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Archive for May, 2010

Attack of the Killer 3D magazines

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

First there was Avatar, then Playboy in 3D, then Desktop and now in the space of a few short days, we’ve had Sneaker Freaker 3D, the Socceroos vs. New Zealand on 3D TV and now… Nuts.

Yep, the UK lads mag per excellence has continued this fine and noble tradition by presenting some of the most eye-bogglingly large breasts ever delivered in three dimensions. (Well, okay, actually it’s two dimensions and they look a bit blue and red and you have to squint a little bit, but it’s definitely something approximating 3D!)

What’s next… Cakes and Sugarcrafts in smell-o-vision?

Posted in Magazine Industry | No Comments »

Scathing Criticism of Mag Nation

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Someone has just written the same comment on 7 of our most recent blog posts. Rather than approving the comment 7 times and hijacking the conversation on those posts away from their intended topic, we have decided to dedicate a separate post to this particular comment. It is replicated (in full) below:





What I would like to know “Mag-Nation” is how a NZ company (which all the profits go back overseas) can claim $30k in government grants for a website from Melbourne city council, (funded by the tax payer) to run a glorified newsagency under the label that its an innovative business?

With content in your “about us” section like – “All the girls who work at mag nation are gorgeous. All the boys have big schlongs.” I’m shocked that the Melbourne City Council thinks its a good idea to fund such blatantly sexist, boorish content.

Not only that, this “Undies Monday” is STOLEN from Gaslight Music who used to have a once a year nude event to raise money for public radio!

So in short – $30,000 of taxpayer funds for a disgusting sexist website, and stolen ideas from other companies.

“Mag-Nation” does not constitute an “innovative” business. More like an innovative way of ripping off other peoples idea’s and wrapping them up in SMUT to make corporate profits that get sent overseas.

WASTE OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS!!!!

Signed:
Angry City Of Melbourne Taxpayer.
(who doubts this message will even be posted in its entirety)





A few thoughts in response Mr/Mrs Taxpayer.

1. It was 15K, not 30K

2. We “started” in NZ, but we are an Australian registered company. The NZ company is a subsidiary of our Australian Parent company. All profits (or losses) stay in the Aus entity.

3. We never claimed Undies Monday was original. We in fact openly admit the inspiration came from Gaslight. See this link and the comments.

4. The Australian Retail Association also awarded us “most innovative retailer” in 2007

5. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. We respect yours, and your right to not shop or engage with us. The City of Melbourne obviously had their own opinion as well.

6. We did post this in its entirety.

Posted in Entrepreneurial, General randomness, The Inside Story | 27 Comments »

Sweet Treats: Frankie’s new cookbook

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Frankie's Sweet Treats cookbook


After the success of Afternoon Tea, the good people at Frankie have come up with a new recipe book, called Sweet Treats.

It’s packed to the brim with delicious recipes for sticky apples, candy hearts, mint-patty delights, florentines, caramel popcorn balls, chocolate crackles, coconut marshmallows, honey joys and plenty more slices of sugary deliciousness!

Frankie's Sweet Treats cookbook

Now if only I could track down that recipe for jelly slice…

Posted in Individual Mag Titles | No Comments »

My Top 5 Mags: Woody from Sneaker Freaker

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Sneaker Freaker issue 18

Sneaker Freaker is one of those magazines that you have to see up close to really understand what it’s about.

A whole magazine about… shoes?

Well, yeah. But it’s kind of more than that…

Founded in Melbourne in 2002 by Simon “Woody” Wood as a ruse to get his shoes for free, copies of the very first issue now sell for over 300 bucks on eBay (that is, if you can find a sneaker head willing to part with their copy!)

Eighteen issues later, Sneaker Freaker is distributed in 43 countries to legions of die-hard fans, has a dedicated Spanish edition based in Barcelona (with a Russian edition on the way!) and collaborates on designs with labels like Asics, New Balance and Lacoste.

This, friends, is niche publishing at its finest.

A visual feast of the latest and greatest in kicks as well as interviews with key figures in the streetwear industry past-and-present and meticulously researched in-depth historical pieces, this really is a definitive round-up of everything you ever wanted to know about sneakers and probably a little bit more.

Issue number 18 comes out today (with a limited edition 3D cover!), so we’ve asked Woody to tell us a little bit about some of his favourite mags…

1. The Face

The Face magazine

The Face was so cool I moved to London. How’s that for a magazine’s impact?

From witty fashion to catty pop stars and even natty sneakers on the regular, The FACE was always ahead of the game. Always. Throw in Neville Brody’s quintessential design and you have a magazine which inspired me more than any other. I simply can’t fathom how it folded… I guess there’s a lesson for us all in this tough game.

How iD mag survived is beyond me, but I guess it’s like Coke and Pepsi, you’re either one of the other and I’m as one-eyed as it comes. My biggest magazine regret was ditching my Face collection before I moved back to Melbourne. Such tragedy!

2. Hot Rod

Hot Rod magazine

I buy 13 car magazines a month and Hot Rod is my favorite by far. They’ve been around since hot rods were invented and consistently been on the precipice of performance, design and manufacturing for the awesome American aftermarket car scene. Hot Rod is clever. Well written. It has a point of view.

The design is no-nonsense and the cars are always progressive and iconoclasts in a world that could easily degenerate into a retro graveyard for baby boomers. I guess you could say that Hot Rod is the perfect synthesis of 50 years of Californian Car Culture. If they offered me a job sweeping floors I’d be on the next plane to LA quicker than Lara Bingle can say goodbye her Aston Martin.

3. Playboy

Playboy magazine

I seriously selected Playboy for the articles. I guess everybody does. Actually, they probably don’t even have words anymore, just bazonga-sized boobs and well manicured lawns so I guess I’m talking strictly in the past tense.

In a previous job, I had the pleasure to collect nearly all the 60s and 70s Playboys I could find. Naked women are one thing… and Playboy has those, but when you get Norman Mailer and others of his ilk writing about sport, contemporary social issues and racial politics while at the same time espousing a libertarian ‘playboy’ lifestyle, it’s a pretty heady brew.

Add a timelessly cool sense of art direction and you have a magazine that was not just a sign of its sexy times. Sadly it’s now a pathetic shadow of its former self.

RIP Playboy. The internet gone done you wrong.

4. Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair magazine

Is this a corny choice? I hope not because I love Vanity Fair.

I could do without their campaign to invent an entire class of whitebread NYC Ivy League royalty, but how can ANY magazine truly be compared to Vanity Fair?

The recent Hollywood issue was incomparable, with never-seen-before features on De Niro and Raging Bull, a wicked insider piece on the reclusive John Hughes (Pretty in Pink) and the Bling Ring, a bunch of teens who pilfered Hollywood celebrities. In this day and age where magazines take five seconds to read, VF still takes a good few hours to get through and is a shining light for an industry that thinks 140 characters is where life is at.

The fact that they have 120 pages of advertisements and start articles in the front of the mag and make you treasure hunt’ to find the last few paragraphs is an irritation that I can definitely live with. RIP Dominick Dunne.

5. Street Machine/Wired

Street Machine and Wired magazines

Fifth place was a tough one.

I was going to stump for arch-techno mag Wired, but that wouldn’t be totally honest. And I like to be honest. Even if that means channeling my inner bogan who likes to read Street Machine. Don’t get me wrong, I love Wired for the 13 colour printing experiments and I love a gadget and the way the mag is edited is another level.

Have you seen their new Adobe-built online version? I feel like a middle-aged Luddite, it’s such brainiac next-decade material.

But it’s a lay-down Misère to pick one of the most influential mags of the past decade, so I made it a dead heat with Street Machine just to prove how eclectic my interests truly are. Street Machine is an Aussie mag where burnouts and tubbed Pro Street Monaros with 6.71 superchargers rule. The writing is a little formulaic, but I like to get an insight of where the suburbs are at and you won’t find a better example than Street Machine.

RIP carbon footprint!

Posted in My Top 5 Mags | 1 Comment »

Mag Nation is trying to take down “da man” – want to help us?

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Apparently we are not the only ones selling magazine subscriptions online in Australia and New Zealand. Thanks Gran. Without your online vigilance, I definitely would never have heard of Poo-Subscribe and BumShop.

Ok, now I know it is really immature of me to refer to my competitors using the words poo and bum. There is nothing inherently wrong with them after all. They are not bad people. They are just… well… not me. And every dollar spent with them is a potential dollar not spent with mag nation. And they are rich and I am poor. So I don’t like them. And immature as it may be, it is still fun to dis them.

As good and sophisticated as we think we might be online, we are never going to be a match for their huge budgets and teams of staff. When you Google most Aus/NZ magazines, they come up first in organic search, and the masses who should be buying from us (because we are way cooler) end up clicking on the top link and buying from them.

How are we to compete? Our stores kick arse over their stores… wait… in fact they don’t have stores (says me smiling and poking out my tongue). But the one big thing that we have that they don’t is you!

Can you help us? Please? Pretty please? We will also try to reward you and make it worth your while. We believe in mutual loving after all.

If any of you have a favourite magazine (and if you don’t, I question what you are doing reading this blog in the first place), perhaps you could review it on your website / blog / online space. It would have to be a genuine website / blog / online space because the key component would be to fill it with content rich key words (thanks for that technical term Ollee) and link it through to the landing page of that particular mag on our website. Or if that is too much work, perhaps just a link on your blog roll with anchor text something like “mag nation has the best magazine subscriptions – much better than all those other pretenders”. Ok, maybe just mentioning mag nation and magazine subscriptions might be enough.

Apparently Google likes in-bound links. Maybe, just maybe, we might be able to erode some of their organic search market dominance. In return for all your efforts, we would name you a mag nation VIP. Other than sounding really really impressive and winning you amazing kudos at parties, it would also get you lots of other really cool benefits. We just haven’t worked out what they are yet.

What do you say friends? Are you willing to aid and abet our attempts to take down da man? Please give us a shout if the answer is yes and we can talk turkey!

Posted in Magazine Industry, The Inside Story | 15 Comments »

The winner of our poetry for coffee competition!

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Deluxe mag nation coffee card

Regular readers of this blog might remember the a competition asking you to write a poem about, well, us. The prize for the best poem on the topic of mag nation, you might recall, would win FREE COFFEE FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR.

Now there were some great entries (we’re looking at you, David Weiss, you haiku ninja!), but as soon as we saw this entry we knew it was gonna take the cake.


Growing up as a tween midway on the Belgrave/Lilydale train line,
I had a Tamagotchi and Furby – my life was pleasantly benign.

If I helped mum with the food shopping I could get a special prize,
“As long as it’s under $6”, she yelled from the frozen meal aisle.

Luckily $5.95 was the price of my selection,
I ran up the escalator to the newsagent and spotted Dolly’s SEALED SECTION.

I tore carefully down the perforated dots, ripping the last bit too quickly,
Previous magazine experience includes mum’s Woman’s Day bought semiweekly.

“The sealed section is crap”, I thought as I flicked through those eight pages,
What kind of 13 year old girl do you think this shit engages?

Dolly Doctor is a joke; no one writes into a magazine about a rash,
And I have watched Home & Away, I’ve already seen Shane & Angel pash.

I flipped the pages with a vague and disinterested gaze,
Ads for Lip Smackers and Neo Pets swirling into a neon pink haze.

Fawning over JTT and Aaron Carter in the Year 7 corridors,
The next few years were spent ranking our top ten most eligible bachelors.

Years 7-10 were filled with similar magazine based disappointments,
Cleo, Girlfriend and Cosmo were all akin to flies in the glossy, beige-coloured ointment.

One Tuesday afternoon I made my way from Flinders St Station to JB Hi-Fi,
Remember in 2004 music copyright laws were something most abided by…

Elizabeth Street: 82, 84, 86, 88…
I turned my head to the left and went into a psychological state.

Running through the doors, my eyes couldn’t take it,
There’s more to life than “How to make your boyfriend commit”?

I saw titles like Frankie, Oyster and Yen,
I’d never buy a magazine with A FREE EYESHADOW VALUED AT $11.95 again.

I saw Vogue magazine from all over the world,
I could read about winter fashion in summer; a new world unfurled.

Shit, there’s even a magazine for dearest little Maggie,
Reading “Dogs Life” sure made her tail go all waggy.

Then there was the cooking mag section, don’t even get me started,
Over the next few years definitions of words like “reduction” and “jus” would be imparted.

On that Tuesday afternoon at Mag Nation I lost track of time,
(Kind of like I have been for my whole lunch break writing this rhyme).

I love everything about you, the homely vibe and the coziness,
The amazing selection of magazines and the employees’ effusiveness.

Mag Nation – what you mean to me is difficult to describe,
But one thing is for sure – to you I will never unsubscribe.

Emily Naismith, you are hereby certified mag nation poet laureate for perpetuity!

(Oh, and if you’re wondering what the photo is; Emily came in to claim coffee number one of 365 today and since we hadn’t managed to make a gold medallion or giant quill pen trophy to present her with like we’d planned, well, we just rigged a super deluxe version of our Coffee Loyalty Cards with a bit of silver pen. Yeah, we’re good like that…. call us the MacGyvers of the mag game.)

Posted in General randomness | 3 Comments »

AGIdeas – the mag nation wash up

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Last Thursday saw the end of one of our busiest periods in the year. The AGIdeas conference in Melbourne is a massive event, and an opportunity for us to create a pop up retail stall selling books and mags.

As always, it was incredibly well run, with an amazing line up of speakers. All participants we spoke to came away inspired and fired up for another year of creative pursuits.

However, this year our sales from the pop up stall were about half of what they were last year. We don’t really make any profit from our presence at the conference anyway – it really is an opportunity to get our brand name out there, however, the sales performance was a curiosity. When I mentioned this to a couple of people at the stall, they were interested in the reasons underpinning the lower sales, and at the time, I didn’t have a really coherent answer. A couple of factors now come to mind. It took us a few days to analyse all the sales, but we think we now have the reasons pegged:

  • We didn’t have the same number of star new releases. Last year Wooden Toy, King Brown and Curvy, had all just released their latest issues. This year, we had in the new King Brown and T-World, but some of our other best sellers are still to arrive.
  • Not as many of the speakers this year had books or magazines that sold in high volumes.
  • This year was the 20th Year Anniversary of AGIdeas. As such, each participant was given a massive book which celebrated the 20 years of speakers. This thing weighed well over 3 kilos and required 2 hands to carry. Definitely not conducive to people buying books at the same time.
  • A number of free back copies of various mags were given away to participants. This was done after discussion with us, so we were in the know, but people are less inclined to buy stuff after receiving a bunch of freebies as well.
  • The volcano in Iceland delayed a shipment of some of our more interesting books, meaning they didn’t come out until later on the second day.
  • The retail economy sucks. While the niche mags we specialise in may not have suffered, we hear from book retailers that book sales are well down. Also, most people have under-estimated just how much of an impact the government stimulus package had last year on maintaining retail sales.

All in all, we were again happy with our involvement with this fantastic event. Our main aim was to remind people that we exist. With no real budget for advertising, we see these sorts of events as an important extension of our store presence.

However, when you budget for sales of $X, and you end up doing around half of that, it doesn’t do a great amount for your cash flow forecasts. Looks like my kids are going to be serving behind the counter at a few stores in the coming weeks to make up the shortfall!

Posted in The Inside Story | No Comments »

The Gentlewoman – new from the creators of Fantastic Man

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

The Gentlewoman

One of the most hotly anticipated titles that we’ve had in a long time finally landed yesterday…

From the creators of Fantastic Man comes their new women’s fashion magazine The Gentlewoman. Taking the Patrick Bateman-esque sensibilities of their men’s magazine (is that unfair? probably…) and channeling them into something altogether more pink and feminine (?!?) The Gentlewoman seems like an altogether new kind of women’s magazine.

Discussing housekeeping with model Daisy Lowe (ummm…), correspondance with the artist Alice Rawsthorn (Q: “Is there any alternative to Smythson stationery?” A: “Always!”) and interviewing both the artist Jenny Holzer and London clubland legend Princess Julia, this mag covers a lot of ground.

One of my favourites is the Tips section, ‘for exchanging idea and recommendations’ which, in this issue is about gift giving ideas, featuring recommendations from many of the woman featured inside the mag—Zoe Cassavettes recommends wine or champagne glasses, while Claudia Schiffer suggests bespoke jewellery!

Ridiculous and fantastical while also grounded and common-sensical, taking the best bits of the past while also looking into the future… this is definitely a welcome addition to the women’s mags landscape.

These have already sold out in our New Zealand stores, but there’s a handful left in Sydney and Melbourne available both in-store and online if you get in quick!

Update: We found a few extra copies for NZ, which are available at our Ponsonby and Queen Street stores.

Update: Sorry, they’re all gone! But you can buy a Gentlewoman subscription to make sure you don’t miss out on issue 2.

Posted in Individual Mag Titles | No Comments »

Kate Bezar from Dumbo Feather signing at Ponsonby

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

Dumbo Feather magazine cover

How many of you knew that the cult mag Dumbo Feather, Pass it On was created by a Kiwi?

Well it was, and Kate Bezar, the founder of Dumbo Feather (and one of our really good friends!) has just moved back to the Land of the Long White Cloud.

If you’re not familiar with the mag… well, it’s hard to do it justice in a few short words. But in essence… every quarter it dishes up long-format interviews with five of the most interesting people that you’ve never heard of…

From the American ex-pat in Paris who’s cooked dinner for 60 strangers at his home every Sunday for the past 30 years to a jewellery designer who works with roadkill, to the founder of Wikipedia (yeah, okay, you might have heard of him…)

Kate will be in our Ponsonby store (123 Ponsonby Rd) this coming Saturday (the 8th of May) between 11am – 1pm to sign copies of Dumbo Feather, have a chat, and generally hang out with our Ponsonby customers.

Hope many of you can come along; I can’t think of a better Mother’s day gift than a signed current issue and some back issues of this gorgeous Mook.

Posted in General randomness | 2 Comments »