The Financial Times magazine How To Spend It has long provided inspiration to bankers wanting to blow their bonuses on designer goods – but the publication has been rebranded because spending big is no longer seen as a positive quality.
The luxury magazine, packaged with the FT’s Weekend edition, is stuffed with expensive adverts for high-end watches, safaris, and yachts aimed at its jet-set wealthy readership – making it a money-spinner for the newspaper.
Yet the FT says the How To Spend It name no longer reflects the “changing times and priorities” in a world of financial inequality and the invasion of Ukraine. As such the magazine has been rebranded as HTSI, with the FT inviting readers to “to interpret the ‘S’ in line with their own deeper interests”.
The newspaper suggested possible definitions of HTSI include how to style it, how to save it, or how to steer, surf or savour it. Other potential reader interpretations – such how to splurge it, how to snort it, or how to steal it – did not make the press release announcing the changes.
Jo Ellison, the magazine’s editor, said the change was necessary to “reflect a world with deeper sensitivities” and “the irony with which the title was first conceived has sometimes failed to land”.
She suggested it was uncomfortable to run a magazine called How To Spend It in a world dealing with the after-effects of a pandemic, where Russia was invading a neighbouring country, and where the cost of living crisis was starting to bite.
Despite the rebrand, she insisted the magazine would continue to focus on “optimism, pleasure and beauty” and remain “a little hedonistic”. “We have no plans to change our essential being; we just want HTSI to reflect the deeper sensitivities and priorities of a changing world.”
Many journalists at the FT, which has won plaudits for its increased focus on social issues alongside its traditional financial coverage, have an uncomfortable relationship with the luxury goods magazine.
It is widely acknowledged that the advertising revenue produced by How To Spend It subsidises other parts of the organisation. However, being funded by a publication synonymous with conspicuous consumption can feel uncomfortable for reporters who prefer to think they are critiquing modern capitalism – rather than benefiting from it.
How To Spend It’s popularity among unpalatable characters has also caused embarrassment. In 2011, a reporter for the Independent found a “well-thumbed copy” of the magazine in a coffee table in a compound that once belonged to the Libyan dictator Col Muammar Gaddafi.
The How To Spend It name was created in 1967, when the FT’s first female employee suggested the wives of its readers might enjoy a section on how to spend their husband’s income.
It later became a standalone magazine, riding the luxury goods – and financial services boom – of the 1990s and 2000s. Alice Pickthall, of Enders Analysis, told a 2018 Guardian long read that the magazine was best understood as the “Argos catalogue for rich people”.
