“The name NEW YOU will stand for health and wellness, will stand for beauty, will stand for a name that you could trust and you can inspire. You’re aspiring to be a NEW YOU.” Vanessa Walker

Vanessa Walker may not be a household media name.  However, after celebrating her ninth NEW YOU Awards last week, Ms. Walker has turned to be a truly media power person to contend with.  She did not come from a media background, but from a consumer packaged goods background, mainly the beverage brands LaCroix and Celsius.  She came to NEW YOU in 2020, originally a monthly magazine , “and has turned it into a 360 lifestyle brand – launching products, a conference, an awards platform and most recently launched their latest venture a content production studio.”

All of this in the span of a little more than three years.  Her plans don’t stop there.  She wants folks to know that NEW YOU is for the “timeless, ageless, quality for classy, educated people who are in the know,” and she is doing her best to deliver on that promise.

From seeking celebrities who are timeless and ageless, the likes of Christy Brinkley and others, to adorn the covers of the new NEW YOU, to adding the tag line “The Voice of Health and Beauty” to the name of the magazine, she uses her experience in the beverage industry and her marketing career to use at NEW YOU, and it shows.

Please enjoy this fun conversation with Vanessa Walker, president, NEW YOU media.  But first for the soundbites….

On NEW YOU magazine future: The future of the magazine, the magazine is the crowning jewel. The magazine is the creme de la creme. If we offer you a cover of a magazine, it’s because we want to have you featured, but we also want to use you to brand ourselves in the eye of the beholder.

On putting Christy Brinkley on the cover: We put a 70-year-old on the cover.  Why? Because she’s ageless, she’s timeless, and she’s relevant to everyone. She’s also classy. And so, when we talk about NEW YOU, we want a timeless classic beauty.

On her role as president of NEW YOU: It’s been a time of repositioning. It’s been a time of rebranding.  It’s been a time of fun. I mean, this is our ninth awards, third in-person and the awards have gotten larger and larger. I’m very excited for this year’s NEW YOU awards.

On being more than a magazine: This is a unique company in that they have a junction of media and they have a supplement line so we have the backbone of two uniquely separate, yet adjacent in some way or complementary, I would say, companies.

On NEW YOU audience: That’s really what our positioning is, timeless, ageless, quality for classy, educated people who are in the know.

On NEW YOU 360: Now, the good news is that we can take the printed publication, support it with our website and support it with our social to ensure that we have the story part too…

Really making that magazine come to life with a 360, not acting like it’s a standalone, it’s out there, it’s irrelevant to our website and social, they all have to be intertwined.

And now for my lightly edited conversation with Vanessa Walker, president, NEW YOU:

Samir Husni:  How  does it feel moving from a beverage company to a media company?

Vanessa Walker: You know, that’s a great question, because they’re so different. The volume is much higher in beverage. It’s much faster paced. It’s a much broader, larger operation.

So, I feel like I have picked up a lot of free time, to be honest, time to think. And I guess in media, with journalism, or stories, or covers, or any of that, you need time to think and be creative. So, this is a very different way.

I loved the aspect of branding, and marketing, and positioning within those beverage companies and innovation. I’m going to bring a little bit of that over here to NEW YOU, with a line of products and brands that NEW YOU will also have. So, we’re going to expand the name of the franchise.

It feels different. It feels good. It feels creative.

Samir Husni:  Some say that journalism is becoming branding and marketing. So, do you feel that you fell in the right spot?

Vanessa Walker: I do. Absolutely. Marketing is storytelling. You know, what is this? It’s a liquid in a bottle, or a can. And why does this person need it? You have to inspire someone.

It has to taste great. Sure. But many things taste great.

So, you’re really competing with huge, you know, juggernaut, Goliath companies out there that also have great tasting items. Why does this person need your item? You have to story tell, inspire them. They have to feel smarter, encouraged, nutritious.

I think of a person, a feature, a topic, a brand, it’s all closely woven.

Samir Husni:  Tell me about your goals for NEW YOU? I know you’re doing events, you reduced the frequency of the magazine. Tell me briefly if you and I are having this conversation a year from now, what you would have accomplished at NEW YOU?

Vanessa Walker: We’d like to make it a multimedia broad spectrum. So, the name NEW YOU will stand for health and wellness, will stand for beauty, will stand for a name that you could trust and you can inspire. You’re aspiring to be a NEW YOU.  How do I make myself a NEW YOU? I’m evolving, I’m learning. And so, we’re going to use all of our corporate assets.

NEW YOU is owned by Great HealthWorks.  Great HealthWorks is a D2C fully vertically integrated machine. It’s a supplement company at the heart and the core, we make and manufacture. We bottle here, we pick, pack and ship.

So, through a full warehouse, we actually create our own media through the NEW YOU Media Group. So, we film all of our own infomercials, including the scripting, pre-production, production, and post-production. And then we air, we buy our own media.

We traffic the television shows. So, we already have at the core of our corporate, kind of at a juncture of the supplement company, a pet company that we now purchased in July. And then NEW YOU, we already had beyond a magazine, we have an entire television production department in our midst.  We branded it the NEW YOU Studio. We can film for ourselves and we can film for third parties. If we have a NEW YOU event, the NEW YOU Beauty Awards, why don’t we go ahead and offer those finalists, those winners and those companies or sponsors that we’re meeting through that engagement to come to our studio and film content there? Also, if they have a brand, we may acquire it.

We could put it in through our DTC engine, we could manufacture it, we could fulfill it. And why don’t we have our own line of brands under the name NEW YOU and supplements, advertise those, bring them to the events, use kind of this community that we’re building of interaction through social and the live events, the finalists and winners, to sell products and do it in a 360 multimedia way.

The future of the magazine, the magazine is the crowning jewel. The magazine is the creme de la creme. If we offer you a cover of a magazine, it’s because we want to have you featured, but we also want to use you to brand ourselves in the eye of the beholder. So, we’re using those magazines as branding touch points, as we change as an entity, that magazine really confirms who we are at that time as we’re evolving.

Samir Husni: You’re used to the touchy-feely. I mean, you have to touch the drink, you have to touch the… So, what role the printed magazine? You said it’s the crown jewel, but I mean, what role is it playing or it plays in building that multimedia empire?

Vanessa Walker: So, actually, Christy Brinkley was a magazine cover for us in December. We’ve gone to a new cleaner look.

It looks a bit more Chanel in our branding. It’s black and white, or the reverse of that white with the black, that square edge.

What we’re doing is we’re setting ourselves apart. We’re not a Hot Topic. We’re not a weekly mag.  We’re not an influencer of the day. Christie made a career of being in charge of herself from top to bottom. Yes, she’s beautiful, but what it takes to be there in her seventies is another story.

We want to feature that because we know that beauty is a journey and its beauty and wellness combined. So, we’re kind of telling you who we are, what we’re about, who are we featuring. We put a 70-year-old on the cover.  Why? Because she’s ageless, she’s timeless, and she’s relevant to everyone. She’s also classy. And so, when we talk about NEW YOU, we want a timeless classic beauty.  Someone who is bringing more to the table than just a flash in the pan good looks.

Samir Husni:  And how would you characterize the first few years you’ve been the president now of the NEW YOU media?

Vanessa Walker: It’s been a time of repositioning. It’s been a time of rebranding.  It’s been a time of fun. I mean, this is our ninth awards, third in-person and the awards have gotten larger and larger. I’m very excited for this year’s NEW YOU awards.

We decided to use the atmosphere. One of the things about NEW YOU, we’re not located in New York. We’re not located in LA. We’re located just north of Miami. Miami is our stomping ground.

We’re having a welcome VIP party the night before the awards in a collaboration with Miami Swim Week – The Shows. Let’s use the assets of Miami. So, here we are at the W South Beach collaborating with Miami Swim Week – The Shows. And we’re going to benefit Make-A-Wish Southern Florida. My personal friend is Flo Rida called me and said, “I would love to perform.”

So a concert by Flo Rida to wrap up the night and that’s just our kickoff party. We’re just getting started. We have designs from Ema Savahl, glow in the dark bathing suit designs coming down the catwalk.

We also have Tony Dovolani from Dancing with the Stars. He’s going to do a little Miami salsa dance with a couple of ladies to kick off the night as we’re paying homage to Make-A-Wish Southern Florida.

The next day, we’re going to have our awards. We’re going to kick the day off with an exhibit hall, which is new for us, but we had such fantastic reception last year with people feeling like they wanted to touch and feel these brands that we’re giving exhibitors opportunity to connect one-on-one with consumers. With consumers and networking individuals there, influencers can take their brands away as samples.

Later we go into an influencer panel where we hear from six people about how they made it in the industry and what making it means to them. And then we’re going to take a big cocktail break, a lot of Instagrammable moments, and finally the awards: 17 awards altogether between brands, influencers, and editors’ choice awards.

Samir Husni:  It sounds like a lot of fun. Since you assumed this job, have you been walking in a rose garden?

Vanessa Walker:  Everything has its challenges and I think we’re going through challenges even this week with the last minute fall outs from the hotels that we’re involved with for these events in Miami. It becomes quite the scene, but we’re having a fantastic time. And we have so many new staff members that we’ve just recently hired in the course of the last year, from email marketing to social media to influencer manager and a digital senior marketing manager.

We’re really building out the infrastructure internally to make the NEW YOU Studio, that content powerhouse that can be beyond the infomercials of the early days of our parent company. And so this will be the first year that most of those people have experienced the NEW YOU awards. They haven’t been with us until now. It’s exciting.

Samir Husni: Do you think you’re setting a plan or a stage for other media companies to follow suit to see what they can do with their print only medium?

Vanessa Walker: It’s tough. This is a unique company in that we have a junction of media so we have the backbone of two uniquely separate, yet adjacent in some way or complementary companies.

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But if you didn’t have this level of infrastructure, I can’t see that there would be many media companies able to chase us with supplements manufacturing and DTC. The infrastructure that’s been built over 20 years at Great HealthWorks without there being some kind of major merger.

We’ve got three bottling lines here, all the direct-to-consumer, billing, shipping, packing, and everything right here at our warehouse. So it’ll be easy for us to develop a line of complementary supplements once we build out the positioning of the brand.  What does NEW YOU stand for, and then carry that over into line of wellness items. I don’t see other media groups being able to transition that thoroughly through that many different aspects of touching consumers, no.

Samir Husni: So do you think you don’t have any competitors or you do have competitors? Vanessa Walker: I haven’t seen one yet.

Samir Husni: What was the most pleasant moment that surprised you since you became the president?

Vanessa Walker: I think I’m always surprised, when you have a monthly publication which was heavily distributed on the newsstands until 2017 then printed once a quarter and now a biannual, when we call someone, and this is really a testament to Toni Negas, who’s our managing director, and the relationships that she’s amassed over the years, we have very large names coming to the cover. So that means the reputation has maintained itself all of this time, whether we’ve been on shelf every month or we’re taking a break from shelf and we’re doing it on a bi-annual basis.

The name NEW YOU has a tremendous amount of brand equity. And just the fact that we’ve maintained, in a dot-com era where every name seems to be taken, a fabulous name NEW YOU, it has so many meanings and it’s so timeless. And that’s really what our positioning is, timeless, ageless, quality for classy, educated people who are in the know. They’re focusing on their health and their wellness and their beauty. And it’s inside and out. So I think every time that somebody comes to the phone and says, yes, we want to do a cover or calls us and says, we would like to pitch for a cover, I’m delighted and surprised by that.

Samir Husni: And what has been the biggest challenge that you did not expect?

Vanessa Walker: The biggest challenge is probably how fast paced media is today.  I already expected it, but it’s just the challenge for me is keeping up with it. And so what does it mean to be a publication? Because you have a timestamp when you’re a publication, right? We’re leading up to something, we’re coming out with it. But what if we put someone on the cover and then the day before we went with this cover, they were in a car accident, God forbid, or a scandal broke and they’re all over the news and their homes are being raided.

Then what? We look like we’re out of date immediately. Now, the good news is that we can take the printed publication, support it with our website and support it with our social to ensure that we have the story part too. Since our story broke, this occurred.  Really making that magazine come to life with a 360, not acting like it’s a standalone, it’s out there, it’s irrelevant to our website and social, they all have to be intertwined.

We began to do digital covers. When we released Christie Brinkley we shot her for the cover and she was on the print magazine cover. But we also did the behind the scenes video where we shot the cover, her hair was blowing in the wind. And so when you looked at it, you said, this is a video. As you kept watching, we took you into the cover, into the behind the scenes of the photo shoot. We came back out and ended on the cover again. So it was a live cover.

Samir Husni: As I move to ask you my typical final questions, is there anything that I have failed to ask you that you would like to add?

Vanessa Walker: One thing I’d like to add is how proud I am of our notion to go live with the Beauty Awards three years ago.  Since that time, Sephora has created a live event called Sephora. And Allure has created their live event called Allure Live Event. So I think we’ve already hit the nail on the head with something.  My thought is that we don’t have to be everything to everyone. We don’t need total world domination. Those are very large brands.

I’m flattered that our little team in South Florida hit the nail on the head that a Beauty Awards event should be live. And that now in our third year, we have evolved it. I feel like we’re a little bit ahead of the game.  We’ve evolved it now to include awards, panel speakers, and exhibits, networking for VIPs, and just a fun kickoff party the night before in Miami.  We’re going to continue to utilize our location as a destination so that we’re not only branding NEW YOU on the web and just in print, but also branding and establishing it as a multicultural bilingual entity here in the Miami area. We have big Hispanic stars coming.

Elizabeth Gutierrez, who’s one of the foremost Spanish soap opera stars, Tele Novelas. She’s actually kicking off our panel and she’s moderating our panel. We have Alexa Dellanos,  who has 9 million fans as an influencer.  There’s some other very large names, Roxana Garcia, Maggie Jimenez. We’re dominating in the South Florida market because we’re so close to the people. So we’re finding a way to make this a bilingual without really tainting it one way or the other.

Everybody feels like something is for them. And we’re doing it well in both the live event and with our social media strategy.

Samir Husni: My final questions are more on the personal side.  If I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing? Cooking, reading a magazine, watching TV. What do I catch you doing?

You catch me walking in the door and feeding four dogs and then letting them out the what I call the Kentucky Derby. Because once I open up the patio door into my yard, they take off like a shot.  It’s like somebody blew a gun in the air. My pets are my passion. And so you catch me with the four of them.

And my whole life at home revolves around the four dogs and treats and outside walks and playtime and sitting on the couch with them. I do work at night. I tend to come home, eat and spend about an hour and a half with the dogs. And then I sit back down at my laptop again. It’s a very nasty habit.

And I work for about another hour because I have a lot of alone time then. And I can prepare for the next day.  I leave that laptop so that the next morning when I wake up and I’m letting the dogs back out again, I’m brewing my coffee on my Keurig and I’m sitting back down to catch any last-minute pointers or notes that I want to send out before the day gets going.

So I’m a late riser, but a late nighter. Just my schedule.

Samir Husni: My typical final question is what keeps Vanessa up at night these days?

Vanessa Walker: Oh, boy. Right now, going into the Beauty Awards, it’s the logistics with the hotel.  So pulling this event off is keeping me up at night in the near term. On the longer term coming, looking at how the roles will evolve according to the skill set of the team members here and really setting those goals down with them so they understand 12 months from now exactly what we see the NEW YOU Studio becoming, because we will be open for business within the next 12 months.

It’s already fully functional, but we’re undergoing renovations and branding. Our product line will be enhanced. And I’m sure our awards next year will be way over the top, even bigger than it is this year.

Samir Husni:  Thank you.