From Bourbon to Biscuits: Inside Garden & Gun’s Surprising Southern Portfolio

Garden & Gun is a magazine that’s less about flower beds and firearms as it is about a lifestyle that embraces both, and much more. 

Sure, there are articles on common backyard plants that can be toxic to dogs and over-under shotguns being the ideal for wild turkey hunting, but you are more likely to find stories on boneyard beaches, bourbon, barbecue, biscuits and back-porch music sessions.

Also offered by Garden & Gun? Clubs in Atlanta and Louisville featuring drinks and dining, a membership-only society, games and books, events like seafood rodeos and weekends of hunting and fishing and, finally, goodies from snifters to ostrich trim hats and trout patterned dog leashes to a signature G&G stationary set.

It was diversification of a company that was forced by financial strains to find alternative ways to survive. In 2008, it faced financial difficulties, even skipping an issue to save money.  As a privately held company, Garden & Gun doesn’t disclose financial details, but it has been profitable since 2013 and has experienced consistent revenue growth over the past 18 years, said Christian Bryant, senior vice president and publisher of Garden & Gun. The development of those diversified revenue streams alongside a strong advertising business and strategic media partners have been key drivers in that growth, he said.

The magazine, named after a now-defunct Charleston nightclub popular in the 1970s, has a circulation of around 400,000 and is published six times a year. Digital boasts 864,000 monthly unique visitors and over 1.5 monthly million page views. Co-founder and CEO Rebecca Darwin told the New York Times when it launched in 2007 that the title of the magazine captures its spirit.

“The ‘garden’ is really a metaphor for the land,” she says, “which is really what’s at the heart of this whole magazine. And then the ‘gun’ is the sporting life, which is, of course, a key element of the magazine.” 

Diversify, Diversify, Diversify

The publication has continued to diversify including a few special interest publications like a Garden & Gun Junior issue, which was developed with a strategic partner and is something Bryant may continue pursuing.

“We have had people come to us and say, ‘We want to open up 10 Garden & Gun restaurants around the country,’” Bryant told AMO. “We’re not ready for that yet. We’re still, I guess you could say, a little bit of control freaks and very protective over our brand.”

“We want to keep putting things out there in a smart way and not become this super mass thing,” he added. “Because we know our audience and we know they all feel like they’re part of a club anyway.”

And for some it’s a fairly exclusive club. The membership driven G&G Society costs $2,500 annually and includes an annual gathering at an exclusive resort. It currently has 56 household memberships across 21 states — that alone is a cool $140,000 a year in revenue. 

The readership of Garden & Gun is generally very affluent with an average net worth of around $2.6 million and a median age of 55. Its readership is split 39% female and 61% male, according to Garden & Gun’s 2024 subscriber study. 

“It’s been part of the strategy from the beginning for it to be a magazine that a household would enjoy,” Bryant said. 

It’s a generational publication, Bryant said, with new readers coming via introductions from friends or family. Airport newsstands have also been a driver for new readers, he said.

“You see it a lot at our events where there’s a lot younger audience in their 30s that are traveling with us to different places and they may be readers or they may be like, ‘Oh, my mom and dad used to read this and that’s how I got hooked,’” Bryant said. 

When Bryant joined the magazine 13 years ago, around 80% of the audience was based in the Southeast of America. Now that figure sits at around 70% and the highest growing audiences are on the West Coast and in the Northeast, he said.

“Parents send their kids to the Southern schools and discover us and take it back with them,” Bryant said.  

Events and Weddings

Garden & Gun’s latest offering, G&G Weddings, caters to its generational audience while trying to capture digital growth. Bryant describes it as a natural extension of what the magazine already does well since many of the destinations that they use for events also become places that people want to host weddings.

“We’ve turned our marketing team into a creative studio and an event marketing studio that once you run a certain amount of media with us, it opens doors to then purchase events and bigger experiences with us,” Bryant said. 

“We do about 60 to 70 events a year,” he added. “It’s a huge part of what we know our audience likes, what our partners like and when we put something out there, it sells out immediately.”

What’s unique about G&G Weddings is that it is not geared towards the bride, but rather to those who might be paying for the wedding or readers who might be finding love later in life.

“We believe the fathers of the grooms are probably not headed to Vegas to have a baller weekend with their friends,” Bryant said. “They’re looking to charter a flight to Montana to go fly fishing or to the Caribbean to do bone fishing—they’re having much more elevated bachelor type weekends.”

One of the challenges of the wedding market is that it’s a constant turnover of audience, Bryant said. But the digital platform is designed to offset this, being a hub that sits within the Garden & Gun site where readers can navigate to and buy either the digital magazine or engage with free content on the hub. 

Being digital means there’s the optionality to do a refresh six months later if certain brands didn’t make it in by the deadline, Bryant said. The goal is to do one digital issue a year and launch it in November, which he notes is the start of the “unofficial engagement season.”

“Our digital has grown a lot in the past several years,” Bryant said. “And this year I’m pacing to probably have one of my biggest years ever [in digital] and this does clearly have a correlation to how businesses are spending.”

“We’re seeing strong momentum in that area, driven by increased demand for premium content environments, custom storytelling, and innovative digital media solutions,” he said.

Bryant is already thinking toward other interesting partnerships and products to launch ahead of Garden & Gun’s 20th anniversary in two years time. He’s also exploring how to introduce audiences to the title through other means as newsstands in airports and stores dwindle.

“I’ve never liked to call ourselves a niche publication because we’re just as big as some of the bigger national brands,” Bryant said. “But that might be something I really want to start embracing again because we are a very special type of magazine and people think of us that way.”