Jan Wenderhold
Their greatest success was with the magazine Seventeen that was begun to be published in 1975. Its name was reflecting the fact that the preferred models for the magazine were at seventeen years of age or sixteen at youngest. However, as it featured models who were minors as per the legislation of many countries, Seventeen faced difficulty in worldwide distribution. For example, in the United States, Seventeen materials were prohibited. Seventeen also began to issue other magazines in later years, including Teeners from Holland and Seventeen Special. In 1986 Seventeen also started to produce videos. Seventeen preferred an amateur flair to the pro-am preference of many pornography producers. Often, male performers were real-life boyfriends of models.
By the 1990s, Seventeen changed its name to Club Seventeen, an umbrella label for most series. Also, they united various assets that functioned under companies such as Profil and Scala and formed the company Video Art Holland. In the late 90s, they initiated a process of change, featuring only models over 18 years of age, because they were informed, that the Netherlands were **** to raise the age to 18, because of a European law "harmonization".
After the first edition of SEVENTEEN came out (totally sold out), we had to get started on the second edition immediately. We had enough photos of teens in stock for the first few magazines, but I was worried about getting enough photos to fill a magazine each month. Thankfully, after a few months the success of the magazine was huge, and so was the offer of models. We became famous all over the world with our SEVENTEEN girls. All wearing our t-shirts, head bands and caps with the well known SEVENTEEN logo with the heart on it. Many of our “SPECIALS” were also brought out internationally. We sold several hundreds of SEVENTEEN video productions. At the hight of our success we sold over 60.000 copies of SEVENTEEN every month.
There were low points as well. We featured a German-Kurdish girl on one of our covers once. This got us threats from a couple of Kurdish families, which even resulted in us having to remove our entire circulation of the magazine in Germany.