My Greatest Mistake: Jo Elvin Editor, 'Glamour' Magazine

I was editor of Sugar, the girls' magazine, in late 1996. Sugar was the market leader and my whole background had been in teenage titles.

One of the golden rules at the time was that putting girls on the front of pop magazines didn't sell. We had just come off the back of the whole Take That phenomenon, and just before the Spice Girls broke I was taken out to lunch by their record company publicist. It was the big sell. They had bought lots of advertising space in all the magazines and launched the whole "girl power" thing. But they were untried and untested, and the publicist really wanted me to put them on the cover of Sugar. I said – in the true style of the man who turned down the Beatles – "Oh, it will never work – girls don't sell magazines".

It wasn't until about four weeks later, when I was in Dublin for the Sugar cover-girl competition – that I realised that I had just missed the next big thing. Thousands of girls turned up wanting to be our new cover girl. Every time the compère put on the Spice Girls' song "Wannabe", these screaming girls, who before were making a noise, pushing barriers and scrambling for free make-up bags, were suddenly silenced into miming the words and doing little dance routines, lost in a world of their own.

I got back to London and said that I'd like the Spice Girls on my cover after all. But by then, they were negotiating to do The Face, not Sugar. It would be safe to say that this was a misjudged moment. I seriously questioned how I got it so wrong. Was I really that out of touch with my readers? But in my defence, the Spice Girls did rewrite the rulebook. Until then, there wasn't a sellable female band.

I still like to go with my instincts, but this mistake reminds me I'm not always right. Now if someone is passionate about something, I give a bit more thought before sticking to any absolute rules.