Was launched in 1986, people said it wouldn’t work: They said that men didn’t want general-interest lifestyle information. They said men didn’t read magazines. They said the name was boring. Ten years later, with a circulation of nearly 1.4 million and an enviable status as one of the leading men’s magazines in this country, Men’s Health is proving everybody wrong.

In an ongoing effort to be the leading provider of health and fitness information, Emmaus, Pennsylvania-based Rodale Press launched Men’s Health on the newsstand as an experiment. Executive editor Michael Lafavore, who produced the first issue with a staff of three, says the magazine was conceived by Rodale president and COO Robert Teufel. Lafavore bandied about the idea for under a year, held many casual focus groups with friends and Rodale employees and came to die conclusion that men really would read a lifestyle/service publication. He was right: The first issue sold 90,000 copies on the newsstand.

“The two things that are key to a successful launch are being relevant to your readers, and being unique,” says publisher Jeff Morgan, who joined Men’s Health four years ago after serving as national sales director for Playboy. “If a magazine is a low-fat, low-sodium version of somebody else’s title, it’s really risky.”

With its focus on health and relationships, sex and work, Men’s Health was the first magazine to bring service journalism to the men’s market. After three trial issues, it became a full-fledged quarterly in 1988. Lafavore says he didn’t start a direct-mail program until 1988, when roughly 150,000 subscription offers were mailed to names on outside lists as well as to Rodale’s in-house newsletter and book-buyer lists.

Lafavore says he tested numerous lists from both inside and outside the obvious men’s and health categories. “Some of the men’s magazines didn’t work for us, but some general-interest magazines did,” says Lafavore, who stresses that publishers should test a sampling of names from each fist to measure its viability before renting or buying whole lists. Today, Men’s Health comes out 10 times a year, and the circulation has been doubling every year (currently it’s at 1.4 million). Newsstand sales have also maintained their strength: Men’sHealth sold an average of 294,000 copies per issue on the newsstand in the first half of 1995, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, up 36 percent from the same period last year.

Lafavore acknowledges the benefits of having Rodale’s corporate backing. “I never worried about having to put my furniture on the lawn. But had it been my money, I probably would not have done it.” Being an in-house launch is certainly easier than going it alone. But the launch of Men’s Health was not entirely worry-free. Lafavore says it was initially a tough sell because advertisers had never seen anything like it. Consequently, Rodale was compelled to offer a few deals during the title’s start-up phase.