We stock about a gazillion different magazine titles as well as stationery across our 5 stores in Australia, New Zealand and online.

Archive for May, 2009

Getting the strategy completely wrong

Sunday, May 31st, 2009

We thought our business was all about magazines. How wrong we were. This erroneous focus almost cost us our company.

When we raised capital for mag nation, our pitch was focus focus focus. We would be the magazine experts. The category killers. A disruptive force in a static industry.

It turns out that we have become all these things, but focusing on it cost us big. Our focus on product (sounds like a smart thing to do), led us to ask the wrong questions. Who likes magazines? Everyone does – men, women, sports nuts, fashion queens, petrol heads, stamp collectors, IT nerds, entrepreneurial dreamers… everyone. So where is everyone? Before we knew it, we had stores in crowded shopping malls as well as high street strip locations. Nightmare.

We gradually realized that our focus should be on our customers. Why didn’t any of you hit us on the head earlier? We can’t be everything to everyone. So, we took a look at which of our customers love us, and which of them were indifferent, and unsurprisingly, the love wasn’t coming from the malls. We couldn’t identify a common gender or age group, but there was a common trait amongst those engaging with us. So we came up with a term called “urban savvy”. This group of people transcends age brackets and professions, but focuses on an outlook on life. These were the people who were spreading the love. These were the people who really got what we were trying to do.

So, we simply asked these good folks what they liked about us and what they wanted from us. Revelation! Amazing rocket science stuff. Talk to your customers and ask what they want. In doing this, many of our assumptions were shattered. I have been quoted in the press saying mag nation will never sell stationery and that we are only about magazines. Who has egg on his face now?

Our core customers told us they also love design books, beautiful stationery, and niche designer t-shirts. They told us that they enjoy the mag nation atmosphere. They like the quirkiness of the brand. They like it when we talk to them. They are often as passionate about a particular magazine as we are about the magazine category. We share a bond.

So, our focus is now on our core urban savvy customer. We still welcome everybody (mag nation was built to be inclusive), but our principle has always been focus focus focus. We were just focusing on the wrong thing.

Hopefully we now have the strategy right. We are engaging. We have conversations on Twitter. We are listening and learning from you. Keep talking to us. We need you.

Posted in Strategy | 7 Comments »

A Beginning

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

There are already plenty of blogs about magazines. Why the hell are we starting a new one? Well we are not. First, let me introduce myself. I am Sahil. Thanks to the three of you who are reading this. Or am I being optimistic?

I am one of the two co-founders of mag nation. My official title is Chief Magazineologist, but that is just us being cute. The other co-founder Ravi, is my uncle. Yes, we are a small family business. Some people think we are a big corporate. We ain’t.

I am somewhat schizophrenic. My dual personality alternates between me and mag nation. At times I find it hard to know with which voice I speak. I tell you this because if you continue to read this blog, I will inevitably alternate between the pro-nouns “we” and “I”. In many ways, they refer to the same thing. The collective mag nation persona.

So, back to my initial question. Why read this blog. I haven’t told you anything interesting so far. Truth be told, don’t know if I ever will. Here is what the mag nation blog will focus on – the journey of creating a magazine retail Brand. Sound wanky? Journey is such an over-used word. Well, as entrepreneurs who have risked everything on a crazy concept which all the industry experts told us was flawed, the mag nation story to date has been nothing but a rollercoaster. It still continues to be so.

We will at times talk purely about an individual magazine, but if you are here to get the latest gossip on Brittney, you are in the wrong place. Nor are we here to replicate what our good friends at magculture.com do with their blog. Well worth a read for all our fans who love the design and creative components of magazines. We love this side of the industry, but we are not designers either.

What we will blog about is the magazine “industry”, and how it translates through to consumers from a retail and Brand perspective. We will talk about supply and distribution, niche publishing, what’s hot, and philosophical crap such as the future of print. However, more than anything else, this Blog will document our story as we try to build a Brand and ultimately a successful business. We still bleed cash. Ravi and I are still on the bread line.

So this is perhaps as much an entrepreneurial blog as it is one about magazines, the live story behind a Brand as it tries to get traction and engage more people. We are faced with massive hurdles. The odds predict we won’t be around in even 2 years time. Last month we had five days of cash left in our accounts until new capital came into the company. I was frequently changing my underwear.

If you decide to keep reading this blog, what you will get is a true account of what it is like to put yourself out there, risk your career and family security, all in pursuit of a dream. Our words will drip of passion. We truly love magazines. We truly love mag nation. We are truly proud of our achievements to date. And we look forward to sharing the enormous challenges that confront us as we look to survive, expand our Brand nationally and internationally, and maintain our sanity through 18-20 hour working days while also raising young families.

Welcome to the mag nation blog.

Posted in Entrepreneurial | 29 Comments »