Earlier this year, the Cape Town team launched a Paarl Stellenbosch Somerset West edition with 15 000 copies a month. This was followed by Get It Vaal Triangle and Get It Rustenburg - the first venture for the community glossy into the North West Province - which both launched with print orders of 15 000.
Publisher of the Vaal Triangle and Rustenburg editions, René Koen, explains the expansion: “Many people who work in Johannesburg or Pretoria have opted to move out of the cities and this has led to exciting development in areas like Rustenburg and the Vaal Triangle. Launching local Get It magazines into these burgeoning communities has been a great initiative.”
A newly-appointed Get It Witbank Middelburg team is already in place in Witbank to mark the September launch of its local edition, which will bring the total number of Get It magazines published nationally to 27, with a combined monthly print order of more than 400 000 copies a month.
Testament to the success of this pioneering neighbourhood publication is the fact that several of the local editions have also recently increased their print orders to accommodate demand. Most notably, these include Get It Northcliff Randburg, Get It Fourways Bryanston and Get It Lowveld.
Comments Northern Office branch manager Karen Geurtse, “We'd been receiving calls from readers who couldn't get their hands on their copy so we decided to take the plunge, increase the print orders and ensure that the magazine is in the marketplace for the full month.”
Increasing awareness and popularity of the titles led Caxton to appoint a national head office team at Get It earlier this year. The team, based in Johannesburg, is made up of Danielle Weakley as editorial director, Anastasia Meier as advertising director and Sam Morrison as creative director. All three members of the Get It head office join the community stable after successful careers in mainstream consumer magazines. Weakley was the editor of Essentials magazine, while Meier was the advertising manager at FHM and Morrison the creative director at Upper Case Media.
“It's been incredibly enjoyable to be involved with a concept that is so completely different to anything anyone else is offering and anything that any one of us has ever worked on,” comments Weakley. “To be relevant to readers at a home-grown, 100% local level but still reflect a national brand with a national brand identity is proving to be really exciting and a great challenge. Also, the opportunities we can offer advertisers in terms of being local and glossy - with complete relevance and no wastage - are obviously also very exciting.”
