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Playboy history
Playboy company history timeline
Beginning in 1965, Hefner invested over $55 million to develop resort hotels in Jamaica, Miami, Great Gorge, New Jersey, and Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
Bouncers kept tipsy keyholders from groping or grabbing tails. (The original yarn tails were replaced by fire-retardant fake fur by 1969 because “customers were always trying to light them,” Bunny Alice Nichols recalled in The Bunny Years.) Touching a Bunny was grounds for expulsion.
Playboy Bunnies welcome Hugh Hefner on the inaugural flight of his new jet, named "The Big Bunny," in March 1970.
One of PLAYBOY’s most significant and groundbreaking covers emerged in October 1971, featuring a young woman named Darine Stern.
Hugh bought the mansion for $1.1 million in 1971
The circulation of Playboy magazine reached its height in 1972 with 7.2 million readers.
In 1972, the editors of Cosmopolitan famously published a photo of Burt Reynolds as a centerfold.
The debut issue of Playgirl appeared in June 1973 with the actor Lyle Waggoner as the centerfold.
Pretax profits in 1973 amounted to $20 million, and the company was quickly approaching the 1000 mark for advertising pages.
Christie Hefner, a Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Brandeis University in 1974, joined her father's company one year later.
COMPETITION WITH HUSTLER • It was first published in 1974.
In 1982, Christie Hefner, the 29-year-old daughter of the founder, took charge of the company, which was moving into television and video products.
Christie was named chief operating officer in 1984, after having long been seen as heir apparent.
In 1985, she was promoted to the position of president, while Hugh Hefner continued as editor-in-chief and majority stockholder in the company.
She was promoted to chairwoman and chief executive in 1988 at a time when Playboy was reeling from losses.
Just when did the Bunny become a dinosaur? The club scene began to fade in the early ’80s, with the last of the original clubs closing in 1988.
Still the majority owner of stock in the company, Hugh Hefner had forsaken his pipe and silk pajamas in order to settle down and marry the 1989 Playmate of the Year, Kimberley Conrad.
The Rabbit has been known to hide within a lock of hair, a rumpled bed sheet and even, in August 1992, a swirl of spaghetti.
The company established a Web site, Playboy.com, in 1994, which was an immediate success.
Advertising pages had dropped to 595 for the year 1995, but circulation was holding at a steady 3.5 million, in spite of the stiff competition from other magazines with more explicit nude centerfold pictures.
The contest even became a plot line in a 2000 episode of Friends, with Ross and Chandler arguing over which of them had actually authored a joke published in PLAYBOY.
Hefner's little black books were sold at auction in 2003.
In December 2008, she announced that she was resigning from the company.
She also expanded some of the company’s hard-core pornography products, including the purchase of Spice TV. In December 2008, she announced that she was resigning from the company.
They are very rapidly letting down their 1700 fans. • These are a bunch of things that have been realized on Facebook from 2008 till nowadays: • All the Playboy Bunnies finaly have profiles.
BUNNY BUSINESS SOLD OR NOT? • The last news of the Playboy Enterprises selling were found on September 13, 2009. • A potential buyer is Richard Branson.
Hefner and top editors agreed in 2015 to stop publishing images of naked women in a bid to broaden its audience.
In August 2016 the Playboy Mansion was bought for $100 million by Daren Metropoulos, the co-owner of Hostess Brands.
Also that year, citing the wide availability of pornography on the Internet, the company announced that Playboy would no longer feature photos of nude women, but it reversed that decision in 2017.
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Playboy competitors
| Company name | Founded date | Revenue | Employee size | Job openings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adweek | 1978 | $13.0M | 322 | - |
| Los Angeles Times | 1881 | $780.0M | 2,052 | 15 |
| The Onion | 1988 | $2.7M | 17 | 5 |
| Salon Media Group | 1995 | $4.5M | 24 | - |
| Chronicle Books | 1967 | $75.0M | 100 | 3 |
| Andrews McMeel Universal | 1975 | $11.0M | 100 | 1 |
| Hallmark Cards | 1910 | $5.0B | 30,000 | - |
| Muscle & Fitness | 1940 | $27.0M | 50 | - |
| Regnery Publishing | 1947 | $6.3M | 175 | - |
| Llewellyn Worldwide | - | $2.8M | 50 | - |
Playboy history FAQs
Zippia gives an in-depth look into the details of Playboy, including salaries, political affiliations, employee data, and more, in order to inform job seekers about Playboy. The employee data is based on information from people who have self-reported their past or current employments at Playboy. The data on this page is also based on data sources collected from public and open data sources on the Internet and other locations, as well as proprietary data we licensed from other companies. Sources of data may include, but are not limited to, the BLS, company filings, estimates based on those filings, H1B filings, and other public and private datasets. While we have made attempts to ensure that the information displayed are correct, Zippia is not responsible for any errors or omissions or for the results obtained from the use of this information. None of the information on this page has been provided or approved by Playboy. The data presented on this page does not represent the view of Playboy and its employees or that of Zippia.
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