Playboy Licensing

The Playboy Licensing Group is a division of Playboy Enterprises. The Licensing segment licenses the Playboy name, the Rabbit Head design and other images, trademarks, and artwork, as well as the Spice name and trademarks for various men's and women's apparel, men's underwear and women's lingerie, accessories, collectibles, cigars, watches, jewelry, fragrances, small leather goods, stationery, music, eyewear, barware, and home fashions.

The Company's trademarks and copyrights are critical to the success and potential growth of all of its businesses. Its trademarks, which are renewable periodically and which can be renewed indefinitely, include Playboy, the Rabbit Head Design, Playmate and Spice. The Company also owns numerous domain names related to its online business. In 2005, Playboy moved into the top 50 World's largest licensors.

Currently the Licensing division accounts for about 10% of the revenue of the Playboy Enterprises.

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Playboy Entertainment

The Playboy Entertainment Group is a division of Playboy Enterprises that includes Playboy TV and Playboy Online, which is the fastest growing revenue source for the company. The Entertainment segment develops, produces, acquires, and distributes various feature films, magazine-format shows, reality-based and dramatic series, documentaries, live events, and celebrity and playmate features for television networks, Web-based entertainment experiences, portable podcast entertainment, DVD products, and online gaming under the Playboy and Spice brand names.

As of December 31, 2005, it owned, operated, or licensed 23 television and movie networks under Playboy TV, Playboy TV en Espanol, and Spice in the United Kingdom, South East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and Japan. Its programming is carried in the U.S. by all six of the major multiple system operators and both of the satellite direct-to-home, or DTH, providers. In 2005, a Playboy satellite radio station launched on Sirius Satellite Radio.

The company offers multiple subscription-based Web sites and online video-on-demand theaters under the Playboy and Spice names. It also operates e-commerce Web sites, including PlayboyStore.com for purchasing Playboy-branded fashions, calendars, DVDs, jewelry, collectibles, back issues of Playboy magazine, and special editions, as well as non-Playboy-branded products; and SpiceTVStore.com, which offers adult-oriented products, including DVDs, lingerie, and sensual products. The Company has online operations consisting of a network of websites with an established and growing subscriber and revenue base.

The Company distributes its original programming domestically in DVD format. More recently, it began developing portable podcast content. It also distributes various non-Playboy-branded movies and continues to re-package and re-market its catalog of previously released DVD titles. Company-wide marketing operations consist of Alta Loma Entertainment, the Playboy Jazz Festival and Playmate Promotions. Alta Loma Entertainment functions as a production Company that leverages its assets, including editorial material, as well as icons such as the Playmates, the Playboy Mansion and Mr. Hefner, to develop original programming for other television networks.

Its revenue is derived from Domestic Television, International Television, Online, and other sources. Currently the Entertainment division accounts for over 60% of the revenue of the Playboy Enterprises.

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Playboy Online

Playboy Online (or Playboy.com) is the internet business segment of Playboy Enterprises. There are a lot of nude and adult videos. It produces some original content that differs from print editions of the publications produced by Playboy Publishing, one of the three business segments of Playboy Enterpises. Playboy Online falls within the Entertainment business segment, which is the largest of the 3 business segments and accounts for 60% of corporate revenue (2005, 3Q06). Playboy Online is the fastest growing revenue line item in Playboy Enterprises. Its revenue comes from both online subscriptions to Playboy Cyber Club and from E-commerce, which includes internet advertising. It accounts for 15% of corporate revenue.

Playboy Online should not be confused with Playboy Digital, which began production late in 2005 as an electronic duplicate of physical print offerings within the Publishing group. The site has been available online since 1994.

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Playboy Enterprises: Investor Information

Playboy has two classes of stock.

NYSE: PLA are the actively traded class B shares without voting rights. As of November 2006 there were 28,341,000 shares outstanding with a market capitalization of about $350 million. The 3 month average trading volume was 239,262 shares.

NYSE: PLAA are the closely held class A voting shares. As of November 2006 there were 4,864,000 shares outstanding with a market capitalization of about $55 million. The 3 month average trading volume was 2818 shares.

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Playboy Enterprises: Divisions

* Publishing Group:
o Playboy magazine
o Playboy Newsstand Specials
o Oui magazine (1972–1981)
* Entertainment Group:
o Playboy TV (formerly the Playboy Channel)
o Spice Network (Consists of 12 digital networks)
o Online group:
+ Playboy.com
+ PlayboyStore.com
+ Playboy Cyber Club
+ Playboy Plus
+ Playboy.net
o Playboy Radio
* Licensing Group:
o Handles Playboy trademarks on apparel, accessories, collectibles (like: trading cards, toy cars, dolls, etc.) and more
* College Division
o Playboy on Campus

Playboy also ran forty Playboy Club properties from 1960 to 1986. The company is returning to nightlife business with the Playboy Club at the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. And Playboy is hunting other casino licensing deals in Macau and London. Meanwhile, the company says it will open at least three Playboy stores in each of the next three years.

The company is connected with the Playboy Foundation, a corporate giving organization that provides grants to non-profit groups involved in fighting censorship and researching human sexuality.

Hugh Hefner, who founded Playboy, continues to oversee Playboy. However, his daughter Christie runs day to day operations.

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Playboy Enterprises

Playboy Enterprises, Inc. (NYSE: PLA), also organized as New Playboy, Inc. (NYSE: PLAA), is the company founded by Hugh Hefner to manage the Playboy magazine empire. It was created in 1953 as the HMH Publishing Co., Inc. for the purpose of publishing the Playboy Magazine. The business quickly expanded beyond the magazine and began to develop and distribute a wider range of adult entertainment. It eventually went public under the current name in 1971. Christie Hefner, the daughter of Hugh Hefner, has been the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer for Playboy Enterprises since 1981.

Today, Playboy Enterprises, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, engages in the development and distribution of adult entertainment including some of the most hardcore video content available in the market today. Via its CJI unit, the company is one of the nation's largest producers of hardcore adult film. The Playboy brand is one of the most widely recognized and popular brands in the world. The Company's is structured with three business segments: Publishing, Entertainment, and Licensing.

Playboy Enterprises, Inc. occupies the 14th (Playboy.com), 15th (main) and 16th (corporate/executive) floors of 680 N. Lake Shore Drive (formerly 666 N. Lake Shore Drive) in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood. The company employed 725 full-time employees as of February 28, 2006.

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Voluptuous Vixens/Vixens

The Voluptuous Vixens / Vixens series features models with prodigious breasts.

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College Girls

The models featured in this series are usually selected from the student population of American colleges and universities.

At first, the magazine was published only in the fall to roughly coincide with the beginning of the school year. Each year, the magazine includes a feature on students of an athletic conference, usually from a BCS conference. For instance, the 1997 issue (pictured) featured the Big 12 but also students from other schools.

The 2006 issue caused some controversy at Baylor University, which has a religious affiliation. Baylor declared that associating with the magazine would be a violation of the school's code of conduct.

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Book of Lingerie/Lingerie

Playboy Special Editions' most popular series is Lingerie (formerly known as Book of Lingerie), which is published on a bimonthly basis. The first issue was released as Book of Lingerie in 1984. It became bimonthly as from November 1988 and had its name changed to Lingerie as from September 2002.

Playboy Special Edition: History

Playboy magazine began supplementing its monthly edition in the mid-1960s with irregularly-published special editions devoted to, for example, its cartoons or the Playboy Clubs. The first edition, The Best from Playboy in 1964, was nothing like the present-day specials. Its 120 pages contained a sixteen-page Jayne Mansfield pictorial, but was otherwise filled with articles, including the celebrated 1962 interview with Miles Davis. A 1972 Little Annie Fanny special is highly sought after by Harvey Kurtzman collectors.

In the 1970s, perhaps in conjunction with the appearance of Oui, the special editions would feature somewhat more explicit photography or situations than Playboy itself would run at the time. One release, 1976's Noelle, was quite notorious in its day for its racy content.

In 1984, Playboy published the first volume of its flagship Special Edition, Book of Lingerie, which featured 110 pages of photos of Playmates from the last decade (reprints and outtakes, with no specially-commissioned photos). The magazine sold extremely well, and a second edition, in 1987, proved the market was there for the Newsstand Specials, as they were formally called at this time, to begin a regular, formal sales cycle. Each Newsstand Special would have a two-month shelf life, with two titles published each month.

The greatly increased demand for new photos to fill the 24 editions published annually -- reprints from the early 1970s having little erotic value to readers twenty years later -- required Playboy to look further than their own archives to fill the page count. Newsstand Specials of the late 1980s and early 1990s would often feature previously unpublished outtakes from Playmate pictorials, but also a number of "one-shot" models, possibly posing under a pseudonym or unnamed entirely, bought in bulk from glamour photographers. Sometimes these would resurface in other magazines; outtakes from a 1992-93 shoot with a model named Simone Burkhard which first appeared in Playboy's Girls of Summer '93 were published in Perfect 10 some five years later.

By the mid-1990s, Playboy had formalized its model process to help give the Newsstand Specials their own unique identity. Commissioning regular shoots with Playmates from the last two or three years provided an ongoing source of new photos which increased the models' popularity and won them new fans, but the editions also found new talent popular enough to warrant multiple appearances. Models such as Alley Baggett, Patricia Ford and Sung Hi Lee rarely or never appeared in the monthly Playboy, but were featured in the Special Editions dozens of times.

By the end of the 1990s, the label Newsstand Special had been phased out in favor of Special Edition, and a host of regular publications had joined Book of Lingerie (renamed simply Lingerie) on the shelves. One edition each of Playmate Review, Nude Playmates and Girlfriends, among others, are published annually. College Girls is published three times a year.

By 2005, the Playmates had actually found themselves completely squeezed out of Lingerie. Its 100th edition was the first to feature no Playmates at all; Playboy has such a bank of available, popular models that it no longer needs the Playmates to sell some of its Special Editions.

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Playboy Special Edition

Playboy Special Editions (formerly known as flats, then Newsstand Specials) are a spinoff series of Playboy magazine devoted entirely to softcore nude photographs of the Playboy models that are found sporadically scattered in the monthly Playboy magazine.

Unlike the monthly magazine, which features a variety of articles, opinion columns, and works of fiction, the only texts found in the Special Editions are captions of the photographs and readers' letters. Approximately two issues are published each month. In addition, the models that appear in the Special Editions are not necessarily former Playmates of the Month, though such Playmates also appear in them.

Early issues, beginning in 1983, featured approximately 100 pages of old reprint and outtake photos of Playmates with no specially-commissioned photos. Issues from the early 1990s began to include a number of "one-shot" models purchased in bulk from glamour photographers. By the mid-1990s, Playboy had established a unique identity for the line by mixing new shots of recent Playmates with new models, some of whom soon became as popular as the Playmates themselves.

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Playboy Bunny: International icon

The Bunny suit is also very popular in Japan, where it has lost much of its association with Playboy. In fact, it has become associated with sexiness in general, where they are referred to as bunny girls (or bunnygirls) and have an association with the female human/animal hybrids common in anime and manga known as kemonomimi. Bunnies should not be confused with Playboy Playmates, women who appear in the centerfold pictorials of Playboy magazine, although a few bunnies went on to become Playmates (see below).

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Playboy Bunny: Patent Pending

The Playboy Bunny outfit was the first service uniform registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (U.S. trademark registration number 0762884). The tight costume forced servers to bend at the knees, not the waist, when serving drinks; this maneuver became known as the "Bunny Dip". All drinks were served in the same glass, the long stemmed "Bolo Grande". A special round tray was developed with holes along the sides. The glasses stem would slip through and the bowl would sit flat on the tray. This allowed the Bunnies to carry drinks without spilling them and facilitated the dip.

The uniforms were custom made for each Bunny. There was usually a seamstress for each Club to maintain the fit. To avoid rumours, the Club Manager had only two responsibilities for the Bunnies, floor service and weigh in. Before every shift the Manager would weigh in each Bunny. Bunnies could not gain or lose more than one pound. Exceptions were made for water retention. Playboy Enterprises required all employees to turn in their costumes at the end of employment and Playboy has some costumes in storage. Occasionally costumes are offered for sale on the Playboy Auction site or eBay. Some of the costumes on eBay may be counterfeit or damaged in some way. Genuine Bunny costumes in good condition have sold for over $10,000.[citation needed] The only two on public display are in the collections of The Smithsonian and the Chicago History Museum .

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Playboy Bunny: In the beginning

In the beginning

Plans for a Playboy Club began in 1959. Seeking to maximize on the image Playboy was most famous for, its Playmates, initial talk centred on dressing the Playboy Club's hostesses in revealing negligees and calling them "Playmates". But during a night-out, Playboy executive Victor Lownes' then girlfriend, Ilse Taurins, suggested to Hugh Hefner the idea of dressing the hostesses in the image of the tuxedoed Playboy Bunny character. Hefner took some persuading as he had always viewed the rabbit as a male character but once he saw a prototype of the outfit (made by Taurins' mother) he changed his mind. He particularly liked the tail. A very strict Club Rule was that members or their guests were not allowed to touch the Bunnies' tail. The penalty was expulsion.

Bunnies almost never liked being associated with the Playmates. The reputation of Bunnies had to be kept above board. Bunnies were not allowed to date customers, which would have made the club vulnerable to prostitution charges. There were several types of Bunnies. The Door Bunny controlled entrance to the Club. Entrance was restricted to members and their guests.

Pool Bunnies played pool with the members and controlled the pool table. In 1966, one of Atlanta's pool bunnies, Bunny Kelly, beat pool legend Minnesota Fats several times—a feat that was written up in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Paul Hemphill

Bunnies were supervised by a Mother Bunny who was not uniformed. She was responsible for service, appearance, and conduct.

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Playboy Bunny

A Playboy Bunny was a waitress at the Playboy Clubs (open 1960–1988). They wore a costume called a bunny suit inspired by the tuxedo-wearing Playboy rabbit mascot, consisting of a corset, bunny ears, a collar, cuffs, and a fluffy cottontail.

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