Amazing Welsh Homes, Western Mail

Amazing Welsh Homes is an exciting entirely new product. It is an 84-page glossy magazine, which was launched in spring 2023 - a compelling opportunity to expand our portfolio to meet our readers’ obvious interest in property and to gain important circulation and advertising revenue.

The idea for Amazing Welsh Homes was inspired by the engaged community property editor Joanne Ridout has created around the brilliant homes content she produces daily for the Western Mail and its online sister WalesOnline. Such content often garners more than 20,000 page views, on occasion 100,000+, an article and delivers Welsh Homes pages in the Western Mail’s Saturday edition - its biggest-selling day each week. So we know it is popular content, but Jo has cemented this further by nurturing an 11,000-strong Facebook group Amazing Welsh Homes represented the next natural step to respond and to tap into this homes interest - taking advantage of the Western Mail’s established trusted brand to further package and replatform such aspirational content with crip, gorgeous design and tone. A first for the competitive homes magazine market as it is attuned completely to the Welsh market, Amazing Welsh Homes offers an attractive mix of innovation, renovation and practical from terrace to castles, with appealing reader offers and stardust added with self-confessed property addict Jo’s own interview with Wales’ decor king Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen. It celebrates its Welsh identity too by featuring renowned Wales-based interior designer Yvonne Jones, a regular Western Mail columnist, and delivers candid access to one of the best-known faces in property - Homes Under the Hammer host Martin Roberts. Real-life case studies, who could live just around the corner, plus great photography to match abound to help feed the readers’ interest. There is also ‘news you can use’ such as the Little Black Book, and the excuse to showcase some of social media’s best interior examples. Copies, which held their own in ‘look’ against other regular homes glossies on the shelf and were priced competitively at £4.99 each, were available across Wales at more than 900 retail outlets including Tesco, Co-op, WHSmith, One Stop, Sainsbury’s and Lidl. It was also sold through Reach plc’s online shop and Amazon, and was cross-promoted from the Western Mail and WalesOnline. Initially launched as a one-off product to test the market, there are now plans for further editions with the next Amazing Welsh Homes edition already in progress and due out in November 2023. This is because of the first edition’s circulation and advertising revenue success, plus its positive response from our readership. The first Amazing Welsh Homes edition has unlocked new advertisers, sold more than 750 copies and has been praised by readers, who “loved” it, for its “very interesting and informative articles"