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Spacely: A New Platform To Help Sustain Print & Out-of-Home Media. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Founder and CEO David Coker and Co-Founder and COO Beth Mach.

December 11, 2024

What if there were a platform that lets you buy an advertising page in a magazine as easily as buying an airline ticket? Well, there is an answer in one word: Spacely.

You will ask, what is Spacely? In the words of its founder and CEO, David Coker,“Spacely is a two-sided market for offline media. It was born from the idea that it should not be any more difficult to buy a page in a magazine or even a billboard ad than buying an airline ticket.”

David shared the idea of Spacely with me almost a year ago and I fell in love with the idea that someone planned to create a digital platform to help magazines and billboards find, access, and place advertising pages in the magazines and on the billboards. I loved the platform so much that when David asked me to join the advisory board of Spacely I did not hesitate to say yes.

Spacely is still in its infancy but has grown in a way that even surprised its founder. “We thought we’d launch with 20 or 30 publications and grow it from there,” David told me in a recent interview, “but now we’re at over 600 media partners in more than 40 countries.”

I took the opportunity to chat with David and his COO, Beth Mach, to learn more about Spacely and provide my audience with an in-depth look at a platform that is created to help them sustain their business in these difficult times.

So, please enjoy my interview with David Coker, Founder and CEO, and Beth Mach, COO, of Spacely. But first the soundbites:

On what is Spacely: “Spacely is a two-sided market for offline media. It was born from the idea that it should not be any more difficult to buy a page in a magazine or even a billboard ad than buying an airline ticket.”

On why creating a platform to help print in a digital age: “We could see that the print industry was an underserved market. A lot of innovation was happening on the digital side.”

On the ease to use Spacely: “The platform is built is also very intuitive and familiar in the way that somebody would buy toothpaste or clothes or an airline ticket.”

On how Spacely works: “As Spacely is a tool for print and out-of-home, there are different mechanisms for making this possible for both. The ultimate goal is to make it transactable to the extent that it can be.”

On the early reaction to Spacely: “Early reaction is a lot of excitement. People are very excited for the opportunity to have their content discovered — easily discovered — and to be able to connect directly with media buyers.”

On the most important factor in Spacely’s platform: “We know that this industry is built on relationships, and this is truly to help encourage deeper, more valuable relationships.”

On the goals of Spacely: “We would be remiss if we didn’t say that Spacely helps everybody achieve a positive upside, whether it’s efficiency or sales, as well as create a really positive environment between both the seller and the buyer.”

On challenges facing Spacely: “Our challenge is how much do we get done in a short period of time to be truly viable and to be the product we envision for our customers and for our clients and users.”

On the role they envision Spacely plays: “Spacely certainly gives us an opportunity to play a role in the positive growth and resurgence of the print environment and print industry.”

On whether Spacely is selling content or space?: “Honestly, Spacely is not selling anything. We’re helping your sales team to do the selling. And sometimes there are advertisers who want as much space as they can get, and sometimes there are advertisers who want to be next to certain content.”

On how is Spacely different than other platforms: “Digital has become easy to buy, even programmatically bought in many cases. We’re careful to point out that Spacely is not programmatic, but our platform lends itself very nicely to other offline media.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with David Coker, founder and CEO, and Beth Mach, COO of Spacely:

Samir Husni: Tell me, what is Spacely?

David Coker: That’s the best question to start off with. Spacely is a two-sided market for offline media. It was born from the idea that it should not be any more difficult to buy a page in a magazine or even a billboard ad than buying an airline ticket.

Samir Husni: We live in a digital age. Why are you trying to help print?

David Coker: Number one, we believe in the value of print media, and beyond that, we believe in the value of the talents of print journalists and the necessity to continue to sell local and personal stories in print media.

We could see that the print industry was an underserved market. A lot of innovation was happening on the digital side. There are hundreds of DSPs and SSPs, and different tools for selling digital media. But those tools really had not been created yet for helping print media to be able to be sold as easily as digital media is to be sold and bought. So, it appeared to be a white space.

Candidly, I thought this was already being done. I thought, Surely this has been done, it’s been tried, and someone else is perfecting it right now. When I was at the BBC, I went to Beth and said, “Hey, does this thing exist already?”

Beth Mach: I was like, “Nope, it doesn’t. And it needs to.”

I will say, too, that bringing digital to both print and out-of-home — but in this discussion today for print — this is how people buy everything online. There shouldn’t be any reason why you couldn’t also in our industry buy these two channels online. It’s very familiar.

And the way the platform is built is also very intuitive and familiar in the way that somebody would buy toothpaste or clothes or an airline ticket, like David said.

Samir Husni: Can you briefly explain how it works?

David Coker: As Spacely is a tool for print and out-of-home, there are different mechanisms for making this possible for both. The ultimate goal is to make it transactable to the extent that it can be.

We connect directly into a publisher’s layout via proprietary technology, pulling through the issue architecture, so partners are able to see what positions are available, what positions are taken, and what the adjacent content is. So, if an advertiser wants to be next to an article on a summer concert series, or if they want to specifically find people who are writing about Harry Styles or Rihanna, they would simply search for that content on our platform and see what is upcoming.

It is not historically, “Who does typically write about pop culture,” “Who does typically write about female fashion,” but, “Who is going to be writing about New York Fashion Week in the winter,” “Who is going to be writing about a new art exhibit opening in May,” “Who is going to be writing about Harry Styles’ new album,” and knowing where that content is going to be within the magazine and being able to advertise within the proximity to it that they want to be.

Samir Husni: So, you’re working with the publishers and the advertisers?

David Coker: Yes. As a two-sided market, we’ve actively over the past year or so been recruiting partners on both the supply and the demand side.

On the demand side, we’re fortunate to have a number of early partners who we’re already working with and transacting with as the site continues to move through our launch phase.

On the supply side, we thought we’d launch with 20 or 30 publications and grow it from there. But now we’re at over 600 media partners in more than 40 countries. Some of these are really well-known titles like Nat Geo, Fortune magazine, Rolling Stone, and other major national titles.

But then, a lot of them are regional, local, and niche titles like San Diego Magazine, Hour Detroit, Cherry Bombe, and all the Edible titles. We’ve been fortunate to have had a ton of traction with our partners.

Samir Husni: How is the reception from the publishers? Are they happy with what they are getting? What’s the early reaction?

David Coker: Early reaction is a lot of excitement. People are very excited for the opportunity to have their content discovered — easily discovered — and to be able to connect directly with media buyers.

Right now, it’s often a challenge to get in front of the right media buyer at the right time. Spacely eliminates a lot of the friction points, allows you to easily be discovered, and allows your sales team to cover more ground than they would have otherwise.

We often say that the Spacely platform makes a team of five perform like a team of 15. What our platform is meant to do is create a virtuous cycle between the publishers and the buyers. So, the more the publishers use the platform, the more valuable it becomes to the buyers, and vice versa.

What our platform cannot do is make a team of zero perform like a team of five. We’re very careful to say that this is not a programmatic solution. This is not something you flip on the switch and flip off your day-to-day relationships.

The platform is meant to give your team more time for the relationships, so they spend less time doing manual work, less time doing data entry, automating the tasks that can be automated, allowing them to do higher-value work, managing relationships, and presenting high-value, high-concept ideas for proposals.

Beth Mach: The big thing that David hit on is about the relationships. We know that this industry is built on those relationships, and this is truly to help encourage deeper, more valuable relationships. And at the end of the day, people want to move a bit faster, and people want to make a little bit more money all while feeling like they are connected with people they trust.

We would be remiss if we didn’t say that Spacely helps everybody achieve a positive upside, whether it’s efficiency or sales, as well as create a really positive environment between both the seller and the buyer.

Samir Husni: What’s in it for Spacely?

David Coker: A couple things. Obviously, there is a massive financial upside and obtainable market here. Our business model is transactional, kind of like Airbnb.

There’s a small transaction fee on both sides — the supply side and the demand side — but it’s not an overstatement to say that we certainly have a goal of enabling and creating sustainable business models for local, regional, and niche publications. We think that’s important.

We believe that the erosion of local journalism imperils our overall national discourse, so supporting local journalism — making local journalism a sustainable business model — was very much at the core of our intentions.

Beth Mach: I will also say, we would be remiss, again, if we didn’t mention that we want to build something that helps create an environment of economic stability for the print side, but we’re also not a charity. We do want to make sure we’re creating a positive upside for everyone involved.

Yes, there is an exit plan at some point, but we’ll know what that looks like over the course of time. We’re here to drive positive economic growth for the print industry.

Samir Husni: Are you working with media agencies, ad agencies, or you’re working directly with advertisers?

David Coker: Primarily with the ad agencies. We do have some relationships with advertisers directly. Mostly those have been advisory relationships. We have an advisory relationship with LVMH. We have an advisory relationship with Marriott International, as well as L’Oréal.

Then, we have a handful of other brands that we have friendly relationships with, and they don’t have agencies. So, we’re happy to work with either, but the agencies are really a key part of our overall focus. We want to help the agencies be efficient in their media buys, have transparency in their media buys, and be able to service their clients.

Beth Mach: We also found a new cohort of agencies, meaning digital agencies who don’t have this capability in-house.

There are a lot of advertisers who want the capability of a really smart digital-first agency, but also have print and out-of-home needs, and don’t want to have to go to multiple agencies to be able to do this work.

We’ve found that there’s a bit of a niche of some of the digital agencies coming to us, where they are now with their current business, and with Spacely’s help, have the capability to go in market for existing clients as well as win new business.

Samir Husni: Since the inception of the concept of Spacely and then the actual platform itself, has it been a walk in a rose garden, or have you had some challenges?

David Coker: Like any start-up, there are challenges.

I come from a start-up background, so I’m not unfamiliar with the high highs and the low lows, which is a pretty common story across the founders Beth and I speak with all the time. I tell people, every week is a net positive, and we’re really blessed to have a product that has had such really incredible traction.

I can say in modesty, it’s rare that we hear someone say, “No, this isn’t for us.” It just simply doesn’t happen. Are there things to figure out? Certainly, but almost uniformly, people are excited to use our platform.

People see the promise of Spacely, and we move pretty quickly to an agreement. But candidly, every week is five steps forward and three steps back. We just don’t know from one week to the next what the next challenge is going to be.

Beth Mach: We have a really incredible team, honestly, and that’s been crucial to being able to navigate any challenges.

Every morning, we get together with the leadership team, which I call the Core Four, and our dev team. We debate internally. We debate with the dev team and our business analysts about what should be done, how it should be done. We ask for outside counsel from folks who are in our cohort.

There are challenges. Timing is a challenge. Investment is a challenge. But like David said, we’ve had such a great response. I don’t think we can move fast enough. Our challenge is how much do we get done in a short period of time to be truly viable and to be the product we envision for our customers and for our clients and users.

Samir Husni: What would you consider the major stumbling block, if there is any?

Beth Mach: Money, money, money. Yeah. We’re largely bootstrapped.

David Coker: We’ve been fortunate to raise a nice round among our friends and family, and right now, we’re in the middle of an angel raise, and that’s tricky. A lot of VCs we speak to like us, but we’re too early on in our traction to have a case for VCs to fit their theses.

Almost always, we end up going back to angel investors, who, for us, are former agency leadership, former global publishing house leadership, and people who are within out-of-home currently.

Continuing to raise, finding the right people, finding the right timing, all in the right balance — that’s been a challenge.

I would also say, there’s not just one major stumbling block. It’s a two-sided market. The phrase herding cats gets overused, but what we’ve created is an extremely complicated piece of software. It would not make sense for any one publisher to build it for themselves. It would hardly make sense for one global publishing house to build it for only their titles.

We often compare our platform to Kayak, like the travel booking engine. While it certainly makes sense for Delta Airlines to have its own booking engine on its own site, there’s still need for a third party that sees across the market. We’re that third party that gives macro-market data across the industry, both print and out-of-home.

Our ambitions, let’s say, are grand. Our vision for the product is robust. Getting there, I think our Spacely:Transact product is far more advanced than what we even expected an MVP would be.

We’re very happy with the work. We’re constantly surprised every day at the level of complexity that we can achieve and that we can solve for. That’s quite frankly essential.

Samir Husni: Does it make a difference — working with a large company, large magazine publisher, or an individual local niche magazine?

David Coker: To an extent, it does. I think both have different wants out of Spacely, and we’re able to accommodate both.

A large publisher has existing relationships and they want to maintain those relationships; they want to make the process of working with them efficient, and they want to support their print products.

The local companies, sometimes their print product is their main source of revenue and they want to find incremental revenue. They want to be able to be discovered by Pepsi or Chevrolet, which would normally have a lot of trouble even finding out that they existed, let alone that the content they’re writing is the perfect content for the upcoming Chevrolet campaign. Discoverability is a major factor for the local publishers.

The national publishers, I don’t think they feel like they have to be discovered. To an extent, they do though, because a sales team can only make so many calls and have so much reach, but they don’t feel like that discoverability is a major problem for them. Efficiency is what they are constantly striving for.

Beth, would you say that sounds right?

Beth Mach: Yes, and uniformity.

As David mentioned earlier, our platform gives a team of five the ability to work as a team of 15. You have to have process, you have to have some level of uniformity in the process, but then also in how people are trained.

Using our tool gives them the ability to do that without a ton of training, without a ton of preparation. They can start using Spacely almost immediately.

Samir Husni: So, are you in the business of selling content or filling space?

David Coker: What an interesting way to phrase that question. I would actually say both.

I say that because everybody’s approaching this — each advertiser and each seller is approaching this a little bit differently. If we said we were selling only space, we would be overlooking the benefit of what print brings to a reader.

We would also not be looking at a business in a way that content creates more readership, that it attracts more advertisers, and again, creates that goodwill and the opportunity for us to help stabilize an industry.

Again, I say “help” — it’s not that we’re coming to save the day, but Spacely certainly gives us an opportunity to play a role in the positive growth and resurgence of the print environment and print industry. I would say, the number one bit of feedback we get is, “Why doesn’t this exist already?” We get it from the demand side; we get it from the supply side.

Beth Mach: You asked, “Are we selling content or space?”

Honestly, Spacely is not selling anything. We’re helping your sales team to do the selling. And sometimes there are advertisers who want as much space as they can get, and sometimes there are advertisers who want to be next to certain content.

I think we’re all surprised that a solution that seems as simple and intuitive as what we’re creating has not really existed yet in the way that we’ve built it out.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my typical personal questions, is there any question that I failed to ask you or anything you would like to add?

David Coker: We touched briefly on out-of-home as part of our business. We often refer to Spacely as the Kayak for offline media — offline being print and out-of-home media. But there are other products on our road map, products that are shown to be necessary by our conversations and discovery with our agency partners — anything that’s necessarily not digital.

Digital has become easy to buy, even programmatically bought in many cases. We’re careful to point out that Spacely is not programmatic, but our platform lends itself very nicely to other offline media, and you’ll see some of that coming to the fore in the not-too-distant future.

One other thing I always like to touch on is this, it’s important to know that while we have products, Spacely is a machine-learning platform. Our system works 24-7, understanding the demand-side patterns and supply-side behavior of our users.

Some of our products include inventory management products, as well as the transaction product, Spacely:Transact itself. But I always consider — and I think Beth would agree — that our number one product is our culture. It’s the culture of our team, and how we work with each other, and how we work with our partners that we’re proudest of.

We really rely on two core values, and those are curiosity and kindness. And valuing disagreement is a key part of our everyday process. So, I always like to call out that who we are as a company is very much a product of wonderful people, and not just the products that we’re creating.

Beth Mach: Well said. Thank you.

Samir Husni: So, Beth, tell me, if I come uninvited one evening to your home, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, watching TV, cooking?

Beth Mach: My husband is the chef of the house, and I am a great sous-chef. So, a little bit of cooking, but lots of conversation and hanging out with my husband.

We don’t see each other all that much, because we both travel quite a bit. So, an evening of cooking and drinking a nice bottle of wine is always welcome. And we always welcome strangers and friends to our homes for dinner. It’s a lot of fun. It’s kind of a bit of our love language here.

Samir Husni: And David?

David Coker: So, any night of the week, you’ll definitely find me working late.

If you walked in, you’d see me lounging with my cats, playing chess, and answering emails. My wife will have something on the TV. She’s an entertainment writer and editor, so she’ll have two or three different things on various screens and a movie playing on the main TV here.

So, cats, chess, and cranking out correspondence almost with 100% certainty. That’s my routine.

Samir Husni: Beth, what keeps you up at night these days?

Beth Mach: Well, I would actually like to reframe that a little bit. I like to talk about what gets me up in the morning.

I think what energizes me — and we talked about it a little bit — no two days are the same in start-up land, right? You’re faced with something different every day. That is very exciting to me.

And I know this sounds a little Pollyanna, but figuring out how to make the world of advertising exciting and enjoyable, and figuring out ways to create more space and time and deep opportunities to think beyond what’s in front of you — Spacely gives me that opportunity. I just look forward to it.

I’m also part of some other start-ups and roundtables, and getting energy from each one of those and applying it in ways that make the world a little bit more enjoyable is super fun to me.

Samir Husni: And David?

David Coker: Caffeine, full stop. That’s what keeps me up at night.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

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Flow Magazine: A Dutch Favorite Returns To The United States. The Mr. Magazine™ interview with Irene Smit, Co-Founder and Creative Director.

November 17, 2024

Flow, the magazine that was born in an attic in the Netherlands in 2008, gained the world’s attention for its beauty, elegance, and giving its audience a time for themselves in a very slow but conscience and creative presentation.

What can easily be described as a magnet to paper lovers, returns to the shores of the United States and another 20 English speaking countries after suspending publication in English following COVID 19 in 2020.

The articles in the magazine, the photography, and the illustrations are all printed on paper that corresponds to the nature of the article or illustration. The genius idea of Irene Smit, the cofounder and creative director of Flow, with business partner Astrid van der Hulst, cofounder and former editor in chief of the magazine.

When the magazine arrived on the newsstands in the Netherlands, the skeptics who doubted a “me time magazine,” will survive were stunned by the sales numbers. Flow continued to grow in the Netherlands and beyond. Now in four languages(Dutch, German, French and English) and multiple international editions, the magazine is back on the United States newsstands.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Irene Smit, the cofounder and creative director of Flow via Zoom in her office in the Netherlands. What follows is the lightly edited interview with Irene Smit, but first the soundbites:

On the elevator pitch of Flow: “Flow is about slowing down and living a conscious life.”

On the challenges that forced the suspension of Flow in 2020: “The challenges brought by COVID-19 proved insurmountable. Skyrocketing paper prices and exorbitant distribution costs, combined with widespread shop closures worldwide, made continuing the magazine untenable.”

On the timing of the return of the English edition of Flow: “Last year, Flow Magazine was sold to another publishing house, Roularta Media. They were enthusiastic about restarting the international edition, which was exciting for us.”

On the feedback during Flow’s suspension: “What’s truly heartwarming is that even during the years we were away, we continued to receive letters and messages on platforms like Instagram and Facebook.”

On Flow’s target audience: “In a time of increasing polarization, many found comfort in Flow’s community—people who cherish crafting, paper, and positivity.”

On the genesis of the Flow idea: “People were growing tired of the “more, better, quicker” mentality. Instead, they seemed to crave a simpler, more authentic way of life.”

On the power of print in a digital age: “After years dominated by digital devices like iPhones and iPads, people are rediscovering the value of paper. It resonates particularly with Gen Z and millennials, who are increasingly seeking ways to step away from their screens.”

On Flow’s mission: “Flow has always been about: nurturing your mind through creativity and incorporating positive psychology into everyday life.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Irene Smit, cofounder and creative director of Flow magazine:

Samir Husni: What’s the elevator pitch of Flow?

Irene Smit: Flow is about slowing down and living a conscious life.

When we started Flow (myself and business partner Astrid van der Hulst) in 2008 magazines weren’t about those topics. They were all about more, better, like what social media is now. We already knew what the world wanted before the world wanted it, a place to slow down and to live a conscious life, and that’s what we still offer in the magazine.

Samir Husni: You publish several international editions. You have one in France, you have one in Germany, and you brought an edition to the States. Because of COVID, you had to suspend the International edition. Now you are bringing it back. Why now? And what are some of the reasons for this relaunch?

Irene Smit: Shortly after launching the Dutch version, we began receiving numerous letters from people who had come across it at the airport. They all praised the magazine, saying it looked stunning and had a unique tactile appeal due to the variety of papers used. However, many added, “We don’t really understand what it’s about.” This feedback prompted us to create an English-language edition in the Netherlands.

At its peak in 2020, just before the onset of COVID-19, the magazine was published and distributed in 34 countries. We had licensed German and French editions, while the English edition was produced in-house. This version was developed in the Netherlands with support from English-speaking translators and editors.

However, the challenges brought by COVID-19 proved insurmountable. Skyrocketing paper prices and exorbitant distribution costs, combined with widespread shop closures worldwide, made continuing the magazine untenable. A new publishing company had just acquired us and we decided to stop producing the English issue, and unfortunately weren’t able to start it up again.

But last year, Flow Magazine was sold to another publishing house, Roularta Media. They were enthusiastic about restarting the international edition, which was exciting for us. This summer, we finally made it happen. The magazine will now be published twice a year and distributed across 20 countries. This allows us to gradually grow and adapt to modern distribution methods.

What’s truly heartwarming is that even during the years we were away, we continued to receive letters and messages on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Our Facebook group for Paper Lovers has been especially active. Fans would often ask, “Can you please bring back the English edition? You’re my paper inspiration, my ‘Paper porn.’ I miss you so much!” Some even joked about learning Dutch or French just to stay connected with us. Whenever we posted updates, our many international followers would respond, urging us to return to the U.S., New Zealand, or Australia.

Last year, more and more people were expressing that the world truly needs Flow. They emphasized the importance of spreading a positive message of hope and offering ways to care for ourselves in this fast-paced, often overwhelming world. Flow Magazine has always been about fostering a sense of community, bringing people together, and celebrating creativity. In a time of increasing polarization, many found comfort in Flow’s community—people who cherish crafting, paper, and positivity.

With so many asking for Flow’s return, we realized that now is the perfect time to bring it back.

Samir Husni: If you can go back to 2008, tell me a little bit about how you and your business partner came up with the idea and how did you start this magazine? My understanding that you were in your attic?

Irene Smit: Yes, we were. We were both working for Marie Claire, a glossy magazine that was part of Sanoma Publishers.

One day, we were on the attic when Anita Mooiweer, the new business manager of Sanoma, mentioned, “We feel there’s a need for a different kind of magazine, but we’re not sure what. Could you help us think of a new concept?” Inspired, Astrid and I gathered a variety of paper goodies—things we loved, like stationery and notebooks—from children’s bookstores and sat down to brainstorm.

Both of us shared a deep love for paper. After years of working on glossy magazines, we felt that by 2008—just before the economic crisis—society was shifting. People were growing tired of the “more, better, quicker” mentality. Instead, they seemed to crave a simpler, more authentic way of life.

We noticed that people no longer yearned for more designer clothes or extravagant vacations. Instead, they valued meaningful gestures, for example, like a homemade apple pie from a friend. Those personal, heartfelt moments held more worth than expensive luxuries. Inspired by this, we set out to create a magazine that we would want to read ourselves—something entirely different from what was already available.

At the time, we had just completed a mindfulness-based stress reduction course. It taught us profound life lessons: letting go of perfectionism, accepting ourselves, cultivating a beginner’s mind, and appreciating the little things in life. We realized our magazine should reflect these principles. It should celebrate life’s small joys and offer guidance on navigating lessons that traditional schooling never taught us.

We wanted to learn and share these life lessons with others. That idea became the heart of our magazine. It combined everything we loved—poems, stories about inspiring women, history, and articles that helped us better understand the world and ourselves better.

Samir Husni: And you decided to use a variety of paper in the magazine. It was not one paper stock. The magazine is known for the variety of paper from tissue paper to glossy paper?

Irene Smit: Yes.

Samir Husni: Why do you think this was the choice and what’s the power of print today in this digital age?

Irene Smit: We decided to use a variety of papers because paper is so much more than just a medium for printing text. The tactile feel, the scent—it evokes emotions and can transport you to a different state of mind. For instance, when presenting an article filled with images, glossy paper is ideal. Its shiny, eye-catching quality adds a sense of indulgence, almost like visual candy.

On the other hand, if the article is about confronting personal challenges or pitfalls, a rougher paper feels more appropriate. The texture itself mirrors the subject matter—it’s a bit raw, a bit tough—adding a layer of depth that complements the article’s tone and content.

Today, paper has re-emerged as a luxury product. After years dominated by digital devices like iPhones and iPads, people are rediscovering the value of paper. It resonates particularly with Gen Z and millennials, who are increasingly seeking ways to step away from their screens. Many of them feel the need to reclaim their time and reduce their reliance on phones, often spending hours daily glued to their devices.

This reconnection with paper is beautiful. Younger generations, who grew up immersed in the digital world, are finding joy in treating themselves to offline moments. Whether it’s reading a magazine, journaling, or crafting a mood or vision board, they’re rediscovering the simple pleasures of print. It’s akin to the resurgence of vinyl records; just as people have fallen in love with playing records again, I believe the next step will be a revival of magazine reading.

Samir Husni: That’s good. So, tell me, was it more like a walk in a rose garden or you had some challenges you had to overcome?

Irene Smit: We had a lot of challenges. I wish it was a walk in a rose garden.

In the beginning, it was almost amusing how few people believed in our potential for success. Critics scoffed, claiming we could only fill two or three issues with content. Many doubted it would work long-term.

Some even complained about the empty pages, saying they weren’t willing to pay for blank space. But we stayed true to our vision, deciding to do things our own way.

To our delight, the magazine sold exceptionally well. To all the skeptics, we simply said, “It’s fine to doubt us, but the numbers speak for themselves.” After the first decade of success, while many other magazines started to decline, we remained stable and even thrived.

We were thrilled to still be riding that wave of positivity. However, the past five or six years have been more challenging. The pandemic forced us to pause the English edition, and switching publishers twice added further complications. Creating this product is incredibly time-consuming, and downsizing our team has made the process even more demanding.

Despite these hurdles, we continue to pour our hearts into this magazine. We believe in crafting the best product possible, and we think our audience can feel that passion. This connection is why so many people are eager for its return.

It’s heartwarming to see such enthusiasm. In fact, the English edition seems to have gained an almost mythical status during its absence. People are eager to bring it back, and our Book for Paper Lovers has been equally beloved—it’s a magazine without articles, filled solely with beautiful paper.

We’ve collaborated with Workman Publishing in the U.S. to produce various projects, such as A Book That Takes Its Time, along with stationery and puzzles. Now, as we prepare for our return, Workman Publishing has expressed interest in new books featuring stickers and stationery.

It hasn’t been an easy journey, but we’re on the upswing. With the English edition back on newsstands, we’re hopeful it will be warmly received. Our message of comfort, compassion, and care for one another feels more relevant than ever. We believe this is the perfect moment for our comeback.

Samir Husni: When you launched the magazine, you were all alone. What was your feeling when you saw all those competitors sprouting like mushrooms on the newsstand worldwide?

Irene Smit: Yes, it was challenging. I think in the Netherlands, the situation was manageable. However, in Germany, there were times when we faced competition from 10 or 15 rivals simultaneously. That was definitely frustrating.

Even so, I believe people can recognize when something is created with genuine passion and originality. We’ve always aimed to innovate and bring fresh ideas to the table. Over time, people continued to view Flow as the original, standing out with its unique products. I don’t think the imitations are as good as ours, and I believe people can sense that.

Samir Husni: Who’s your target audience? Whom are you trying to reach with Flow?

Irene Smit: It’s funny, we always said we have a very broad audience, everybody that likes our topics is welcome.

These days, many young people are deeply interested in our topic. From the very beginning, Flow has been about mental health, although we didn’t use that term back in 2008. At the time, nobody really talked about mental health. Instead, we focused on mindfulness and caring for your mind.

It wasn’t until after COVID that mental health became a common topic of conversation. That’s when I realized—this is what Flow has always been about: nurturing your mind through creativity and incorporating positive psychology into everyday life.

Now, many young readers turn to Flow specifically for its mental health articles. At the same time, we continue to have a large audience of readers in their 50s and 60s, making it a truly broad and diverse community.

Samir Husni: That’s good. So what’s your motto now? Is it like “Go with the Flow?”

Irene Smit: Yes, it’s still “Go with the Flow”. We just keep going with the Flow.

We try to sense what people want to read, what they want to hear, and how we can help them in life. Every day feels different, as the world changes so quickly.

We aim to keep up with all these changes, but we go with the flow, embracing the opportunities that come our way—like restarting the English edition. I think that approach works best for Flow.

Samir Husni: Before I ask you my last two typical questions, is there any question I failed to ask you that I should ask you or anything you would like to add?

Irene Smit: You should have asked, “Where is Astrid?” She left. She’s now a primary school teacher. It was very sad because we started this together.

We’re still both parents of Flow, but she’s found something else that suits her life better. She loves teaching and doesn’t want the pressure of all these deadlines anymore. Now, she has found the right balance—she’s a teacher, but still writes articles for the magazine.

I’m happy she’s still involved with Flow.

Samir Husni: If I would come uninvited one evening to your house, what would I catch Irene doing, reading a book, watching TV, having a glass of wine, cooking?

Irene Smit: I’m always striving to improve my life, just like everyone who reads this magazine.

Recently, I started the course The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and as part of that, I’ve been making an effort to spend less time on my phone. Last night, I worked on creating a vision board.

I cut out images from old Flow magazines—both the German and French editions—because it’s difficult for me to cut out from the Dutch edition. I still find that challenging. So, I used illustrations from the French and German versions to create a vision board focused on my future—on what I want to achieve and the experiences I’d like to have with Flow.

I continue to make an effort to stay connected with paper as much as possible, but sometimes, I admit, I get caught up in my phone or the television. Hopefully, you’ll find me engaged with paper when the moment is right.

Samir Husni: My typical final question, what keeps Irene up at night these days?

Irene Smit: I am deeply committed to supporting young people with their mental health. It’s tough to see how much they struggle, and I always try to find ways to help.

Whether through the magazine or collaborations like the one of Flow with the Museum of the Mind in Haarlem, the Netherlands, where we have a permanent Flow Slow Art Tour, I focus on providing programs that support their mental well-being.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Across the Pond, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | 1 Comment »

The Other Magazine: The Latest Launch To Take You “High” Up The Hudson Valley & New York City: The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Peter Shafran, Founder and Publisher.

November 11, 2024

The legacy of cannabis and the legacy of magazines collide to introduce The Other magazine: A magazine devoted to cannabis, its dispensaries, and the customers who partake in enjoying the plant that for years has been the forbidden fruit. With more states legalizing cannabis for recreational use, magazines devoted to the once forbidden plant are sprouting across the nation.

The Other is the latest entry into the cannabis consumer magazines serving the audience of the Hudson Valley in New York State and New York City. Peter Shafran, the founder and witty publisher, has high (pun intended) hopes for The Other. His wit is evident in the cover of the first issue. Take a look at the cover and read what he had to see about it:

“So if you look closely at the mountains, you’ll see that they’re not really mountains. It’s all cannabis. And the bridge, the base of each of the bridges are bongs, or at least the big bridge in the back is.

And this is all based on a real photograph. The big bridge is the Bear Mountain Bridge, which goes over the Hudson River, but the two boats floating on there, one is just a pipe, and the other one is a pipe, it is a boat with a puff on it.

The small bridge in the front, which is the bridge that takes you over the Taconic State Parkway, all those little side things, those are all joints. So when I bring this into the dispensary and I tell people, you know, so do you like the mountains? And they’re like, oh yeah, I like the mountains. I was like, do you really like the mountains?”

I had the opportunity to interview Peter, and his strategic communications consultant, magazine veteran, Stu Zakim. But first the soundbites:

On the name of the magazine: “The title of the magazine hearkens back to a newspaper that came out in 1968 called the East Village Other. It was one of the first underground countercultural newspapers in the country.”

More on the name of the magazine: “But the reason we chose that name is because we as cannabis consumers have always felt that we were on the outside, we’re the others.”

On the reasons the magazine is regional: “We felt that the regional way was the way to go, because especially in the cannabis industry, much of the industry is vertically aligned in terms of the growing, the processing, the distributing and the retail is all contained in New York.”

On why The Other is in print: “Well, tactile. It really is. In other words, cannabis has its legacy. So do print magazines. And I think there’s a marriage there.”

On the mission of the magazine: “The conversation has changed so that we’re focusing more on the lifestyle, the alternatives, the education, the normalization and destigmatization.”

On the status of the cannabis industry: “The cannabis industry is so much mainstream now that they’re providing a portion of the revenue to these towns and villages that they never saw before, or at least haven’t seen since manufacturing was here.”

On the future plans of the magazine: “I really have no desire to go into California, Colorado, Massachusetts, or any of those places. What I’m looking for is a place like New Jersey, which has two or three years of growth. There is no magazine in New Jersey that does what we do.”

On the role of The Other: “It’s a wonderful place to be in because we’re past what we used to call the wild, wild West. But now it is a functioning, growing economy, and we’re able to be there at the ground level and helping make it flourish.”

And now for the lightly edited interview with Peter Shafran, founder and publisher of The Other:

Samir Husni: Congratulations on the launch of The Other.

Peter Shafran: Thank you.

Samir Husni: Would you please give me the elevator pitch of The Other and tell me what’s the idea behind the name?

Peter Shafran: Oh, sure. The magazine is a countercultural lifestyle magazine for people in the Hudson Valley, in New York City, for people who enjoy cannabis and other lifestyle things like psychedelics and the whole lifestyle. The magazine is a consumer magazine.

Unlike most of the magazines that are out there in the community, which are B2B magazines, this is a lifestyle consumer magazine. Though there is a little bit of a space here for another business magazine. So we’re going to add some industry focus on there as well.

I live in the Hudson Valley, which is why we started here and I grew up here. The title of the magazine hearkens back to a newspaper that came out in 1968 called the East Village Other. It was one of the first underground countercultural newspapers in the country, which spurred on the development of other countercultural magazines in Berkeley and Chicago and a couple of other places.

That became the beginnings of the underground movement in the 60s. The people who wrote for the East Village Other were all the top minds and writers of the 1960s and the anti-war and revolutionary writers. So we hearken back to that to give them some props.

But the reason we chose that name is because we as cannabis consumers have always felt that we were on the outside, we’re the others. And even in terms of where we are today in the industry, probably not before a year or two ago was cannabis really discussed among real people, among my friends. I’ve been living in this village for 18 years and people did not discuss cannabis openly, definitely because of the stigma attached to it. We are all parents and we don’t want our kids to talk about it and stuff like that.

So it really has only been in the last couple of years where that openness, and of course, the legalization in New York and the opening up of cannabis dispensaries has changed the whole landscape. It has changed the conversation. We felt there was a vacuum here and we’re hoping to fill it.

Samir Husni: Why did you decide to fulfill that vacuum via ink on paper in this digital age?

Peter Shafran: Well, basically, because I’m insane. Nobody in their right mind would do this, but the reality is that the regional magazines and local magazines are actually flourishing. The national magazines, especially in fringe areas, have a hard time in attracting advertisers and attracting money. We felt that the regional way was the way to go, because especially in the cannabis industry, much of the industry is vertically aligned in terms of the growing, the processing, the distributing and the retail is all contained in New York.

The New York focus was really helping us to find that we want to make a regional magazine. But the eventual goal that “if we can make it here, we can make it anywhere,” to quote Frank Sinatra.

Samir Husni: Besides the fact that regional magazines are doing well, what do you think is the power of print in this digital age? What do you offer your readers, your customers?

Peter Shafran: (Holding the magazine in both hands) Well, tactile. It really is.

The response has been unbelievable. I’ve been driving around to dispensaries within a half hour, 45 minute radius. The magazine’s been out a week.

Every place I go, I wear my shirt or I wear my hat (with the magazine name on them). I walk into the dispensary and one of the workers in the dispensary says, I know that logo. Where did I see it before? Is this where you saw it? And every single bud tender, every single person in the dispensary is like, wow, this is really cool.

Why hasn’t somebody done this before? We’re seeing that from across the spectrum, from the readers to everybody we’ve seen. We went to, Stu and I, and a couple of members of the team went to Reveille Buyers Club a couple of weeks ago when we started talking about the magazine. The magazine hadn’t even been out yet, and the buzz around it was huge because nobody else is doing it.

Stu: There’s another cannabis title out here, but it’s newsprint. Unlike Peter’s point of a tactile and the beauty. A slick, glossy, four-color publication in an era where, to your earlier point, things living digitally is amazing, number one.

It’s an emotional attachment, which I think we all have. The newsprint book has never taken off. You know, it’s not well designed.

It looks like a high school project. When people see The Other at the retailers, at the point of sale, where they pay for the products, curiosity will definitely attract them. They’ll see this gorgeous cover, which in itself has a little gimmick built into it.

Peter, I don’t know if you’ve explained that or not. And, you know, the demographics of the cannabis consumer are me and Peter. And, you know, not that we’re old men, but we grew up in the, we grew up with magazines and the role they played in all of our lives was very central.

So it’s, in other words, cannabis has its legacy. So do print magazines. And I think there’s a marriage there. That’s one thing that’s going to work to their advantage.

But the reality is that community with a big C is really what we are looking forward to becoming the community focus for this region.

Samir Husni: How is The Other different than the cannabis magazines of the 70s and 80s, such as High Times, Inside Dope, The Weed Journal and all these titles that were published before it became legal?

Peter Shafran: Very easy answer. Before we didn’t have dispensaries. So the curiosity, ooh, let’s see what cannabis looks like.

And you’ve got these beautiful pictures, now we call it cannabis, but the whole industry has become such that the curiosity to see something in a magazine, first of all, you can see anything you want on the web. So you don’t need to see beautiful pictures of a bud. Now, of course we have, but I have buds in my background of my pictures, more of a joke than anything else.

The realization is that we have evolved from that point where we’re curious about what bud looks like, because you can walk into any dispensary and see exactly what bud looks like. The conversation has changed so that we’re focusing more on the lifestyle, the alternatives, the education, the normalization and destigmatization.

Also one of the things that New York has going for it that some other states don’t have, is a very strong social justice part of the industry where specifically it was designed to let mom and pops come into the dispensaries and to the growers and the processors and not the multi-states which are coming in, but the mom and pops have the stronghold.

They’re already in here. They’ve been nurtured and they’re growing and developing. So it’s a lot different than it was in the seventies.

Samir Husni: You mentioned in your magazine introduction that the Hudson Valley have changed from what used to be a pumpkin growing area to a cannabis growing area. What’s the reaction of the consumers? Has it been accepted now? Is it just a matter of fact?

Peter Shafran: Number one, New York has the highest use of cannabis than any other place in the world, in terms of per capita. Number two, growing up in the Hudson Valley, my father was a home builder. And the three things that they used to say are going to bring this area back is an international airport.

Well, we have that in Newburgh. High-speed rail, we don’t have it. Casino gambling, we don’t really have it. There’s one or two places around here, but all the things that they promised were going to happen to revitalize the economy in New York, never really happened in those terms.

What’s going on now in cannabis in New York is just incredible. Between the processes and the growers and everybody else that’s coming in here, the jobs and the local towns, the villages, the municipalities, the development corporations, they’re seeing real growth.

It’s not just the dispensaries. They’re employing 500 people at a facility when nobody else is putting these shovels in the ground to build processing plants, to build grow houses and things like that. So even the most right-wing conservative politicians and people who follow them are saying, well, wait a second, you’re building construction jobs, permanent jobs, money coming into the community, both in terms of sales and retail, but also in terms of taxes.

The cannabis industry is so much mainstream now that they’re providing a portion of the revenue to these towns and villages that they never saw before, or at least haven’t seen since manufacturing was here. But going back to the pumpkins and apples, there are still plenty of pumpkins and apples, but several of the smart people in agriculture, like the Hepworths, for example, realized that this is coming and had the foresight to say, let’s start growing. So people who were worried about surviving in the agricultural field now have a secondary and sometimes a primary source of income that is not related to pumpkins and apples.

There’s a company called Ayrloom, which started out as an apple grower, one of the most successful apple growers. And still is. They make delicious apple cider. Well, now they make really good apple cider with a little bit of a hint inside. And I’m a fan.

I happen to love their honey crisp apple cider, which is just absolutely delicious. But here’s a company who been growing apples for a hundred years, and all of a sudden grew into one of the major players in the region. So from the economic standpoint, it’s fantastic for the Hudson Valley. It’s fantastic for the state of New York.

Samir Husni: Do you envision seeing more of lifestyle advertisement or are you on purpose sticking to the advertisement from the cannabis industry?

Peter Shafran: No, we’re actually going about 50-50. That’s our focus now.

We’re hoping to do that in the next round of advertising. But we’re looking at our magazine as more of a lifestyle magazine rather than a cannabis magazine. And the difference is that we’re talking to advertisers and saying, we have a base of probably 250,000 readers geographically in this region.

And that’s not to mention New York City, but just 250,000 people who can read the magazine in the area. And guess what? They buy cars. And guess what? They buy cookies, and they buy candy, and they buy all kinds of things that they want to eat after they smoke.

So we’re approaching the snack companies, the insurance agencies. I mean, we are a niche lifestyle brand, but the numbers are just too hard to ignore.

Stu Zakim : If you look at the other categories, Samir, for advertising, one of the biggest growth areas as an ancillary to the cannabis is cannabis tourism, where they’re taking people from the city or wherever.

They pay a lot of money to go on this tour bus. They come up. They check out the farm. They get to see the fields. And there’s hospitality. There’s hotels that are, since it is legal, welcoming this new population for them because it’s a new customer base.

And rather than having a chocolate on your pillow at night, you may have an infused chocolate on your pillow. And they can serve infused beverage. All this stuff is an offshoot of what Peter’s been talking about with the growth in the industry.

And the other categories, to his point, if we just restricted ourselves to dispensaries and farms, there won’t be any revenue. It’s these ancillary categories that are more normal to regular publications that are actually, as the consumer, it’s not cheap to be a cannabis consumer. So you have to have a lot of extra income, which is the same logic when Rolling Stone transitioned from their newsprint and they became a slick glossy, they went after cars and autos and fashion and beauty and other lifestyle categories who felt more comfortable living in a magazine that had that feel to it and also the kind of customer readership that they had.

Samir Husni: Peter, before I ask you my typical personal last questions, is there any question I failed to ask you or anything you would like to add?

Peter Shafran: Good question.

The growth model that we see here is, you know, in answer to one of your previous questions about why we go regional, I think that this model can be replicated in other areas. I’m not looking to become a national magazine. I’m looking to make The Other something that can be duplicated in certain areas, especially in new growth areas.

I really have no desire to go into California, Colorado, Massachusetts, or any of those places. What I’m looking for is a place like New Jersey, which has two or three years of growth. There is no magazine in New Jersey that does what we do.

There are very few places that do this kind of magazine, which is why I go back to the point of being insane. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this, but the reality is the buzz around the magazine has been huge. And we’re just seeing fantastic replies and the growth in just in our Instagram page in the last couple of days has just been explosive.

Our model was providing free magazines and putting them in every single dispensary in our region. So we distributed 5,600 magazines in one week to dispensaries and ancillary places. And in one week, we’re already getting responses: We need more magazines.

In addition to being a magazine, we have realized that what we can become and what we’re really launching towards is becoming the backbone of a community. There are groups out there that have networking events and they have little things in here, but there is nothing here that is really containing in terms of the lifestyle and the advertising and the culture for this region.

What we’re finding is when we talked to a couple of dispensary owners in the last couple of weeks, and I floated the idea about starting a dispensary owners roundtable. Every single one that I spoke to said, I’m in, tell me when you want to do it. And last week, in bringing the magazine to different places, I said to the bud tenders, what do you think about having a bud tender event of the month? Like, yeah, you want to do it? If you’re going to be providing something free, we’ll all come.

But the reality is that community with a big C is really what we are looking forward to becoming the community focus for this region.

Samir Husni: Excellent. Well, my typical last two questions are if I come to visit you unannounced one evening, what do I catch Peter doing? Smoking a joint, drinking a glass of wine, watching TV, reading a book?

Peter Shafran: Well, so the easy answer is that I have become over the last year or two, more of a, maybe not a connoisseur, but I’m learning how to become a connoisseur.

But what I found is that prior to my involvement in the magazine, and prior to probably two years ago, I used to have a glass of wine with dinner every night. I haven’t opened up a bottle of wine unless company is coming for about six months, maybe more. I’ve had a sip of beer just to taste it in the last couple of months.

So one day I’ll roll a joint and smoke it. And the next day I’ll smoke out of a pipe or a bottle or I’ll do a gummy. The wonderful thing is that we live in a society right now where choice is unbelievable. It was whatever the guy had is what you got for 40 bucks. You got an ounce of whatever he had, whether it was terrible or not, it was what you got.

And now you go in for to any dispensary and you got two, three, 400, a thousand skews of products and it’s dizzying. That’s one of the things that we can provide is that benefit to say, we’ll give you reviews. We’ll show you what’s out there.

It’s a wonderful place to be in because we’re past what we used to call the wild, wild West. But now it is a functioning, growing economy, and we’re able to be there at the ground level and helping make it flourish.

Samir Husni: My typical last question to you is what keeps Peter up at night these days?

Peter Shafran: Well, of course keeping the magazine funded. We wanted to get the business of the magazine up so that that could be our tent pole to be able to use in other areas. We have a newsletter coming out, an online presence, and the live events, which will provide streams of income to be able to fund everything together. But until that happens, it’s hard to go to sleep at night. But I just take a gummy and I’m fine.

Samir Husni: Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time.

StuZakim: But as a hardcore magazine person, you know, the, the role of this format has been diminished over time. And here, I think it takes courage in this rather tough market to break out a new title. To your point about the earlier titles of High Times and all that shit that’s another generation.

We’re in a new world now. And if not only educate people about it to help eradicate the stigma against cannabis, educate people about the beauty of the magazine format and why photography jumps off the page. I mean, look at that cover.

You’ll never see that in a newspaper where it catches your attention as you walk by and bringing this to a whole new group of people who haven’t really grown up with it the way we did. So, you know, whenever you get to it, it’s fine. I would appreciate the, the forum, the platform, and as you know, I’m, I’m just really thrilled that this conversation is taking place.

Samir Husni: Thank you

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

New Christian Makers: A Museum In A Magazine. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Garreth Blackwell, Creative Director & Editor-in-Chief

October 26, 2024

“Now that digital media is the dominant form out there, I think that books and magazines are showing the strengths they’ve always had, which is they’re a respite.”

“Print is a place where you can get away from the noise that never stops in the digital world and have some sort of actual quiet experience within your own home.”

To say I am a proud professor would be a major understatement. What one of my former students has accomplished brings nothing but pure joy to this retired professor. Dr. Garreth Blackwell, my former student and assistant director of the Magazine Innovation Center during my tenure at The University of Mississippi is now an accomplished assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Art and the editor-in-chief and creative director of a new magazine aptly named New Christian Makers.

Garreth, a maker himself, has accomplished so much since he departed from Ole Miss. He worked hard to attain a Ph.D. and a teaching position, in addition to editing and designing many different projects with the helping eyes of his wife Callie, also a former student of mine and an accomplished designer herself.

The father of four still finds the time to edit and design the new magazine that he calls “a labor of love,” that the entire family is involved with.

Flipping through the pages of the first issue of New Christian Makers was like entering through the door of a museum and feasting my eyes on one art piece after the other. A masterful curation of 30 artists and makers and a pure delight for this retired professor. I may not be teaching classes any longer, but as you can see from my blog, I am still tracking and consulting with the magazine creators and makers. Garreth Blackwell is the latest maker whom I had the pleasure of interviewing about the first issue of New Christian Makers. Please enjoy my conversation with the editor-in-chief and creative director of New Christion Makers Dr. Garreth Blackwell. But first the soundbites…

On the genesis of the magazine: “We started to see a lot of folks who had considered themselves makers, artists, designers, whatever it may be, they had time to actually make again.”

More on the genesis of the magazine: “One of the things that we started to see is that even though it seemed like the world was crumbling all around us in 2020, the art we saw coming out was very hopeful.”

On the uniqueness of print: “There’s nothing that beats opening up a box of things fresh off the press and just seeing them, smelling them and seeing that that’s something you’ve put together and done.”

On why New Christion Makers is in print: “The only way to do that would be a tangible product in somebody’s hand. It would have to be a book or a magazine or something of the sort, because we all understood that social media just wasn’t cutting it, that digital platforms, for lack of a better term, were kind of cheap. They didn’t ask a lot of the viewer.”

More on why the magazine is in print: “Having a thing in your hand, touching it, seeing it, actually was much more humanizing.”

On his elevator pitch of the magazine: “The elevator pitch is that for a long time, the historical church was the center of culture. It was where art was preserved. It’s where libraries began. It’s where hospitals started. It was the place where a lot of what we understand as Western culture started.”

On the mission of the magazine: “New Christian Makers seeks to connect artists who have foundational beliefs in Jesus Christ, who make things to the glory of God and the flourishing of a world that we think should be good, true, and beautiful.”

On his reason for the love of paper: “I think there’s more relationship with the paper than there is with the flickering pixels.”

On the future of print: “It would just become a much more niche-based thing. So we see it with people buying vinyl records and things. But as far as print goes, I don’t know that it ever left.”

On the strength of print: “Everything is constantly going, never stopping, and magazines and books give you a rest stop on that busy, busy highway to just take a break.”

More on the strength of print: “More filling than they are depleting, which the research shows that digital media and social media especially can be very, very depleting to people. It takes a lot out of somebody to spend their day engaged just digitally, whereas you don’t have that same experience with print.”

On his role in the magazine: “Moving forward from here on out, the curation is actually going to be something where I would be more of a curation facilitator-in-chief.”

On the magazine as a museum: “One of the things about going into a gallery or a museum is that you’re able to go in and it is a quieting place. It’s a place where you can feel reflective with work. You can look at it, spend time with it. We wanted that to be the same case here.”

On whether the magazine is a mission or a business: “If I were just to give you a blanket answer before going specific, I would say what good business isn’t also a mission. And I think that’s part of it. I think if we focus on mission first, the business can follow. But very often, if the business is the sole focus, the mission will get muddied and get lost.”

On the frequency of the magazine: “So by the time we’re in full swing, we’ll have seven issues a year coming out.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Garreth Blackwell, creative director and editor-in-chief of New Christion Makers magazine:

Samir Husni: My first question to you is, and pun is intended, what is the genesis of the New Christian Makers magazine?

Garreth Blackwell: I’ve been trying to think of where it all started. It’s been a hard, hard time to figure out where we started, but the best way to describe the genesis of it is that in 2020, when everything just went sideways during quarantine, there were a lot of things that people didn’t know about.

People, I think, started to re-understand. One of the things is that disconnected communication and disconnected relationships were not actually something that were fulfilling and stabilizing for people’s lives. Something that also came up is that we started to see a lot of folks who had considered themselves makers, artists, designers, whatever it may be, they had time to actually make again.

These two things together, you started to see a lot of really amazing art start to come out of people’s homes. For the last six or seven years, I’ve been involved in the operations side of a local art gallery here in Richmond. One of the things that we started to see is that even though it seemed like the world was crumbling all around us in 2020, the art we saw coming out was very hopeful.

It was beautiful. It was something that really helped people remind themselves of how wonderful the world actually is and how good God is to give us the world we have, even when it’s upside down or sideways. We started talking a lot, and I have a friend who just like me, we love making stuff.

I’ve always enjoyed books and magazines. I’ve always enjoyed making them. There’s nothing that beats opening up a box of things fresh off the press and just seeing them and smelling them and seeing that that’s something you’ve put together and done.

When we started having these conversations, we said, what does it actually look like for people to be connected, for communities to be established and developed? We said, well, we probably need to make some sort of journal. At that time, we were thinking about writing, maybe something that had some long-form content. But the more we thought about it, the more it just made sense that we needed to connect a community of folks who existed in disparate ways.

The only way to do that would be a tangible product in somebody’s hand. It would have to be a book or a magazine or something of the sort, because we all understood that social media just wasn’t cutting it, that digital platforms, for lack of a better term, were kind of cheap. They didn’t ask a lot of the viewer.

In fact, they just kind of took a lot from the viewer. They took your data and they took your interests and they took all of this for a free product. But we knew that having a thing in your hand, touching it, seeing it, actually was much more humanizing.

It was much more about the embodiment of people in real ways together. So here we are, and we’ve got New Christian Makers issue one, and issue two should be out early next year.

Samir Husni: You created a museum in a magazine. Tell me, what’s the elevator pitch for the magazine?

Garreth Blackwell: The elevator pitch is that for a long time, the historical church was the center of culture. It was where art was preserved. It’s where libraries began. It’s where hospitals started. It was the place where a lot of what we understand as Western culture started.

So throughout the Industrial Revolution, throughout modernism and everything else, those cultural centers shifted. But the historical import of the church and Christians as makers and people who helped to define culture, that never changed. We may have just had a few other voices in the room that were pretty loud.

So New Christian Makers seeks to connect artists who have foundational beliefs in Jesus Christ, who make things to the glory of God and the flourishing of a world that we think should be good, true, and beautiful. So New Christian Makers is about making art with and for your friends, and then going out and making more friends.

Samir Husni: Do you think there’s a community of people your age that are rediscovering print or never left print?

Garreth Blackwell: I think it’s hard because I waffle back and forth on whether they’re discovering it, rediscovering it, or if they’ve always kind of been there. You can see behind me, print has never stopped being something that I enjoy.

I love books. I love how they are and how they exist. I love magazines. I still would prefer to sit in the airport waiting for my plane with a magazine rather than my phone just scrolling through. I think there’s more relationship with the paper than there is with the flickering pixels. But I think as far as my generation goes, we are seeing that, and we saw this in early 2000s with Chris Anderson The Long Tail, where he was talking about that generational media of sorts would never really go away.

It would just become a much more niche-based thing. So we see it with people buying vinyl records and things. But as far as print goes, I don’t know that it ever left.

I think that they began to sequester print to a kind of academic space, right? Like, I buy a book to think about a thing or learn about something, but they didn’t see it as an escape. Well, social media was that escape because we were surrounded by so much print media. Now that digital media is the dominant form out there, I think that books and magazines are showing the strengths they’ve always had, which is they’re a respite.

Print is a place where you can get away from the noise that never stops in the digital world and have some sort of actual quiet experience within your own home. So I think there’s a great draw to that. We have a lot of friends who will spend their evenings with books and magazines because it’s just quieter.

Everything is constantly going, never stopping, and magazines and books give you a rest stop on that busy, busy highway to just take a break. So they are more filling than they are depleting, which the research shows that digital media and social media especially can be very, very depleting to people. It takes a lot out of somebody to spend their day engaged just digitally, whereas you don’t have that same experience with print.

Samir Husni: I noticed in your editorial and in the introduction to the magazine that everything in the magazine is curated. Are you the curator-in-chief, or how is that process of curation taking place?

Garreth Blackwell: Well, it’s fantastic because, like I mentioned in the write-up in the magazine, we could have filled several issues with the people who submitted. And with any new venture, you never have any idea.

Is this going to be good, or are we going to get quality content? Will people even care? We had a strong conscience that they would, but you’re never totally sure. So in terms of curation, one of the things that we wanted to do was make sure we just got our first issue out. We got it out there.

People could see the proof of concept. It wasn’t just talking about it. But moving forward from here on out, the curation is actually going to be something where I would be more of a curation facilitator-in-chief.

We’re going to have guest curators who come in from different parts of the art world, whether they are writers, illustrators, graphic designers, painters, professors, researchers. We’re going to have other folks who come in because it will be kind of a curation by committee of sorts. So we take in whoever we’re blessed enough to receive as applicants, and then we pick our 30 that we want to showcase in that issue that we think just show the breadth and beauty of what’s out there.

Then we have a handful of folks that we know will be just on the cusp of that, and we want to make sure we show them off as honorable mentions as well. So it’s technically just the same way that an exhibition would be in a gallery or museum, just in print.

Samir Husni: So as I walk into that museum and flip the pages, which are designed in a nice horizontal space to project exactly like your eyes, tell me more about the decision to have this specific size (9X7), it’s unusual size for a magazine.

Garreth Blackwell: We debated a lot because if you look at the genre of art books in general or art magazines, you’re going to have things that are very large format because you want to have as much real estate for the eye as possible. So it makes sense, but you also have some other constraints that really have to be dealt with when you’re talking about something of this kind. One, we needed to make sure that we kept the per issue price at a point that would be proper expectations for the market.

So from our research, we knew we had to hit somewhere south of $40, but could be above $20. And we wanted to make sure that we could do that well for folks so we could serve them in that way. The other thing is you have to mail stuff.

When you don’t have the larger size group of folks, larger size of constituency or reader base, you have to take a lot of that in consideration because you may not have a thousand pieces that you can go to the post office with to try to negotiate a lower rate. We’re shipping much lower than that. So we wanted to make sure we hit all of the economic marks for ourselves, but also we wanted something that did feel intimate.

One of the things about going into a gallery or a museum is that you’re able to go in and it is a quieting place. It’s a place where you can feel reflective with work. You can look at it, spend time with it.

We wanted that to be the same case here. We also wanted to make sure that it was still portable, that this was something you could pass to your friends, you could show off to others.

Some of the bigger, bulkier art books. I have a few books on my shelf behind me from Taschen that they’ll break your back, right? I mean, they’re not really passable books for the most part to friends. But this is something we wanted to make sure somebody could kind of throw in the seat of their car, take it to their friend’s house, show it to them, have on a bookcase, pull it off, and easily pass around. So we kind of ended up on this size because it did all the things we wanted it to.

Visually, like you said, it moves you left and right across. It feels very much like you’re viewing a gallery or a museum. The size helped us economically, but they also helped us in terms of how we wanted it to be used.

So form, function, economics all had to be considered. And this was the best of all possible worlds.

Samir Husni: You mentioned the economics. So is this venture a business or a mission?

Garreth Blackwell: Oh, gosh, that’s such a tough question. Well, I think if I were just to give you a blanket answer before going specific, I would say what good business isn’t also a mission. And I think that’s part of it.

In a large part, it is mission first, because with what we’re doing, we went into it knowing that this was going to be a labor of love. It was going to be nights and weekends. It was going to be.

My children were helping me pack envelopes, sending them off to people. My wife was, as always, a second set of eyes to make sure that all of my spelling errors or missed things that just became white noise visually as I was designing actually were corrected, that I wasn’t doing the same kind of habitual design mistakes that I tend to that she came in and helped with all that. So it’s been a wonderful way for a lot of us to do work together.

And because we knew that it wasn’t going to be something that just skyrocketed, I would say it’s more of a mission to connect artists who have foundational beliefs about life and the way that the world is supposed to be, that do things with excellence towards God. I think that if we can connect those people and provide a playground for them to showcase what they do in a way that brings joy and promotes them, I don’t think we ever have to really have full time positions to do it.

It can stay working. I think if we focus on mission first, the business can follow. But very often, if the business is the sole focus, the mission will get muddied and get lost.

Samir Husni: Excellent. Is there any question that, before I ask you my personal questions, that I failed to ask you or anything else you would like to add about New Christian Makers?

Garreth Blackwell: I would say one thing, because it’s nothing we talked about in the first issue, but just to give some kind of clarifying questions, we’re at $25 per copy as the cover price for it. The outlook for the magazine is something that we have, I’ve been slowly stepping into.

We wanted to make sure we tested the market and tested it in a real way, not in some sort of fake or less quality than it would eventually be, but actually do the thing. So I had this really great old professor back in the day, and he talked a lot about how your frequencies can change as you understand what’s going on, and as you test the market. So I’m taking his advice to heart, and I’m saying, well, the first year, I’m going to do two of these, because I think two is very reasonable. But by the time we get to full frequency, we’re going to be a quarterly publication with three special editions each year.

The quarterly publication will be exactly like what you’ve seen. And the special editions, one will be geared towards professors within art schools, so that we can showcase the things they’re doing. Because within the current art culture right now people aren’t so excited about you if you’re a Christian. So giving them a platform and a place where they can showcase their work, their research, what they’re doing, we think is a necessary and needed thing.

The second one will be for rising seniors in high school in the arts, because we want to showcase young artists as soon as possible. We know how hard it is to get your work out there, and how most of college, if you’re in an art program or a design program, you’re going to just be going up against a brick wall trying to get your work shown somewhere. So we want to provide a platform for that.

And then each year, we’ll have an annual that would be a kind of a best of show for the year, where we showcase in depth the folks who have really just been the winners, the kind of best of issue for each issue. So by the time we’re in full swing, we’ll have seven issues a year coming out.

Samir Husni: So tell me, Garrett, if I come uninvited one night to your house, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, watching TV, taking care of the four children?

Garreth Blackwell: Oh, gosh, Doc, I would say most nights, you probably find me accidentally dozing off in my chair. I think that’d be the truest answer. But it’s a smattering of things.

As a family, we do watch a lot of like different makers on YouTube, whether that’s like people who build homes, or make small dioramas, or models, or things like that. So different things the kids have interest in. Dude Perfect is constantly on the TV at the house. But there are, I would say, most nights, we’re around the kitchen table, we’re talking about stuff, we’re hanging out, the kids are drawing and playing, and we’re just trying to stay awake until we can go to bed.

Samir Husni: My typical last question is what keeps you up at night these days?

Garreth Blackwell: I’ve heard you ask this question a million times. And I would say that probably every other time I heard you ask it, I had a quick answer. And I knew because that’s the folly of youth, right? To have extremely quick answers to things that maybe you shouldn’t.

What keeps me up at night? I think a lot of the times, the things that keep me up at night are, what am I building for my kids? I think that’s what it is. I thought a lot the last few years about what it looks like for the things you do to produce a generational impact. I’ve got the things that I like and I desire.

I have the things that I have interest and ability in. And I know that won’t be the exact same things for my kids. But with four kids ranging from almost 11 to just turning one, there’s a whole range of what I want for them.

One of the things I want for them is to build something that they can take and do something with, no matter how small that is. So when I think of things like New Christian Makers or the other stuff I’m a part of, I always like to think of, what could my daughter do with this? How could I grow my son into doing something with this? I think it takes folks a long time to figure out what they like and what they want. And sometimes it might be helpful if a little earlier in their lives we say to our kids, hey, here’s a thing you can do right now.

You don’t have to be in your early 40s to launch a magazine. Why don’t you launch one with dad? Why don’t you learn design not in a classroom one day because you think it’s cool. But what if you learn design as part of the work you’re doing as a family business, as a hopeful family business? So I think that’s probably it, what am I leaving for my kids in terms of things for them to do, stuff for them to have in the world they’re going to inhabit?

Samir Husni: Thank you and good luck.

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There Is Nothing Basic About BASIC Magazine And The Woman Behind It: Viktorija Pashuta. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview.

October 10, 2024

Viktorija Pashuta, the founder, CEO, and editor in chief of BASIC magazine, left her home country, Latvia, with a little book that she started writing her ideas in it at age 11. Her dream was that one day she would create all the ideas in that book. One of the ideas must have been BASIC magazine: an upscale magazine that is anything but basic.

Also an award-winning director and film maker, Viktorija Pashuta launched BASIC magazine seven years ago in Los Angeles as “a print platform for artists from all over the world to express themselves and give them the opportunity to share their artwork and their passions on the pages of the print magazine.”

I was so impressed by the quality of the magazine and the way it has progressed since its launch. Flipping through the pages of BASIC was like taking a first-class trip around the world, luscious photography accompanied by imaginative design and complemented by beautiful typography. It is a delight for both the eye and the brain.

A photographer by profession, Ms. Pashuta is also a writer who combines the art of audio-visual writing to her editorials that introduce every issue of the magazine. She is a dreamer and she is more than willing to share her dreams with you. When I asked her what she would be doing if I stop by unannounced, she told me that, “sometimes you could catch me doing something weird like I imagine I’m a batman and I’ll go outside in the dark streets and just walk around at night and there would be someone who needs my help randomly.”

It was hard to separate her drive for life and adventure from her passion and zeal for BASIC magazine. So, please join me with this wonderful conversation with Viktorija Pashuta, founder, CEO and editor in chief of BASIC magazine. But first, the soundbites:

On why print: “I’m really proud that BASIC is actually in print, not in digital…It was really important to create a physical product, a magazine that has the presence in the physical world.”

On how to do print today: “The idea was to invest in the quality of the paper, invest in the quality of binding, invest in talent, create content that is timeless and you wouldn’t easily find online.”

On the challenges of creating a magazine: “If I knew then what I had to go through, I’d probably think twice if I should start a print magazine…it’s not enough just to have the funds. You also have to be extremely passionate about it and live with it.”

More on challenges of creating a magazine: “There were definitely challenges creating content that would resonate online and also would be relevant in print because these are two complete different platforms.”

On sources of revenue: “I created different avenues with the product placement that we utilize the smaller brands and provided them additional value by creating unique organic content for them within the pages of the magazine.

On appearing on the cover of the magazine: “That actually was very unplanned and I’m a person that would never put myself on a cover because I thought that’s sort of abusing your power.”

More on appearing on the cover of the magazine: “I thought if you use yourself as the main inspiration I think it will give inspiration for other people to believe in themselves and keep going with whatever ventures they enter.”

On finding the BASIC DNA: “We’re trying to shape our own voice which I think was the hardest thing and I think for any brand it’s really hard to stand out in the crowd so that’s kind of our goal been to find our DNA, to find BASIC DNA and to really stick to it and be authentic.”

On her life’s philosophy: “The most talented people are very humble and they don’t really want to push themselves. The loudest people on social media are usually the least talented.”

More on her life’s philosophy: “I’m a hardcore fan of the cat woman, so I believe being behind the scenes and being that savior for those who cannot speak for themselves and elevate people. I would love to do more charity work. I would love to help more people.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Viktorija Pashuta, founder and editor in chief of BASIC magazine:

Samir Husni: As I told you in my email BASIC is anything but BASIC. Tell me the elevator pitch. What is BASIC magazine?

Viktorija Pashuta: Well, BASIC, first of all, it’s my passion project.

This is something I’ve been craving and wanted to do since I was in high school. And pretty much it’s a platform that provides opportunity for artists from all over the world to express themselves and to give them that opportunity to share their artwork and their passions on the pages of print magazine. And I’m really proud that BASIC is actually in print, not in digital.

So we take pride creating such a publication that became sort of a coffee table book and collectible edition. So yeah, like you said, absolutely right. BASIC is everything but BASIC.

Samir Husni: You wrote that while others are abandoning print and are going digital, and with the high increase of paper costs, mailing costs, you name it. Why is this print drive that you have?

Viktorija Pashuta: Well, I think I believe that nowadays there is such a high demand for interpersonal connections, for physical products, for physical touch, especially in our modern age of technology and of desensitization of the society, of people not being willing to connect in person or they really craving to have personal interpersonal experiences. So for me, it was really important to create a physical product, a magazine that has the presence in the physical world.

Besides that, I believe that the pages transcend the experiences that we go through creating the magazine. What’s really important is being on set, creating a community, working with passionate people with the same interests and sharing those passions with the world through the print publication. I’ve noticed that trend, especially being myself constantly on social media, that you have those two, three seconds to look at the post, like the post and you forget about it.

But the beauty about print publication, it’s something you look through, but then you put it in a shelf, you can get back to it later. You can look through it and you have this connection that digital can never substitute.

I always have a comparison. Would you like to have a digital kiss or a physical, actual kiss? And the same with print. We want that interpersonal connection. It’s very similar to the luxury sector where we want to have luxury products, luxury experiences, and the same with print.

The idea was to invest in the quality of the paper, invest in the quality of binding, invest in talent, create content that is timeless and you wouldn’t easily find online. So that was the goal. And for me, it was extremely important to create a physical product and have basic in print.

Samir Husni: It sounds like you have had in the last seven years since you launched BASIC, a walk in the old garden, or was there some challenges, there were some thorns across the road?

Viktorija Pashuta: Oh, absolutely. I mean, every step of the way, there was a challenge starting from the fact that when I was getting myself into print, I had zero knowledge in publishing, zero knowledge in printing, zero knowledge in logistics.

All I knew is photography since I started to be a fashion photographer and experience in writing since I was writing back in my country for another smaller magazine. That’s all I had. And then if I knew then what I had to go through, I’d probably think twice if I should start a print magazine.

I thought, oh my God, it’s so easy. I’m going to do it. But then once you start doing it and you realize how huge of an undertaking it is from looking for clients and advertisers, looking for cover stars, being on top of current affairs and finding the budgets for the productions and finding the right team, the passionate, loyal team that would have the same vision as you have or be willing to bring your vision to life.

So all of these things are very, very complex. Even people and companies with unlimited budget would consider having a print magazine quite an undertaking. So it’s not enough just to have the funds.

You also have to be extremely passionate about it and live with it. So I live BASIC. I live 24-7 with the publication, with the ideas, with the concepts, with the things we need to do with the project.

Definitely there were some challenges. There were challenges on many levels, on the production level, to really build the team, to have the right team to support me, to support the vision, to find the funds to run the publication since the magazine is fully self-funded. And I can talk a little bit more about that, and different avenues, how we monetize the publication, how we keep it alive.

There were definitely challenges creating content that would resonate online and also would be relevant in print because these are two complete different platforms. And something that goes for print would necessarily go viral online and vice versa. If you take an influencer that has millions of followers online and put them in print, it’s going to completely contradict itself and not going to resonate with the audience who loves the fresh print, who loves to read something more meaningful and in-depth with the in-depth research.

Those are two different things were really hard to blend, but I managed to do it. I started it with the viral project, blending my photography and having a concept that resonated both online and in print. That concept was what if cars were supermodels.

I took different types of cars like a Tesla, a Toyota, and a Ferrari. I imagined what they would look like if they were supermodels. So that concept went viral right away. We got so many, like almost billion impressions online and so many different magazines picked it up and translated to different languages. And for print, it also was a really good artistic series. So things like that are used to sort of be relevant in the digital time, but also print relevant, you know, in modern times.

Samir Husni: How do you monetize BASIC?

Viktorija Pashuta: Very interesting question, because in my mind, the traditional advertising didn’t work. Something that worked maybe 10, 15 years ago when you have a full page of a luxury brand, it wouldn’t work for BASIC because we didn’t have the right numbers for the advertisers.

We didn’t have the right quantities in the beginning. We didn’t have enough celebrity power at the time. So in order to survive, we had to be creative. We had to be resourceful. I created different avenues with the product placement that we utilize the smaller brands and provided them additional value by creating unique organic content for them within the pages of the magazine.

So we started to get that product and integrate the product within our editorials, within our articles, within the special projects that we were creating, at the same time, giving the brand so much more value than they would have gotten in a digital, I mean, in the traditional media, just having a one page ad, they would get traction, they would get word of mouth, they would get new original content that they in turn would use on their social media pages.

That was one of the things that we utilize is the product placement.
Secondly, we started to create specific targeted projects for brands that would increase the brand awareness and create content that will resonate with the image of the brand. So we take a suitcase company brand and we create a series of imagery that would support that brand.

For example, we work with a Taiwanese brand of suitcases called Desenio and their series were based on the Marvel Comic-Con heroes like Hulk and Captain America and Black Panther. We took those suitcases and I reimagined them as a female superheroes because traditionally in the Comic-Con world, all these characters were played by male characters. So I took a female Black Panther, I took a female Hulk, I took a female Captain America and then we utilized through fashion a series of works for them holding the suitcase in the photo shoot series that also became viral and we actually got the word of the ads of the world website for that campaign also printed and that both got viral digitally.

In addition, we diversified our revenue streams by utilizing additional activations that supported the magazine non-directly like organizing events, creating a production company that would create social media content for brands. We created a fashion showroom that represents fashion designers and provide press placements for those designers.

We had different revenue streams also connected to entertainment, fashion and content creation but non-directly they all were supporting BASIC magazine and all under the Basic Media Company umbrella and that really helped us to keep going and help us to succeed. That doesn’t mean we don’t want traditional advertising, we want it but at the same time that challenge pushed us to be more creative and find new non-traditional ways to monetize our operations.

Samir Husni: It sounds like more than a love affair with BASIC for you, yet at the same time it’s one of the rare moments that I see the editor-in-chief herself on the cover of the magazine. Tell me about that.

Viktorija Pashuta: Yes, that actually was very unplanned and I’m a person that would never put myself on a cover because I thought that’s sort of abusing your power. But for that specific issue it was very challenging to find a cover star. It was the 20th issue of BASIC. The stars that were suggested to us from publicists didn’t really match my aesthetic or they didn’t really were in line with the grandeur of the matter because it was a 20th issue. I wanted to do something special, none of the stars really kind of match that idea .My sister suggested, “that since it’s our 20th issue why don’t you put yourself on a cover and have your team inside of the magazine.”

I said no. I mean that would be too much. I would never really do that. Why would I do this? She said well it makes sense because you are the only photographer and the editor in chief. You are the visioner of the magazine that’s out there. Even Anna Wintour editor in chief of Vogue didn’t invent Vogue but you did. So I thought maybe that is something interesting to explore and also with my own story I can inspire other people specifically other women because I do have a quite big female following that always admire my journey and admire my tenacity and they know how difficult it is so that was a testament to the team and to myself. I thought okay if you cannot inspire yourself how can you inspire the world. I thought if you use yourself as the main inspiration , it will give inspiration for other people to believe in themselves and keep going with whatever ventures they enter.

Samir Husni: Well, your sister was right.

Viktorija Pashuta: I hope so. She’s always my secret advisor and, to have a little confession, most of the time she helps me with my editor’s letter. She has a very interesting perspective on things.

Samir Husni: You and I are having the same conversation in 2025. What would you tell me you’ve accomplished in the 24-25 year for BASIC?

Viktorija Pashuta: I think we made such a huge leap even right now. Look back at the first issues of the magazine. I’ve seen how different we’ve transformed since issue one and I also think it’s deeply connected to my own personal transformation. Certain things that interested me seven years ago no longer interested me now. As far as I grow personally and I transform personally so does the magazine. I feel we’ve done so much but also so little in my mind within the seven years. I always had these grand goals. I thought by this time we would become such a huge media company with huge following and it would have a very huge impact, but we’re not there yet. At the same time

I learned that no matter how big you become or no matter how successful you become you will never truly be satisfied with what you have and I think that’s a good thing that will always keep you pushing because once you feel like you’ve done it all and if you accomplish it all this stagnation period starts and you kind of start degrade and I always say the same about Oscar winning actors I feel like when DiCaprio won that Oscar he kind of slowed down. I always kind of wanted him not to win that Oscar because you know he’s going to push more, do more movies, do something more mind-blowing and keep growing as an actor so the same thing for me. I feel like even though I’m so close of being big but at the same time it always keeps pushing me to do better.

Looking back if we’re talking in 2025 I think we’ve done some really great accomplishments. We had quite a few renowned stars from Megan Fox to David Guetta to Michelle Rodriguez to Bebe Rex. All these really amazing personalities in music, film, and art world. So it’s been really great to have those celebrities.

I think we did quite a shift, especially for the past few issues, having more written content as before. In the beginning stages of BASIC we started highly as a visual publication. We had a lot of editorials, a lot of artworks, but we didn’t have a lot of articles. Right now we started to have more in-depth interviews. A little more articles, a little more research, a little more data, that we’re trying to get a little bit more a point of view, and trying to shape that BASIC identity.

We’re trying to shape our own voice which I think was the hardest thing and I think for any brand it’s really hard to stand out in the crowd so that’s kind of our goal been to find our DNA, to find BASIC DNA and to really stick to it and be authentic

I have a lot things to share but looking back I think we’ve done a lot of immersive projects, a lot of interesting events, which right now is my priority. My goal is to not also have a beautiful publication, but to create a community outside of the magazine, and that’s been my focus. As of right now I want to involve more projects supporting artists, supporting female founders, supporting emerging musicians, emerging student designers. For me I really want to be the voice for those who cannot really speak.

The most talented people are very humble and they don’t really want to push themselves. The loudest people on social media are usually the least talented. I want to shift that dynamic and give the platform for the truly talented people who don’t really have crazy presence on social media but they have something to say and they have some beautiful artwork that they’ve been working the whole life.

That’s my goal, that’s my passion, and looking back I feel we’ve done a lot, but I want to do more.

Samir Husni: Before I ask my typical last two questions is there any question I failed to ask or anything you would like to add.

Viktorija Pashuta: Interesting question. If you allow me just to kind of philosophize, I always feel that I want to judge myself . I feel, as any artist, there is always an internal struggle and sometimes people became too much consumed by consuming things right there’s so much choice and there’s so much pressure to be successful and to create, create, create and sometimes we kind of lose ourselves in that process and we lose ourselves. Why are we doing these things, what’s the purpose?

For me, it’s been a continuous journey to find myself and to find my voice, but also to be silent and listen more to those who have something to say so with the magazine. Maybe the question would be how individuals, who stand behind this smaller passionate project, how do they really keep that positive mindset that allows them to keep motivating themselves every day and keep continuing doing what they do because it’s not easy.

It’s always challenging. You always have this black and white stripes every day, you want to give up one day and the another day like no I’m doing something right. I want to continue because you feel there’s a feedback, and another day just like why am I doing all this. There’s so much already out there I just might just stop and get an eight to five job and just be happy and travel. But this is what I think really makes it so different for BASIC because despite all these challenges and the pains and the hurts you still persevere and still keep moving, still keep creating, because you know that’s through these pains you create something new, you make a difference, you inspire someone else and keep the planet going.

You keep grinding that wheel and you are not willing to settle and just take the easy path. I guess that would be my comment to your question,

Samir Husni: If I come to visit Viktorija one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing cooking, watching tv, reading a book, reading a magazine?

Viktorija Pashuta: A good question. It depends on the day. I taught myself on the thought that I do live in my own bubble. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing to be so disconnected from the rest of the world. If you come into my house you probably will see me doing either two things: one either watching a super dark bloody thriller or a documentary. I really love dark documentaries and research about unsolved crimes and cold cases. I’m really passionate about that mystery and that enigma of those cases and trying to find what happened and who done it.

The second thing you may find me doing is spending time in silence. Having some candles on, having some essential oils, and just maybe dancing in the dark. I love dancing, I love connecting to myself through movement and I think it’s very important to move in general in your life with your mind physically emotionally being out there.

Sometimes you could catch me doing something weird like I imagine I’m a batman and I’ll go outside in the dark streets and just walk around at night and there would be someone who needs my help randomly. It happened to me a few times. I just was at the right place at the right time to help somebody like an older person falling. Minor little things where I was just there at the right time to help them.

Samir Husni: Were you fascinated with the black cat back home in Latvia?

Viktorija Pashuta: Oh yeah. I’m a hardcore fan of the cat woman so I believe being behind the scenes and being that savior for those who cannot speak for themselves and elevate people. I would love to do more charity work. I would love to help more people. I’ve been trying to find something meaningful that connect with me, especially in the long term. I want to work more with kids and do more of the educational talks where I can inspire young people to find their passions. I was really grateful having really great mentors in my life and I want to pass it on and give back and be that mentor for someone else down the line.

Samir Husni: My typical final question is what keeps Viktorija up at night these days?

Viktorija Pashuta: What keeps me up at night usually some obsessive idea that I will never do. I had so many obsessive ideas that I see them so vividly but they never come to life. I roll them over back and forth in my head and I’m just thinking yes that’s exactly what I’m going to do but at the end of the day never do them, so that keeps me up at night.

Some kind of concepts,visions, and dreams that I feel stuck in my brain but would never materialize and that really drives me crazy I want this magic one where, well, maybe like a utopia thing where one day I would be like saying Viktorija, you have all the wealth in the world now, you can do anything you want. I actually had a little notebook that I’ve been writing since age 11. It contains all of the amazing cool concepts and ideas I want to do one day. Right now, that little book is full with ideas from books, shows, and restaurants.

I mean anything in the world that I could have created in that little book. So one day maybe if I have so much free time and unlimited wealth probably will bringing my crazy ideas to life.

Samir Husni: May all your wishes come true and thank you.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

Ray Seebeck , The Twenty Something Young Person* Behind The Unique Print Magazine “Magazine TM” The Mr. Magazine™ Interview

September 28, 2024

“There’s something different about holding something in your hand and looking at it to actually create that experience that we want to create.” Ray Seebeck, Founder and Editor

They say Gen Z is the digital generation, and print is their parents and grandparents’ medium. However, one twenty something young person from Chicago begs to differ from that adage. They are the founder and editor of the print “Magazine TM” which they launched last year.

The oversized, accordion bound magazine, is a beauty to view and a delight to flip through its pages. Ray wants the magazine to be an experience for artists and the audience. An experience it is. It is a very pleasant experience that ends with a series of pages that looks like a wall mural.

To say Ray is passionate about print, would be an understatement, but they are also very digitally oriented. They use online for their research and searches for anything and everything beautiful. They hope to invest in that passion to create a profitable magazine that will hopefully make a living for them and those who work with them.

So please enjoy my conversation with a print fanatic, Ray Seebeck, founder and editor of “Magazine TM,” but first the soundbites:

On the role of print in a digital age: “For me the end solution is print. Part of what I’m trying to do is make that finished product.”

On the binding method for Magazine TM: “I wanted to do something that was memorable, that was unique for the first issue. We settled at the accordion bound method.”

On the magazine audience: “Right now, it’s mostly people in the art community is who I want to reach.”

On their vision of the magazine: “It’s more an experience of actually viewing art through how it’s designed.”

On their goal for the magazine: “I’m trying to make a model where it’s positive for the artists. It’s building community for the artists.”

On their aim to help artists: “It’s really important for the artists to have their work published. It’s huge. And then just to be doing something that I love is hopefully showing people and inspiring them in a small way.”

On the TM in Magazine: “The answer is no. It’s a play on letters… it’s not actually a trademark, but what it means is TM stands for The Magazine. So it’s basically Magazine, The Magazine is what it stands for. And TM is like abbreviation.”

On what keeps them up at night: “It’s just the idea of the keeping the magazine running. That’s a big one.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Ray Seebeck, the founder and editor of Magazine TM:

Samir Husni: My first question to you is, you’re a young man in his 20s, and you launched and produced a print magazine unlike any other print magazine that I’ve seen in a long time. What’s your fascination with print?

Ray Seebeck: It probably started when I was a young kid. I did collect some magazines. I collected National Geographic, and we had Life Magazine running around the house, and Sports Illustrated.

I was a big Sports Illustrated fan, but I really got into print as an art form in college at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I had some really great experiences there where I learned from teachers screen printing, lithography, and letterpress as well. So I really just developed. It was a great opportunity where I was able to chart my own education, and so I studied in the print media department at SAIC, where you were able to take the classes you want to take, and I was able to take a lot of classes related to printmaking and try to develop a lot of skills in that field.

Samir Husni: People will tell you we live in a digital age. What makes print so attractive to you? You’re so passionate about print, you produced a magazine called Magazine. What’s in you that makes you feel print is essential today as it was yesterday?

Ray Seebeck: It’s kind of a tough question to answer, but I feel print is just the answer, it’s the solution.

There’s no other solution for me. There’s no other possible route, like the end product. For me the end solution is print. Part of what I’m trying to do is make that finished product. There’s something different about holding something in your hand and looking at it to actually create that experience that we want to create. So printing is sort of a solution for that.

Samir Husni: Why did you choose this format for magazine? It opens up like an accordion and it becomes like a mural.

Ray Seebeck: I worked with, I worked with a few people to make it.

We had five meetings as we were preparing to make the magazine and as I was gathering submissions. And so one friend from New York, one of my classmates from college, and a friend’s friend from college. We had a few Zoom meetings.

My friend Christiaan, who’s a designer, the print designer, who works with me to design print, put together this like Pinterest board with different print and different binding ideas. We talked through what were the design details we wanted to have for the magazine. We discussed different binding formats.

We all kind of came to a decision together. I wanted to do something that was memorable, that was unique for the first issue. We settled at the accordion bound method. That opened up so many possibilities for the actual design of it, which was really exciting.

Then one of the people who I was working with asked what size we wanted to make it and we decided large format would also be very memorable. We went by the 11X17 size. Those are the two key elements as we decided accordion bound and large format.

Christiaan and I had some book binding skills from our college days, so we were able to figure out how to do that.

I definitely want to turn it into a business and hopefully make a living off it and help other people make a living off it.

Samir Husni: Who’s your audience? Who do you want to reach with this magazine?

Ray Seebeck: Right now, it’s mostly people in the art community is who I want to reach.

I would love to reach art collectors. It is an audience I want to grow to. Anyone who’s like interested in art and artists. So I’m hoping to expand the audience. But right now it’s mostly people in our community.

Samir Husni: Give me the elevator pitch the magazine?

Ray Seebeck: I would say there’s a few things that are really important: I’m really trying to create a different kind of publication, something that’s different than what most people have seen before. A magazine that’s more an art experience. It’s a simple magazine. It’s more an experience of actually viewing art through how it’s designed. That’s one huge aspect is trying to do something really creative.

The second aspect is that I’m trying to create a better experience for the artists. So there are a few art magazines they make artists pay them to get involved in their magazine. I’m trying to make a model where it’s positive for the artists. It’s building community for the artists. And it’s something that artists want to be a part of and they can themselves grow through being involved in it. So those are the two key probably aspects, I would say.

Samir Husni: Is the magazine a mirror reflection of you? Are you the magazine?

Ray Seebeck: I would say yes and no. I put so much of myself into it. So in one way, it’s a lot of the artists in the magazine are artists, that I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing at art shows or events. I’m kind of reinterpreting the art that I’ve taken in through the magazine. So in that way, it’s sort of a reflection of me. And then also, I would say, being it’s not meant to be super loud. It’s not meant to be super loud and showy.

It’s meant to be reserved. Once you start looking at it, it’s kind of an amazing experience. In that way, it’s maybe a reflection of my personality maybe kind of a reach. I definitely put a lot of myself into it. But at the same time, I feel like it is something totally different. Just like an end product of a lot of hours of work.

Samir Husni: It sounds like you have a love affair with this publication. Do you ever or would you consider it to be also a business? Is your dream to make money from this or just to do a magazine and say, hey, I have a magazine?

Ray Seebeck: No, I definitely want to turn it into a business and hopefully make a living off it and help other people make a living off it.

That’s the dream. So I’m trying to take small steps every month to achieve that. So in terms of producing the magazine, I have to figure out how much each issue costs and how much I’m selling each issue.

And then packaging and mailing is a huge thing I’m working on trying to reduce the cost of. Then just trying to create more revenue by expanding to new areas such as a podcast I started, which is basically just interviews for the next issue of the magazine.

I’m trying to create new ways to maybe make money off it. I have some like possible goals for the future. But right now it’s a passion project.

So I work on it whenever I can. A lot of times late nights and things like that. But my dream is to definitely turn into business.

Samir Husni: Good luck on that.

Ray Seebeck: Thank you.

Samir Husni: What are you looking for to work in print?

Ray Seebeck: I’m really looking to just to keep the magazine going. That’s the main goal.

So if I can keep it afloat, and not losing money on it. At the end of the day, if I’m what’s most important to me, is to put something out into the world and to have it mean something to people. That’s a big part of it.

It’s really important for the artists to have their work published. It’s huge. And then just to be doing something that I love is hopefully showing people and inspiring them in a small way.

Samir Husni: So Because you have limited distribution, how can people get the magazine?

Ray Seebeck: So I did, with the first issue and also will do with the second issue coming out next March, a presale for them, probably the month of February. I’ll have a presale online and that determines how big the edition is going to be for the next issue. Basically print however many copies we sell for the limited edition.

Samir Husni: And your website is?

Ray Seebeck: It’s rayseebeck.com backslash magazine dash tm.

Samir Husni: Okay. Were you able to register magazine as a trademark?

Ray Seebeck: That’s a good question. The answer is no. It’s a play on letters. So it’s slightly misleading, which I understand because it’s not actually a trademark, but what it means is TM stands for The Magazine. So it’s basically Magazine, The Magazine is what it stands for. And TM is like abbreviation.

Samir Husni: Is there any question that I should ask you that I didn’t ask you? Or anything you would like to add.Ray Seebeck: I would say I have done a lot of market research, not necessarily market research, but read research on different publications and podcasts that has really informed me in the evolution of the magazine, the design evolution for especially for this next issue. So I could talk about that a little bit, if you wanted me to.

So have you ever heard of Esopus magazine? It’s no longer published.

There was a show at the Colby College Museum of Art about Esopus magazine. I learned about it because of that show. I actually found a copy at a bookstore in Chicago. That was really cool to see that magazine because they do a lot of similar things in terms of creatively, making creative layouts, interviewing artists, and having different formats in the magazine. That was pretty cool. It’s something to look up to.

But it’s definitely not the perfect model of what I’m trying to do. But it was cool to see. I’ve gained a lot of research by going to libraries and looking through old magazines, or print design inspirations.

I also have gotten a lot of inspiration from different art books, too. I just wanted to share that I’ve done a lot of research of looking through magazines and also art podcasts. I’ve been listening to a lot of art podcasts in the last year or so.

Samir Husni: Let me ask you my typical last questions. If I come uninvited to visit you one evening at your home or apartment, what do I catch Ray doing? Watching TV, cooking, having a glass of wine?

Ray Seebeck: So to be honest, most nights, what I’m doing is after I’ve done everything I need to do that day, I’m generally pretty busy.

I generally will like take a shower, change into like a comfortable t-shirt and shorts and make dinner. I will turn on the TV basically every night. I watch a lot of different television shows.

Right now I’m watching like the Great British Bake Show. And RuPaul’s Drag Race is a big show that I like. I watch a lot of TV shows. I’m currently watching Only Murders in the Building.

I like to decompress. I know the magazine is very print oriented, but I’m also a very digitally oriented person. So I do a lot of online research and look through a lot of photographs all the time. That’s generally what I’m doing at night.

Sometimes I’ll… If I have something to work on for the magazine, I will work on that at night. That’s kind of my exception is that because I love doing it. If I have like if I have a submission from an artist, I will like organize all the content or work on the design layout at night.

Samir Husni: My typical last question is what keeps you up at night these days?

Ray Seebeck: I’m worried about the magazine falling apart. I would say that keeps me up. It’s just the idea of the keeping the magazine running. That’s a big one. There’s a lot of things that goes into that. Making money for the magazine also sometimes will keep me up. And just like diversifying.

Samir Husni: Thank you and good luck.

Ray is a non-binary and they use they/them pronouns.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, New Launches, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

Model Cars: The Hobbyist Magazine Celebrates 25 Years. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Gregg Hutchings, Editor & Publisher Extraordinaire.

September 22, 2024

“Print is forever… With magazines, its there. It’s permanence. It’s always there.” Gregg Hutchings

Those who read my blog know that I don’t use adjectives such as extraordinaire, or incredible, or outstanding and such. But after my conversation with Gregg Hutchings, editor and publisher of Model Cars magazines, I felt the urge and the need to use such adjectives. The one-man band has been at it for more than two decades, with the last 15 years dedicated to Model Cars magazine.

To quote his bio, “My name is Gregg Hutchings, and I grew up in Kailua, Hawai’i, on the windward side of the island of Oahu. I graduated from Kalaheo High School in 1979 majoring in hot rods and girls, and went into the automotive industry as a mechanic. Around 1984, I hurt my back working at a Porsche/VW/Audi dealership, and had three back surgeries during the 1985-1987 time frame. To help pass the time, I got into building model cars, a hobby I grew to be a part of locally.”

Hurting his back was just the beginning of his journey with pain and surgeries. He was rear-ended twice in car accidents which only enhanced the pain and introduced more surgeries, that as you will read in my conversation with Gregg, forces him to work on the magazine laying on his back. The pain is so severe at sometimes, he can’t sit down to work. “Because I fall a lot. My head gets knocked up from the falls,” Gregg tells me, “my back will just seize up and I lose all feeling and everything. And it’s not a good way and it’s not a fun way to live life.”

With at least six surgeries so far, and a host of screws and pins in his back, Gregg refuses to give up and is so happy to announce that this coming October the magazine will celebrate its 25 anniversary.
The first issue of Model Cars was published in October 1999.

So please join me as you read this incredible story of an extra-ordinary man, wishing him a very happy anniversary and all the best for his health.

But first the sound bites from the conversation with Gregg Hutchings, editor and publisher, Model Cars magazine:

On getting published in the magazine: People must have “done something good to get in print, because anybody can get on the web. But to get in print is something else.”

On whether the magazine is a hobby or a business: “It pays my bills, it pays my monthly bills. And I’m able to travel to shows all over the country whenever I can because my wife and I actually caregivers for her mom. So that’s my full-time job.”

On the usage of digital and online: “We’re getting a lot of our content from online. So it’s a lot of accumulating what we see online and finding new people that want to be in print and are tired of their internet fame, because it is so fleeting.”

On his pain and physical health: “I can’t sit up. My whole desk is elevated. I can stand up and work. Or I actually lay down here. This is where I do a lot of work too, just laying down.”

On the audience reaction to him: “It’s like, here’s this guy from Hawaii that’s done something he loves to do. And people all across the country and the world just love to talk to him.”

On the plans for the 25^th anniversary celebration: “I’d love to have a social media blitz going. Just to say, it has been 25 years. It’s the only magazine out there that’s lasted this long. I want to get more new people. Because one thing with COVID, I had 247 dealers, which gave me a lot. It did really well for my bottom line. After COVID, I’m down to 146. Now, I’m down to 129.”

On working on model cars: “I can’t work on cars anymore. I can’t build cars. I was an incredible mechanic. But with this hobby, it’s just every day I can work on cars.”

On what keeps him up at night: “Pain. Besides pain, it is the next project, I think, it’s always the next thing. It’s what do people want to see? Because they trust me.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with the incredible Gregg Hutchings, editor and publisher, Model Cars magazine:

Samir Husni: My first question Gregg, you are approaching the 25th anniversary of Model Cars, and you’ve been the owner for the last 10 years. What’s the attraction to a print publication, a specialized print publication in this digital age?

Gregg Hutchings: Somebody gave me that word: eternity. It’s permanent. Because digital, you have to know where you’re looking. With magazines, it’s there. It’s permanence. It’s always there.

That’s what everybody likes, because everybody can put their self in or on a website or whatnot. But to get yourself into a magazine, to be in print, that means something to all these people. It’s self-acknowledgement. They’ve done something good to get in print, because anybody can get on the web. But to get in print is something else. Print is forever.

You can go ahead, and if you did a mistake, you are not going to reprint the magazine. I always call my mistakes, I spell them M-I-S and then steak, like eat a steak. That’s how I spell my mistakes. I said, oops, I made a mistake. No backspace in the magazine. No control alt V or what.

Samir Husni: Give me your elevator pitch for Model Cars, for people who don’t know the magazine. You’re based in Hawaii, but the magazine is distributed in the entire country and internationally.

Gregg Hutchings: It’s the hobbyist magazine. It’s the magazine for the model car hobbyists. I got into it as therapy. A lot of the people I talked to have had health issues and whatnot, and that’s why they get into the hobby or got back into the hobby mostly. It’s always been that way. I think that’s why it’s not corporate, it’s down grassroots, that’s the word. It’s the grassroots magazine.

And the fact that I was able to do something really smart when I had Plastic Fanatic magazine, when I bought it, I think the circulation was about 2,500 or 3,000 and it was okay. But then I come up with this idea to sell directly to the hobby shops. That’s the core, that’s the key, billing the hobby shops directly. That’s why I’ve lasted 25 years, because I don’t have to worry about advertisers or circulation or doing renewals. Every issue I send out invoices and it pays for the printing.

Samir Husni: You mentioned, besides being therapy and hobby, that it’s your life, it’s your business. You’re not doing this for charity work or anything. You said that through this distribution system, it pays the bill for the printing. How about for the publisher, for the editor-in-chief?

Gregg Hutchings: It pays my bills, it pays my monthly bills. And I’m able to travel to shows all over the country whenever I can because my wife and I actually caregivers for her mom. So that’s my full-time job.

She’s 92 years old and she’s got major health issues. We are caregivers for her. I watch her during the day and my wife watches her at night, which is when I get to do my work that I need to.

Samir Husni: Describe for me, what’s a day in the life of Gregg? I mean, when you are putting this magazine together.

Gregg Hutchings: One thing I do like about what you did mention about the digital part is we’re getting a lot of our content from online. So it’s a lot of accumulating what we see online and finding new people that want to be in print and are tired of their internet fame, because it is so fleeting. Once they get in print, it’s forever.

Finding the people, making sure they’re a good fit, because like you said before, in your book, you got to keep that lighthouse going of what you’re actually about. And that’s what I think has kept me different from everybody else is I love this hobby. I love the people.

My best friends are model car builders, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I was a mechanic for many years. I ran one of the biggest firms here for 10 years, all while doing the magazine too.

But the people with the hobby are just fantastic. I think that’s what makes these niche magazines so great, because it’s not a huge corporation. It’s a bunch of guys I can call up any time of day, say, hey, how are you doing? What are you building? What are you doing? Or if I need help, they’ll come and help me here. I couldn’t ask for something better. I really couldn’t. It makes good money because I can live here comfortably. It pays all the bills, but I have to chase the money. That’s the only thing I don’t like. I have to chase the money. That’s the hard part.

Because I can’t sit up. My whole desk is elevated. I can stand up and work. Or I actually lay down here. This is where I do a lot of work too, just laying down. And I always said, if I was 100%, I’d probably have this magazine at 20,000 circulation.

But it’s just hard to chase it. Right now, I’m at 5,500. And when I was with Source Interlink and Ingram we were at about 7,500 with a 63% sell-through. That’s unheard of. The Atlanta group recently approached me to be back on the newsstands. A lot of people are asking for it. But because I’m so behind all the time, I’m about two months behind schedule. It’s just really hard to get back up to speed and being able to have a solid publication schedule. Still trying to do six issues a year. I started at six, went to nine.

Then when I got hurt in 2016, I went back to six. But when we’re doing nine issues a year, it was doing really good.

Samir Husni: You’re the publisher and the editor-in-chief.

Gregg Hutchings: Yeah, everything. Accounting, taxes, subscription, renewal.

Samir Husni: Which hat do you like more? The publisher or the editor-in-chief?

Gregg Hutchings: That’s a tough one. I kind of like the incognito guy, if that makes sense. Because if I go to shows and stuff, sometimes I won’t wear my shirts or my uniform, and people don’t know me.

I’ll just walk up behind them and talk to them, and they find out who I am. It’s like they met their idol or something. And it’s an incredible feeling. It really is. It’s like, here’s this guy from Hawaii that’s done something he loves to do. And people all across the country and the world just love to talk to him.

It’s not egotistical. That’s one thing about Hawaii. We don’t really have egos and all that stuff.

A couple of quick stories. When I go to shows, nine times out of 10, the person’s wife is the one that comes up to me and thanks me. Because it’s made such a difference in the husband’s life for doing the model cars. That’s what I like. I just think it’s unreal to be able to touch that many people. I know it sounds corny.

Samir Husni: No, it is your passion, love, and work all in one and one in all. So tell me, when Larry Bell retired and said, okay, here’s the magazine, in 2015, can you describe that moment? Can you describe your feeling?

Gregg Hutchings: Well, back up to 1999 when I went to the mainland and got hooked up with Golden Bell Press. I was co-owner with Larry Bell from the start of 1999.

And then about a year or two later in 2001, I was in a serious rear-ended accident in Denver. The back of the Honda Civic I was in, the bumper hit my seat. The back bumper hit the back of my seat.

I was the passenger. So I was extricated from that. And I came back to Hawaii and then Larry said, instead of being co-owner, he just paid me a straight salary.

So that way I didn’t have to worry about, I had strict income, I didn’t have to worry about percentages or whatnot. So he took over complete ownership and I was paid a salary or 1099. I’m on heavy medications too. You became more like a freelance. You became on a set salary.

I became the editor instead of just the co-publisher. But he always considered me the publisher because I did everything still. It was just the financial part of it was it was safer for me because I had to go.

I went, I had three surgeries before that. Then after the accident, I had two more. And then it worked out great. We went up to nine issues a year. And then in 2015, he wanted to retire. And so he just gave me everything.

At that time, I had started another magazine called Slot Cars Magazine. And that one was doing really good. But the problem with that is when he gave me that magazine, he didn’t give me. The needed paperwork for the periodical mailing.

It’s terrifying. My wife, Kelly, and I went through the whole schooling process of that. But when he gave me Model Cars Magazine, he didn’t give me all the original paperwork.

So, I didn’t have the original requesters, all the copies of everything they had and whatnot. So, I could not get my periodical permit.

The post office really tried to help me out. They came to the house. They did the audits and everything. But I didn’t have the original paperwork. So, that was… I just gave up. And then in 2016, December, I was hit again.

I was rear-ended. My wife hates it because I drive by the rearview mirror. She’s like, what are you looking at? I said, I’m just watching, just watching. If I get hit again, I’ve got so much rods and screws in my back, it would be… This time, my next surgery is going to go through the front, break two ribs, fuse the front of it, flip me over, take out all six levels of rods and screws and go all the way up.

So, it’s not going to be fun.

Samir Husni: I wish you the best.

So, tell me, what are the plans for the 25th anniversary?

Gregg Hutchings: I don’t know. I’d love to have a social media blitz going. Just to say, it has been 25 years. It’s the only magazine out there that’s lasted this long. I want to get more new people. Because one thing with COVID, I had 247 dealers, which gave me a lot. It did really well for my bottom line. After COVID, I’m down to 146. Now, I’m down to 129.

So, I lost a lot of shops, a lot of hobby shops. I want to find more. Either go back to Barnes & Noble or find other ways to find other retail shops. Because that’s what does it for me. They pay the bill within 30 days. And it is about chasing the money.

I mean, the advertising revenue is not that high. I think I’m at 6.5%. But with my printing schedule, I don’t have the reputation of being timely. Most of these people know me. And they know that, he’ll be down for a week if something happens. Because I fall a lot. My head gets knocked up from the falls. My back will just seize up and I lose all feeling and everything. And it’s not a good way and it’s not a fun way to live life.

Samir Husni: Yeah, it’s not. So tell me, if I come uninvited to your house, not that I’ve been to Hawaii before, but let’s say I come to see you one evening, what do I catch Gregg doing? Reading a book, watching TV, or laying on the floor?

Gregg Hutchings: Probably the last one. Laying on the floor. I’ve got what I call the squirrel syndrome. I’ll see something shiny and I’ll just jump right on it and I’ll forget about what I was working on. And I’ll have so many projects going on.

I guess with the specialized part of the hobby, I’m always building something. I’m always working on something. I added the projects I am working on now on a spreadsheet. I’ve got 157 projects like that started. And it’s always something going.

I can’t work on cars anymore. I can’t build cars. I was an incredible mechanic. But with this hobby, it’s just every day I can work on cars. And then I got into computers. I just met so many unreal people with the magazine. I’m just such a small little guy that has been able to do such unreal things.

Samir Husni: And what keeps Greg up at night these days?

Gregg Hutchings: Pain. Besides pain, it is the next project, I think, it’s always the next thing. It’s what do people want to see? Because they trust me.

Samir Husni: Is there anything you would like to add or I failed to ask you?

Gregg Hutchings: One thing I’ve always said is I don’t do reviews on something I haven’t had in my hands. So if a company sends something a PR piece, I’ll say, no, no, no, you got to send me the actual thing. Because people trust that.

Because they know that if I’ve looked at it, if I read it, if I wrote about it, so it’s either thumbs up, thumbs down, or like we say, a shocker or a no shocker. But I love the business side of it.

I really do. Because it’s got the potential to be really well. I used to tell Kelly, if I hit 20,000, that’s a million bucks a year for one guy.

That’s pretty good. So I mean, it can be done. And it’s just physically being able to do it.

It’s just, I wish I could. But I’m not going to give up. That’s the one thing people ask me with the pain and stuff.

How do you keep on doing it? I don’t know. I’ve got too much junk to pass on to my wife that I’ve got to keep on looking forward. And it’s just, I love the magazine industry too much.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

I Have Two Eyes…. A Mr. Magazine™ Musing

September 16, 2024

That is two Eye magazines. One from the days before I was born, and the other when I was a 13-year-old teenager. However the two Eyes have a lot in common and few good lessons to learn if you ever thought or think of going into the magazine business. And by magazine, I mean the ink on paper publication that is published on some regular frequency.

So without any further ado, here are the lessons I have found in those two Eyes that are still applicable in the year 2024, some 75 years after the first EYE was born:

Lesson number 1: Magazine publishing is not for the faint of heart. In 1949 when the first EYE ( Martin Goodman, publisher and Carlton Brown, editor) was published, magazines were the only mass medium available to the public nationwide. This EYE was first published in May 1949 with the tag line “People and Pictures.” The editors wrote in the first letter to the readers, “Starting a new magazine is as exhilarating as jumping into a mountain pool – and as filled with suspense. You hold your breath, take the plunge, and hope for the best.”

In March of 1968 editor Susan Szekely, wrote in the first issue of the Eye published by the Hearst Corporation (Helen Gurley Brown was the supervising editor), “ To get off the ground, EYE went high in the sky. For our first issue, we sent a host of venturesome journalists aloft. Among the most unruffled was Yale graduate Peter Swerdloff who set off casually to hitchhike around the country by air. Although he makes it look easy, Peter was no slouch. Where he succeeded, another writer had failed, returning home in disgrace with a toe stubbed during a forced landing.”

Both magazines took calculated risks and knew that magazine publishing, even in the 40s and 60s of the last century was not for the faint of heart.

Lesson number 2: Plea for help from the audience.

Without your readers, the magazine is not going anywhere. Readers input is essential. EYE of 1949 offered readers money for the best letters about the first issue. “We want this to be a magazine that you will like – whoever you are, wherever you live. To help us make it that, we want you to write us letters telling us what you like and don’t like in this first issue, and what you’d like to see in future issue,” the editors wrote. They continued, ‘We’ll mail checks for $10 each to the ten people who write us the best letters about EYE – the letters that will help us most in making this the kind of magazine you – and we – want it to be.”

Hearst’s eye was more on the wishful side of things with the audience. “May you be as high on EYE as we had to be to do it,” wrote the editor.

Lesson number 3: Great content was and will always be king and queen.

The importance of good quality content is as important as it was in 1949. For magazine content goes beyond good writing to include good photography, design, and the art of packaging a coherent and pleasing publication both for the eye (pun intended) and the brain. “The publishers and editors of EYE, have no misgivings about this first issue. We’ve packed it with what seem to us the best photographs to be found,” EYE’s editors wrote, “plus two full-length articles that we believe are worth anyone’s reading time.” The editors were humble enough to admit, “But our judgment, unless it’s backed by our readers’ approval, is worthless.”

As for the May 1968 Hearst’s eye, the editor wrote, after paragraphs of introducing the writers and photographer for the volume 1, number 1 issue, “EYE promises more of the same—hip young writers, photographers and artists (and a few oldies and goldies) covering the pop scene, the political and social controversies of the day, sports and travel (Spartanburg, South Carolnia?) and the latest fashion news—with each future issue.”

Publishing a magazine, a good magazine still depends on those three premises stated above. Recognizing it is not for the faint of heart, engaging your audience from the very beginning, and providing excellent content that can’t be found any other place.

If you would like to take a dive into the “oldies but goldies” magazines of the past, feel free to reach to John Henry at the Special Collections division of The University of Missouri Libraries and ask for the Samir Husni Magazine Collection

Until the next musing, stay tuned…

All the best

Samir “Mr. Magazine™” Husni

Posted in A Launch Story..., A Mr. Magazine™ Musing, From the Vault, Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views | Leave a Comment »

An Upscale Magazine For The Masses. The Story Of The Launch Of hiii: “The Vanity Fair For Weed.” The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With Rob Hill, Co-Founder And Editor In Chief, And Pam Patterson, Co-Founder And Creative Director.

September 12, 2024

“We love magazines. We’re finding out that a lot of other people who didn’t know they love magazines, love magazines. I’m feeling really buoyant and positive. You say, “Will this be a business? Yes, we are very, very confident. This is not a vanity project. We’re here to make money. The universe is conspiring such a thing.” Rob Hill

An upscale magazine for the masses “who partake.” A “Vanity Fair for weed.” A new twist on marijuana magazines. Elegant in design and even more elegant and sophisticated in writing and photography. The brainchild of Rob Hill and Pam Patterson, hiii magazine arrived on the newsstands in the city of Los Angeles and at all its dispensaries.

The lifestyle magazine utilizes every inch of space to channel messages to its readers and advertisers. From the margins to the spine and the front edge of the magazine, there is content, a very specific message to the audience.

To say the magazine is well done will be an understatement. Rob and Pam poured their heart and soul into this new publication that goes beyond the ink on paper magazine. To find out about this hiii adventure I reached out to Rob and Pam and had a delightful conversation about the magazine and the entities surrounding the publication.

Please enjoy this conversation with Rob Hill, co-founder and editor in chief, and Pam Patterson, co-founder and creative director, that is sure to give you a hiii whether you partake or not. But first for the soundbites:

On the genesis of the magazine idea: “My thinking was that the industry had nowhere to brand. And there are about 2800 potential advertisers in this city. So I just saw it as a numbers game. But it also had to bring a new and veneer to the industry. A new take for a new time.”

On the mission of the magazine: “Because what this industry didn’t need was another rag that was basically looking backwards and not forwards, actually propelling the stereotypes. We’re totally anti that. We don’t believe that. I think 64% of people use cannabis in this country.”

On scoring an ad from Porsche: “We don’t all live in a silo. We buy Porsches. I hope you saw the ad. We booked Porsche, which has never been done in a cannabis magazine. They booked it for the full year and paid. So we’re going after car companies, we’re going after mainstream brands.”

On expanding beyond Los Angeles: “We’re getting calls from Vegas, NYC, and Detroit, etc, to bring the magazine there. It’s just been so exciting. I don’t want to say we’re saving print, but I think we’re part of a resurgence of print. Nylon is back, Spin is back, Creem is back, Life is back, Playboy is back. There is a digital fatigue that has set in.”

On the role the magazine aims to play: “One of the things that makes this audience so much different is we really are a lifestyle magazine. It’s a tool for connection between people. I think people who don’t smoke wouldn’t completely understand it.”

On the flipbook in the margins: “When I heard that Mickey Mouse came into public domain, at least Steamboat Willie, we took a look at it. He’s driving the boat and it’s just begging for a joint in his mouth. “

On the distribution model: “The thinking is to conquer the country through cities rather than the traditional way of printing half a million magazines and putting them on newsstands all over the country.”

On the creation of the magazine: “We just felt we were the best people to redefine, update, and package it in a way that made sense to everyone. Concentrate on the positive, creative, and medicinal parts.”

On the content: “We’re going to always have some really good stories in there too. Like the prison story we did. People don’t know that there are people still rotting in jail for selling three joints in 1975. It’s crazy.”

On the audience: “The audience is very broad, but it’s like the coolest people in all of those sort of segments smoke weed.”

On young folks reaction to the magazine: “We have a lot of young people that work in our office who are in their twenties and a lot of people that come through here who are millennials that treat the magazine like it’s a jewel. It’s an exotic thing to them that they’re liking. What’s not to like?”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Rob Hill, Co-founder and editor in chief, and Pam Patterson, Co-founder and creative director of hiii magazine:

Samir Husni: In this digital age, you are launching a print magazine, and not any print magazine, a print magazine “for people who partake.” What’s the reasoning behind it? What were you thinking? Are you out of your mind?

Rob Hill: Well, during COVID, I was sitting home alone a lot. I kind of fell back in love with cannabis. I’ve had an on and off love affair with it.

I was coming from a business to business cannabis magazine called MG, which was the biggest cannabis business to business magazine with a very different model. It was a subscription only model. It went out to CEOs and owners of companies.

I would go down to the Malibu newsstand before they locked us all down. Even when they did, and just kind of, buy magazines and bring them home. I started to make a collage on my wall and started to just envision it.

My thinking was that the industry had nowhere to brand. And there are about 2800 potential advertisers in this city. So I just saw it as a numbers game. But it also had to bring a new and veneer to the industry. A new take for a new time.

I thought if we could bring it into the 21st century, and give it a splashy, fun, and modern take, that it would work. That was kind of the thinking behind it.

We’re going to make money. We spent the first 18 months after we developed the idea and got it where it needed to be.

I think what’s really broken in the magazine industry is the distribution model and the fact that if you don’t love magazines don’t launch one. Anyone can have a blog and a website but not everyone can have a magazine.

Samir Husni: hiii is unlike any of the cannabis magazines that were launched even as back as the 70s. We had a lot of magazines like High Times, Inside Dope, Head, Kush, you name it. hiii is more like an upscale magazine, yet it’s a mass magazine. Tell me the thinking behind combining upscale and mass at the same time.

Rob Hill: I think that’s the target we needed to hit to be successful. Because what this industry didn’t need was another rag that was basically looking backwards and not forwards, actually propelling the stereotypes. We’re totally anti that. We don’t believe that. I think 64% of people use cannabis in this country.

We don’t all live in a silo. We buy Porsches. I hope you saw the ad. We booked Porsche, which has never been done in a cannabis magazine. They booked it for the full year and paid. So we’re going after car companies, we’re going after mainstream brands.

Our hope is by this time next year, a third of the magazine is going to have advertising in it that has nothing to do with cannabis. We’ll get Levi’s and Doc Martens and Bentley and Range Rover. Porsche plowed the road for us, so to speak. They parked their cars at our party to out in front of Woody Harrelson and Bill Maher’s cannabis lounge/garden The Woods in West Hollywood which was really cool.

Porsche’s whole marketing team came and it’s a really big deal. Ad Age or Adweek should really do an article on that.

Samir Husni: That’s not your first venture editing a magazine. You’ve been there, done that. What’s the difference? You and Pam are now owners and publishers. Does it feel any different that just being an editor?

Rob Hill: The last time we spoke we were launching Treats magazine. That was pretty exciting. Hugh Hefner tried to buy it the day after we launched it. He invited us up to the mansion.

But this is different. Pam and I purposely put our emails in our editor’s letters because we wanted people to email us. We didn’t want to do info@ or editorial@. And we’re getting about a dozen a week of just people that are saying things like, “I saw your magazine at the dispensary. I picked it up. I commute to work on a bus. I read it cover to cover.”

We’re getting calls from Vegas, NYC, and Detroit, etc, to bring the magazine there. It’s just been so exciting. I don’t want to say we’re saving print, but I think we’re part of a resurgence of print. Nylon is back, Spin is back, Creem is back, Life is back, Playboy is back. There is a digital fatigue that has set in. People are tired of being on their phones and all ages are looking for more tangible experience. This is why we spent lavishly on our paper stock, size, and design. And it’s paying off.

Samir Husni: The design of the magazine from printing on the edge of the magazine or having an edgy design. Tell me about the creative design of hiii.

Pam Patterson: I’m the creative director and I’ve been a weed smoker since I was 13.

One of the things that makes this audience so much different is we really are a lifestyle magazine. It’s a tool for connection between people. I think people who don’t smoke wouldn’t completely understand it. But when you’re part of this community, there’s a bond there that we channel when we’re concepting the magazine.

We wanted to create a toy, something where people could relate to it in a lot of different ways. We could have a story of substance, and then have a story that speaks to the tools of the trade and whatnot. Also where they could have a little passage from some novel that someone may see in a new light.

We want to be fun like Bob Marley’s quote on the edge printing. It’s just a fun way. I think it’s kind of a wink to our audience that we get it. Weed smokers are thinkers. We’re creative thinkers.

Samir Husni: What about the flipbook? I mean, the images that run in the margins?

Pam Patterson: When I heard that Mickey Mouse came into public domain, at least Steamboat Willie, we took a look at it. He’s driving the boat and it’s just begging for a joint in his mouth. We wanted to do a flipbook for some time, and that was kind of a thing we devoted that real estate, the right hand margin to, in addition to a literary passage and the edge-printing. People were like, oh, advertisers are not going to like you getting into that space. But it’s been just fine.

Samir Husni: It looks like you have a love affair with the magazine and with print. But my question to you how is hiii as a business? Are you going to spend your savings or are you going to make money out of this?

Rob Hill: Absolutely. We’re going to make money. We spent the first 18 months after we developed the idea and got it where it needed to be. We have a CFO who was CFO from Hard Rock Cafe and other companies. We did talk to a lot of people. But what we found was the investors didn’t get it as much as the advertisers did. So our business development consultant said, “Well, your advertisers are your investors. So just go start selling and don’t worry about all of this other stuff.”

We were hoping to have 15 ads and we booked 26. And the Porsche ad, goes above and beyond what they paid. It’s not even about the money with Porsche. It’s about having that real estate for the full year in the magazine and being able to go to other brands like Woody Harrelson, Whiz Khalifa, Snoop, Jay-Z, Willie Nelson etc., and say, “Hey, your ad is going to be after Porsche.” They like that.

We just started to knock down some barrier to entry and it was difficult in the very beginning. People were saying cannabis isn’t the hottest thing right now and magazines aren’t the hottest thing right now. But we didn’t believe that. And Samir, I think what’s really broken in the magazine industry is the distribution model and the fact that if you don’t love magazines don’t launch one. Anyone can have a blog and a website but not everyone can have a magazine.

I think we’ve come up with a way to do distribution right. In fact, last night, I went after dinner to go check the markets in Studio City and Laurel Canyon, where we distribute the magazine on the racks outside the markets. And there we put 25 on each and they’re gone in three days. There are 128 dispensaries and cannabis lounges that also carry the magazine in their stores and half a dozen that we have partnered with to deliver the magazine right to their door of their VIP customers with their cannabis.

And that’s all over the city. That’s Erewhon, Vons, Ralphs, Whole Foods. And then we do have a paid model. We’re distributed through Mader News. We took over the Beverly Hills newsstand for the month of August! Never been done before by a cannabis magazine. The first day David Lynch sent his assistant to buy the magazine. The next day it was Quentin Tarantino.

They put us right next to Monocle, which was really cool because Tyler (Brule) is one of my heroes. I think we figured out distribution, and the model is to take this to the next city in second quarter 2025.

The thinking is to conquer the country through cities rather than the traditional way of printing half a million magazines and putting them on newsstands all over the country. We’re sort of doing what Cigar Aficionado does married with what Departures did, with a dollop of traditional newsstand and the whole National Geographic in the dentist office thing.

Once Cigar Afficionado got distribution in the thousands of cigar lounges, the advertisers were like, What more could we want? If you’re an advertiser, you have a guy or a woman that’s in a cigar shop, hanging out, having a good time, talking with their friends and then they pick up Cigar Aficionado and spend 20 minutes enjoying it. It’s a warm audience. That’s hiii in the lounges and dispensaries.

The other unique and singular thing hiii does is reach not only consumers but also the budtnders, buyers, and owners of cannabis dispensaries who are all reading the magazine. The competition is fierce for foot traffic and for space on the shelves. Yesterday I got two calls from buyers who saw ads in the magazine of products that they would like to carry. Both brands scored over a 1000 unit order. That will be 10x what they paid for the ad. Needless to say, they called and asked to book for the rest of the year. Smart. Happy advertisers make my day.

Samir Husni: You wrote that you’re “going to change the perception and the veneer of the industry.” What do you mean?

Rob Hill: I think that so much of this world is about perception and whether that perception is real or not, it is your reality. If you are a person that is perceiving cannabis users as criminals and low-lifes, then that’s not good for our industry. I always felt if we don’t define it, someone else will, and they have tried their darndest. Even magazines like Rolling Stone and The Atlantic have begun to take pot shots at the industry.

We just felt we were the best people to redefine, update, and package it in a way that made sense to everyone. Concentrate on the positive, creative, and medicinal parts.

Pam Patterson: Not everyone’s asleep on the couch. I think some of the highest performing individuals, and especially in the creative fields, are smoking pot all the time.

Rob Hill: You know what I’m most proud of? I’d say 80% of our advertisers have never done a print ad before. They’ve never done any marketing. This is a brand new industry, so to speak. And it’s hitting another phase because the genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

They’ve tried to slow it down and that’s not working either because humans are very malleable, flexible, and we figure stuff out. So one of the good things that happened to us right when we were getting out to sell ads, a law was passed that’s going to allow cannabis companies to write off their marketing and their advertising like every other industry. And that kind of gave us a little bit of a tailwind where we were coming from a headwind.

That changed a lot right there. Right after that, we went to the biggest cannabis expo and met with over 400 companies and started selling ads. Started telling them, “You can now write this off, like a beer company or a clothing company.”

Samir Husni: So here’s my question to you. What can you do in print that you could not do on the digital portal?

Rob Hill: Well, I was going to make a comment that because the industry is not federally legal, it makes a lot of media vehicles unwilling to do any advertising with cannabis. So things like radio, TV, much of print, etc. is off limits to cannabis companies. Also you can’t trade across state lines. So it’s all very regional play. There are some very unique, specific things to this industry that make hiii something that the community really needs.

They need an advertising vehicle. They need a place to brand. We can’t be shadow banned. We can’t be censored. We feel good. And we are something that the industry can be proud of. Every revolution needs a magazine, right?

I like the idea that we’re not going to wake up in the morning and have our Instagram taken down. I mean, like a lot of people wake up in the morning, have their Instagrams just taken down. That just happened to the biggest guy in our industry who had 8 million followers. He just woke up and it vanished. The disruption to people’s businesses who depend on that for a product that’s locally legal it’s kind of crazy.

We’re finding that print done well, like the paper that Pam picked and the size of the magazine, she’s so good at just packaging things and understanding what’s good and what catches the zeitgeist.

Print is a tangible object, people are buying vinyl albums again, and magazines are back in vogue. Are there going to be 2 million circulation magazines launching weekly? No. Those days are over.

Life magazine is coming back as a quarterly. Not a bad idea. I think quarterly is where these magazines are finding their sweet spot. Mader News told us what’s working right now are quarterlies with high quality and a high cover price. That’s why we’re charging $20 for that because they said you will get that at these newsstands.

Samir Husni: To me, this year is the year of the relaunches. But you are the year of the launch. You are launching something from scratch and using all the experience that you had for year. It’s manifested in hiii. The goal now is quarterly and LA. What next?

Rob Hill: Well we may change our minds. We talk about telepathy every night when I’m in my bed and she’s in her bed, 25 miles away. We started thinking the same. It’s been interesting.

One of the things I do want to say that’s very important to our business and unique to this business is the trade shows and the events. This industry will write big checks, 50,000, 70,000, 150,000 to have booths at these trade shows. They’ve been doing it for about a decade now.

So they’re very comfortable writing those checks. What they haven’t been comfortable with or what they haven’t been doing is writing checks for magazine advertising because there hasn’t really been that vehicle. So we wanted to combine the two.

In addition the print pages, we sold eight activations at our launch party, which means that a company brings their product, sets up a table, has their signage, while educating consumers and handing out samples. We had 500 people at our launch party We’re packaging this with, You get the goodie bag, which they all want because they want these products in people’s homes very badly.

They want the activation to basically give samples away and to educate the consumer. They all fell in love with the magazine too. That’s going to be a big revenue generator for us.

We have an event space here that’s 12,000 square foot that’s outside that can fit 500 people. For every issue we’ll do a party. So we’re selling a 360 product because our newsletter has a 67% open rate.

We’ve curated a newsletter that’s like triple or double what you’d hope to have—a 67% open rate. We’ll be able to, as we grow that, monetize it. Digital is obviously really important, but we want the magazine to drive ROI and traffic to the stores. And so far after a month the ROI is tangible.

Digital doesn’t really do that well, but a magazine that you pick up and put in your car that when you go pick up your girlfriend and her friends after class or whatever, and they all see it and begin passing it around and gawking at the ads, does that really well. There’s something happening right now and it’s totally counterintuitive, but it’s happening. I’ve never been more excited in my life. We had to throw caution to the wind. We’ve had to just jump in.

I really do feel it. We have a lot of young people that work in our office who are in their twenties and a lot of people that come through here who are millennials that treat the magazine like it’s a jewel. It’s an exotic thing to them that they’re liking. What’s not to like?

Pam Patterson: It pays off. People who take the time to open the magazine, get rewarded. And that is an essential quality. One thing I wanted to mention, too, is that weed smokers are of all different ilks, all ages, highly diverse, from all different kinds of communities including LGBTQI+. The audience is very broad, but it’s like the coolest people in all of those sort of segments smoke weed.

There’s a common thread. It’s intentionally made to relate to a broad section of people, to be a unifying factor among everyone, and something everyone can be proud of. People who are in this industry are in it because they love it. It’s still very much a mom and pop industry.

Rob Hill: You know, it’s very difficult to be a big Coca-Cola type brand when you can’t sell your product in many states and almost all countries. That’s going to start changing pretty rapidly. Japan, Thailand, Germany, and Israel are opening up. We’re probably going to have to think about some licensing deals here because it looks like globally this thing is just on fire and I think is very interesting.

I liked what Imbibe did for the alcohol industry and they rallied behind it and they have stuck with it. It’s a good magazine. They have big brands in there and we actually really feel like we’re going to get a lot of those alcohol brands at some point. You only lose when you run away from the internet or run away from the things that you know are coming. Well, and in LA I think that there are more dispensaries than McDonald’s now.

Pam Patterson: And it’s outselling wine. There’s a lot of really big categories that cannabis is marching past.

Samir Husni: So before I ask you my typical last questions, is there any question I failed to ask you or is anything you would like to add.

Rob Hill: No, think you covered it. You totally understand the magazine.

I’ve always had a lot of respect for you and follow your blog and did my favorite interview with Treats with you. And, you know, it’s great to be endorsed. You love magazines.

We love magazines. We’re finding out that a lot of other people who didn’t know they love magazines, love magazines. I’m feeling really buoyant and positive. You say, “Will this be a business? Yes, we are very, very confident.

This is not a vanity project. We’re here to make money. The universe is conspiring such a thing.

Samir Husni: I know you are playing on the word high and hi. What was the thinking about the Hii?

Rob Hill: Well, we really liked the sing-song because it’s when you see somebody that you like, or maybe you’re flirting with, it’s kind of like, hiii. And so we thought that that was a sweet way to do it.

You got to be careful in this industry to not be too obvious. A lot of those like really obvious brands get into that realm of just showing pictures of flower and stuff like that. We wanted to be something fresh, new, and friendly.

It just made a lot of sense in that regard. We trademarked the whole thing. “hiii: For People Who Partake.”

Pam put on the spine “The Third Eye,” which is referring to our pineal gland, our antenna to other dimensions, etc. There’s evidence that cannabis, CBD, and mushrooms help to decalcify the gland which has been corroded with Fluoride, etc.

Pam Patterson: We’re going to always have some really good stories in there too. Like the prison story we did. People don’t know that there are people still rotting in jail for selling three joints in 1975. It’s crazy. Not many. Lots of them have been pardoned, but it’s pretty crazy.

Samir Husni: If I come to visit you one evening unannounced, what do I catch you doing? Reading a book, smoking a joint, watching TV?

Rob Hill: At six pm we’re still at work. We’ll probably have people dropping in and probably smoking a pre-roll, but we’re not watching TV. We’re talking about issues.

We’re talking about the magic of the plant. Our office and event compound has a neighborhood clubhouse feel; hundreds and hundreds of people flow through here every month. The word is out. Frogtown and hiii are the place to be.

We’re the center of the community. We have this event space. We have the magazine that people are rallying behind.

We just hired the woman that used to work for Bob Guccione Jr. at Spin. She also worked at Cosmo too. She’s on our ad sales staff; we have now five ad sales people.

I just really feel like the ads are going to go from 26 to 40 to who know how many pages. Our main competitor, who’s not really a competitor, but he’s more of a newsstand magazine, he’s doing consistently 176 pages six times a year.

He’s doing pretty well. He has a different audience than us and a different business plan, but it’s good. We see that as a good thing.

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

Pam Patterson: We’re hitting our stride. We have a lot of fun stories.

Rob Hill: There’s a difference when you can’t sleep at night because you’re freaking out and stressed out. Then there’s this other side that for me, it’s just excitement, almost like I don’t want to go to bed. I know I have to, because the rocket’s taken off. There’s so much to do in so many fantastic ways. It’s really a playground over here. The timing is perfect.

I think we’ve caught lightning in a bottle.

Samir Husni: Thank you both and good luck.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | 3 Comments »

Kat Craddock Loved SAVEUR Magazine So Much She Bought The Company. The Mr. Magazine™ Interview With The CEO & EIC Who Relaunched The Print Edition of SAVEUR.

April 25, 2024

Kat Craddock is to SAVEUR magazine what Victor Kiam was to Remington Shavers in the late 1970s. The famous salesman who said, “ I liked the razor so much I bought the company.” And so did Kat Craddock who liked SAVEUR magazine so much, she bought the company.

A restauranteur who fell in love with the magazine at a very young age and was sad to see it halt printing in 2020 decided to do the unthinkable, buy the magazine from its current owners and relaunch its print edition without ignoring the digital space that the magazine enjoys among its faithful readers and followers.

In an all-encompassing conversation with Kat, I had the opportunity to ask her about the relaunch of the magazine in print, the role of print in today’s digital world, and how she is going to achieve success. Her answers were down to earth, passionate and unpretentious. She knows what she is facing and what are the challenges in store for her and the magazine, but, together with her team, she is determined to prove the theory of “print is dead” is wrong.

Kat told me that, “Since we stopped printing in 2020, our readers have been telling us that they wanted the magazine to come back. I knew that enough people loved it and enough people would buy it that we could make it work. Maybe not in the old school distribution models, but I knew that there were enough people out there that wanted the publication that we could deliver something that they were excited about and that we were proud of.”

So, please enjoy this Mr. Magazine™ conversation with Kat Craddock, CEO & EIC of SAVEUR magazine. But first for the soundbites…

On SAVEUR’s mission: SAVEUR is such a particular type of publication with original recipe content, original photography, recipe testing, and travel. It’s so core to our identity. Those are all really expensive things.

On the magazine revenue model: . A lot of the advertising revenue that we are generating is built into these larger packages that are a combination of digital content or experiential and print. Our print magazine is $25 now. We’re not doing discounts for subscriptions.

On the myth of digital vs. print: I guess I’m being a little defiant about it. I don’t like hearing from the industry that since people want digital now, they by default aren’t going to want print. I feel like I have this kind of personal mission to prove that theory wrong.

On what print can offer that digital can’t: There are a lot of different types of storytelling through photography, through different story type, through different story lengths, through design that just don’t translate to digital.

On the role of events in her business model: I want events to become more a part of our business model and our marketing model.

On selling out of the relaunch issue: we sold out, which is a great problem to have. It’s nice to be in a position of going back to our printer who was so wonderful to work with and say, okay, next time we’re going to be doubling our print run.

On what keeps her up at night: I’m a year into basically owning a startup. So probably the, the day-to-day business side of things and making sure that my team is happy and feels supported.

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Kat Craddock, CEO and EIC, of SAVEUR.

Samir Husni: Well, congratulations on the relaunch of SAVEUR.

Kat Craddock: Thank you so much, we’re very excited.

Samir Husni: You’re one of the few who not only relaunched the print magazine, but also have a relaunch party and also sold out of the relaunch issue. What’s going on?

Kat Craddock: Well, a lot’s going on, I guess. We bought the magazine out from our former owner last April. So it’s also our anniversary.

It’s a big anniversary this year. It’s our 30th anniversary as a publication. This month is our first anniversary since being an independent publication.

We relaunched the print magazine last month. We spent the last year working towards the relaunch. That was the first order of business that I really wanted to make sure we were able to do.

Since we stopped printing in 2020, our readers have been telling us that they wanted the magazine to come back. I knew that enough people loved it and enough people would buy it that we could make it work. Maybe not in the old school distribution models, but I knew that there were enough people out there that wanted the publication that we could deliver something that they were excited about and that we were proud of.

We’re starting slow. We’re only going to be doing two a year to get off the ground. So right now we’re working towards our fall/winter issue, which will launch in September and kind of pivoting our team, who largely had done only digital before, to the print mindset.

Getting out of the kind of quick turnaround cycle and working on assigning and shooting some seasonal content for next spring and next fall, which is it’s nice to be back on that rhythm again.

Samir Husni: I see you’re holding, to use a cooking phrase, two pots at the same time. You’re editor-in-chief and you’re a CEO. How are you balancing the job of your love for editorial and being a businesswoman at the same time?

Kat Craddock: Some days are better than others. It’s really exciting. I came from the restaurant world, so I’m used to kind of spinning a lot of plates or holding a lot of pots.

I do wish I had some more time for editorial. There are certain things that I had no idea would take as long as they did, like working through our employee handbook or our terms of use for our website, that sort of thing. I spend a lot more time looking at contracts than I ever thought I would.

But it’s exciting and we’re learning very fast. I have an incredible team, in particular, an incredible operations person who’d worked as our managing editor previously when we were owned by Bonnier. We’re learning very quickly together.

Having her insight into how print publishing and print operations worked in the old method has made it a lot easier for us to kind of pick and choose which systems are going to work for us as an independent pub and which ones we want to kind of reinvent.

Samir Husni: Do you think independent publications are the future of print in this digital age?

Kat Craddock: I can’t really speak for everybody else. SAVEUR is such a particular type of publication with original recipe content, original photography, recipe testing, and travel. It’s so core to our identity. Those are all really expensive things. I think that if we were trying to do a more kind of mass high volume sort of publication rather than something so niche, a lot of what we’re doing wouldn’t necessarily work. But since we know that we have a pretty loyal, devoted niche audience, we can kind of rejigger how our spending works and what we’re spending time on and what we’re not.

Samir Husni: The print editions are not cheap. Are you going more toward consumer revenue model rather than advertising revenue model?

Kat Craddock: All the revenue is important. I’m really trying to get out of putting all of our eggs in one basket. Advertising revenue is still part of the equation. Obviously, print advertising is not this king’s ransom that it used to be. A lot of the advertising revenue that we are generating is built into these larger packages that are a combination of digital content or experiential and print.

Our print magazine is $25 now. We’re not doing discounts for subscriptions. We’re doing a little bit of wholesale direct to retailers. And in those cases, we’re not doing returns. We want to sell out of all these magazines. We don’t want to be throwing a bunch of copies away. The consumer purchase is really at the forefront of what is funding the print product.

Samir Husni: I’ve seen quite a few interviews with you. You’re so passionate about print. Why?

Kat Craddock: I don’t like being told that nobody wants it (print) because I don’t think that’s true. I think that I went into food because I read SAVEUR. I hear that from so many people in the food and beverage industry. After we stopped printing, every single day, somebody told us that they wanted it to come back. And on some level, I guess I’m being a little defiant about it. I don’t like hearing from the industry that since people want digital now, they by default aren’t going to want print.

I feel I have this kind of personal mission to prove that theory wrong.

Samir Husni: What do you think print can offer that digital cannot?

Kat Craddock: That’s a really good question. There are a lot of different types of storytelling through photography, through different story type, through different story lengths, through design that just don’t translate to digital.

And obviously, there’s a lot that print can’t do that digital does really well. And I think that they both complement each other really nicely. We’re not looking to get rid of our website or anything like that.

But if we’re going to be investing in beautiful photography, long form storytelling, and more playful, short form storytelling that leans a lot more heavily on design, why not present that on the most beautiful paper that you can get and give people the opportunity to lean back and look at that content without ads and flash and video and all of this kind of distraction popping up in your face. And I think that people find that really relaxing. It’s a lot more of a pleasure and a luxury to consume media that way.

That’s why we’re not printing 12 of these a year. This is meant to be kind of a slow, leisurely experience to read a print magazine that we’re putting out. But I think that, you know, that different experience is something that print does really well that you just don’t get from consuming media on your phone.

Samir Husni: You’ve opted to bring back the magazine the same dimensions as 2020 and before because you said you have the whole collection on your bookshelf and you don’t want to.

Kat Craddock: It’s right up there. (Pointing to the magazines on her bookshelf). The same cut size, yes. It is significantly longer. It’s 160 pages.

If we’re going to be on stands, or available for six months, we want people to be able to take some time with those stories. We did consider going to a larger cut size. I think that some of the relaunched print magazines are going really big and it is delicious and wonderful to open up like Bitter Southerner or Field and Stream might be going bigger also.

That said, when I unpacked my bookshelves or when I packed my new bookshelves and I got all of the archives up in one beautiful line and I realized how perfectly they all lined up. There are a lot of collectors out there. A lot of people that kept all of their SAVEURs. It’s not just me, the crazy SAVEUR lady that has every issue.

It seemed like it would be a shame for the new issues not feel like they were in the same family. The width had kind of gone up and down over the years a little bit, but the height is exactly the same.

Samir Husni: It has been years since I’ve heard of a magazine launch or relaunch party. It’s

like even if people are relaunching the magazine, they are just doing it like hush hush. It’s like they are ashamed of relaunching it, but you went all out. Based on what I’ve seen on your website you had a great relaunch party.

Kat Craddock: Well, a big part of the reason is that back in 2020 we still had a brick and mortar space in New York City. The whole team was based here. That’s not the case anymore. About half of our team is in New York, but we’ve got editors in Spain and Nashville and Boston and Florida, and everyone worked so hard on this together. I thought it was really important that we had an opportunity to come together to celebrate. We also just really like throwing a party.

Like I said, I came from the restaurant world when we did have our Test Kitchen space. We loved doing events there. I want events to become more a part of our business model and our marketing model.

So it was important to me that we kind of kicked off this important moment for us in person. It was also a great opportunity for a lot of people who worked on SAVEUR over the years to come together. So there were people who have been writing for, contributing to SAVEUR in some way, shape, or form all the way back to the 90s were in attendance.

And to see that level of support from people that worked on a brand that I loved all those years ago was really wonderful. It was nice to see everybody coming together and talking together, too, because these aren’t necessarily people that knew each other at all. But kind of being able to celebrate over something that everyone sort of shares this love for was really nice.

Samir Husni: Tell me a little bit about your audience. People are saying print is more of a nostalgic thing, who is reading SAVEUR?

Kat Craddock: I think about this a lot. I started reading SAVEUR when I was pretty young. My mom got it when I was 10 or so, and I started reading it a couple of years later.

I would love to find young people that are interested in cooking. It’s important to me that we’re developing relationships with the culinary schools in New York City and beyond for that reason. Yes, we have a lot of readers who have been reading us since the 90s.

They’re very valuable and very important to us, and we want to make sure that we’re giving them what they love about SAVEUR, but it is also important that we’re reaching out to that next generation. I think that it gets harder and harder to find print magazines and buy print magazines, but that makes them a little rarer and a little bit more special. We do see young people buying up vinyl records left and right, and I think that nostalgia is valuable to everybody.

It’s not just people that necessarily remember buying print magazines back in the day. I have spoken to a number of journalism students who are excited about print and see the value in it. I don’t think it’s going to get back to the volume again that it once was doing, but people are really appreciating the luxury of buying a print magazine.

Samir Husni: Can you tell me what has been the most pleasant surprise since you acquired the magazine and since you relaunched it?

Kat Craddock: When we announced that we were coming back into print and opened up our presale, I had no idea if people were going to be comfortable with the price point. So I wouldn’t say that’s like the biggest surprise, but I was like the biggest relief that people seem to be okay with it.

I know that some folks balked a bit at the price, but by and large, I think that the readers that really saw the value, they came out. As you mentioned, we sold out, which is a great problem to have. It’s nice to be in a position of going back to our printer who was so wonderful to work with and say, okay, next time we’re going to be doubling our print run.

Hopefully that is a trajectory that we get to stay on moving forward.

Samir Husni: And what was the most challenging moment?

Kat Craddock: Half of our team hadn’t touched print at all. So I wouldn’t say it was a huge challenge, but it was definitely a learning curve for everybody to shift over to. Deadlines in print are a very different thing than deadlines in digital publishing and getting people to kind of shift gears a little bit while still working on digital publishing, editing and writing new content for digital. I know that was hard for everybody. It was even hard for me and I had worked on print before, but just coming out of four years of not thinking that way is definitely a shift.

Samir Husni: Is there any question I need to ask you that I failed to ask you?

Kat Craddock: I would love to talk about our distribution model. I don’t want to be working in a distribution model where a bunch of magazines are going in the trash. We spent a lot on these magazines. They’re very precious to us. And we designed them so that they last for another 30 years on the shelf. They’re not intended to go in the garbage. There is one distributor that that we found that is willing to work with us on a no returns basis.

They’re on the West Coast. They’re Small Changes. They’re lovely.

I don’t know as many bookstores in like the Northwest area. So they were able to kind of help us coordinate with them. Other than that, all of our retail partners are stores that we know and love that we reached out to directly, and they’re buying directly from us.

Bookstores, wine shops, cheese shops, kitchenware stores. These are just shops that we know where the SAVEUR reader is or is likely to be or find us. It’s a lot more plates to spin.

Our brand partnerships person got that program off the ground. And one of our other employees is taking it over now so we can grow our list. You’re not going to find us in, big box bookstores or national supermarket chains at this point.

Samir Husni: My typical last two questions are, if I come uninvited one evening to your house, what do I catch doing? Are you cooking, reading a book, watching TV?

Kat Craddock: I am not cooking as much as I used to. And I really miss that. And I kind of have to force myself to do that because it’s a big part of who I am and why I do this.

But right now the business has definitely taken over my brain space in life. Most nights I’m after the Zoom influx ends, I eat quickly and then I’m back in front of my laptop, usually streaming some television while I answer emails until I crash.

Samir Husni: And what keeps you up at night these days?

Kat Craddock: I’m a year into basically owning a startup. So probably the, the day-to-day business side of things and making sure that my team is happy and feels supported.

Samir Husni: Thank you.

Posted in A Launch Story..., Innovation in print, Magazine Power, News and Views, The Mr. Magazine™ Interview | Leave a Comment »

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