Product Description

Real Simple is the new magazine for the way you want to live today. You'll find actionable solutions to streamline the ways you manage your life. Systems for reducing clutter, saving time, and reducing stress. Inspiring ideas about home, food, money, clothes, health, work, family, and holidays.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1 in Magazine Subscriptions
• Formats: Magazine Subscription, Print

Amazon.com Review

Who Reads Real Simple?
Real Simple’s core audience is comprised of smart, busy women who are looking for creative solutions to their everyday challenges, so they have more time to focus on what really matters. Real Simple serves a wide range of women with just as many loyal fans in their 20s as in their 50s. The Real Simple reader is well-educated, affluent and professional, but most of all, she is looking for ways to make life easier. Real Simple has an impressive monthly audience of 8.6 million people, including a loyal following of women who say they feel calmer and more in control when they receive the magazine each month.

What You Can Expect in Each Issue:
Real Simple incorporates and speaks to all aspects of a woman's busy life, including beauty, entertaining, etiquette, family, finance, food, health, home, pets, soul, style and technology. From time-to-time, Real Simple also addresses gifts, the holidays, travel and weddings. Each month, the magazine starts off with “Your Words,” where readers share their answers to a question of the month; followed by “Simple Solutions,” the front-of-book section with smart pieces of ideas, insight and inspiration including the popular New Uses for Old Things and Products of the Month. “The Guide” offers strategies, systems and smarts for making life easier with stories in every topic area the magazine covers. Real Simple also features “Moneywise,” a section dedicated to spending smarter; “Road Tests,” real-people tested product recommendations; and “Cooking,” a back-of-book section devoted to recipes, techniques and tips. “Real Simple To Go” closes the magazine each month, featuring tear-out perforated pieces of useful information for readers to take with them in their daily lives. The Real Simple “feature well” changes from month-to-month but always features beautiful, smart stories on a broad range of topics intended to inspire the reader.

The fourth annual Real Simple Family special issue will offer inspiring and innovative ideas to make all aspects of family life better.

Magazine Layout:
Real Simple’s design objective is twofold: to convey information with clarity and organization within a simple, accessible format and to create a serene and uncluttered environment that imparts a sense of calm. One of the key components to that objective is ample use of white space, which gives the page design “breathing room” and distinguishes the brand from other women’s magazines.

Click on any image below to see select pages from Real Simple:

Contributors:
Many stories are written by Real Simple editors; however, the magazine prides itself on featuring writers, photographers and contributors of note.

Past Issues:

Comparisons to Other Magazines:
Real Simple is unique and is the only magazine out there that focuses on the mission of making life easier.

Advertisers:
Real Simple appeals to a broad range of advertisers. The three biggest advertising categories are: food & beverage, beauty, and retail & department stores.

Awards:
Real Simple has won numerous industry awards and accolades, including three National Magazine Award nominations in the category of “General Excellence.” Real Simple is the only magazine to have earned a spot on Adweek’s prestigious “Hot List” of top-ten titles for seven years in a row. The brand has also been named to Adweek’s “Brand Leaders” list for three consecutive years since the list’s inception, and has won Advertising Age’s “Magazine of the Year.”

Customer Reviews

Recommends High-Priced Unnecessary Items
I am a strong proponent of living a simpler, less stressed life and I was really happy when I saw an entire magazine was dedicated towards the simple life. After reading it, though, I think what they meant to say was that this is the way to spend money and feel better about yourself.

An idea for avoiding dishes? Buy lots of coffee filters, line your mixing bowls with them and throw them away when you're done. This turns us into a disposable lifestyle, not a simple one. Need to figure out if a window is sunny enough for a plant? Buy a $60 device that (I kid you not) plugs into the dirt, records the sunlight for you and then plugs into your USB port to tell you what it saw. There's an article on an interracial marriage which doesn't sound simple to me, and while it's cool, it doesn't help me learn anything about living more simply.

How about dressing simply? They want you to buy an $85 pair of flats and a $68 belt. Maybe a $70 pair of shorts.

Some articles are helpful. How can you spot a fake bill? Might be useful to know. Other articles miss out on basics. They talk about how a pound of sugar was 12 cents in 1960 and is now 52 cents - but they say nothing at all about what it WOULD be adjusted for inflation. Is this higher than before? Lower? Nobody knows.

There are good tips in here. Go to your library and use their vast resources for free. Negotiate with your health care provider for lower costs. Use local playgrounds for exercise and fun. Bring your lunch, don't eat out. Even so, you turn the page and they're suggesting $200 blazers as cool items for the simple household - blazers that, honestly, most of us would only wear once or twice given its color and what it would go with in a given season. Never mind the $400 giant black jumpsuit. Not simple.

I'm not saying simple has to be boring or drab - but there is a big difference, in my mind, between recommending a simple item of clothing that could be worn every week without an issue and recommending a $400 splurge on something that would rarely be brought from the closet. That belongs more in a "splurge fashion" magazine, not a "real simple" magazine.

So while I appreciate some of the tips here, there was too much emphasis on buying things - especially things people simply don't need. I feel the magazine falls into this category itself.

Real Simple is simply about buying stuff
I subscribed to this magazine for a year and enjoyed my first few issues, but I soon noticed that all of the ideas for "leading a simpler life" involved purchasing expensive products. You might as well just flip through a Pottery Barn catalog. They both offer the same fantasy -- "What a stress-free, genteel life I could lead if only I had closet organizers and all-white furniture!" Eventually I simplified my life by letting my subscription run out.

Real Simple?

Don't get me wrong..I love the two hard cover books, Real Simple Solutions and Real Simple: The Guide to Organized Living. They are gems. However, the magazine simply betrays it's words. As one rater stated, it seems like the reader is cajoled into buying un-needed expensive products, and my god..the magazine is cluttered with ads and inserts, plus it is very hard to turn the pages and read. I realize ads are necessary, but this is extreme, especially for a magazine that supposedly promotes a less complicated and cluttered life for it's readers.