Welcome to Wm Brown Weekly

Hey! I’m Matt Hranek, the founder of Wm Brown (my quarterly men’s lifestyle magazine), and best-selling author of A Man & His Watch, A Man & His Car, The Negroni: A Love Affair with a Classic Cocktail, and The Martini: Perfection in a Glass. I started my career as a photographer, but at some point I became less excited about shaping other people’s ideas, wanting to execute my own. I started a blog in 2009, The William Brown Project, named after my farm in upstate New York, where I wrote about all the things I loved: raising our own pigs and making charcuterie from them, antiquing in France, collecting vintage outerwear, etc. From there, I was given the dream opportunity to have my own TV show, Alternate Route—which I’d like to say was a bit ahead of its time, before the days of non-network niche programming—the fun lasted only one season. And then my friend who was the head of Condé Nast Traveler roped me in to be their men’s style editor. When those glory days were over, my wife, Yolanda Edwards, and I launched our own magazines, wanting to create something we felt was missing—and behold, Wm Brown, a men’s lifestyle magazine, and Yolo Journal, a travel lifestyle magazine, were born. We concentrated on print only, not wanting to be distracted by making a website (we had seen how much thankless work went into creating them), which we knew would kill our enthusiasm for making thoughtful content, besides being unsustainable for our tiny team. And now, a few years later, I’m excited to start this newsletter! Thanks for coming along on the ride. 

Why Subscribe?

Free subscribers will get my semi-regular posts, and paid subscribers will get weekly posts with my favorites in the worlds of style, food+drink, cars+watches, books, music, hooks+bullets, travel, and q+a—plus have access to the archive of newsletters.