• by Ray Schultz , July 24, 2022

Mel Magazine, the off-again, on-again online men’s lifestyle title, is off again. Recurrent Ventures has decided to bail, laying off the magazine's entire staff of about 15 on Friday.

Recurrent, which also owns The Drive, Field & Stream, Popular Science, Saveur and Outdoor Life, acquired Mel last summer from Dollar Shave Club, which had withdrawn its financial backing in March. Mel had resided on the club's Medium site since 2018.

When it acquired Mel, Recurrent said that it would serve as the marquee brand of its new lifestyle division. But that plan apparently has not worked.  

Recurrent management announced the shutdown and layoffs to staff in an online meeting on Friday.

"Just as staffers were absorbing that they'd lost their jobs, they were all bumped out of the online meeting — the company deactivated their email and Slack accounts at the same time they were receiving the news — before they could even learn how much severance they would be paid," reported Business Insider. "'[They] basically unplugged us in the middle of firing us,' one staffer told Insider." 

Mel is now reportedly looking for a new home.

Recurrent made the “difficult decision to pivot our editorial and acquisition focuses away from the lifestyle vertical which includes our key lifestyle brand, Mel,” the company said in an email. 

While Mel's editorial team has "done a tremendous job not only getting the editorial back to where it was but expanding the scope of Mel’s content," the owners said they have "spent more than a year implementing and strategizing a variety of different monetization channels that haven’t gained traction. At this stage, we’ve invested more into the business than we committed to because we wanted this to succeed. Our overall M&A strategy has evolved to be focused on building a leadership position in our core verticals. These are difficult decisions, but ones we believe are necessary to ensure Recurrent is properly structured for the long term."  

Recurrent announced the reorganization of several teams, predominantly in direct sales and strategic partnerships, but also in various operations areas.

In May, the company said it had raised $300 million in new capital led by funds managed by Blackstone, bringing its total funding to date to $400 million. 

Recurrent acquired We Are The Mighty, a veteran-led digital publisher and media agency, in June. Last week, the company announced that it was relaunching its Military Influencer Conference after a two-year hiatus necessitated by the pandemic.