CAPITAL: When you started Sandow, you envisioned it as a publishing business. Now only half of the company's assets are in the media space. Your professional background is in media, so why did you decide to diversify and acquire brands like the clothing retailer Fred Segal?

SANDOW: I’ve always been a huge fan of magazines and continue to be. But, at Sandow, we’re about using our foundation of media to build a much larger and more diversified company. Our goal as a media company is not just to migrate print readers to online but to “layer on” businesses that will allow us to continue to grow and come up with new ideas and strategies. I believe, for example, that digital tools and services are a way to build value and grow a business.

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Fred Segal made sense for us because of its focus on design and innovation, both of which drive me personally, as well as all of the businesses we own. But here’s a great example of how we layer businesses on top of our print assets: We own the most powerful design brands in print—the 80-plus year-old bible of design, Interior Design, and Luxe Interiors + Design, a luxury shelter magazine with both national and local editions. With Material ConneXion, we’re building a global network of material libraries that readers and advertisers of our magazines can access to experience and discover the world’s most innovative and advanced materials.

CAPITAL: One of Sandow's businesses is a newsstand network at more than 250 private airports in North America. Where did the idea to reach affluent consumers at their transit hubs originate?

SANDOW: When we bought Worth in 2008, we knew we needed to reach the richest people in the country so I said, “What if we build our own newsstands in private airports?” This group is not flying commercial. So we launched MediaJet to be able to get our magazines into the hands of the ultra-affluent as they board their flights. Last year, we started taking that platform we’ve built and allowing other high-end brands, such as St. Regis, Ralph Lauren, luxury jet manufacturer Gulfstream and others, to distribute their publications through MediaJet. It’s an additional revenue stream for us, and an opportunity for these brands to reach a highly coveted audience that they couldn’t get to otherwise.

CAPITAL: What evidence do you have that Sandow magazines are impacting those readers' spending habits?

SANDOW: We’ve done independent surveys that prove that our readers are deeply engaged with our magazines. For example, the average NewBeauty reader who has a household income of $200,000 spends 94.5 minutes with our magazine, so we know that our brands move the needle for our partners. It’s why we have such strong renewal rates and such loyal advertisers.

CAPITAL: Sandow has a service called BeautyDNA that matches users with beauty products suited to their preferences, a kind of Netflix of beauty. The company also sells the data gathered to beauty companies who can use it in research and development. Was selling the data always part of the plan? Compared to other revenues streams, how much is it worth?

SANDOW: BeautyDNA is a new digital service that matches women with their perfect beauty products. This is a huge data play that we were able to introduce as a result of our 10 years of beauty industry knowledge and experience with NewBeauty. Our goal is to be the single largest source of consumer data on beauty habits and preferences and, during our beta period, we’ve already collected over 3 million data points from paying members.

Women love the beauty products they’re being matched with—in fact, our research shows that 85 percent of our members received perfect or practically perfect matches and 76 percent have purchased beauty products they’ve discovered through BeautyDNA, so it’s a great service for consumers.

But what we’re really creating is a platform that, through our powerful data, will help beauty companies with research, development and marketing. If you’re a luxury car company and want to reach men who drive high-end sports cars, it’s easy to find them. But if you’re a beauty brand looking to target women in their 40s looking for a light anti-aging moisturizer, that list is impossible to find. BeautyDNA fills that data gap.

CAPITAL: The coolest thing in Sandow's New York offices is the materials library, which collects new materials invented across all disciplines of design. What's your favorite material on display there and why?

SANDOW: We add 40 new materials to the library each month and there’s so much innovation happening across the material world, with technology and sustainability having a big impact on the kinds of materials available today. What excites me most is our huge consulting business, ThinkLab, where we’ve collaborated with Fortune 500 companies like Nike, BMW, Estee Lauder and Citi to find innovative materials to use in developing and designing next-generation products. For example, we brought BMW a polyurethane-coated Lycra that could be stretched over a wire-aluminum frame—never before used in automotive—to help them create a futuristic concept car called GINA. It doesn’t get much cooler than that.