Hugh Hefner’s youngest son is offering to buy back the Playboy brand for $100 million, according to a report.
Cooper Hefner, 33, told The Wall Street Journal that he and a group of investors submitted an offer to Playboy Group that would see the brand once again family-owned more than seven decades after it was founded by his late father.
“It’s a great American company and a great American brand, outside of my personal connection to it,” Hefner, whose mother is former Playmate and Hugh Hefner’s second wife Kimberley Conrad, told The Journal.
Hefner lamented the fact that the company “has been managed to a state of potentially nonexistence.”
As part of the proposed deal, Hefner and his investment firm, Hefner Capital, would buy back the Playboy brand and run the intellectual property while the other parts of the business would continue to operate as a separate entity under a new name.
The newly carved out entity would also get a 10% ownership stake in a Hefner-run Playboy.
Hefner, whose investor group includes a hedge fund and one of Playboy’s former licensing partners, told The Journal that he would assume the role of CEO.
Playboy Group, whose stock was as high as $50 a share in the spring of 2021, was trading at less than $1 a share on Monday. Its market valuation was around $50 million.
In 2021, it went public via a special acquisition company. But the firm has been losing money and is currently holding more than $200 million in debt.
The year before, it ceased publication of its magazine, ending a nearly seven-decade run on newsstands that began in 1953 with a debut issue featuring Marilyn Monroe.
Hugh Hefner founded the magazine and built the brand. In the 1970s, Playboy had a monthly circulation of 7 million.
But he ran into trouble in the 1980s with competition from Penthouse and Hustler — magazines that had much more explicit photos — and Playboy’s social impact faded considerably by the 21st century.
Shrinking advertising revenues as well as readily available pornography on the internet made Playboy obsolete.
Hugh Hefner died in 2017 at the age of 91. He left behind four children including Cooper Hefner, all of whom sold their stakes in the company.
Cooper Hefner told The Journal that the brand has been mismanaged.
“It’s Playboy entering businesses that they’ve never operated before,” he said, adding that the products are “not resonating at all with consumers or customers or fans.”
“And the business’s decline and the brand’s relevance — in terms of being hardly spoken about today — is a direct reflection of that.”