New baby, new business: both well

Corinne Jedwood had just had a baby when she launched the first issue of Inside DB magazine two years ago.

She had worked night and day from her Discovery Bay home for six months setting up the business.

Her hard work paid off when the monthly lifestyle and local news freebie made its debut.

In just 24 months it has doubled in size but still has to turn advertisers away.

Circulation is 15,000 and it is distributed throughout DB.

Ms Jedwood arrived in Hong Kong four years ago with her husband, a Cathay pilot.

Having left a successful jewellery business behind in South Africa, she was soon looking around for things to do.

'I thought, there's no way I'm going to sit around all day eating lunch with friends, and owning my own business was the only way I could work and be in control of my time,' Ms Jedwood says.

She quickly realised there was a need for a local magazine.

There was no local print media in which businesses could advertise and there was a huge untapped market in Discovery Bay of people with disposable income, including recently arrived expats who did not know how and where to spend their money.

Ms Jedwood worked as a French language teacher to save up the $20,000 she needed to put together a mock-up of the magazine. On the strength of that, three large advertisers signed up for between six months and a year.

The project was a stretch for someone who had no experience in the publishing industry.

'If you have some business sense you don't need to be skilled in the specific product,' she says. 'The key is to surround yourself with extremely competent people and of course to have a good product.'

She recalls that during the run-up to the launch issue, she was lying on the hospital gurney, talking to potential advertisers on her mobile telephone as she was about to be wheeled into the operating theatre to deliver her baby.

'If an idea is going to work, you know it straight away,' she says.

She says the venture is more a labour of love than profit: 'People feel that it is their magazine and that is important,' she says. 'If I wanted to make more money I would print the magazine on cheaper paper, but I need to be proud of the product.'

She admits balancing it all can be 'quite challenging' - especially with the lack of sleep that comes with nursing a newborn.

'We do have plans for incremental growth, but we know that this one is a winning recipe and we don't want it to suffer by moving too quickly,' she says.