We’ve all seen ‘em… those cards that say, “To the best Mum in the world”, among other gratuitiously hyperbolic claims about superior your particular mother’s alledgely superior nurturing skills.

Well, enough of that malarkey, ’cause we’re just not buying it.

We’d like to introduce a competition which we call “BATTLE OF THE MUMS”. Simply put, tell us why your Mum is awesome. The Mum that we declare better than all others wins a magazine subscription (up to a value of $80) and you’ll win a $50 gift voucher for yourself.

How to enter? Just comment on this post and you’re in the running.

Let the games begin…

Every year around Easter, scores of design enthusiasts and speakers from across the design spectrum converge on Melbourne for the AgIdeas International Design Forum.

It’s one of our favourite events on the design calendar and speaker-wise, this year, they’ve got people like the chef Guy Grossi, ad man Adam Hunt (he had 80% of his brain removed and his work banned from the ABC… these two incidents may or may not be related), the illustrator Oslo Davis, photographer Stephen Dupont (who, among other things, has taken some amazing photos of Afghanistan and Raskol gangs in Port Moresby), Japanese designer Ken Miki and plenty more exciting and inspirational design peeps to feast your eyes and ears upon over the course of the three days in the salubrious surrounds of Melbourne’s Convention and Exhibition Centre.

We’ll have a stand there again this year and will be bringing along a selection of our favourite books and magazines available to sell; do let us know if there’s anything particular that you’d like us to bring down.

There are still a few tickets left over at the AgIdeas site, but don’t leave it too late as this baby always sells out!

Last year we offered 1 in every 100 subscriptions for free and gave the person who bought the most subscriptions their magazines for free (in the end, it turned out that the winner didn’t even know that we were running the promotion at all. D’oh!)

While our competitors offer trips to Paris or $30,000 skiing holidays as prizes, we want to set our sights on something that you might actually have a chance of winning. (And well, if we could afford $30,000 skiing holidays… rather than giving them away, we’d probably actually be writing this blog post on a laptop in front of a roaring fire with a mug of hot chocolate in a lodge somewhere in the Swiss Alps. But I digress…)

So, this year we’ve put our heads together to come up with a special offer to spread around the chance of winning and to give you a special offer every day from now, until Christmas.

We call it… THE MAG NATION CHRISTMAS TWITTER/FACEBOOK GIVEAWAY ADVENT CALENDAR! Catchy, right?

Here’s how it works:

Every day up until December 24th, at precisly 11am AEST we’ll post a discount voucher code (valid until midnight that same day) on our Twitter and Facebook pages. It could be for 30% off a subscription to Vogue Paris or $5 off a Moleskine diary or practically anything in between.

N.B. We’ll be running the first of these at 2.30pm on December 6th. Long story, but I think we were milling around the coffee machine or checking our RSS Feeds at 11am today.

The first person to use this code will get their order FREE, 100% refunded to their credit card or Pay Pal account. And as for everyone else, well, you’ll still get a pretty sweet discount that should put a smile on your yuletide dial.

Feliz Navidad!

We’re a little bit excited, ’cause it’s time for Semi-Permanent, Melbourne again. After SP Auckland last month and Sydney in March, the Semi-Permanent juggernaut makes its way down south, this Friday and Saturday at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre.

As usual, there’s an incredible range of speakers… among them, the animator Simon Allen from Pixar (yeah, we know, freaking PIXAR!), Leif Podhajsky (he designed the cover to Tame Impala’s album Innerspeaker in addition to heaps of psychedelic maths-y third eye expanding visuals that you can see in mags like Pilot and Monster Children), Timba Smits (the mastermind behind Wooden Toy magazine), Kelvin Ho (he’s a ‘retail architect’ but I have to confess, I know him more from perving at his house on The Selby) and so many more inspiring artists, designers, photographers and all-round superhuman creative types.

Although tickets are fast becoming scarce, we have managed to secure 5 free passes to give away. (Bless the cotton socks of those Semi-Permanent organisers, Andrew and Murray.)

Yep, amigos and amigas, you read that right.  We’ve got five passes (valued at $310 each) to give away! If you want to go in the running to win, all you need to do is post on our Facebook wall and make us laugh. The five people who make us laugh the hardest… win! Easy as that. If urine is dribbled, we may even give you two passes.

In honour of the creative spirit of Semi-Permanent, we are making this a little bit free-form. Entries will not be restricted to words alone… you can draw a picture, record a video (why does nobody ever post wall videos using those great iSight cams that every computer has nowadays anyway?), heck, you could even get your Dad to enter on your behalf with some of his famous ‘wordplay’.

(Common sense reigns, we reserve the right to amend, modify or make up rules at our discretion. The only thing that’s guaranteed is that five passes will be given away!)

An article in The Herald Sun today reports that social networking site Foursquare has hit 3 million users. While that’s not large by Facebook or Twitter standards it is, well, three times the population of Auckland. And growing rapidly.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the latest developments in mobile technology, Foursquare is a location-aware game for iPhones/Androids/Blackberries which involves ‘checking in’ to physical spaces with your phone, letting your friends know that you’re there and winning points and unlocking all kinds of specials the more check-ins you make along the way.

We’ve just started a special offer for Foursquare users where every fifth time to check-in to our Elizabeth Street store, we’ll give you a free coffee.

Got any other ideas for specials? We’d love to hear them.

From: Mag Nation Queen St.
Sent: Wed 04-Aug-10 11:50 a.m.
To: Ravi Pathare
Subject: Gay mags

Ravi,

(Insert unnamed IVF clinic here) have an account with us to send them porn once a month but we don’t get any Gay porn titles anymore, can we put them back on order?

mag nation
100 Queen Street
PO Box 106196
Auckland CBD
Tel: 3666 216

________________________________

From: Ravi Pathare
Sent: Wed 4/08/2010 12:02
To: Mag Nation Queen St.
Subject: RE: Gay mags

How many gay porn titles do they want per month and what nos. of each?

Ravi Pathare
Managing Director
Mag Nation Pty Ltd
100 Queen St.

________________________________

From: Mag Nation Queen St.
Sent: Wed 04-Aug-10 12:05 p.m.
To: Ravi Pathare
Subject: RE: Gay mags

Two a month, along with two straight porn and one mens mag. I have the others on hold waiting to send out once a couple of gay titles come in, but DNA/Attidude are just lifestyle magazines

mag nation
100 Queen Street
PO Box 106196
Auckland CBD
Tel: 3666 216

________________________________

From: Ravi Pathare
Sent: Wed 4/08/2010 13:16
To: Mag Nation Queen St.
Subject: RE: Gay mags

Understand. For the intended purpose, DNA/Attitude simply won’t cut it.

Ravi Pathare
Managing Director
Mag Nation Pty Ltd
100 Queen St.
Auckland
New Zealand.

________________________________

From: Vali Valibhoy
Sent: Wed 04-Aug-10 1:20 p.m.
To: Ravi Pathare
Subject: Re: Gay mags

…

________________________________

From: Ravi Pathare
Sent: Wed 4/08/2010 13:22
To: Mag Nation Queen St.
Subject: RE: Gay mags

Mama Mia?

Ravi

________________________________

From: Vali Valibhoy
Sent: Wed 04-Aug-10 1:50 p.m.
To: Ravi Pathare
Subject: Re: Gay mags

This is destined for the blog.

________________________________

As a part of the State of Design Festival, Design:Made:Trade will be taking place in the opulent surrounds of the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne over the weekend.

Part trade show, part seminar and exhibition it’s a really comprehensive round-up of some of the best design happenings right now. There are over sixty 3×3 meter cardboard booths (and a veritable jungle of other paper-based displays… we’re still wondering how we can convince them to let us take one of their gigantic cardboard geodesic domes back to the store once they’re finished!) containing all kinds of great design bits and pieces from furniture to fashion to lighting and beyond.

And if you need to take a break and check out some mags or browse through a selection of design and architecture books while you’re there… well, we’ll be there as well. Happy days!

Magazines are like friends.

They have certain characteristics that make us love them, quirks that we accept, and traits that are uniquely theirs.

Ignoring the fact that the personification of some mags are either male or female, we have a question for you. Two questions in fact, although you only have to answer one to be in the running to win a $50 mag nation voucher.

Answer either of the questions below via commenting on our blog, or via Twitter or Facebook, and the response we like best will win the $50 voucher.

1. If you could have a long term relationship with a magazine, which would you choose and why?

2. If you could have a hot, steamy one night stand with a magazine, which would you choose and why?

Good luck, and let the mag lovin’ begin!

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.

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.

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.)