZ House & Garden reaches three times more readers than its competitors. It has 52% more readers than its nearest competitor, Habitat magazine.

Jo Mccarroll, editor of NZ Gardener which has 251,000 readers, says in the past few years more Kiwis have turned to iconic magazines ‘‘to find inspiration to help them create beautiful spaces in which to live their lives’’.

The continuing magazine spend comes in the face of global increases in paper prices which has led to some titles raising their cover price.

The price of paper took a big hike after the closure last year of the Norwegian-owned Norske Skog’s paper mill in Kawerau, forcing publishers to buy their paper offshore.

The combined power of Stuff’s print and digital offering in the house and garden space reaches

1.2 million people ( NZ House & Garden, NZ Gardener and Homed) according to Nielsen CMI Q2 2021 to Q1 2022 Fused.