From Podcast to Print Magazine: The Grand Tourist Bets on (Really Nice) Paper
The Grand Tourist podcast—and now magazine—is very purposefully not for everyone. It’s not even for most people.
And that’s fine for founder and design journalist Dan Rubinstein, who remains the lone full-timer at the media company he created in 2021. Rubinstein covers the worlds of fashion, art, interior design, travel, food and culture, interviewing “the leading tastemakers of the creative world, from master chefs to experimental architects.”
The podcast is made for a rarified class that has heard of Axel Vervoordt, one of the most famous interior designers, architects and antiques dealers of the past 50 years, and for those who can appreciate the cover art of a lobster donning a Van Cleef & Arpels necklace—a photograph that involved armed guards and specialized handlers with white gloves. The podcast has been growing since its inception, but that’s not Rubinstein’s goal.
“I definitely reached the point where I was like, in order to keep growing this, I’d have to kind of dumb it down, and I really didn’t want to do that, or I would have to ignore things like food and travel and just focus on interiors or just focus on design. And I really didn’t want to do that. I was doing—consciously and purposefully— everything you’re not supposed to do with a podcast, other than worry about quality,” Rubinstein told AMO.
Based in New York City, Rubinstein has recorded 130 podcasts over 12 seasons with about 400,000 cumulative downloads to date. Serving a niche audience has served Rubinstein quite well: he has been profitable since his first season, reinvesting the money into the business and putting some away for retirement. Rubinstein, who has self-funded his efforts, also has a newsletter with sponsors, partners with others on events (like leading tours for Lumens, a design retailer and moderating panels) and holds his own events. Last month, he started selling a print magazine version of The Grand Tourist.
But with business going swimmingly then, why risk going to print? Rubinstein said he had noticed a significant shift back to print, with digital becoming too “convoluted and too unprofitable and too complex” for mid-size luxury brands.
Print is a way to provide deeper connections and relationships that just don’t translate in digital media, he said. The world of art, design and style “has been flattened by Instagram and the web,” Rubinstein said. He tries to provide depth and human connection that goes beyond surface-level imagery, and the magazine allows him to expand The Grand Tourist concept, offering long-form stories, commissioned photography and a tangible product that captures the essence of his podcast.
“We got a lot of encouragement from our clients, and I would say almost all of them helped out with the first issue,” Rubinstein said. “We were able to also get a ton of new clients as well that maybe weren’t able to do events, or they didn’t have an audio campaign—but they still believed in print.”
A Lobster and its Bling
The Grand Tourist is meant to evoke the grand tours through Europe that the wealthy would go on in the 18th century prior to settling down and getting married.
“You started with the classics. You would sow your wild oats. You would taste good food. You would see the sunshine. You would see all the different parts of Europe, and then you would go home to England to live on your family’s estate and be a boring lord or lady or what have you,” Rubinstein said.
The magazine—more akin to a hardcover coffee table book with three cover options including the aforementioned blinged-out lobster—was published last month in Belgium on linen with a tipped-in cover. It’s 364 pages long and includes an inside look at a Berlin museum that’s rarely visited to a photographic journey down the River Nile, and conversations with artists and designers from Tunisia and South Korea to Los Angeles and Oxford. It’s sold in select bookstores and online.
There are some 23 stories in the edition, which costs $45 each and will be published twice starting in 2026, written and photographed by gallerists, editors and furniture designers.
“It’s just trying to feel as much like you’ve traveled all over the world in a really sophisticated way,” Rubinstein said. “You can actually learn from these people who have seniority in all these different fields, like a painter or a chef or an artist or an architect or a collector or a gallerist, and that was really a big part of why I think people really respond to it… It was really about life.”
The first issue of The Grand Tourist in print had a circulation of 10,000, which will be slightly increased for next year. Rubinstein was particularly pleased with the launch party for the event, held at Apparatus Studio in New York in May with 550 attendees. They decided to go against the norm and charge for anyone interested in taking home a copy of the magazine.
“A lot of people in the industry were like, Don’t give it away. You can’t give this away. This is too beautiful,” Rubinstein said. But “asking people to cough up money at a cocktail event for the industry is ballsy, to say the least. And so we had one open copy that you could flip through, and then everything else was shrink wrapped. We brought 120 copies there, and hoping that we would have some leftover we could take home for our own archive… We sold every single copy, and at the end of the night, someone stole my sample copy… That made me think, like, wow, we really hit on something here, that the most jaded people in the universe would actually cough up money to buy a book that they would have on their coffee table.”
A key point for The Grand Tourist is that Rubinstein has worked closely on customization with sponsors. In the first issue, they did five content collaborations, including the custom cover with the Van Cleef necklace. Those custom partnerships should continue to evolve among the different media, including events, which they’d like to produce more of in-house.
As we start to scale up, we want to tackle more of the event production ourselves, and that’s a big part of growth for us in the future. Plus, we’re toying around with all sorts of different ideas, including an awards platform, custom publishing and a lot of creative consulting,” Rubinstein said. “I’m trying to be the most authentic version of the Grand Tours as humanly possible. And I find that if you are super authentic and genuine, but also high quality, people really do respond to that. The trick is really about how do you monetize it, and how you turn it into a business.
What he remains committed to is not growing for the sake of growth.
“I don’t really have that much of a desire to scale up, mostly because that’s why a lot of media is failing miserably—their sole reason for existing is no longer about producing something of quality, but of simply scaling up for the investor class,” Rubinstein said.
