In founder Jack Yan’s words

It’s New Zealand in the 1980s. Remember, this is pre-World Wide Web. New Zealand was coming out of its shell, but it still felt like an isolated place. I still remember a telex machine at my father’s work and the notion that you could be talking to someone on the other end in real time. Like all kids my age, I was fascinated with the movie War Games. It had been around for a while, but we were now used to the idea of satellite TV, of seeing events live from around the world. This was a period where you really felt, at least in the developed world, that tastes were converging, and it made sense to do things as one people, on one planet.

To complement what I was doing in the design business, I created a customer magazine, called Create Art Print, or CAP for short. Playing with a program called Neobook, I eventually created a DOS-based version that could be distributed via bulletin boards. I covered international news, as there was only so much going on here in New Zealand.

I spent time on the Reuter Textline terminal at my university. Adobe invented PDFs. The World Wide Web came into being—and was becoming more of a publishing medium. The world was coming together on this idealistic new medium, one where I didn’t need tens of thousands of dollars for a colour print run to tell the world about something. This was a level playing field. It didn’t matter where you were from. Whomever had the best content would win.

CAP Online was born, but there were greater titles to come.

The advent of Lucire and Autocade

Lucire was created as an online fashion magazine, the first in New Zealand, a single-issue student title called Fashionbrat excepting. Using a similar formula to our earlier publications, we’d do international features. We beat Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue online—the latter even advertised its website with us to get known. In 2003, we were nominated for a Webby Award. Lucire became the UN Environment Programme’s first fashion partner.

With seven years under our belt, we felt the brand was strong enough to go into print. From what we can make out, only Slate had managed to take a website into print before us. And that was just a Microsoft Word file run off at copy shops. We stayed true to our ethos, of being independent, of meritorious, global coverage. Since we didn’t have a print legacy, we had no reason to localize our coverage too much. People told us that they read each issue ‘from cover to cover’. We were on to something special.

In 2005, we were the first magazine to publish a sustainable style editorial, thanks to our good friend Summer Rayne Oakes. We also had our first licensed edition in Romania. Thailand, Qatar, Bahrain soon followed, and in 2018, Lucire KSA began as a monthly edition.

We kept refining Lucire, taking our readers on a global journey in every issue, and building up an online community. In 2020, Lucire Rouge appeared as a US-based edition with similar topics of fashion, beauty, lifestyle and travel, but including wellness, food and beverages.

Autocade was born in 2008 as an online resource on cars. By 2020, it had become so useful it was netting 10,000 page views a day. It took a shorter and shorter time to notch up another million page views. With that in mind, we felt there would be a demand for Autocade in print, and the first Autocade Yearbook was born—with endorsements from William Woollard (Top Gear) and award-winning motoring author Giles Chapman.

With both titles, we believe that if you’re spending time with us, we want to make it enjoyable and fruitful. Hence our motto, ‘The joy of knowledge’, or ‘Ipsa scientia gaudium est’.

The future

It doesn’t stop there. We knew the Lucire brand could go further when it was licensed for swimwear and intimate apparel briefly. Two Autocade yearbooks have now come out. We’ve begun adding other non-fiction titles, beginning with Panos Papadopoulos’s autobiography in paperback in 2024. We also have our own online store, Libriz, dispatching from the UK and US.

Online and in print, our work continues to take you on global journeys, bringing you that joy of knowledge.