The evolution of Playboy CEO Scott Flanders
By Sophie Pappas
In 2009 the board of directors at Playboy Enterprises, Inc. made the leap from a decades-long tradition of putting only family members at the helm. That all changed when Scott Flanders, now 59, was asked to lead the company perhaps best known for its center spreads of naked women.
Now, on a sunny 84-degree day in Los Angeles and a three-degree day in Carmel, the Carmel native and father of three sits in his office on Rodeo Drive.
“It was 81 degress yesterday in Beverly Hills,” he said during an interview with Current in Carmel. “I walked to lunch but had to take off my jacket because it was so hot.”
He and his wife keep a home in Newport Beach and on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, along with a vacation home in Colorado. They only sold their Carmel home in the Bridgewater neighborhood two years ago.
“I always joke that we should send our Christmas cards from our Rodeo Drive address just to be pretentious,” Flanders said, jokingly. “But we haven’t done that yet. It would be like saying Indiana boy makes it to Rodeo Drive.”
Even though, of course, that’s exactly what has happened.
The early years
Flanders was born in Carmel, but early on was deemed a “black sheep” for moving to the west side of Indianapolis with his parents, where he graduated from Ben Davis High School.
“My entire family is from Hamilton County,” he said. “My grandmother graduated from Carmel High School and my grandfather graduated from Fishers a bazillion years ago.”
After high school, he went farther west where he studied at the University of Colorado.
“My father thought I need a little bit of exposure out of state…but came back and went to law school at Indiana [University], then after law school I took a job in Indianapolis,” he said. “Once I did that I moved to Carmel and almost never left.”
He practiced law in Indianapolis for three years and worked locally until 1992 when he moved his wife Linda and three daughters, Jade, Jordan and Allison, to New York City for a job with the music and media company Columbia House.
“During this time we still spent a great deal of time and our summers in Carmel,” he said. “And now we still love Indiana and I’m glad that my daughters were raised there, as was I and my wife. I think that the grounding in the Midwest is all about the values of hard work and family and strong personal ethics,” he said. “It’s the real world. But all of my daughters would say they wouldn’t trade their upbringing in Carmel for anything in the world.”
The path to Playboy
In 2009, Flanders was exhausted. After decades of working in law, media and music industries plus nearly five years in the newspaper business and overseeing thousands of layoffs, it had all taken its toll on him and he was ready for a change. That’s when Playboy approached him.
“It was really a classic case of a headhunter who I had met in New York,” Flanders, who was by now living in Los Angles, said. “She got the assignment from the board to hire the first non-family member CEO of Playboy. And she knew 180 people that she processed through the search and I was just one of the candidates.”
His wife and daughters supported him fully, something that many people still find hard to believe.
“Whenever we’re at cocktail parties I always get asked that question,” he said. “People always ask, ‘How did you get the job?’ ‘Have you met [Hugh Heffner]?’ then ‘What did your wife say?’ Interestingly enough my wife strongly encouraged me to do the job. Her feeling was that it would be a lot more interesting that the newspaper business.”
His wife told him it would be “rejuvenating.”
“She could see that [the newspaper business]was wearing me down,” he said.
Flanders said his wife has been by his side through all of the international travel and the “complexities” of their busy lives, although he said he’s not so sure his wife understood the commitments she would have as wife of a CEO when she first encouraged him to take the job.
“I don’t think she fully understood all of the parties she would have to host at the [Playboy Mansion],” Flanders said. “Recently before Halloween, a woman told my wife ‘Oh I’d love to go to one of those parties at the mansion,’ and my wife said, ‘Well why don’t you dress up at Linda Flanders and host it for me?’”
Restoring the vision
These days, Flanders spends his weeks revamping what he calls Heffner’s original vision for an “aspirational lifestyle brand,” and has brought Playboy out of the pornography business and into a multi-level media outlet that publishes articles about everything from clothing to dating, and sometimes even sex.
In recent months Flanders has been quoted saying that Playboy will stray from having nudity on its pages, which is true, but only to an extent.
“It should be tasteful,” Flanders said. “But it was never supposed to be porn. That’s never been the vision.”
Three years ago, the company sold off its porn TV business and has since been “chipping away” on what Flanders calls an “ice block” to regain the company’s online presence with a new, non-porn, and “safe for work” website.
“I always use the example of if you’re carving an ice elephant, you have to start with a block of ice and you chip away anything that’s not consistent with the elephant,” he said.
Last year, the website had more than 20 million unique visitors, a point of pride for Flanders.
“It’s about being tasteful and classy,” he said. “It’s about restoring Playboy.”
About Scott
Job: CEO of Playboy Enterprises
Hometown: Carmel, Indiana
High School: Ben Davis High
Colleges: University of Colorado and Indiana University School of Law
Favorite team: Colts
Wife and kids: Wife Linda and three daughters; Jade, Jordan and Allison
