Playboy is looking to $tay erect
PLAYBOY Enterprises is in exclusive talks with Mountain Crest Acquisition Corp., a blank- check company headed by Chinese national Suying Liu, that would enable the once-iconic brand to return as a publicly traded company.
A key ambition of the firm, which in March dropped the print version of the magazine founded by the late Hugh Hefner, would be to expand into sexual-wellness products, including those that treat erectile dysfunction.
The company also hopes its media holdings will help it branch into other areas, including liquor and cannabis, and has already begun marketing a CBD product.
Playboy still offers articles aimed at the male-lifestyle market on its Web site, playboy.com, which is now a safe-for-work site. But it offers a premium site behind a paywall for racier pictorials featuring full nudity.
Mountain Crest, a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, raised $50 million in June, selling 5 million shares at $10 each. It has a year to find a suitable target that would trade on the open market. Its stock price jumped to $10.75 on Sept. 18 and closed at $10.85 on Tuesday.
If Playboy does jump into the sexwellness business, it would directly compete with two relatively young unicorn startups. Roman, started in 2017, raised $200 million in July at a valuation of $1.5 billion. San Francisco-based Hims, which started as a mail-order hair-loss treatment company before getting into the men’s and women’s sexual-wellness market, raised $100 million in early 2019 at a $1 billion valuation.
More recently, two sisters and chemists at MIT, Angela and Yoojin Kim, landed $2.5 million on the TV show “Shark Tank” for what they said was a unique testosterone-boosting pill.
Playboy Enterprises CEO Ben Kohn, who heads the investment firm Rizvi Traverse, did not return a call seeking comment, nor did Mountain Crest’s Liu.
The national Society of Professional Journalists has elected its first-ever Latina president following a contentious race.
Rebecca Aguilar, a seven-time Emmy Award-winning TV reporter out of Dallas, is the new presidentelect, pulling in 62.3 percent of the vote and defeating Susan Kopen Katcef, a retired journalism lecturer and freelance reporter at Maryland Public Television, who polled 37.7 percent.
“Like any election, you will have your supporters and detractors,” said Aguilar. “In my case, there was a group that passed along misinformation, but fortunately the truth always comes out in the end,” she said without elaborating on what she called the “misinformation.”
“I am honored that SPJ members trusted me with their votes and now I just push forward with a team of good board members. We have big plans to help journalists, educators and students get through unpredictable times in the news business,” said Aguilar, who will serve a one-year term shadowing president Matt Hall before automatically moving into the top job next year.
Reached via e-mail, Kopen Katcef did not offer congratulations to her opponent.
“I just want to wish President Matt Hall all the best in the year ahead,” she said.
“This was a truly groundbreaking election,” said
Alex Tarquinio, head of the nominating committee and a past president of the national organization. “It was a hard-fought campaign, with the opposition working flat out. But Rebecca won by nearly two out of every three votes cast by SPJ members. The voters have spoken for a new beginning and a brighter tomorrow.”
Aguilar was the secretary treasurer of the national organization. Rounding out the board, and succeeding Aguilar as secretary treasurer is Ivette Davila-Richards
from Fox News.
Two at-large members of the board were also elected: Claire Regan, former managing editor of the Staten Island Advance and the current president of the Deadline Club, and Rafael Olmeda, a Pulitzer Prize winner at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
Vogue.com has promoted fashion-news director Chioma Nnadi to the editor’s job — making her the third person to hold the top job in less than a year. The hire comes just three months after editor Stuart Emmrich announced in June that he would be leaving at the end of the summer so he could spend more time writing. He had succeeded Anna Wintour pal Sally Singer, who left in December.
Nnadi is a native of London with a Nigerian and Swiss-German background, which helps the company at a time when it has come under fire internally for a lack people of color in the upper ranks.