Pocket mind trips

GRANT Thatcher’s Luxe City Guides have so much attitude they’ve been called Sex and the City in a handbook.

The Luxe City Guide for Hong Kong

BEFORE meeting Grant Thatcher, founder of Luxe City Guides, I’m informed by a colleague in Hong Kong that I will have no trouble spotting him in the busy lobby of the Peninsula Hotel. “He’s 6ft tall, he has a big shock of white hair and a big white, perfectly sculpted beard,” my friend tells me as I run off to my meeting with Thatcher. (I haven’t had time to do a Google image search.) And my friend is right — I spot him even before he has entered the hotel lobby. Just as Thatcher stands out in a crowd, so too does the product he created that has led to this meeting. Thatcher is the man behind Luxe City Guides, those pocket-sized, concertina-folded travel guides. They have no photography and are designed with a tiny font size but are written with plenty of attitude, which is what has made them a cult success with discerning travellers since they first appeared almost 12 years ago.

Since launching in 2002 with one city guide — Bangkok — Luxe has sold more than 1.4 million guides covering more than 30 cities that span the globe from Bali to Berlin and from Melbourne to Madrid. Vanity Fair described the range as “so cutting edge you could be lacerated if you’re not up to its cool pace”. The New York Times said the guides are “exacting, opinionated and deliciously bitchy takes on cities”. And The Times of London called them “Sex and The City in a handbook”. Luxe guides are not just about where to stay, eat and what to do; they’re an insider’s guide written by people who actually live in the city they’re writing about and edited to give you just the right amount of information on the right places without the PR hype.

They’re honest, authoritative and have a tone of voice that speaks to travellers eager to find the best a city has to offer and who don’t want to trawl through endless brick-sized travel guides to find it. Given the global readership Luxe has, it’s not surprising it would one day attract the eye of investors. Late last year, Luxe was acquired by the Melbourne-based travel entrepreneur Simon Westcott, as part of a group of investors, for an undisclosed sum. Westcott is a co-founder of Mr & Mrs Smith (Asia-Pacific) with James and Tamara Lohan and was previously the global publisher at Lonely Planet.

“To me this content is so unique and so powerful and so well curated,” says Westcott. “I’m very committed to that lovely proprietary format that I always think of as the original app … I don’t want to mess with that — it’s a really beautiful product. The key thing is that we’ve raised money not just to buy Luxe but to grow it and invest relatively considerably compared to the investment Grant and [co-founder] Jeremy Webb have been able to make to date.”

That injection of funds will be used to complement the print product with an enhanced digital offering. New destinations will be added and guides will be updated more regularly. “We’re going to change how frequently destinations are updated from what is currently about 18 to 24 months to at least monthly. We also want to look at bundling digital and print subscriptions for frequent travellers and to use our base in Hong Kong to really tackle China,” says Westcott. Thatcher will remain with Luxe and will establish an editorial advisory board to help maintain the standard of curation the guides have become known for. “I never want Luxe to lose its voice,” says Westcott. “It’s pure gold — a travel guide that really makes you laugh out loud sometimes.”

It’s a long way from the first guide’s humble beginnings. Thatcher, who trained as an actor, moved to Hong Kong 17 years ago with the intention of staying for six months. He quickly found work as a voiceover artist before eventually landing a job in Bangkok making documentary films for the Thai royal family.

“It was a two-year project and during that time I started designing a lot of furniture and interiors for our apartment, which then got photographed,” recalls Thatcher. “Then people kept asking me, ‘where did you get your curtains? Where did you get that bowl? Where did you get this, that and the other?’ So I started to write a list about where you could get all these things made and I used to send this list around. And that’s really how the very first Luxe Guide started. The list got added to and longer and longer and people were then sending the list around independently. I was at a party one weekend in Singapore and someone who I didn’t know came up to me and said ‘if you’re going back to Bangkok you must take this list with you’. And then she brought out of her handbag this big list which by then was about eight pages and had CCs all over it. It had gone backwards and forwards and it was my list. It was like a lightbulb went off. Originally we thought it would be a one-off, the Luxe Bangkok guide, and we launched it in November 2002.

“We never took any investment in the business. It started very organically and we did everything on the dining room table, writing things and then typing them up. When we had it printed I took the little guide and walked around to booksellers in Wan Chai and in Central and asked them to sell it. I literally sold it door to door. It was only me for the first two years. I printed them, I packed them, I took them to shops, I got the money and I did the banking.”

The business was profitable from day one, says Thatcher, but it needed an investor to expand the digital side of the business. “We’ve known Simon since 2007 and he’s always been very passionate about Luxe, and after a while it became clear that it was a good fit and that it would work. You know sometimes the heavens open up and the sun shines and you say, ‘yes, let’s do this’.”