I was sitting at my desk earlier today having a high falutin’ conversation with our wa… I mean bankers, when I had to abruptly cut the conversation short, promise to call them back, and then sit in wonder with my mouth wide open.

Our store manager was at the desk opposite me engaged in an animated conversation with a customer, and having caught a snippet, I was compelled to listen in.

This particular customer had called from Sydney. We don’t have a store in Sydney…yet. The customer had bought a car mag from a retail outlet (in Sydney) and then subscribed to that magazine by filling out the little subscription insert (damn evil things that fall out of magazines and make a mess of my shelves).

Having not yet received his magazine, he calls us (in Melbourne) and berates us for it. Natural thing to do right?

Mother of God man… what is wrong with you? When our store manager in his most polite voice asked him… “but where in all of this does mag nation come into it?”, I just had to listen to more.

The frustrating thing for me was to see how 30 mins (no kidding) of my store manager’s time was taken up explaining to this gentleman that just because we might come up first in a google search for a subscription to that magazine title does NOT mean that we are responsible for fulfilling it. Especially when he admittedly bought the subscription via the evil insert.

I love customers. No, I really do Our stores would be pretty lonely places without you. But for the 1% of you out there, do you really need to bust our balls for things that could and should put you in the loony bin? With around 5,000 customer interactions a day across our stores… well, lets just say welcome to our world of customer fun and games.

For such a small, still relatively unknown brand, it amazes us that we receive between 2-3 requests a day from people who want to work at mag nation.

WHY PEOPLE WHY?

This is sooo not a glamorous job. If you want to work at mag nation because you like magazines, then you would have a rude awakening awaiting you. There is no time to read mags when you work at mag nation!!!

I have the utmost respect for the mag nation staff. It is a really tough job. Unlike many retail jobs where you are on your feet most of the day but your time is spent serving customers and “selling”, our staff are running around constantly and moving stuff. The inflow of magazines, the labelling, shelving, pulling for returns and re-shelving (out of the returns boxes) is never ending. We liken it to Medusa – cut off one head and three more spring up to replace it.

Here is the other thing people don’t realise. Magazines are HEAVY. Check this out – this is just a small part of a normal morning delivery. Someone has to move this from A to B. And upack them.

And this is our Frankie delivery…

And this our Russh delivery…

Still look glamourous?

By the way, why do the suppliers have to pack magazines wrapped with those damn sharp plastic thingies (highly technical magazine industry term)? Don’t they know that they cut our fingers to shreds. Perhaps they don’t care.

Oh, and we have to serve coffee. And deal with 324 people in Melbourne last week telling us that McGills has gone under (yes we know), and that we should run our operations just as they did (NO – they went under remember!)

Funny, despite it being such a tough job, our staff turnover compared to most retail jobs is incredibly low. May have something to do with all of us being gorgeous and having big schlongs!

What a leading question! Especially when this post is all about asking you for feedback.

I am conscious that most popular blogs are as visual as they are written content driven. Being in the magazine business, I would have thought that we would never have been short of glossy imagery to fill our blog pages. Yet, till now, I have really struggled to find images relevant to what I have wanted to say.

Are we losing readers because the blog “looks” heavy? Should we do more posts about cool magazines so we can throw in cover images and break up the text heavy format? Or should we not give a damn and keep on doing what we want?

Does the question boil down to whether the mag nation blog is for you or us? Some of you might say yes, but lets be brutally honest here – if no one finds this blog relevant and doesn’t read it, then there is no real point. I love the process of getting the collective mag nation consciousness down on paper, but I could just as easily talk this through with the mirror. What drives us to blog is interaction with you, and this can’t be achieved if no one reads it.

So, back to my original question – how do we get more people to read us? And, how do we keep you interested in reading us?

See, some random magazine images definitely make the thing more visually attractive. For a business that is so dependent on visual culture, does this need to permeate our blog? Your thoughts would be appreciated.

There are so many facets to the mag nation business, but one of my favourites is the mag nation newsletter. We send this out to our newsletter database, which currently only numbers around 5,000. In the scheme of things, this is tiny. Some of our competitive friends have lists around the million mark (no kidding). Still, we have built ours up organically – mainly via store sign ups on a grubby piece of paper. (Funny how more elaborate in-store tactics to build up the database fell flat, but the simple coffee-stained list on a clipboard worked best). We are also experimenting with new ways to build our readership. Last week we sent out our latest newsletter and offered the chance to win free Moleskines in return for some potential reader names. Online sign up is now also possible. And strongly encouraged!!!

I am not sure that our newsletter will ever reach massive numbers, and the reason is that they are not purely functional. Most retailer newsletters these days are all about offering products and discounts. They are all geared to woo you. Little creative effort goes into them, but they just whack in whatever is cheap at the moment, and then push. There is a reason that Junk Mail is called Junk!

Ours are very different (you can see our past issues here). We only highlight a small number of products, and most of these products are quite niche, with what will be a very low potential audience. Yet, this is who we are. And our newsletters are the very personification of our brand. They are to be read as well as be clicked.

So I am therefore not sure whether there is a place for our newsletter amongst the masses. We are told that our newsletters are hilarious and highly entertaining. We certainly piss our pants when we re-read them, but this is where things get highly subjective. Save $10 is a universal language, but humour, entertainment and irreverence is in the eye of the beholder. We definitely save you dosh as well, but with a style that may not appeal to everyone.

That said, the style of our newsletter does not represent the dilemma discussed in an earlier post. This particular issue is clear as mud for us. Our newsletter is a window to our soul. Whether it goes out to 100,000 people or just Mr McGoo and his cocker spaniel, we will continue it in the vein it has started. Call it selfish if you like, but we write our newsletters to appeal to ourselves. As long as we chuckle and find them enjoyable, there will be a Mr McGoo out there somewhere.