Mr. Magazine

“We don’t hear from the people that are using the magazine that they’re dying for it to be digital. In fact, I will tell you that we had a digital edition that we stopped doing. It cost us more to produce it, because no one ordered it; no one wanted it.” Sally Sampson

“I honestly could not begin to understand why people feel that way. I still read paper books and I love magazines. I just think that there is something really special about print. I have an iPad and I read The New York Times on it; I read little things on it. But I think there is no sensuality to digital. Touching and feeling the paper is amazing. And I think for a child, for the magazine to be theirs, is pretty incredible.” Sally Sampson (on the myth that digital natives have an aversion to print)

The mission of ChopChop is clear and precise: To inspire and teach children and families to cook real food together. The non-profit brand believes strongly that cooking and eating together as a family is a vital step in resolving the obesity and hunger epidemics that are in the world. It’s an absolutely brilliant idea and one that has grown the magazine and its brand into many different areas of need. The magazine is a useful tool for doctors, teachers and anyone who wants to see a change in the eating habits of children and their families.

The founder and president of ChopChop is Sally Sampson, a seasoned writer of cookbooks and many, many articles. Sally had a reason very close to her heart for starting ChopChop and trying to make a difference in the eating habits of children, one of her own children had a chronic illness growing up and Sally felt the need to help and give back in some way by using her considerable talents to further this wonderful and needed mission.

I spoke with Sally recently and we talked about that mission and about the past, present and future of the ChopChop brand, or maybe movement would be a better description. Thanks to Sally’s efforts, doctors are including cooking and the values of good eating habits into their well visits for children, and teachers have a curriculum that they can utilize to further this education of food in the classrooms. It’s a movement that shows no signs of slowing down, as soon there will be another magazine geared toward older adults who also need help in the kitchen when it comes to eating healthier. And the grandest thing about all of these wonderful titles? They’re all in print. Mr. Magazine™ is definitely smiling.

So, without further ado, here is the Mr. Magazine™ interview with a woman who knows her way around a healthy kitchen, Sally Sampson, founder and president, ChopChop magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On her motivation behind ChopChop magazine: My career experience has been as a cookbook writer and a magazine contributor. I wrote different cookbooks and I contributed to a lot of different food magazines and other magazines. And I also had a child with a chronic illness. She needed to be on a very, very low-fat diet, so as a result I learned a lot about obesity. I began to feel that writing cookbooks wasn’t what I wanted to keep doing. I wanted to give back in some way. And I thought that I could use my skills as a cookbook writer to help address obesity by getting doctors to prescribe cooking during well-child visits. So, I don’t know if you have children, but it’s now mandated that you take your kids at certain times and that doctor’s talk about healthy eating and physical activity during these appointments.

On expanding the mission: We’ve expanded the mission to obesity, poor nutrition and hunger. Unfortunately, that covers a huge portion of the population. Poor nutrition is an obesity effect, rich and poor, and hunger affects the poor and we’re focused in our brains on those most at risk, but ChopChop is written to appeal to any children. We hope that the Whole Foods moms pay for it and the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) food moms get it for free through their SNAP program.

On whether she sees the niche market of children’s food magazines as growing: Well, it’s definitely grown. We’ve quadrupled in volume since our first year. And we have a bit of a strange business model. We’re a non-profit and we don’t take any ads. So, it really is 39 pages of content. There is one page where we have sponsors.

On any stumbling blocks that she’s had to overcome: If you asked my staff if we had stumbling blocks, they would say yes more than I would. I’m just the sort of person who puts one foot in front of the other and I don’t worry too much. Having had a chronically ill child, I don’t worry too much about anything other than my children being sick.

On the most pleasant moment she’s had throughout this magazine journey: We went to the White House and we interviewed Mrs. Obama; we did sort of a shared 5th anniversary of “Let’s Move” and ChopChop. We both launched within a month of each other and that was really incredible. We brought two kids to the White House and they interviewed her and she was amazing; she gave us way more time than she said she would. She was beyond charming with the kids. That was an amazing experience. We also won the James Beard Award, which was also incredible. So, those things are not insignificant, but I would say that the letters that we get from kids are just really moving and very real.

On whether anyone has ever told her she was out of her mind for launching a print magazine in a digital age: Oh yes, all of the time. Of course, the people who ask us if we’re out of our minds are not our readers. I think for a child to get this beautiful four-color thing that they can hold and touch, where they see a child who looks like them is important. We show kids of every color, adorable, braces, in wheelchairs; we just featured a child with Down Syndrome. We show real kids, and we don’t put makeup on them; we don’t tell them to smile. So, your grandchildren, and I don’t have grandchildren yet, but my grandchildren someday; the idea is that any child should be able to open the magazine and feel like they can relate.

On the myth that digital natives do not want anything to do with print: I honestly could not begin to understand why people feel that way. I still read paper books and I love magazines. I just think that there is something really special about print. I have an iPad and I read The New York Times on it; I read little things on it. But I think there is no sensuality to digital. Touching and feeling the paper is amazing. And I think for a child, for the magazine to be theirs, is pretty incredible.

On why she thinks it took the magazine industry so long to discover that print is not dead: I think it’s human nature and that people just have a tendency to go to extremes. First it was: no, you can’t eat any fat. Now you can eat fat. It must be the nature of human beings. I don’t know. I never felt like paper was dead and as you said in the beginning, we launched when people thought we were nuts. We launched within a very short time of Gourmet closing. Everybody asked why we were doing paper? But it just seemed like the right thing to do.

On whether she feels now that ChopChop is a movement rather than just a magazine: I do. If you think about it, we’ve got the cooking club; we have the curriculum; we’re not just a magazine. And also, when I started, not only did people ask was I crazy for doing print, but they also asked are you crazy; kid’s cooking? Like, who cares? But you look at it now and everybody sees kid’s cooking as a pipeline to many different things, whether it’s teaching kids about math or teaching them manners or teaching them to be responsible for themselves; really cooking is everything. There’s nothing that you can’t learn in a kitchen.

On what she would say if this interview were conducted one year from now: I would tell you that we launched a third magazine called “Seasoned.” And that magazine is for older adults. And you would say to me, but you’re focused on kids, and I would say to you, we’re focused on people who need help in the kitchen. “Seasoned” is launching in February, 2017. The AARP Foundation gave us a grant and I believe we’re actually launching in Mississippi as one of four southern states. It’s a smaller magazine and it’s for adults who need to cook from scratch instead of buying junk, and who are downsizing.

On what someone would find her doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at her home: I cook a ton. This sounds crazy, but whenever I’m emptying my dishwasher, I’m sort of amazed at how much I cook. I cook all of the time. I don’t eat anything prepared; I make every single thing from scratch.

On what keeps her up at night: Not ChopChop. The direction of the country keeps me up at night, or if my children are having a problem, that concerns me, even though they’re in their 20s. That’s the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Sally Sampson, founder and president, ChopChop magazine.

Samir Husni: Six years ago you founded ChopChop as a bit of an experiment, but since then it has turned into somewhat of a movement. I see that you’re now worldwide and in two languages; you have different editions, one for the woman, infant and child, and one for the schools. If you can, go back six years and tell me what motivated you to begin this ChopChop journey, and then briefly bring me up to date.

Sally Sampson: My career experience has been as a cookbook writer and a magazine contributor. I wrote different cookbooks and I contributed to a lot of different food magazines and other magazines. And I also had a child with a chronic illness. She needed to be on a very, very low-fat diet, so as a result I learned a lot about obesity. I began to feel that writing cookbooks wasn’t what I wanted to keep doing. I wanted to give back in some way. And I thought that I could use my skills as a cookbook writer to help address obesity by getting doctors to prescribe cooking during well-child visits. So, I don’t know if you have children, but it’s now mandated that you take your kids at certain times and that doctor’s talk about healthy eating and physical activity during these appointments.

And what doctors were telling me was that they were talking about healthy eating all of the time, but they actually had no tools. So, I conceived ChopChop as a tool for doctors, but right after we launched, suddenly other kinds of organizations were coming to me and saying that they wanted it too. After school programs, Indian reservations, food banks; just wherever you could find kids. So, we expanded it from doctors “prescribing” it to anyone that worked with kids.

Samir Husni: So, you started it for a specific reason and now you’re all over the map with it.

Sally Sampson: Well, I wouldn’t say that we’re all over the map. We’ve expanded the mission to obesity, poor nutrition and hunger. Unfortunately, that covers a huge portion of the population. Poor nutrition is an obesity effect, rich and poor, and hunger affects the poor and we’re focused in our brains on those most at risk, but ChopChop is written to appeal to any children. We hope that the Whole Foods moms pay for it and the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) food moms get it for free through their SNAP program.

Samir Husni: There are a lot of children’s magazines out there, but you were one of the forerunners when it comes to a food magazine for kids. But there are some imitators; even the Food Network publishes a special one once a year.

Sally Sampson: Yes, and that’s all ads. We have no ads.

Samir Husni: Do you see this niche market as growing?

Sally Sampson: Well, it’s definitely grown. We’ve quadrupled in volume since our first year. And we have a bit of a strange business model. We’re a non-profit and we don’t take any ads. So, it really is 39 pages of content. There is one page where we have sponsors.

The way we operate is you can get a subscription; so let’s say it’s you; you get a subscription for one of your grandchildren at $14.95 per year; done. Then the next step up is you could decide that you want every child in your granddaughter’s class to have a copy of ChopChop, so then you could order a teacher pack. And anyone can order that teacher pack. You pay for that and it’s very heavily discounted. It also comes with curriculum, so the teacher can use ChopChop in the classroom for math, science, social studies; now we’re doing some Spanish language skills, and that’s the next level of sponsorship. And the reason we did teacher packs is because teachers said to us that they were using ChopChop and wanted to continue to do so in the classroom, but that they were really busy, could we create curriculum? So, we’ve been doing that.

Then the next step up is you could be a doctor’s office or anything really, and you could order a case, which could be either 50 copies or 100 copies. Then the next level is a bulk order; we have people who buy 10,000 copies and they distribute them. Above that, we have people that the magazine is customized for, so we do about 12 customized versions. For instance, there are land grant universities that work with the U.S.D.A. and they use their SNAP education funds to pay for ChopChop as educational material. So, the University of Kentucky buys, and it varies from quarter to quarter, so plus or minus 150,000 copies. So, the bulk of our business is bulk. We’re not on newsstands; we do subscriptions, but that’s not the main part of our business. And, unlike other magazines, we don’t give away subscriptions because we’re not trying to get our numbers up to get advertisers.

Samir Husni: The way you operate allows you to stay truly honest to your mission.

Sally Sampson: Exactly. And I’m very, very strict about that. Everything goes through the mission for us. Does this fulfill our mission? Now, that’s not to say that sometimes we don’t say this or that might be an interesting thing to experiment with, but it would never be against our mission in the first place, if that makes sense.

Samir Husni: Throughout these six years, has it been a stroll through a rose garden for you, or have you had some stumbling blocks that you’ve had to overcome?

Sally Sampson: If you asked my staff if we had stumbling blocks, they would say yes more than I would. I’m just the sort of person who puts one foot in front of the other and I don’t worry too much. Having had a chronically ill child, I don’t worry too much about anything other than my children being sick.

But there are things that have happened, such as we lost a major sponsor about a year ago. I know this may sound Pollyannaish, but it really does seem like when one door closes another door opens. There was a time when money was tight, obviously, but it doesn’t seem to stay that way. I’ve never had to lay anyone off or to make compromises that I didn’t want to make.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant moment for you throughout this magazine journey?

Sally Sampson: We went to the White House and we interviewed Mrs. Obama; we did sort of a shared 5th anniversary of “Let’s Move” and ChopChop. We both launched within a month of each other and that was really incredible. We brought two kids to the White House and they interviewed her and she was amazing; she gave us way more time than she said she would. She was beyond charming with the kids. That was an amazing experience.

We also won the James Beard Award, which was also incredible. So, those things are not insignificant, but I would say that the letters that we get from kids are just really moving and very real. For instance, we got a letter recently from a nine-year-old, and they’re always drawn, there are always pictures on them. And the child wrote: I told my mother that I would give her one million dollars if we could just test one recipe. And that’s incredible.

It’s just incredible. We get these very sincere letters from kids and it feels like we’re changing their lives.

Samir Husni: We live in a digital world and yet you launched the magazine in print, and in really, the height of that digital age. And you continue in print six years later. Has anyone approached you and told you that you were out of your mind for launching a print magazine in a digital age?

Sally Sampson: Oh yes, all of the time. Of course, the people who ask us if we’re out of our minds are not our readers. I think for a child to get this beautiful four-color thing that they can hold and touch, where they see a child who looks like them is important. We show kids of every color, adorable, braces, in wheelchairs; we just featured a child with Down Syndrome. We show real kids, and we don’t put makeup on them; we don’t tell them to smile. So, your grandchildren, and I don’t have grandchildren yet, but my grandchildren someday; the idea is that any child should be able to open the magazine and feel like they can relate.

And I think that’s really important. We’ve been very diligent about that. And particularly with low-income kids and all of the Xeroxed copies of things that they receive, they don’t get that glossy and beautiful magazine. And we don’t hear from the people that are using the magazine that they’re dying for it to be digital. In fact, I will tell you that we had a digital edition that we stopped doing. It cost us more to produce it, because no one ordered it; no one wanted it.

That said we have an online cooking club, which you should get all of your grandchildren to join. It’s free. And it’s really more about skills. So, it’s not as if we have no digital presence. This year we’re also going to do an app.

Samir Husni: You’re not the first to tell me that the younger generations crave print and want to have something in their hands. I see it with my own grandchildren. They get their magazines, whether it’s Highlights or Hello for my one-year-old, and they love them. So, why do you think that there’s this myth that because we live in a digital age, the digital natives don’t want anything to do with print? Do you think we’re lumping all of print together in the same pile; the newspapers, magazines and specialty things?

Sally Sampson: I honestly could not begin to understand why people feel that way. I still read paper books and I love magazines. I just think that there is something really special about print. I have an iPad and I read The New York Times on it; I read little things on it. But I think there is no sensuality to digital. Touching and feeling the paper is amazing. And I think for a child, for the magazine to be theirs, is pretty incredible. That’s the feedback that we get. So, I don’t really know.

Samir Husni: I’m starting to hear more editors in chief and more CEOs say that they’re starting to think print first again. Why do you think it took the magazine industry so long to discover that print is not dead?

Sally Sampson: I think it’s human nature and that people just have a tendency to go to extremes. First it was: no, you can’t eat any fat. Now you can eat fat. It must be the nature of human beings. I don’t know. I never felt like paper was dead and as you said in the beginning, we launched when people thought we were nuts. We launched within a very short time of Gourmet closing. Everybody asked why we were doing paper? But it just seemed like the right thing to do.

Samir Husni: Do you feel now that ChopChop is a movement rather than just a print magazine?

Sally Sampson: I do. If you think about it, we’ve got the cooking club; we have the curriculum; we’re not just a magazine. And also, when I started, not only did people ask was I crazy for doing print, but they also asked are you crazy; kid’s cooking? Like, who cares? But you look at it now and everybody sees kid’s cooking as a pipeline to many different things, whether it’s teaching kids about math or teaching them manners or teaching them to be responsible for themselves; really cooking is everything. There’s nothing that you can’t learn in a kitchen.

You learn cooperation; a respect for other cultures; it’s science. We teach kids about fermentation and we teach them about emulsification, and we teach them how to multiply. We teach them, oh, here’s this dish and it’s eaten in 10 different countries, except in this country they put cumin in it and in that country they put dill in it, and it has a slightly different name, but it shows how people are the same all over the world.

I think about when my children were small, they’re in their early 20s now and we live in Watertown, Mass., which is very Armenian. My kids would bring hummus to school. And Watertown is so diverse, and they were teased for bringing hummus, but now hummus is like ketchup. (Laughs) So, the world changes around food.

Samir Husni: If you and I are having this conversation one year from now, what will you tell me? What are your future expectations for ChopChop?

Sally Sampson: I would tell you that we launched a third magazine called “Seasoned.” And that magazine is for older adults. And you would say to me, but you’re focused on kids, and I would say to you, we’re focused on people who need help in the kitchen. “Seasoned” is launching in February, 2017. The AARP Foundation gave us a grant and I believe we’re actually launching in Mississippi as one of four southern states. It’s a smaller magazine and it’s for adults who need to cook from scratch instead of buying junk, and who are downsizing. It’s like a cousin to ChopChop. It’s not going to look just like ChopChop, but you will look at it and get it.

Samir Husni: If I showed up at your home unexpectedly one evening after work, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine; reading your iPad; cooking; having a glass of wine; or something else?

Sally Sampson: All of the above except for the wine. I cook a ton. This sounds crazy, but whenever I’m emptying my dishwasher, I’m sort of amazed at how much I cook. I cook all of the time. I don’t eat anything prepared; I make every single thing from scratch.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Sally Sampson: Not ChopChop. The direction of the country keeps me up at night, or if my children are having a problem, that concerns me, even though they’re in their 20s. That’s the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

A Mr. Magazine™ Launch Story

“I’ve always believed in print and I don’t think it will ever go away. About eight or nine years ago when I was still in design school, they were saying that since the industry was moving toward digital, if you’re a designer you need to make sure you know how to make a website, but I always believed in print and that was my passion. There’s nothing like picking up a book and feeling and smelling that beautiful paper, and the beauty of the cover. You don’t get all of that on a Kindle; you don’t get that experience. So, I created this magazine for print and not for digital. We never offer a digital version of the magazine, because the experience would not be the same. For me, I feel like print will never go away.” Daniel Tran

The story behind the wedding is vital to the powers-that-be at Geraldine magazine, namely Daniel Tran, editor in chief and creative director. According to Daniel, Geraldine is a wedding publication that serves as an inspiration for couples who want to create a refined and intimate event. The content between its covers is both thought-provoking and uplifting, and the photographs are nothing short of brilliant. The magazine is a breathtaking venture that proves talent and dreams certainly go hand-in-hand. The passionate entrepreneur is certainly alive and well inside of Daniel Tran.

I spoke with Daniel recently and we talked about Geraldine. It was as edifying a conversation as the magazine itself is. Daniel’s love for the world of visual design is definitely apparent as you flip through the pages of Geraldine. Having attended the Academy of Art of San Francisco, he was torn between heading for New York after graduation or staying in San Francisco and creating something uniquely different on his own. And with the artful Geraldine, we see his choice and appreciate it. Daniel calls it an inspirational force and Mr. Magazine™ would have to agree with him.

The magazine is a visual masterpiece and the young man behind it a true entrepreneur. So, I invite you to relax and enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Daniel Tran, as you come inside the world of dreams, talent, and wedded bliss.

But first the sound-bites:

On the genesis of the magazine: I graduated from design school about six years ago, the Academy of Art of San Francisco, and it was my intention to do something related to page layout and design in print. So, I was deciding if I should go to New York and work for the Martha Stewart brand, because they do amazing work and I’ve always appreciated the beautiful typography in the layouts coming out of Martha Stewart, but instead of going to New York I decided to stay here in San Francisco. That was when I started to think about whether I wanted to do branding, design, or if I wanted to start something on my own. I had been following Kinfolk magazine and Darling; these independent magazines that focused more on storytelling in an artful way. So, when I looked at what I could do that was sort of in a similar vein, but that I could tap into, I looked at the wedding industry and realized that people were spending so much money in their own weddings, but it wasn’t being displayed or communicated in an artful way. So I felt like that I could somehow take that subject and turn it into an art form. And that’s how I started the magazine.

On the name Geraldine: When we came up with the brand, my team and I, we tossed around a bunch of key words and we looked at the audience that we wanted to reach out to. There were common words and key words; meaningful words that resonated with us. So, it was this big process to come up with a name that was memorable and also strong. And we wanted a name instead of a word, so Geraldine was somehow part of the list. For me, when it comes to a brand, it can sound beautiful, but for me it also has to look beautiful written out. Or look beautiful as a logo. It has to make sense, so Geraldine was where we ended up. And there wasn’t any personal relation to the name. It wasn’t my grandmother’s name or anything like that.

On the most pleasant unexpected surprise that happened during the journey of launching the magazine: The most unexpected surprise was that the industry people were very interested in the creation, and when we shipped over a sample copy to some of the industry leaders, I didn’t expect them to respond to me in one day. They were so interested and loved the creation and the execution of the magazine. That was one pleasant, unexpected surprise.

On the biggest stumbling block that he had to face and how he overcame it: One thing was to figure out the execution part. We were working with a printer in Canada because we wanted the magazine to be printed in an artful way and executed in the same vein that the publication was offered, so we put up a huge investment in getting the light printer to print it, but after two issues we realized that the cost was way too high. So, we had to figure out another way to lower the cost of the printing and the production of the magazine.

On how he is trying to make the magazine more of an experience for his readers:
It’s not about the most expensive wedding out there; it could be a farm-to-table type of wedding that someone put together for $15,000. So, it’s not so much about money as it is about the story behind the wedding. This couple has an interesting background and the way they put together the wedding is interesting. The way they hired the team that produced the wedding for them is unique; just things like that. So, we want to communicate that to new brides who are putting together their own weddings and we want to educate them in all aspects of the wedding, from working on their stationery to working with their wedding planners and florists in these capacities.

On how he feels about the future of print: I’ve always believed in print and I don’t think it will ever go away. About eight or nine years ago when I was still in design school, they were saying that since the industry was moving toward digital, if you’re a designer you need to make sure you know how to make a website, but I always believed in print and that was my passion. There’s nothing like picking up a book and feeling and smelling that beautiful paper, and the beauty of the cover. You don’t get all of that on a Kindle; you don’t get that experience.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly to his home one evening: You would find me on Pinterest. Before even the social media came out, I was always looking through magazines and other things for ideas. But in this day and age, I come home and after dinner I go on Pinterest. That’s my sort of downtime. I want to be inspired and so I go on Pinterest. I also collect books, so many books. I love books. I love typography books. The one element in design that I truly love and am passionate about is typography.

On what keeps him up at night: How the magazine could be evolved. In the beginning, I had a lot of angst and sleepless nights because when we first released the preorder of the magazine there were only like 50 orders coming in and I was nervous. It might look easy to sell 500 copies of a book, but believe me, it’s hard. (Laughs)

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Daniel Tran, editor in chief and creative director, Geraldine magazine.

Samir Husni: Tell me about the genesis of Geraldine.

Daniel Tran: I graduated from design school about six years ago, the Academy of Art of San Francisco, and it was my intention to do something related to page layout and design in print. So, I was deciding if I should go to New York and work for the Martha Stewart brand, because they do amazing work and I’ve always appreciated the beautiful typography in the layouts coming out of Martha Stewart, but instead of going to New York I decided to stay here in San Francisco.

That was when I started to think about whether I wanted to do branding, design, or if I wanted to start something on my own. I had been following Kinfolk magazine and Darling; these independent magazines that focused more on storytelling in an artful way. So, when I looked at what I could do that was sort of in a similar vein, but that I could tap into, I looked at the wedding industry and realized that people were spending so much money in their own weddings, but it wasn’t being displayed or communicated in an artful way. So I felt like that I could somehow take that subject and turn it into an art form. And that’s how I started the magazine.

I began by reaching out to a group of industry leaders in the wedding business. What I did was reached out to laser photographers that shoot more film, but also work on brands like Martha Stewart, and I really hand-selected some of the people to share the vision I had for the magazine and asked them would they like to work with us.

It’s a very candid magazine; I didn’t want to be sneaky or creep up on people with the concept. It’s pretty direct. So I just reached out to them and explained what the magazine was about. And I did reach out to a lot of the major leaders in this industry, and I received a lot of closed doors in my face, to be honest. Then some people didn’t respond at all.

We also did a test project first because I wasn’t sure if people would even be willing to spend $30 on a magazine. But while Geraldine is a magazine, it’s more like a softcover book, where there was no advertisement. Basically we highlighted the industry, hand-selected people who were doing beautiful work and has that organic and classic aesthetic.

We were also thinking about where we could sell the magazine. The first place that came to mind was Anthropologie because they sell a hand-selected number of publications, Kinfolk is being sold there. So, I thought there is a space for us there, because they don’t have a wedding publication yet.

Initially, after finishing crafting the magazine, I sent it over there and they loved it. We only sent a sample copy with 20 or 30 pages; at that time we hadn’t gone to print yet. So, we sent it over to the buyers and they loved the magazine. And they were really interested in stocking it. So really, everything just came from there.

Samir Husni: How did you come up with the name Geraldine for the magazine?

Daniel Tran: When we came up with the brand, my team and I, we tossed around a bunch of key words and we looked at the audience that we wanted to reach out to. There were common words and key words; meaningful words that resonated with us. So, it was this big process to come up with a name that was memorable and also strong. And we wanted a name instead of a word, so Geraldine was somehow part of the list. For me, when it comes to a brand, it can sound beautiful, but for me it also has to look beautiful written out. Or look beautiful as a logo. It has to make sense, so Geraldine was where we ended up. And there wasn’t any personal relation to the name. It wasn’t my grandmother’s name or anything like that.

We got a lot of people curious about why we chose that name. In fact, the first thing people ask me is why I picked the name Geraldine.

Samir Husni: You have managed to create a beautiful, coffee table book/magazine. Tell me what was the most pleasant and unexpected surprise that happened during the journey of launching this magazine?

Daniel Tran: The most unexpected surprise was that the industry people were very interested in the creation, and when we shipped over a sample copy to some of the industry leaders, I didn’t expect them to respond to me in one day. They were so interested and loved the creation and the execution of the magazine. That was one pleasant, unexpected surprise.

And there were others. You’re creating this masterpiece and it’s your baby, and then you spend so much time and you get so many people involved and you keep asking yourself whether people are going to pay $30 for it. That’s a lot because we’ve almost doubled the price of Geraldine compared to some other magazines. And that was a scary part.

One other surprise was when we went to the U.K. because the shipping costs were so expensive, the magazine sold for $40 and the fact that people were willing to pay $40 for it was awesome. That was another surprise for me.

Samir Husni: What was the biggest stumbling block that you had to face and how did you overcome it?

Daniel Tran: One thing was to figure out the execution part. We were working with a printer in Canada because we wanted the magazine to be printed in an artful way and executed in the same vein that the publication was offered, so we put up a huge investment in getting the light printer to print it, but after two issues we realized that the cost was way too high. So, we had to figure out another way to lower the cost of the printing and the production of the magazine.

But once the brand was out there, people loved so much about the magazine that they would send us content without asking for payment or without us having to produce it, because when we produce an editorial it’s very costly. But of course, that doesn’t mean that we take just anything for the magazine.

We’re now working with different collaborators and partners in the industry, which is another way for their work to be featured, but we do it as a collaborative process, and not selling anything. And then the other struggle that we have is with advertisement. In this day and age, and in the digital world with Instagram and Facebook, a lot of brands do not want to advertise because the wedding industry is a little different than fashion. The wedding industry really doesn’t understand the value of advertising and with the advertisement model; it doesn’t really work for us because our magazine is more about storytelling.

In Issue #3, we tried some ad things, but it’s more like we collaborated with the brands and we produced editorial for them and then we advertised their advertorial. But we got pushbacks from our readers saying that they loved the magazine for what it stood for, and it was distracting for the magazine to feature wedding dresses and other things, so that was another roadblock for us. It wasn’t an easy task to break through.

And now we’re working on Issue #5, number four was released a couple of months ago. And we’re continually keeping the magazine without advertisements, because we’ve decided that’s the best route for us. We went from $30 to $25, because we want to reach a wider audience, where people can afford the magazine. So, we lowered the cover price by $5. And if it makes sense to do so, we’ll lower it a little more, but with no advertisements inside the magazine, I think we’re now at the right price. As I said, it’s a coffee table book more than a magazine.

Samir Husni: As you’re creating, and to quote from your mission statement, “this refined and intimate event,” how are you trying to make the magazine more of an experience for the audience, rather than just ink on paper?

Daniel Tran: When we get submissions, editorial content or real weddings, basically our magazine is to inspire new brides, and not just brides, but also industry people because they’re the ones who are working with us. So, throughout the entire process we don’t do this alone, we can’t. We have to rely on industry folks who give us the right type of content that we like to feature.

It’s not about the most expensive wedding out there; it could be a farm-to-table type of wedding that someone put together for $15,000. So, it’s not so much about money as it is about the story behind the wedding. This couple has an interesting background and the way they put together the wedding is interesting. The way they hired the team that produced the wedding for them is unique; just things like that. So, we want to communicate that to new brides who are putting together their own weddings and we want to educate them in all aspects of the wedding, from working on their stationery to working with their wedding planners and florists in these capacities.

But it’s different than how Martha Stewart weddings would guide someone during the whole planning process. We’re not trying to guide anyone in the process, because everybody has their own way; it’s a very personal thing. It’s whatever that particular couple wants for their own wedding. We always focus on intimate events and events that are unique and relatable.

We also stay away from over-the-top weddings, the ones with extravagant chandeliers and things. That’s not really our thing. We really strongly believe in our curation process. I have a managing editor that helps to filter through the content. And now that we’re working on Issue #5, I think the industry understands what this brand is about. And if there’s a certain wedding that they know doesn’t make sense for the brand, they don’t send it our way.

Samir Husni: With your background as a creative designer and art school, and now that you’re more of a storyteller and magazine maker; do you think that the future of print is going to be this combination of art, photography and beautiful things, or there’s still room for anything in print?

Daniel Tran: I’ve always believed in print and I don’t think it will ever go away. About eight or nine years ago when I was still in design school, they were saying that since the industry was moving toward digital, if you’re a designer you need to make sure you know how to make a website, but I always believed in print and that was my passion. There’s nothing like picking up a book and feeling and smelling that beautiful paper, and the beauty of the cover. You don’t get all of that on a Kindle; you don’t get that experience. So, I created this magazine for print and not for digital, so we never offer a digital version of the magazine, because the experience would not be the same. For me, I feel like print will never go away.

And yes, right now, with the social media impact, we are very conscious about what we put on our social media and it has to be in brand with the print publication. We’re actually working on our blog and our new website that will have content from our magazine. It’s another way we’re using digital to grow our print publication. It’s not going to replace our publication. But we are adapting to the digital age as well. Print is my passion though, and if people stop buying print, that is when I want to stop.

There are a few independent wedding publications out there, but for us I want it to be educational without dictating that things have to be any certain way. It’s an inspirational force. If something doesn’t inspire me, then I won’t put it in the magazine. Every issue we produce a vital fashion editorial because we want to educate the bride. We’re not telling her what to wear; we’re telling her that there are other unique gowns to choose from as a bride. And we show that through the way we style our models; the way we have the photographer that we hire shoot the story; we’re always challenging ourselves to make our bridal fashion editorial as unique as possible.

In Issue #4 we went to Aspen, Colorado, which is another wedding destination, so we used Aspen as a backdrop. We shot the two models in the snow with beautiful dresses; it was a lot of work, but we were all really inspired by it. And that’s what makes us different. We push the boundaries; we don’t follow in anyone’s footsteps.

A lot of people ask me how I started the magazine, because my background isn’t in weddings. I came into this as a designer; as a person with very little knowledge about the industry, but because of that I bring something new to the industry. I’m not following the Martha Stewart grid or I’m not following any bride’s magazine format. I’m just doing what I feel this industry needs and wants, which is this beautiful book that comes out twice a year.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly one evening at your home after work, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine; watching television; having a glass of wine; or something else?

Daniel Tran: You would find me on Pinterest. Before even the social media came out, I was always looking through magazines and other things for ideas. But in this day and age, I come home and after dinner I go on Pinterest. That’s my sort of downtime. I want to be inspired and so I go on Pinterest. I also collect books, so many books. I love books. I love typography books. The one element in design that I truly love and am passionate about is typography. It’s doesn’t make a magazine without beautiful type or typography. A book that has only photos and no type in it, then it’s a photography book; it’s not really a design. So, I love Pinterest and design blogs and that’s what you would find me doing at night.

Samir Husni: And my typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Daniel Tran: How the magazine could be evolved. In the beginning, I had a lot of angst and sleepless nights because when we first released the preorder of the magazine there were only like 50 orders coming in and I was nervous. It might look easy to sell 500 copies of a book, but believe me, it’s hard. (Laughs)

So knowing that you’ve created something really beautiful and you want to share it with the world, and people can’t afford it or don’t appreciate it and aren’t willing to pay for it makes you nervous. But there has been a lot of good feedback so far. We have photographers who buy boxes and boxes of the magazine and they give them to their clients as a gift because they want their clients to be inspired by the beautiful work these shoots create.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

“The thought of starting just a website and the monetary factors of that felt very uncertain to me. From day one, I didn’t see a way to do what we wanted to do with that model. What I’m trying to say is that it was half a business hunch and half a nostalgia play that led us to do it in print. And I think that it’s worked out from what I’ve seen since we launched. I was in London recently at Jeremy Leslie’s magCulture, and I saw all of these wonderful-looking magazines. And none of them, including Howler, should probably even exist. They’re all really heartfelt attempts by people who want to do and say something that’s important to them, but there is no spreadsheet that’s going to say that this is a great business. You have to be a bit of a crazy dreamer to try and do it.” George Quraishi

Since 2012 there has been a voice on newsstands “howling” the joys and passions of soccer, and one that is inimitable in its style and stance on creativity and storytelling. That magazine is Howler. And the powers-that-be behind the brand are dedicated professionals that know a thing or two about magazines and magazine design.

Mark Kirby and George Quraishi, two of the original founders of the magazine, are former editors at GQ, Condé Nast Portfolio, National Geographic Adventure, and HarperCollins Publishers. Both are soccer fans, but more importantly they’re all fans of great magazines that are prone to providing audiences with great artwork, great content and even greater connections with the people the magazines serve.

I spoke with George recently and we talked about Howler, where it has been, where it’s at, and also where it’s headed. The magazine was first funded by one of the earlier Kickstarter campaigns and is proving that passion, fortitude and a little bit of crazy can go a long way when you’re finding your footing on the path to launching a great magazine.

So, pull out your favorite chair, grab your soccer gear and join Mr. Magazine™ as he picks the brain of a man who loves the art of storytelling and a good game of soccer, George Quraishi, Founder & Editor, Howler magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On the genesis of Howler: There are four founders, and it was a group that in a sense I guess, I brought together. Mark Kirby was my coeditor, and he and I; we never worked together, but he offered me an internship at National Geographic Adventure when I was still in college. And then the art directors for Howler were the art directors that I had worked with at Condé Nast’s Portfolio after I finished up at National Geographic, and so the four of us came together to make Howler. And then we launched it on Kickstarter as a project in June, 2012. And we funded it, and it was very exciting. Then we had a few months to actually finalize the issue and it came out in October, 2012. So, that was the timeline.

On funding Howler through the crowdsourcing platform of Kickstarter: I have to say that my inspiration for the magazine was because I saw a friend of mine do a very similar thing. My friend Jamin Warren was an arts and entertainment reporter at the Wall Street Journal who loved videogames and he quit his job at the Journal and he did a Kickstarter project to fund a print magazine about videogames called Kill Screen that still exists, which was redesigned and relaunched. And he came to Kickstarter even earlier than we did, when it was a much smaller ecosystem.

On why he thinks there is an audience for a soccer magazine in the States when the sport isn’t as popular here as it is in places like Europe: You’re right; soccer in the U.S. isn’t as mature as an industry as it is overseas. It’s not as mature as other American sports, but it’s not as mature globally either as it is in countries like South America and Europe. But rather than putting us off, that was the opportunity that we saw. There are plenty of people here who love and follow the game, but we weren’t seeing the type of coverage that we as readers and fans wanted to see.

On any stumbling blocks that he’s had to face and how he overcame them: It has been a constant learning experience. I can only speak for myself, but I left college and I went abroad to teach English for a year in South Korea and I came back and worked as a writer and an editor at magazines and at HarperCollins Publishers in New York City. But nothing that I did prepared me for entrepreneurship or managing a “staff” of people. And those have been things that I’ve had to try and learn how to do.

On how he moved from the idea maker to the idea executioner: You go from having an idea for a magazine and then the questions become how do you found it; how do you build an audience for it; and then how do you sustain it? And those are all related questions. A lot of it was intuition and step-by-step decision-making, as opposed to a grand master plan, such as in four years we’d like to be where we are.

On the most pleasant moment he’s had throughout this experience: That’s a good question. We’ve been lucky; there are several to choose from. I would probably say one of the most gratifying moments happened two years ago when Longform Podcast had a contest. And I vaguely knew the guys who did it, but I wasn’t aware of the contest. They asked their readers what was their favorite all-time soccer story and a Howler story beat out several others. One I believe from The New York Times and one from ESPN, and a couple of others. And a Howler story actually won.

On whether he feels the Howler brand could have accomplished as much as it has without the print component: That’s another good question and something that we considered from the very beginning. Like I said before, when we went public and launched with Kickstarter, we really thought about this. We asked a lot of people that we knew for their advice and people in the soccer business. And a pretty common question that we heard from people was why were we making a print magazine? It needed to be online. This was in 2012. Our thinking and my hunch was that while this might be kind of crazy, for this to be viable and for us to deliver the kind of journalism and artwork; to make the kind of magazine that I wanted to make, there had to be a model where the reader was supporting what we’re doing.

On what his future expectations are for Howler: I would say that right now my goals are to diversify the ways to make money. The ways now are reader, advertising, which is a small, but healthy chunk of how we make money, and the marketing work that we do for third parties. They come to us; brands like Gatorade and Nike, especially in the early days when I quit my job, that was a big help so that I didn’t go homeless.

On anything else he’d like to add: Our website has been getting a lot of attention lately. We just relaunched our website and we changed the name from howlermagazine.com to whatahowler.com. Whatahowler is our official handle for Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Our attempt there was to realign the website as its own digital property and shift it a little bit away from being just a place where people go because we’ve been talking about the print magazine. And we’ve partnered with a really fantastic blog that predates Howler by a few years; it’s called Dirty Tackle. It was acquired by Yahoo in, I believe, 2009, and it had a good five year run with Yahoo before regaining its independence, so now whatahowler.com and Dirty Tackle cohabitate.

On having no advertising on Howler’s website: The types of advertising that we could get, with the page views and the readers and the metrics that we have for this small website, we would be making pennies really. The digital advertising game is really for websites that can scale or have scale and that have extremely large numbers.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up at his house unexpectedly one evening: My wife comes home, she’s doing her Ph.D. in education right now; she’s exhausted, so she’s sitting on the couch working and I’m next to her with our dog. And I’m reading or working myself, or doing something that needs doing, because there is always something.

On what keeps him up at night: Like anyone who does what I do, I think, just thinking about where media is going and can we, in some small way, latch onto some of these trends? That’s why we’ve placed some of our bets on podcasting as a low cost, but highly personal way to reach our audience. The media landscape is so exciting and I think that’s where a lot of the big players present a real challenge to us. For a company our size, it also presents real opportunity. Not only is it harder and harder to reach the mass audience, but you don’t necessarily have to in order to be a viable business.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with George Quraishi, Founder/Editor, Howler Magazine.

Samir Husni: You’re getting ready to celebrate four years of Howler; can you recreate the launch of Howler? I know that you had other founders, but your name was the name associated with the magazine from the very beginning. Tell me about the genesis of Howler.

George Quraishi: There are four founders, and it was a group that in a sense I guess, I brought together. Mark Kirby was my coeditor, and he and I; we never worked together, but he offered me an internship at National Geographic Adventure when I was still in college. By the time I took it, he had moved on to GQ. So, he and I just stayed in touch and started playing soccer together.

And then the art directors for Howler were the art directors that I had worked with at Condé Nast’s Portfolio after I finished up at National Geographic, and so the four of us came together to make Howler. We did a lot of work in the beginning before we ever took it to the public, to figure out what the magazine would look like, sound like, who would be writing for it, and structurally just putting together that first issue.

And then we launched it on Kickstarter as a project in June, 2012. And we funded it, and it was very exciting. Then we had a few months to actually finalize the issue and it came out in October, 2012. So, that was the timeline.

Samir Husni: And I think you may have been one of the earlier crowdsourcing entities, because now it is becoming the norm rather than the exception. If someone has an idea for a magazine, they simply go to Kickstarter.

George Quraishi: I have to say that my inspiration for the magazine was because I saw a friend of mine do a very similar thing. My friend Jamin Warren was an arts and entertainment reporter at the Wall Street Journal who loved videogames and he quit his job at the Journal and he did a Kickstarter project to fund a print magazine about videogames called Kill Screen that still exists, which was redesigned and relaunched. And he came to Kickstarter even earlier than we did, when it was a much smaller ecosystem.

I think we had a much easier time fundraising Howler, because there was just more people familiar with the platform and I’m sure that today the audience for Kickstarter has grown and the familiarity with it has become so much more prevalent that people who are funding through Kickstarter now would probably look back at our campaign and be able to tell it was quite a while ago. (Laughs) But it’s such a wonderful platform.

Samir Husni: Soccer is getting bigger and bigger in the United States, but it’s still not as popular as it is overseas. When you hear the word football there, you know that people are referring to soccer. Why did you think there was an audience in the States for an international soccer magazine when you launched Howler? And why did you decide to publish it in its oversized format and with all of the stunning illustrations?

George Quraishi: You’re right; soccer in the U.S. isn’t as mature as an industry as it is overseas. It’s not as mature as other American sports, but it’s not as mature globally either as it is in countries like South America and Europe. But rather than putting us off, that was the opportunity that we saw. There are plenty of people here who love and follow the game, but we weren’t seeing the type of coverage that we as readers and fans wanted to see.

And I would say there are so many things you can look at to measure soccer’s growth and the maturity of the game just in the last couple of years, but one that I would point to and that I feel a bit of pride, in terms of helping in some small way to push along, is the fact that by the 4th or 5th issue of Howler I began to see more coverage of the game the way we aspire to do it in the major and more established publications.

You’re seeing more illustrations such as Howler uses; you’re seeing people realize that there’s an audience for long soccer stories. Just recently ESPN’s FiveThirtyEight site posted a new podcast on their Hot Takedown about a guy named Charles Reep, who was sort of the father of soccer analytics. And when I heard about it I knew that it sounded like an episode of Howler Radio, which is a podcast that we started a few years ago. Now, I would never take credit for any of these things (Laughs), but it’s been very encouraging to see the type of stories that I wanted to see created and that gave us the impotence to start Howler in the first place, become more prevalent in the culture at large. I don’t know if it’s our influence or just a correlation, but I just think that it’s fantastic to see.

Samir Husni: Have you had any stumbling blocks along your journey and if so, how did you overcome them?

George Quraishi: It has been a constant learning experience. I can only speak for myself, but I left college and I went abroad to teach English for a year in South Korea and I came back and worked as a writer and an editor at magazines and at HarperCollins Publishers in New York City. But nothing that I did prepared me for entrepreneurship or managing a “staff” of people. And those have been things that I’ve had to try and learn how to do. And we do have a large team now of what we call semi-professionals, most people do have other jobs, but they work on Howler as well; our editors and our copy editors; our creative director and our editorial assistants, and our podcast producers. So, it’s quite a large team.

Along the way there have certainly been challenges, in terms of just the basic tasks of running a business that I think anyone who starts a small organization has to learn how to do. Cash flow and reconciling the books; all of these foreign processes that are totally unfamiliar to someone who enjoys sitting down and editing and working with good stories. I have had to learn how to do all of that. So, yes, there have been quite a few challenges along the way.

Samir Husni: You were a journalist before you became a businessperson. As someone who is passionate about creative ideas and the subject matter of Howler, how did you move from the idea maker to the idea executioner?

George Quraishi: You go from having an idea for a magazine and then the questions become how do you found it; how do you build an audience for it; and then how do you sustain it? And those are all related questions. A lot of it was intuition and step-by-step decision-making, as opposed to a grand master plan, such as in four years we’d like to be where we are.

We started with the Kickstarter fund, which was around $70,001; something like that. And that was our capital. We’ve never taken on investors and we’ve never been in the red for longer than maybe a day. Overall, we’ve been very fortunate to have had a print magazine startup that has been at most times at least a break even proposition. And the magazine business is all about scale, and for us it’s about trying to grow the audience, which we’ve done by, up to this point, basically social media and by earned media. We were fortunate in the early days to get great reviews from some other much larger publications. We’ve built our audience via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and just by really focusing on reaching our small audience. We have a small, but very passionate audience. And I think that what we’ve done and what was smart on our part was really focusing on what we knew that audience wanted, instead of trying to be all things to all soccer fans.

Samir Husni: Are you doing this full-time now?

George Quraishi: Yes, I quit my job as soon as we funded the Kickstarter actually. So, for the past four years I’ve done this full-time.

Samir Husni: What would you consider the most pleasant moment throughout this experience?

George Quraishi: That’s a good question. We’ve been lucky; there are several to choose from. I would probably say one of the most gratifying moments happened two years ago when Longform Podcast had a contest. And I vaguely knew the guys who did it, but I wasn’t aware of the contest. They asked their readers what was their favorite all-time soccer story and a Howler story beat out several others. One I believe from The New York Times and one from ESPN, and a couple of others. And a Howler story actually won.

And it was a story from readers and I wasn’t surprised that that was a popular story, but the fact that a Howler story had penetrated the consciousness of this other audience, the Longform audience, was kind of amazing to me. And it was a wonderful feeling. It felt good just to be in the same conversation with these other venerable publications and to actually beat them out in some small way. I just wanted to pump my fist in the air and shout, “Yeah!”

Samir Husni: Do you think that you could have accomplished what you have with Howler without the print component?

George Quraishi: That’s another good question and something that we considered from the very beginning. Like I said before, when we went public and launched with Kickstarter, we really thought about this. We asked a lot of people that we knew for their advice and people in the soccer business. And a pretty common question that we heard from people was why were we making a print magazine? It needed to be online. This was in 2012.

Our thinking and my hunch was that while this might be kind of crazy, for this to be viable and for us to deliver the kind of journalism and artwork; to make the kind of magazine that I wanted to make, there had to be a model where the reader was supporting what we’re doing.

The thought of starting just a website and the monetary factors of that felt very uncertain to me. From day one, I didn’t see a way to do what we wanted to do with that model. What I’m trying to say is that it was half a business hunch and half a nostalgia play that led us to do it in print. And I think that it’s worked out from what I’ve seen since we launched.

I was in London recently at Jeremy Leslie’s magCulture, and I saw all of these wonderful-looking magazines. And none of them, including Howler, should probably even exist. They’re all really heartfelt attempts by people who want to do and say something that’s important to them, but there is no spreadsheet that’s going to say that this is a great business. You have to be a bit of a crazy dreamer to try and do it.

But I think that what we’ve learned is that people who recognize that and who love these magazines are willing to support them. It’s not easy, but finding that audience and seeing that support makes it totally doable and necessary.

Samir Husni: I’ve always said that there is a sense of community when you’re holding a print magazine, it’s like your membership card and if you’re not willing to pay for that membership, you can’t be in the club. I was in New York recently and picked up some new magazine and the cover prices were anywhere from $25 to $34.

George Quraishi: Yes, and you know, Samir, when I was in New York and looking around at new magazines, I noticed that most of the covers were Issue #1, Issue #2, Issue #3; there were definitely a few that were more mature, but a lot of them were very young and to me that just validated the fact that while this business is tough and not easy to sustain on the financial side for a new magazine; I really admire the people who try. I know how difficult it is and seeing that people still believe in print and are willing to pay for quality work is really heartening.

Samir Husni: If we talk again in two years, what would you hope to tell me that Howler has accomplished? What are your expectations?

George Quraishi: I would say that right now my goals are to diversify the ways to make money. The ways now are reader, advertising, which is a small, but healthy chunk of how we make money, and the marketing work that we do for third parties. They come to us; brands like Gatorade and Nike, especially in the early days when I quit my job, that was a big help so that I didn’t go homeless.

Right now we’re looking at other ways. We’ve launched our Podcast and we’re in the process of trying to make them user-supported; we’re exploring a few other things that refocus our efforts and attention on the audience we already have, while trying to grow that audience, but not at the expense of the people who are already paying attention to us.

For instance, could we go on any more trips, which might be something that we could do; it’s a great way to connect with readers, but also explore interesting things with soccer and also gain experience, rather than a product. Could that become a part of our business? I’m exploring things like that and hopefully in a couple of years I’ll have good news to report. We’ve tried to make the business a little more stable by not relying on one thing.

Samir Husni: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

George Quraishi: Our website has been getting a lot of attention lately. We just relaunched our website and we changed the name from howlermagazine.com to whatahowler.com. Whatahowler is our official handle for Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Our attempt there was to realign the website as its own digital property and shift it a little bit away from being just a place where people go because we’ve been talking about the print magazine. And we’ve partnered with a really fantastic blog that predates Howler by a few years; it’s called Dirty Tackle. It was acquired by Yahoo in, I believe, 2009, and it had a good five year run with Yahoo before regaining its independence, so now whatahowler.com and Dirty Tackle cohabitate.

This is our first move in trying to bring in other voices, those other soccer blogs that I love, but like Howler online, find it difficult to reach a big enough audience to make a living off of it. My thoughts were to put our readers together, Howler’s and Dirty Tackle’s, and maybe have a more meaningful share of the soccer world’s attention.

We moved the website from Word Press.com to Medium.com, which is a very exciting platform because it’s half CMS and half social network. We’ve already seen a really cool uptick in the enthusiasm of our readers to come and participate on our website in a way that we haven’t seen before. They’re leaving comments and highlighting things they like and part of that is due to just the tools that Medium gives them. And certainly the marriage of Dirty Tackle and Howler has helped. Bringing those readers together in one voice has been great.

Samir Husni: I see that there is no advertising on the website. Is that intentional?

George Quraishi: This is sort of a strategy question for us. The types of advertising that we could get, with the page views and the readers and the metrics that we have for this small website, we would be making pennies really. The digital advertising game is really for websites that can scale or have scale and that have extremely large numbers.

My theory is that any monetary benefit that we would get from serving up those ads would be very, very small compared to the inconvenience and the bad experience that we would be providing to readers when we had those ads. It’s actually not even a choice on the Medium site now to serve up those ads, but it was our choice to move to a platform that didn’t. It is such a vastly better experience for our users that I don’t miss seeing those little ads being served on our website. They weren’t doing much for us anyway and I think that it really aligns with our strategy to really double down on the idea that our users and our readers and our listeners are going to support Howler in more ways than just buying the magazine.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly one evening at your home after work, what would I find you doing: reading a magazine; reading your iPad; watching a little soccer on television; or something else?

George Quraishi: My wife comes home, she’s doing her Ph.D. in education right now; she’s exhausted, so she’s sitting on the couch working and I’m next to her with our dog. And I’m reading or working myself, or doing something that needs doing, because there is always something.

But I’ve been really involved with TV shows like “Mr. Robot” and I’ve reached the point where I feel like watching one of these TV shows is as satisfying as reading a great book. So, that’s become part of my evenings too.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

George Quraishi: Like anyone who does what I do, I think, just thinking about where media is going and can we, in some small way, latch onto some of these trends? That’s why we’ve placed some of our bets on podcasting as a low cost, but highly personal way to reach our audience. The media landscape is so exciting and I think that’s where a lot of the big players present a real challenge to us. For a company our size, it also presents real opportunity. Not only is it harder and harder to reach the mass audience, but you don’t necessarily have to in order to be a viable business. And when I say viable, I’m leaning more towards doing what we do, rather than making the money that we make. As long as we can pay for the work that we do and keep writers and editors in print and keep them doing what they love; I’m extremely satisfied with that.

When I think about running Howler and what that gets for us as a part of the soccer culture, it’s stories. Ultimately, we’re trying to maintain that positive balance until the next issue.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

A Mr. Magazine™ Launch Story

“It does feel like a radical thing to do at this moment, for sure. But I think kids in particular still crave, and in fact, require printed material. There are statistics from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children have on average seven hours of screen time per day, which is insane. No parent wants that for their child. And I don’t think it’s satisfying for kids either; it’s not engaging. And I know this is true of my daughters; kids like to have that tactile sensation; they like to turn and feel the pages and see the bright colors. And also go back to stories over and over again, without all those annoying popup ads and the low-battery lights; all of those things.” Erin Bried (On whether anyone asked her during this magazine journey if she was out of her mind to launch a print publication in this digital age)

“The act of holding a magazine in your hands and turning the pages gives you some breathing room and some time to focus and concentrate. It gives you a moment to pay attention and sit with material and come back to stories over and over in a way that the Internet doesn’t allow. It’s just so fast paced. It just gives kids space to think and dream. With Kazoo that’s what I want for them. I want girls and boys too, but girls especially, to come to these pages and be inspired. Here’s a scientist who’s studying space and meteorites that come to Earth, and what if I could do that? And I don’t think you have the room to daydream like that on the Internet and to imagine your future like that when you’re on the computer and you’re constantly clicking forward and backward and bookmarking and closing popup ads. It just doesn’t give you the space to do that like print does.” Erin Bried

Kazoo is a new kind of print magazine for girls – one that offers a world filled with more than the color pink and shiny lip glosses. Its founder, Erin Bried, is an author and veteran of the publishing industry. She decided to launch Kazoo magazine as an alternative to the staunchly stereotypical girl’s magazines that are out there in the marketplace and give her readers, target age 5-10 years old, something a little meatier to engage with; a magazine that promotes critical thinking and strong women, both past and present, and gives its readers successful and admirable role models to consider.

It’s a lovely magazine with a fresh and energetic take on the world of little girls. And it’s a Mr. Magazine™ selection for one of the 30 Hottest New Launches, well-deserved, I might add. I spoke with Erin recently and we talked about her vision for Kazoo, both before the first page was ever printed and now, after the second issue has been completed. Having been unable to find any magazines that reflected her daughter’s passions and interests, such as science and tree-climbing, Erin decided that it was time to fill that niche. So, Kazoo was born through Kickstarter and a lot of support from readers who obviously agreed with Erin, as her campaign was the highest-grossing journalistic endeavor in history for the crowdfunding resource.

I hope that you enjoy this conversation with a woman who knows innately that to offer children the world, there’s no better way to do it than through a great magazine; the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Erin Bried, founder, Kazoo magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On that moment when she discovered that there was a niche, a place for a new type of kid’s magazine: Yes, it all revolved around that trip to the bookstore with my five year old. We were picking up some books and then we stopped by the newsstand and I looked at all of the titles. I’m familiar with the adult magazines, certainly, having been in the industry for so long. But I hadn’t really paid too much attention to the kid’s magazines up until then, when my older daughter came of age and started reading them. So, I figured we would stop by the newsstand and see if we could find something good for her to read. And I was so shocked by the offering on the newsstand and the lack of diversity for girls. Every cover we saw that day had a little girl in lip gloss and makeup on the cover; stories on good manners or pretty hair, or about her personal drama, and I just wanted so much more for my daughter.

On the prevalence to launch new magazines these days via a crowdfunding source such as Kickstarter: I think it’s such a fantastic platform for us. I chose to launch through Kickstarter because I wanted to see if there was a big enough audience right away. I know how hard the print landscape is right now and I wanted to make sure that I was launching a successful enterprise with a big enough and passionate enough audience behind it.

On whether anyone stopped her during this journey to ask if she was out of mind for launching a print magazine in this digital age: It does feel like a radical thing to do at this moment, for sure. But I think kids in particular still crave, and in fact, require printed material. There are statistics from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children have on average seven hours of screen time per day, which is insane. No parent wants that for their child. And I don’t think it’s satisfying for kids either; it’s not engaging. And I know this is true of my daughters; kids like to have that tactile sensation; they like to turn and feel the pages and see the bright colors. And also go back to stories over and over again, without all those annoying popup ads and the low-battery lights; all of those things.

On the biggest stumbling block she’s had to face and how she overcame it: I wouldn’t say that there has been a stumbling block; I think it was a tremendous blessing for us, but we took off so quickly. We finished the Kickstarter and I had scheduled the first issue to come out only three months later, which in retrospect I wish I would have allowed myself a little bit more time (Laughs), because we spent the first few weeks fulfilling all of the rewards for the Kickstarter. So we were sending T-shirts and bags; kazoos and stickers all over the world. And that was very time-consuming. We’ve had such tremendous growth so quickly, and for that I am so excited and grateful. And we’ve had to adapt to that quickly as well. I was doing the envelope-licking and stuffing and managing the subscriber data base myself with this increasingly unwieldy Excel spreadsheet. We finally got help for that and I think it will make a huge difference in freeing up my time and brain space to think harder and longer about the actual making of the magazine.

On the most pleasant moment for her throughout this experience: Despite all of the glue on my tongue from the envelope licking, the entire process has been so exciting, heartening and inspiring. And I have loved every second of it. We have gotten such incredible reader feedback everyday on social media. And through email we get pictures of our readers clipping the magazine with their art projects. Now we’re starting to get mail from them with pictures they’ve drawn and funny jokes they want to share, and questions they want us to ask scientists.

On whether she thinks there is room for more children’s magazines in the marketplace that are purely circulation driven and with no ad revenue: I certainly think there is more room; we’re definitely proof of that. There is nothing like Kazoo on the newsstands. There is nothing with such a strong point of view. And I think that’s what sets up apart; every story in Kazoo is either developed or inspired by a top woman in her field.

On whether she believes that’s the future of the magazine industry; to be more circulation driven than advertising driven, especially in print: We don’t have any ads between our covers and I think that’s because no parent wants their kid wading through advertisements; these aren’t savvy consumers, and they don’t know the difference between editorial and ads. And I want our editorial to remain pure. Most magazines make most of their revenue through advertising and I feel like that can be a problematic paradigm.

On whether she hesitated when she made the cover price of Kazoo $12.50: I was a little concerned about that, but then I thought of all of these major consumer magazines and if you pulled out every ad page, the quantity of editorial in Kazoo is certainly comparable. So, will parents pay a higher premium to protect their children from a constant barrage of advertisements; I think so.

On having an online presence: You have to have an online presence, that’s the way we connect with the parents of our readers and let them know what we’re doing. To be a quarterly; you put your issue out and then you’re sort of quiet for a few months, and I want to maintain the relationship throughout the whole year, every day.

On what role she thinks the printed magazine plays in today’s digital age: The act of holding a magazine in your hands and turning the pages gives you some breathing room and some time to focus and concentrate. It gives you a moment to pay attention and sit with material and come back to stories over and over in a way that the Internet doesn’t allow. It’s just so fast paced. It just gives kids space to think and dream.

On whether she will publish a Kazoo for boys: As far as boys go, we certainly welcome boys as our readers; our target is girls, but I think it would be amazing for boys to subscribe to Kazoo. There’s nothing about the actual content of the magazine that boys couldn’t read and enjoy. They could do the mazes, read the short stories, and do the science experiments. There is nothing gendered about it. Would I launch a separate magazine for boys? Not right now.

Erin Bried with daughters, Ellie (5) and Bea (1). The daughters are Kazoo’s Tiny and Teeny Editors. (Illustration by Libby Vanderploeg)

On what made her decide to go with the handwritten-type covers: I wanted it to be colorful and playful and engaging, and also accessible for our readers. Our five-year-old readers are only just learning to read, so they’ll be reading with their parents. Our ten-year-old’s certainly will be reading by themselves, so I wanted it to engage and be accessible to all of our readers.

On anything else she’d like to add: One thing I would like to say about Kazoo is you hear a lot of talk about how we need to inspire our girls and help them feel confident and all of these different things. That’s often the talk we hear about what girls need and require, but I think what’s different about Kazoo is young girls are our target readers, ages 5-10, and they already know that they’re smart. They already know that they can be silly and run fast and they can do anything, this is not new information to them. It would be shocking to them if you told them otherwise.

On what someone would find her doing if they showed up at her home one evening unexpectedly: Right now, after the kids go to bed, I’ll often hop back on the computer and do more work while the house is quiet. But yes, a glass of wine is always such a nice way to end the day, and some conversation with my better half. Going out to dinner in Brooklyn; any of those things sound great.

On what keeps her up at night: (Laughs) What doesn’t keep me up at night? It’s been a little bit difficult lately. My kindergartner was having a thing at school where her whole class takes a bite of an apple at the same time, and I woke up in the middle of the night because I had forgotten to put an apple in her bag. I got up and put the apple in her bag, so it can be something as trivial as that, to what artist are we going to use for the spring issue? Which fiction author will write our next short story?

And now the lightly edited transcription of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Erin Bried, founder, Kazoo magazine.

Samir Husni: You’ve managed to receive a lot of publicity and write-ups about Kazoo and about your story; would you mind telling me about that moment when you discovered there was a niche, a place for a new kind of kid’s magazine?

Erin Bried: Yes, it all revolved around that trip to the bookstore with my five year old. We were picking up some books and then we stopped by the newsstand and I looked at all of the titles. I’m familiar with the adult magazines, certainly, having been in the industry for so long. But I hadn’t really paid too much attention to the kid’s magazines up until then, when my older daughter came of age and started reading them. So, I figured we would stop by the newsstand and see if we could find something good for her to read.

And I was so shocked by the offering on the newsstand and the lack of diversity for girls. Every cover we saw that day had a little girl in lip gloss and makeup on the cover; stories on good manners or pretty hair, or about her personal drama, and I just wanted so much more for my daughter. She’s not interested in any of that. She’s more interested in climbing trees, running fast and playing pirates. There was nothing on the newsstand that we saw to reflect her interests and her passions.

So, we left that day with no magazines and she was just totally OK with it; she didn’t think twice about it. As we were walking home I kept thinking about it. I kept thinking how terrible it was that I could not find anything for her and that we could do so much better for our daughters. These messages have real consequences in their lives; we’ve seen this in so much of the research.

Well, I tucked it in the back of my mind, but I kept thinking that somebody should do something about it, and it became one of those ideas that stuck. It kept percolating and percolating. Finally I thought if somebody is going to do something; I can’t wait on that. I had the background and I certainly had the skills, so I decided to do it. I was going to be the one to bring this into the world. And then shortly after that we launched the Kickstarter.

Samir Husni: It seems that almost three out of every ten new magazines I see have been launched via crowdfunding; via Kickstarter.

Erin Bried: I think it’s such a fantastic platform for us. I chose to launch through Kickstarter because I wanted to see if there was a big enough audience right away. I know how hard the print landscape is right now and I wanted to make sure that I was launching a successful enterprise with a big enough and passionate enough audience behind it.

And I was so happy and inspired to find out that there were so many other parents and uncles, grandparents and neighbors who felt the same way I did. Within 30 days we had raised over $171,000, which made us when we closed our campaign, the highest journalism Kickstarter campaign in history. And that was so exciting.

Samir Husni: Erin, you’re a product of this magazine industry and have been involved with so many things; did anyone stop you during this entire journey and ask you were you out of your mind to launch a print magazine in this digital age?

Erin Bried: (Laughs) It does feel like a radical thing to do at this moment, for sure. But I think kids in particular still crave, and in fact, require printed material. There are statistics from the American Academy of Pediatrics that children have on average seven hours of screen time per day, which is insane. No parent wants that for their child. And I don’t think it’s satisfying for kids either; it’s not engaging. And I know this is true of my daughters; kids like to have that tactile sensation; they like to turn and feel the pages and see the bright colors. And also go back to stories over and over again, without all those annoying popup ads and the low-battery lights; all of those things.

Also, Kazoo is designed for kids to actually use and manipulate the pages. There are search and finds, where they will circle the hidden objects; there are mazes where they will take a crayon or pencil and mark right on the page and I think that’s very important.

And I was also heartened by the statistics that the sales of children’s books were up; they’ve gone up steadily over the years. I think it was a 13 percent rise last year, so children may buck this trend. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: Now, with two issues under your belt; what has been the biggest stumbling block that you’ve had to face and how did you overcome it?

Erin Bried: I wouldn’t say that there has been a stumbling block; I think it was a tremendous blessing for us, but we took off so quickly. We finished the Kickstarter and I had scheduled the first issue to come out only three months later, which in retrospect I wish I would have allowed myself a little bit more time (Laughs), because we spent the first few weeks fulfilling all of the rewards for the Kickstarter. So we were sending T-shirts and bags; kazoos and stickers all over the world. And that was very time-consuming.

But we managed to pull off a wonderful first issue. We had all of these great contributors from Alison Bechdel to Diana Nyad and Mickalene Thomas. So we did it. It wasn’t easy and I didn’t sleep very well, but we made it. So, I would have allowed more time.

And as I said earlier in our conversation, we’ve had such tremendous growth so quickly, and for that I am so excited and grateful. And we’ve had to adapt to that quickly as well. I was doing the envelope-licking and stuffing and managing the subscriber data base myself with this increasingly unwieldy Excel spreadsheet. We finally got help for that and I think it will make a huge difference in freeing up my time and brain space to think harder and longer about the actual making of the magazine.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant moment for you throughout this experience?

Erin Bried: Despite all of the glue on my tongue from the envelope licking, the entire process has been so exciting, heartening and inspiring. And I have loved every second of it. We have gotten such incredible reader feedback everyday on social media. And through email we get pictures of our readers clipping the magazine with their art projects. Now we’re starting to get mail from them with pictures they’ve drawn and funny jokes they want to share, and questions they want us to ask scientists.

And I have never before in my career felt so connected with the reader and so conscious of doing right by them. I want to exceed their expectations every issue, and I’m talking about both the kids and the parents. I just want to make it great and I want everybody to be excited. I want every issue to be better than the last. And just seeing the smiles on their faces and the art projects that they’ve been inspired to do, and getting these letters from parents that say things like their kids have never read out loud before, but they have been reading the stories over and over again to everyone. There is nothing better than that; there’s nothing more satisfying than that.

Samir Husni: There are plenty of children’s magazines in the marketplace and as you’ve said, the majority of them cater to the Barbies and the princesses of the category. When you look at magazines like Highlights, which for 70 years never accepted advertising and depended on circulation; do you think there is more room for children’s publications today that are along the same route as Kazoo, which is purely circulation driven with no ad revenue?

Erin Bried: Yes, Highlights is amazing with what they have done and what they’ve grown. I certainly think there is more room; we’re definitely proof of that. There is nothing like Kazoo on the newsstands. There is nothing with such a strong point of view. And I think that’s what sets up apart; every story in Kazoo is either developed or inspired by a top woman in her field.

Samir Husni: Do you think that’s the future of the industry; to be more circulation driven, rather than advertising driven, especially in print?

Erin Bried: We don’t have any ads between our covers and I think that’s because no parent wants their kid wading through advertisements; these aren’t savvy consumers, and they don’t know the difference between editorial and ads. And I want our editorial to remain pure. Most magazines make most of their revenue through advertising and I feel like that can be a problematic paradigm.

Samir Husni: You’re someone who is in the industry; you’re not some novice who just one day decides to start a magazine. You know how the industry works. Did you hesitate when you put a cover price of $12.50 on the magazine? For $12.50 I can get a whole year of some magazines that will remain nameless.

Erin Bried: Yes, it’s true, I was a little concerned about that, but then I thought of all of these major consumer magazines and if you pulled out every ad page, the quantity of editorial in Kazoo is certainly comparable. So, will parents pay a higher premium to protect their children from a constant barrage of advertisements; I think so.

There are two other reasons for our cover price. One is we print in the U.S.A., in Vermont, on recycled paper, which I think is important when you’re making a magazine for children to keep their futures in mind; we wanted to do it in a sustainable way.

And finally, I feel very passionately about the importance of paying your contributors, and I think that’s one of the problems with digital media. You have all of these websites that are asking for content and are not paying their contributors as well. And I want top contributors and I want to value our artists for their work. And to do that, you need to pay them.

Samir Husni: I love your P.S. in the first issue: Although Kazoo is print only by design, we have some cool stuff online.

Erin Bried: You have to have an online presence, that’s the way we connect with the parents of our readers and let them know what we’re doing. To be a quarterly; you put your issue out and then you’re sort of quiet for a few months, and I want to maintain the relationship throughout the whole year, every day. And let people know what we’re up to and what we’re excited about. We want to hear from them and find out what they want to see more of so that we can keep evolving the magazine, and keep everyone excited, happy and satisfied.

Samir Husni: In this day and age, where you see we are bombarded by information and we’re living in what I call an “isolated connectivity,” what role do you think the print magazine plays in today’s new generation?

Erin Bried: The act of holding a magazine in your hands and turning the pages gives you some breathing room and some time to focus and concentrate. It gives you a moment to pay attention and sit with material and come back to stories over and over in a way that the Internet doesn’t allow. It’s just so fast paced. It just gives kids space to think and dream.

With Kazoo that’s what I want for them. I want girls and boys too, but girls especially, to come to these pages and be inspired. Here’s a scientist who’s studying space and meteorites that come to Earth, and what if I could do that? And I don’t think you have the room to daydream like that on the Internet and to imagine your future like that when you’re on the computer and you’re constantly clicking forward and backward and bookmarking and closing popup ads. It just doesn’t give you the space to do that like print does.

One thing that I love that we do in Kazoo is that we illustrate all of our experts as they were when they we were young girls. So, I get photos of all of them when they were girls to give to whoever is illustrating our current issue, we have a different illustrator every issue, and they illustrate our experts. We get their childhood photos and we draw them as they were when they were kids, so our readers can more easily see themselves in these future positions of power. What does a future Fulbright Award winning cosmos chemist look like? She looks just like me. Or what does a future Olympian look like? She looks just like me. A future major artist or a future record-breaking swimmer; what do they look like? I just want our readers to be able to see themselves in every page of the magazine and imagine a future where they can be anything.

Samir Husni: Will you publish a Kazoo for boys?

Erin Bried: We get so many emails from parents asking about a Kazoo for teenaged girls and I always laugh and I’m so flattered that people will write and think why not just launch two magazines at once. (Laughs) It’s a wonderful idea, but I don’t think I can do that right now.

As far as boys go, we certainly welcome boys as our readers; our target is girls, but I think it would be amazing for boys to subscribe to Kazoo. There’s nothing about the actual content of the magazine that boys couldn’t read and enjoy. They could do the mazes, read the short stories, and do the science experiments. There is nothing gendered about it.

It would be amazing for them to see all of these wonderful women role models, because we don’t see them when you look around in popular culture. We don’t see them as much in politics, or hanging on the walls of our museums or in our Fortune 500 companies. We just don’t see women as much, so I think it’s important to carve out that niche for girls. We don’t see them even in children’s books. Boys are 1.6 times more likely to be in the title of a children’s book than a girl. It’s important to create this space for girls.

Boys certainly have a lot of gender expectations that are put on them that are as unfair as the gender expectations that are often put on girls. Would I launch a separate magazine for boys? Not right now.

Samir Husni: I have to ask you about the design. What made you decide to go with handwritten covers; what was your thinking behind that?

Erin Bried: I wanted it to be colorful and playful and engaging, and also accessible for our readers. Our five-year-old readers are only just learning to read, so they’ll be reading with their parents. Our ten-year-old’s certainly will be reading by themselves, so I wanted it to engage and be accessible to all of our readers.

And we also made a conscious decision not to picture any girls on our pages. You’ll see that there are no photos of real girls on any page, because I never wanted our readers to start comparing themselves to anyone else and think that they don’t look right or doing it right; that they don’t look happy enough or just whatever. I wanted them to totally be lost in their own experience. So, that was a conscious decision not to picture girls on any pages. And it was a good one. It allows us to be really playful with our illustrations and we often combine illustrations with photos, which I think is really fun and engaging, and offers a lot of depth and diversity.

I have such a great team helping me; Nia Lawrence is our art director and Andie Diemer is our photo editor. I just feel so grateful to be working with such smart and creative people.

Samir Husni: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Erin Bried: One thing I would like to say about Kazoo is you hear a lot of talk about how we need to inspire our girls and help them feel confident and all of these different things. That’s often the talk we hear about what girls need and require, but I think what’s different about Kazoo is young girls are our target readers, ages 5-10, and they already know that they’re smart. They already know that they can be silly and run fast and they can do anything, this is not new information to them. It would be shocking to them if you told them otherwise.

Kazoo’s mission is to reinforce what they already know. If you go to playground and you look at young girls play, they’re screaming, running, hanging upside down; they’re being strong; they’re already amazing. And Kazoo is just reinforcing in them what they already know, so that by the time they do get to adolescence, which is typically when young girls start to question their confidence, our Kazoo readers will be fortified, they will be more likely to question anybody who makes them feel wrong or that they can’t do something, than they would themselves.

I’d also like to say that I don’t have a problem with princesses, just that there is more out there than the color pink for girls. Kazoo is not an anti-princess magazine in any way; it’s just a magazine that offers a whole world out there.

Samir Husni: If I showed up at your home one evening unexpectedly what would I find you doing; reading a magazine; reading your iPad; having a glass of wine; watching television; or something else?

Erin Bried: Right now, after the kids go to bed, I’ll often hop back on the computer and do more work while the house is quiet. But yes, a glass of wine is always such a nice way to end the day, and some conversation with my better half. Going out to dinner in Brooklyn; any of those things sound great.

I feel like it’s been a while since I’ve done any of those things. Right now it’s still fast and furious startup mode.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Erin Bried: (Laughs) What doesn’t keep me up at night? It’s been a little bit difficult lately. My kindergartner was having a thing at school where her whole class takes a bite of an apple at the same time, and I woke up in the middle of the night because I had forgotten to put an apple in her bag. I got up and put the apple in her bag, so it can be something as trivial as that, to what artist are we going to use for the spring issue? Which fiction author will write our next short story?

It’s such exciting stuff to think about, and I guess I’m up because I’m excited about everything we can do. There’s so much to do and having only put out two issues so far I have a list of ideas longer than my arm. It’s just so amazing and I feel so grateful and lucky to know I have a job where I can think, who do I want to talk to? Which writer in the whole world do I want to talk to next about writing and getting writing activities or lessons from to teach our readers? Which amazing woman should we feature in the next maze, where they can meet her from one point to her destination? We’ve done Jane Goodall, Into the Forest of Tanzania; we’ve done Diana Nyad, from Cuba to Florida; who do we want to feature next in this maze? It’s just all so exciting.

The whole world is out there for us to explore and to share with our readers; that’s what keeps me up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

A Mr. Magazine™ Launch Story…

“We think people are going to want to keep these as sort of a record of the sport. A history of the sport and who were the biggest athletes and what were the best storylines of any given year. That’s why we went high on the price…” Braden Keith, on the high cover price of the magazine.

A magazine for those folks who can’t get enough of chlorine and the excitement of the swimmer’s life; SwimSwam grew from a very popular website into a beautifully-done, very high-quality large format magazine. Its paper is thick and lush and its contents filled to capacity with everything about the sport of swimming that could possibly interest an enthusiast. In fact, Mr. Magazine™ was so impressed with the new launch that I selected it as one of the 30 Hottest New Launches of the year.

Editor in chief Braden Keith and one of his partners, Olympic Gold Medalist Swimmer, Mel Stewart and his wife Tiffany, came together with two other very interested parties to found this amazing read. And I for one am awfully glad they did.

I spoke with Braden recently and we talked about the ins and outs of bringing a magazine such as this one to life, especially after four years on the web. Braden said it had been a learning process for him and his partners, and it continued to teach them every day more and more about the magazine industry. He reflected on a few of the challenges they had faced and those pleasant moments that made it all worthwhile. And he talked about the passion they all had about the brand, which convinced them they could contribute something valuable and collectible in the niche market.

So, grab your goggles and your love for a day at the pool and join the conversation – the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Braden Keith, editor in chief, SwimSwam magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On what made him decided they needed a print component to go along with the website: We launched the website in 2012. I’d had a previous website and Mel Stewart, one of my partners, who is an Olympic gold medalist in swimming, was looking to start something and we saw that our visions aligned. And the baby of that came out to be SwimSwam.com and we were like most people, we thought print was dead. Why would you print a magazine when you could have real time stuff up on the web forever. Fast forward four years later and all of the magazines were still around, and what we were hearing from all of our advertisers was that our competitors were getting a certain percentage of their money because they had a print magazine and people liked it. And so we decided that we’d give it a try and we thought that we could do it better than what was already in the market.

On the reaction to the print magazine from the swimming community: Some people were definitely skeptical and we had a lot who said the exact thing we’d thought earlier: why print? But I think that once people got the magazine and they held it, this is something that’s been very important to us; we wanted a magazine with thick pages and a thick cover that felt almost like a book more than a magazine. And people just loved it.

On whether the rather high cover price is a reflection of their belief that the magazine is more like a collector’s edition: I think that’s exactly what it is. We think people are going to want to keep these as sort of a record of the sport. A history of the sport and who were the biggest athletes and what were the best storylines of any given year. That’s why we went high on the price.

On any challenges he had to face while creating the print magazine: Definitely there have been challenges. When you’re producing content for a magazine, it all has to be good; it all has to be right. The copyediting; you need an extra layer of copyediting. We haven’t struggled with what to produce, but the actual production process has been a whole different thing.

On the most pleasant moment for him on this magazine journey: We set up a table at the Olympic trials in June this year in Omaha in a local restaurant near the pool and had magazines there for sale. We had a lot of people come up and buy the magazine there, but we had more people who were already subscribers to come up and tell us what a great magazine it was and how much they loved it.

On his future expectations for the magazine: We’d like to go to more than four issues per year, but we have to ramp up our subscribers so that we can afford it. That’s really something that we’d like to do. But we’re always going to be nervous. You hear what people say about magazines. For example, one of my favorite magazines, Mental Floss, just announced that they’re no longer going to be printing their magazine.

On his own personal background: I was a high school swimmer and played water polo in college. I coached swimming throughout college as a summer job, because it beat lifeguarding or checking out groceries at a grocery store. Then I kept getting sucked back into coaching and now I coach high school swimming, but that’s not my primary job; I work for a pipeline company in downtown Houston doing business analysis stuff.

On how he met and got into a partnership with Olympic gold medalist swimmer, Mel Stewart: I was doing my other website and there is a guy named Garrett McCaffrey, and he’s also a partner in the website, but he’s no longer a participating partner. He was sort of the godfather of swimming on the Internet, and had a site called Floswimming back in the day, and he had been aware of what else I was doing on the Internet on my other site. He and Mel had hooked up to start this new site and they wanted to do everything video-based. And Garrett told Mel that he needed to check out my site. Mel is an Olympic gold medalist and gets an automatic credibility and I was not a notable swimmer. But Garret told him that I had built an audience out of basically nothing and that they needed to talk to me about working with them.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly at his home one evening: I will be on my computer and I’ll probably have the TV on sports, and I will be in front of my computer either writing or just compulsively refreshing social media.

On what keeps him up at night: Conflict, just interpersonal conflict. And in this industry there is always conflict. Somebody doesn’t like what you wrote, and I’ll just go over it and over it again in my head and that’s the toughest thing I deal with and what keeps me up at night.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Braden Keith, editor in chief, SwimSwam magazine.

Samir Husni: Congratulations on being named one of the “30 Hottest New Launches” of the year; a job well done. I know SwimSwam started as a website and then you launched the magazine; can you take me through the history of the launch? What made you decide that you needed a print publication to go along with the website?

Braden Keith: We launched the website in 2012. I’d had a previous website and Mel Stewart, one of my partners, who is an Olympic gold medalist in swimming, was looking to start something and we saw that our visions aligned. And the baby of that came out to be SwimSwam.com and we were like most people, we thought print was dead. Why would you print a magazine when you could have real time stuff up on the web forever. And all of our competitors had magazines; we sort of didn’t get it. We thought the magazines would go away before we were ready to launch one.

Fast forward four years later and all of the magazines were still around, and what we were hearing from all of our advertisers was that our competitors were getting a certain percentage of their money because they had a print magazine and people liked it. And so we decided that we’d give it a try and we thought that we could do it better than what was already in the market. We thought that we could make it look and feel better; that we could capture a way to do a magazine that wasn’t a news-based magazine. We didn’t want to put out a magazine about things that had already happened and was old news that people had already read about on the Internet.

So, we just gave it a shot and we’re learning as we go, but as always we’re focusing on the content, content, content and trying to make it look good.

Samir Husni: What has been the reaction from the swimming community? Once you came up with that first issue, and after you’d been online for almost four years, what were people saying about the print edition?

Braden Keith: Some people were definitely skeptical and we had a lot who said the exact thing we’d thought earlier: why print? But I think that once people got the magazine and they held it, this is something that’s been very important to us; we wanted a magazine with thick pages and a thick cover that felt almost like a book more than a magazine. And people just loved it. We were 50/50 when we launched and we weren’t sure what the reaction would be, but people have really liked just the feel of it and the images have been a big piece of it, there are big, powerful images. Ad I think that’s worked really well for us.

Samir Husni: It’s not a cheap magazine, neither the subscription nor the single copy price; it’s almost $15 per issue. Is the cover price a reflection of the content or the belief that you feel like every issue of this magazine is more like a coffee table book or a collector’s edition?

Braden Keith: I think that’s exactly what it is. We think people are going to want to keep these as sort of a record of the sport. A history of the sport and who were the biggest athletes and what were the best storylines of any given year. That’s why we went high on the price. Obviously, the subscription is a pretty good discount from the cover price. I’m sure you’re aware that magazines on newsstands are not a very good economic model unless you’re a big producer.

Samir Husni: And were there any challenges that you had to overcome while doing it?

Braden Keith: Definitely there have been challenges. When you’re producing content for a magazine, it all has to be good; it all has to be right. The copyediting; you need an extra layer of copyediting. We haven’t struggled with what to produce, but the actual production process has been a whole different thing. Dealing with deadlines; we have deadlines on the web, but it’s more or less you get it done as quickly as you can, but when it comes to a magazine there’s a print deadline and things have to all be copyedited and there’s an entire process.

On the web, you write something, throw a picture on it and you copyedit it real quick and you put it up. With magazines, it’s a bit more complex. Between the deadlines and the design process that you have to go through, it’s very different. Information in the articles can change between when it was written and when it actually goes to print.

Those are some of the things that have caused us stress, but at the end of the day when we looked around at the market, there are two other big swimming magazines in the U.S., and we just thought we could do it better and were lucky enough to have found a good printing partner who happens to be a swim geek, as we like to call people who are big in the swimming world. And so he’s been really instrumental in helping us learn about the magazine industry and how to do this.

I wouldn’t say that it’s been as hard as we thought it would be, but then again we’re not perfect yet either. I think we’re still learning where some of these challenges are coming in. A big challenge that we got hit with, and I’m sure a lot of people did; our subscriber’s sign up for auto-renew and everybody received a new credit card with a chip in it this year and we lost probably half of our subscribers in a weekend from getting new credit cards. So, we’re learning about a lot of these things as we go, and I think we’re not far enough in to have learned all of the challenges yet, but we’ve had good people help us out.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant moment for you throughout this magazine journey?

Braden Keith: We set up a table at the Olympic trials in June this year in Omaha in a local restaurant near the pool and had magazines there for sale. We had a lot of people come up and buy the magazine there, but we had more people who were already subscribers to come up and tell us what a great magazine it was and how much they loved it. And it felt really cool to have that fact-to-face interaction with our audience. Once again on the web, you don’t get a lot of interpersonal interactions with your audience, but it was a lot of fun to meet people face-to-face.

Samir Husni: If you and I were talking one year from now, what would you hope to tell me about the magazine? What are your future expectations?

Braden Keith: We’d like to go to more than four issues per year, but we have to ramp up our subscribers so that we can afford it. That’s really something that we’d like to do. But we’re always going to be nervous. You hear what people say about magazines. For example, one of my favorite magazines, Mental Floss, just announced that they’re no longer going to be printing their magazine. And I think it’s the greatest magazine that’s ever been made and if they can’t make it; it just makes me nervous. So, I hope that we’ll still be doing it in a year. I hope that people keep subscribing and the economics of it still makes sense, but I’ll still be very nervous about it.

Samir Husni: What’s your background? Are you a journalist or a swimmer? Or a swimmer turned journalist? What’s the story of Braden Keith?

Braden Keith: I was a high school swimmer and played water polo in college. I coached swimming throughout college as a summer job, because it beat lifeguarding or checking out groceries at a grocery store. Then I kept getting sucked back into coaching and now I coach high school swimming, but that’s not my primary job; I work for a pipeline company in downtown Houston doing business analysis stuff. I worked for the Texas A&M student paper for about three months when I was in college, but that’s the extent of my journalism training. I didn’t like it. They didn’t write things interestingly; they were really focused on this AP kind of, no analysis, no adjectives, style of writing and it just bored me and I hated it.

And that was always in the back of my mind, but the reason I go into this; I actually started more on the programming side and that drew me into it. I needed some tools for my coaching. I needed to build tools for calculating relays and things like that. Then people started using them and I wondered what I could do to get more people reading them, and make a little bit of money off of it at the same time. So, I just started writing stuff and it took off. I don’t really know what the catch was or why it worked, but I just happened to back into it accidentally.

Samir Husni: How did you meet Mel Stewart and get into this partnership with him?

Braden Keith: I was doing my other website and there is a guy named Garrett McCaffrey, and he’s also a partner in the website, but he’s no longer a participating partner. He was sort of the godfather of swimming on the Internet, and had a site called Floswimming back in the day, and he had been aware of what else I was doing on the Internet on my other site.

He and Mel had hooked up to start this new site and they wanted to do everything video-based. And Garrett told Mel that he needed to check out my site. Mel is an Olympic gold medalist and gets an automatic credibility and I was not a notable swimmer. But Garret told him that I had built an audience out of basically nothing and that they needed to talk to me about working with them. Mel was doing a clinic and he called me up and invited me out to dinner. We talked about it and discussed the money and advertisers he already had signed up and I told him that was more money than I had made in two years doing it, so consider me in. And away we went.

Samir Husni: On the current issue you have four co-founders; are you all from Texas?

Braden Keith: No, three of us happen to live here, but none of us are actually from here. We have one Canadian and the non-participating co-founder lives in Phoenix. We’re spread out all over the place.

Samir Husni: But the offices are in Austin?

Braden Keith: Yes, but it’s Mel and Tiffany Stewart, who are husband and wife that are there. We avoid having any kind of a formal office, which is an intentional decision. But technically our headquarters are in Austin. I’m in Houston.

Samir Husni: If I showed up at your home one evening unexpectedly, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine; reading your iPad; watching television; or something else?

Braden Keith: I will be on my computer and I’ll probably have the TV on sports, and I will be in front of my computer either writing or just compulsively refreshing social media.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Braden Keith: Conflict, just interpersonal conflict. And in this industry there is always conflict. Somebody doesn’t like what you wrote, and I’ll just go over it and over it again in my head and that’s the toughest thing I deal with and what keeps me up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

A Mr. Magazine™ Launch Story

“Our demographic, our gamers that grew up in the dawn of the videogame age, the late ‘70s and early to mid ‘80s, through the crash and into the ‘90s; these people all grew up with videogame magazines. And to this day, and our sales show that we’re selling quite a few more print than we are digital, these people still enjoy that tangible product. And to that end we try to make a magazine that’s a little collectible. We have different artwork on the covers and different artists. We use a real high-grade paper inside and on the cover, not many ads; and it’s just a real high-quality magazine.” Mike Kennedy

After being successfully crowd-funded through a double shot of Kickstarter, RETRO Videogame Magazine is into its 11th issue, with its gaming eye on the future. And while founder and president, Mike Kennedy will tell you in a heartbeat that it hasn’t been, nor is it now, a stroll through the proverbial Rose Garden, it is something that he has a passionate commitment to and a project that stirs his entrepreneurial spirit like nothing else could.

I spoke with Mike recently and we talked about the magazine, past, present and future; taking note of each step of the process along the way. It has been a bit of a harrowing journey for Mike and his wife, Tricia, who is co-publisher of the magazine, but it’s also been a learning experience and an exciting joy, such as when they saw Issue 7 in Barnes & Noble for the very first time. It was quite the proud moment for them both.

Mike is a man who is learning as he goes when it comes to the world of magazines, but he has no intention of quitting school. He wants to take RETRO as far as possible and turn it into a gaming brand that people can turn to for that vintage gaming experience that a tangible print product can provide. And it would appear that he’s doing that, with his team of some of the best writers, editors and artists that the industry offers. And with his RETRO store and his website, gamegavel.com, Mike is on his way to becoming a competitive brand indeed in the world of retro gaming.

So, I hope that you enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with a man who has a gamer’s heart with an entrepreneur’s dream inside of it, Mike Kennedy, Founder and President, RETRO Videogame Magazine.

But first the sound-bites:

On the genesis of RETRO magazine: I never thought that I’d be a magazine publisher. In 2008, I started a video-gaming auction site called “GameGavel.com” and it was basically a gaming-dedicated auction site, very similar to what eBay does, but just dedicated to games and other things that geeks, nerds and gamers like. That was my first entrepreneurial venture that I was involved in. I started that for around $800, I think. And I’ve grown that site over the years.

On his most pleasant moment during this magazine experience: But the first milestone, as you indicated, was just getting that first issue in my hands after three or four months of work and a month of doing the Kickstarter; seeing that issue come in was a huge high. It was just amazing. Not only for me, but for my writers, who never probably in their careers, other than a couple of them who have been in the magazine business for a long time, a lot of the younger writers probably never thought they’d see their story in a magazine. So, it was cool for the entire team to be involved with that.

On the biggest stumbling block for him and how he plans to overcome it: Costs right now are our major stumbling block. It costs me somewhere around $14,000 to produce an issue. Not counting the printing. That $14,000 is what my content costs; my layout costs; artwork, editorial and my editors. And that’s not a ton of money. I don’t know in the magazine world if that’s high-end for creating a single issue or low-end.

On what he hopes to be saying about RETRO one year from now: I hope to be telling you that we’re hugely successful and we’ve been managing to get our issues out on time; we’re growing our readership and have expanded into more newsstands, which is something that I’m going to be doing, hopefully, very shortly with Curtis Circulation, maybe with Issue 13. I hope that’s what I’m telling you. (Laughs)

On anything else he’s like to add: Just that we appreciate all of the readers, obviously. We hope that we’re giving them a product that they’ll continue to read and to love, and want to continue to collect. My writing team, again, is the best in the business as far as I’m concerned. If we were better funded, we’d certainly be able to get these issues out on a regular basis; they’d all operate within the time frames and the deadlines and the schedules without fail. But everything is great; it’s just the constant kind of funding battle, which is something that every entrepreneur faces, certainly in the early stages like this.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at his home: I probably work until somewhere between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. If I’m doing stuff during the day for the magazine, then I have to make up for my real job in the evening or on the weekends. When you work out of your house you kind of are always working. My wife kind of goes crazy with it, but again, generally, you’re kind of always working. When you work out of your home and your home is your office, there’s always as excuse to go and sit down at the desk, pull up your financials and see what you can do. You’re always thinking about business, at least I am. Unfortunately, since I started all my videogame adventures; one of the things I do the least anymore is play videogames.

On what keeps him up at night: The magazine; 100 percent. Sometimes it’s just hard to sleep because I’m always trying to figure out that next move. And when you’re trying to survive, which is kind of the mode that I’m in, you’re constantly thinking about what you’re going to do tomorrow to make sure that another issue will be coming out? Again, it’s just a lot of biz-development type thoughts.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Mike Kennedy, Founder & President, RETRO Videogame Magazine.

Samir Husni: Tell me the story of RETRO.

Mike Kennedy: I never thought that I’d be a magazine publisher. In 2008, I started a video-gaming auction site called “GameGavel.com” and it was basically a gaming-dedicated auction site, very similar to what eBay does, but just dedicated to games and other things that geeks, nerds and gamers like. That was my first entrepreneurial venture that I was involved in. I started that for around $800, I think. And I’ve grown that site over the years.

About three or four years into running the auction marketplace, I got the idea of adding content to it. This whole idea of content and commerce combined was really interesting to me. What I wanted to do was give gamers the ability to go online and read about all of these retro and older games. And also give them the opportunity after reading about them to go buy them or sell them. And then embedding those buy/sell links into the content. So, the content all started as an online website; it integrated with the auction site.

After a few years of doing that, I became part of a podcast. And I had a listener who reached out to me and happened to be in the marketing/magazine side of things and he had the ability to do the entire layout and design and the creative work involved with a magazine. And he reached out to me and asked had I ever thought about doing a magazine? And I told him, obviously no. And he told me he would love to work with me on it and help me create it. Me being in the gaming world through the auction site and my podcast, I had quite a few contacts with journalists and writers and things like that.

So, it wasn’t a big switch to go from online to print, as far as attaining the content. It was kind of the same process. We had all of the building blocks in place, but then the question became: why do a magazine in this day and age?

Our demographic, our gamers that grew up in the dawn of the videogame age, the late ‘70s and early to mid ‘80s, through the crash and into the ‘90s; these people all grew up with videogame magazines. And to this day, and our sales show that we’re selling quite a few more print than we are digital, these people still enjoy that tangible product. And to that end we try to make a magazine that’s a little collectible. We have different artwork on the covers and different artists. We use a real high-grade paper inside and on the cover, not many ads; and it’s just a real high-quality magazine.

Anyway, it was a really nice switch. And then we decided that we’d do a Kickstarter for it and this was in the fall of 2013. We did our first Kickstarter and raised around $70,000. We sold about 2,500 subscriptions in a month and that really got the whole ball rolling. From the time our Kickstarter ended, which was in November, 2013; we had our first issue out in January. We’re bimonthly; so we’re supposed to be getting an issue out every other month, six issues per year.

And that’s what happened with the magazine its first year. For the most part, we got our issues out on time; it got a little slow in the summer, but everybody received their issues and then in the fall of 2014, in October, we did our second-year Kickstarter. And we raised another $40,000 to $50,000; sold another 1,400 to 1,500 subscriptions during that second time around.

And that’s pretty much gotten us to where we are today. I ended up having a sort of falling out with my layout/design person and so it’s been a struggle, because when he started he got a little stock in my company and was supposed to get some advertising commissions, but just starting out our ad sales were very insignificant for the most part, so he didn’t get paid a lot for that.

But when he left; when I let him go after Issue 7, suddenly I had to pay a layout/design person to come onboard and that was never budgeted in to the second-year Kickstarter. And like a lot of people who do Kickstarter, many times you underfund it; you don’t know all of the ends and outs. I had never published a magazine before, so finding the right printer, knowing what we should be paying to print; I think we got taken advantage of just a bit for six or seven issues; we were paying a lot for printing. We’ve since lowered the cost on that significantly by finding another vendor for that.

But you learn all of these things as you go, and frequently you don’t load everything into that Kickstarter that you need. Certainly, things like salaries for me were never loaded in. I have another job on the side, a career that I’ve been involved with for almost 30 years. I work out of my house; I’m a regional person, so it’s given me the opportunity to start this passion project on the side. I’ve really never paid myself, it was never budgeted in, but now we’re going on three years and I’d really like to start getting paid. (Laughs)

It’s a great magazine and super high-quality. So, that’s how the magazine started and has evolved. We’re 11 issues in right now and getting ready to finish out our second year, which will be the final issue of the year-two Kickstarter. We got pretty slow; again, underfunded. I’ve borrowed more money from my 401K to get Issue 11 out and now I’m trying to figure out what to do for Issue 12. I’m looking for other opportunities for my writing team to leverage their abilities to write for third parties and things like that. I’m looking for other revenue-generating opportunities to continue to help fund the magazine. And that’s where we’re at today.

Samir Husni: What has been the most pleasant moment for you during this magazine experience? Was it holding that first issue in your hands when it came back from the printer?

Mike Kennedy: There have been a few milestones for me and first of all, I absolutely love this. I want this magazine to continue forever; for people to enjoy it. Certainly, videogame magazines in the U.S. have pretty much died out completely, other than one behemoth magazine that we all know, “Game Informer.”

But the first milestone, as you indicated, was just getting that first issue in my hands after three or four months of work and a month of doing the Kickstarter; seeing that issue come in was a huge high. It was just amazing. Not only for me, but for my writers, who never probably in their careers, other than a couple of them who have been in the magazine business for a long time, a lot of the younger writers probably never thought they’d see their story in a magazine. So, it was cool for the entire team to be involved with that.

And then the second big milestone was finally seeing Issue 7, which was our first issue in Barnes & Noble. That was really great. That was probably the second-best day of this whole thing.

But everything else is just great. The whole creative process is amazing; figuring out what you’re going to feature in every issue; looking for the artists. It’s always a high when you see what your cover art is going to look like. Those are probably the next best days for me and then just working with a talented group of writers, some of them are the best writers in the industry.

When I did the Kickstarter, I surrounded myself with some of the best writers in the industry. Andy Eddy has been a writer; he was editor in chief of VideoGames & Computer Entertainment back in the mid-‘80s. I read his magazine back then and to have him on my team is pretty neat. And again, just to work with some of the best in the industry has been another great thing; so it’s really been a great project. It’s been a great experience. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s certainly very rewarding.

Samir Husni: What is the biggest stumbling block for you and how do you plan to overcome it?

Mike Kennedy: Costs right now are our major stumbling block. It costs me somewhere around $14,000 to produce an issue. Not counting the printing. That $14,000 is what my content costs; my layout costs; artwork, editorial and my editors. And that’s not a ton of money. I don’t know in the magazine world if that’s high-end for creating a single issue or low-end.

We do pay our writers well. I want to be a company that pays writers well. There are so many companies and websites that don’t pay at all; it’s really bad. The problem is you have so many people that; number one, think they’re writers because they can just sit at home and do it. Many of them are not great writers. It comes back to; you get what you pay for, it really does. When I originally started out I wasn’t really paying for writers for content, although I still had very acceptable writers at that time. But when you get into the magazine side, you really can’t low-ball these people. They’re contracting the writing for a lot of outfits and not getting paid a lot from some of them, just trying to get their name out there. So, I want writers that want to write for us because we do pay well.

And we didn’t budget $14,000 an issue times six into the Kickstarter; that was our fault. So, I’ve been trying to manage it, self-funding this to the point where we are today. But we do sell some advertisement, although I don’t have anyone full-time doing that. That’s one of my problems. I don’t really have the time to do it, which I feel terrible about because I think if I could focus on it, I would sell more. But when you have a real job and you do this on the side, there’s that tipping point where you have to decide when do you leave the comfort and safety of your real job and jump into this thing full-time? My problem is I get paid pretty well on my real job and at this point sucking all of that money out of the business wouldn’t make any sense. First of all, there wouldn’t be enough to suck out to support me, but even if there was, I’m sort of able to do it all at this point. It’s just a balancing act.

But the costs are certainly up there and I’m not personally wealthy to just continue to keep on funding this forever. I’m always looking for avenues to generate more revenue. We’re doing some side projects for third parties; we’ve done a couple of those. I’m talking to retailers about doing holiday buyer’s guides. The bottom line is we have a great pool of writers, editors and artists. Some of the best in the industry and they’re all here. It doesn’t seem like too much of a longshot to think that I can use those same people to create other products for other people; publish other products for other people, whether it be digital or print or both.

So, finding writers, keeping good writers, finding artists, none of that has been a problem. There are a lot of people that are good writers and who want to write and love being a part of a tangible magazine. Telling your friends and family to go to the store and pick up your magazine is pretty cool. And it’s just more meaningful than a website or a digital magazine to some extent.

Samir Husni: If you and I were having this same conversation one year from now, what would you hope to be telling me about RETRO?

Mike Kennedy: I hope to be telling you that we’re hugely successful and we’ve been managing to get our issues out on time; we’re growing our readership and have expanded into more newsstands, which is something that I’m going to be doing, hopefully, very shortly with Curtis Circulation, maybe with Issue 13. I hope that’s what I’m telling you. (Laughs)

Samir Husni: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Mike Kennedy: Just that we appreciate all of the readers, obviously. We hope that we’re giving them a product that they’ll continue to read and to love, and want to continue to collect. My writing team, again, is the best in the business as far as I’m concerned. If we were better funded, we’d certainly be able to get these issues out on a regular basis; they’d all operate within the time frames and the deadlines and the schedules without fail.

But everything is great; it’s just the constant kind of funding battle, which is something that every entrepreneur faces, certainly in the early stages like this. But we’re 11 issues in and I think we have a pretty good track record for quality.

Samir Husni: If I showed up one evening unexpectedly to your home, what would I find you doing; reading a magazine; reading your iPad; playing a retro videogame; having a glass of wine; or something different?

Mike Kennedy: I probably work until somewhere between 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. If I’m doing stuff during the day for the magazine, then I have to make up for my real job in the evening or on the weekends. When you work out of your house you kind of are always working. My wife kind of goes crazy with it, but again, generally, you’re kind of always working. When you work out of your home and your home is your office, there’s always as excuse to go and sit down at the desk, pull up your financials and see what you can do. You’re always thinking about business, at least I am.

Unfortunately, since I started all my videogame adventures; one of the things I do the least anymore is play videogames. So, you’re probably never going to walk in on me playing a videogame. You may walk in on me watching TV and relaxing with my wife, or in the garage, which is the office, either planning the next issue or trying to figure out how I’m going to pay for the prior issue; just trying to figure out what my next move is, anything to progress this and keep this great thing moving forward is pretty much always on my mind.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Mike Kennedy: The magazine; 100 percent. Sometimes it’s just hard to sleep because I’m always trying to figure out that next move. And when you’re trying to survive, which is kind of the mode that I’m in, you’re constantly thinking about what you’re going to do tomorrow to make sure that another issue will be coming out? Again, it’s just a lot of biz-development type thoughts. LinkedIn has been a tremendous asset. Whether it’s connecting with the writer, or the printers; LinkedIn has just been tremendous. Anybody that’s an entrepreneur and trying to make connections, you can’t go wrong with LinkedIn. It’s really great. And the people are great.

But the magazine keeps me up at night and what I’m going to do to get that next issue out. That’s the first thought, and then getting it out on time is the next thing. But again, it just really all comes down to capital and funding.

Right now, we’re just scratching the surface for this magazine. When we did the Kickstarter, we had subscribers in over 34 countries. So, it has international appeal and it’s selling really well. We were going through Ingram, and we were only in Barnes & Noble and Hastings Entertainment. Well, Hastings just went out of business. So we’ve been selling 30 percent, pretty much on target. We’ve nailed 30 percent sell-through at Barnes & Noble. But Ingram; that’s the only place they had us.

We’re talking to Curtis now and they love the magazine and they’re telling me that we’re going to sell 25 percent of what we stock. And they’re going to research the best stores for us to be in and get us in to a ton of other retailers. I’ve been told that growing your subscriber base really goes back to the newsstand primarily. You’re not going to grow your subscriber base just by being in Barnes & Noble. You have to be everywhere.

And printing costs are pretty cheap these days; I don’t really have any problems with that. Selling 25 percent of what we stock; we can certainly cover our printing costs, and hopefully some of the content cost and then factor in the advertising. It’s all the chicken or the egg; you have to have the circulation to get the advertisers. And you need the advertisers to help fund that circulation, so that’s the battle, I think, that so many people starting out are going to face. It’s really been a big learning experience.

Samir Husni: Thank you.