Happy birthday to us…

This week mag nation turned four years old. To the 399 potential investors who laughed at us and said we wouldn’t last more than a year – suffer in your jocks. Ok, so you guys are all probably rich beyond belief anyway, but nothing helped spur us on more than beyond wealthy know-it-alls telling us that no one would ever care about a specialty magazine retail concept.

As for the approximate 4 million customers who have walked through our doors, thanks for caring about a specialty magazine retail concept! Thanks for interacting with us, watching us grow, laughing with us (and occasionally at us), stripping down to your undies for us (with a fair dose of self-interest thrown in), drinking our coffee and most importantly, loving our mags.

It has undoubtedly been a wild ride so far, and we are looking forward to the next four years with great anticipation. What will the face of print look like? Will the iPad impact magazine sales? Which mainstream mags will fold and who will be the new Frankie? Hopefully a presence in Brisvegas and other Australian cities? Maybe even new international horizons…

It is with a real sense of optimism that we quietly pass the four year mark without much fanfare (other than this blog post!). While we have made some real strategic errors along the way, our biggest learning has been that as long as we keep an open dialogue with you, we can’t go too far wrong. Whether it be tactical advice on how to grow our website or more philosophical questions around brand integrity versus the commercial imperative to sell, who needs a Board of Advisors when we have you?

So thanks once again for engaging with us. Retailers are constantly reminded that customers vote with their feet, and we keep on seeing our traffic in store and online increasing, so it is good to know we are doing something right. We hope to continue to serve you with great magazines, designer stationery, creative books, and online subscriptions. More than anything, however, we look forward to continue having fun with you, creating smiles through some (at times loose) connection to magazines, and filling a void in your lives irrespective of whether it relates to magazine availability, receiving a newsletter that makes you chuckle, or simply where you can kill some time when you need to.

Happy birthday to us… but the fact we have made it to four is more about you.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 26th, 2010 at 9:04 am and is filed under The Inside Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.