Year Of The Playboy Bunny

The fortunes of Playboy Enterprises have suffered with the rise of the Internet, but the company continues to try and boost its brand, particularly in Asia where the bunny-head logo is still a sign of rugged iconoclasm and a kind of fashion brand.

As it happens, 2011 is the Year of the Rabbit, and the company plans to open a Playboy Mansion in the gambling mecca of Macau sometime in 2012. The company has already opened a Playboy Club in the former Portuguese colony.

Apparently, Playboy had been trying to open a club in Macau for a long time and finally struck a deal with Sands China Ltd., a unit of Las Vegas Sands Corp., led by Sheldon Adelson.

The new 12,000-foot Playboy Club opened Nov. 20 on top of the Sands hotel-casino in Macau with 18 bunny staff recruited from the U.S., Australia, Estonia, Hong Kong and Macau.

Playboy has tried to extend its publishing empire into Asia, but except for Japan, where the local edition suspended publication in Jan. 2009, they’ve had little success. The magazine in any form or language is banned in China, and a fairly tame Indonesia version was halted after several issues due to a backlash from Muslim hard-liners.