Having continued publishing five monthly titles – Colouring Heaven, Colouring Heaven Collection, Women’s Running, Vegan Food & Living and Ultimate Dot2Dot – throughout the pandemic, Anthem is now bringing Classic Pop and Planet Mindful back from short pauses onto the newsstand this month, with Italia! and Vintage Rock to follow in the late summer. The company has sold baking title Food Heaven to Warners Group Publications and vegan fashion brand Bare Fashion to stylist Rebekah Ray, and has ceased publishing Long Live Vinyl and Gluten-Free Heaven as regular magazines.

Commenting on the changes, Anthem CEO Jon Bickley said, “Having reviewed our whole business, we’re now ready to push forwards with even sharper focus on our core wellness brands along with our most established specialist titles. We’ve had to make some difficult decisions and are deeply sorry to have to make a number of redundancies, but now feel strongly placed for the future in a world where people are more and more focused on their personal health and wellbeing.”

Although ceasing in print, both Long Live Vinyl and Gluten-Free Heaven will continue as digital brands, with regular newsletters at the core of their reader interaction and additional benefits for existing print subscribers, say the publishers.

Bickley added, “During the lockdown we’ve actually enjoyed our best newsstand sales for years on a couple of our titles, as well as booming single issue and subscription sales across the entire portfolio, and better than expected advertising revenues. Even more impressive has been the surge of innovation we’ve witnessed on our core brands, as clearer focus and greater independence for staff working from home has seen creativity flourish. But it’s sad that some of our titles didn’t have sufficient scale to ride out this storm for the long run, and some good friends and colleagues will be leaving us.”