These are our brand new envelopes for sending out your subscriptions, featuring illustrations by our friends over at Alter (they won an ARIA for Cut Copy’s album artwork last year and are generally pretty awesome.)

To be honest, these envelopes aren’t exactly “new” but in the two-months-of-non-stop-frantic-ness that we call Christmas, we didn’t get a chance to blog about them sooner.

We’ve been thinking long and hard about the envelopes that we use to send out our online orders (in fact, we posted about this problem almost a year ago today) and we weighed up dozens of different options for this new iteration: PVC bags, stiff cardboard, Fedex style pounches, bubble wrap envelopes and all sundry of combinations of the above.

It was important to strike a fine balance between protecting the magazine (keeping it from getting both bent and wet), shielding it from the eyes of the potentially thieving public (this happens more than you’d think!), looking good and being environmentally responsible.

Our old waterproofing solution of wrapping magazines in sealable plastic pouches worked in the very early days our business when we were sending out just a trickle of magazines, but when you’re posting out tens of thousands of mags each year the environmental consequences of all that land fill became stunningly apparent. Biodegradable organic plastic substitutes are still way too expensive for prime-time, so we went with a lightly waxed card that we’ve subjected to a number of in-house ‘soak’ tests.

And we reckon it came up pretty well!

That said, mag nation envelope v2.0. is only the second stage of what will undoubtedly be a long evolution and right now it’s far from perfect: the seal doesn’t always stick as well as it should, the printer completely forgot to put in an opening tab (d’oh!) and some customers in the rainier parts of far-North Queensland have requested extra waterproofing.

But it’s definitely a good start.

We’re committed to improving and iterating this as we go—heck, Netflix changed their envelope more than ten times in their first five years.

Got any ideas about how we might improve these? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

For a couple of years now, we’ve been kicking around the idea of making a newspaper of one sort or another.

A last minute decision (why do we always enter into these things at the last minute?!) meant that we spent a frenzied week of scanning, writing and layouting (with the help of our friend Thomas Williams at Hunt Studio and the guys at Alter who put together the illustration on the front after—an hour or two before the press deadline—we realised we hadn’t organised a cover) a 16 page newspaper of our own, called The Magazine Lover’s Guide to Christmas.

It’s a collection of lots of our favourite magazines, highlighting the really popular Christmas-type subscriptions across our entire range.

Eagle eyes will notice a few typos here-and-there… but despite the odd hiccup, we’re beaming with pride at our little Xmas newspaper. There are big stacks of these in all of our Australian stores right now, they’ll be available in our Auckland stores mid-next week and copies are being sent out with subscriptions* for the next month or so.

Don’t live near any of our stores? Drop us a line on info@magnation.com with the subject line “Wrap me in news”, including your address and we’ll drop one in the post for you.

* That is, the subscriptions that we send out. It’s a bit complicated but for most Australian magazines (i.e. the ones that you get wrapped up in plastic) they’re sent out directly by the publisher. The ones that come in a mag nation envelopes, well, they’re from us. We won’t be including newspapers with the former because that would be impossible, but we will be including them with the latter. Capische?

Cue the sound of tumbleweeds, ’cause Lordy Crikey Moses it’s been quiet around here. What’s been going on? Well, lots and lots of stuff. When you’re a business of our size (i.e. tiny) and you’re just a couple of people working on about a billion different things at any one time, to be honest, blogging is probably one of the first things to fall by the wayside when things get busy. Shouldn’t be the case, but it is.

So, what have we been doing? In a word: Christmas.

And maybe throw in another two words: Nation State.

Between launching our new online emporium for all things non-magazine (and I’m currently spending about half of each day picking, packing and posting orders of Moleskine diaries and Blackwing 602s and Lamy pens and so on) and preparing for the coming festive bonanza that is the yuletide season, we’ve hardly had time to scratch ourselves.

Hold tight, though, dear reader because we’ll be clogging up your RSS reader with details on all the best new magazines and such in no time again soon. We’ll also be unveiling something a little bit special that’s been demanding a lot of our time recently (small clue in the image above for the curious.)

With more of a whimper than a bang we quietly turned five years old last week. The main reason for the lack of fanfare (apart from our abiding modesty and humility, of course) was the fact that… well, it completely slipped our minds.

We know that five years doesn’t sound like much of a long time. And in the scheme of things of course, it’s not at all, but it is an important milestone for us.

You see, when we started out in early 2006, we figured that we’d either be dead broke or rolling around in cash Scrooge McDuck style by now… and while the reality is that while we’re personally erring toward the ‘broke’ end of the spectrum, between our six stores and our website, as a business we’re becoming more profitable with each and every day that passes.

Nope, we won’t be retiring to an island in the Caribbean any time soon but we will continue to be selling printed media for the foreseeable future.

You see, there’s one really important thing that we didn’t know five years ago: there are about 8,763,392,392,001 easier ways to make money than by selling magazines. The fact that we’ve made it this far at all is a testament to the incredible balancing act of tenacity, determination and blood, sweat and (a few) tears that have gone into the last half decade.

Along the way, there have been times where we’ve only had enough money in the bank to keep the lights on for another two or three days. Yet thanks to the the loyalty of our customers and patience of our investors, we’ve always managed to emerge from the precipice of each financial disaster stronger, healthier and more robust than before.

Five years ago Wooden Toy was still free, Frankie was a niche outsider title and all but the biggest nerds would have looked at you blankly if you talked about a ‘tablet device‘! Some magazines have come and gone, our Managing Director left the business, we opened 8 stores and closed two of them, we’ve been told on just about a weekly basis that print is dead, we opened up the 3rd Floor selling t-shirts and stationery (and realised that we suck at selling t-shirts), we opened up a Sydney store and we’ve got plenty more exciting projects in the works that we’ll let you all in on soon.

But enough navel gazing and reflection; we’ll save that for our ten year anniversary blog post. By then, of course, blogs will be totally redundant and we’ll be appearing before you like a holographic Princess Leia informing Obi-Wan Kenobi of the indignities being inflicted upon The Empire. Or maybe just beaming it directly to your brain… but whatever the case may be, we look forward to it.

Our online subscription service really began as a bit of an afterthought.

And it certainly started out slowly enough: one staff member at our Melbourne CBD store would send out packages for half an hour a day in between serving customers, making coffee and unpacking deliveries.

Fast forward three years and we’re in the fortunate position where things have got a little bit bigger. Don’t get me wrong—we’re still tiny compared to most of our competitors, but, well, that one staff member now works full time just sending out packages.

And at this point, we’re beginning to grow to a point where the systems we had in place when we started out don’t really work like they used to. We’re beginning to experience the kind of teething problems that happen as any venture expands beyond its infancy. In this regard, we’re fortunate to have really vocal and passionate customers who will readily engage with us in-store, over e-mail and Twitter. And increasingly we’re getting a lot of feedback about the envelopes that we send out our mags in, suggesting that they don’t really cut the mustard.

One of the big issues is that the postie is pretty much determined to try and stuff magazines right into your letterbox. In some ways, this is a blessing (imagine having to go to the post office to pick up every single issue of your subscription!) but also a bit of a curse as well—in addition to often arriving a little bit bent, your mags also sometimes get rained on, sticking out of the letterbox.

To address that problem in particular, we bought about 100,000 zip-lock plastic bags (okay, slight exaggeration but definitely lots and lots of them) in which we seal each and every magazine inside to give them a bit of protection against the elements. It’s not ideal, but it does the job.

We’ve also noticed that our current paper envelopes really don’t look like they’re up to the stress of all the handling involved in moving mail across the country and around the world. Every day, we get a big delivery from the post office of returned packages; these are from customers who have moved and haven’t updated their address with us or who gave us the wrong address in the first place, etc. And to be honest, they’re scuffed and sometimes torn and generally just look a bit of a mess, so they can’t look that much better when they reach you the first time around.

What’s the solution? To be honest, we’re not entirely sure.

We absolutely don’t want to keep sending out thousands of zip-lock bags destined for landfill pits (although my Mum re-uses hers in the kitchen—good on ya Mum!) and we have similar reservations about padded post-packs. We need to come up with something that’s not only tough, but also waterproof and environmentally friendly.

One option that we’ve been considering is waxed, high-GSM recycled card envelopes, kind of like FedEx pouches. Or even bio-degradable plastic sleeves or recyclable plastic like high-density polyethylene. (Yes, I’ve spent more time looking up different plastics on Wikipedia and examining their relative merits vis a vis recyclability in recent days than I ever really imagined that I would in this life.)

We’re still plotting our next move here, but look forward to getting some great new envelopes—of one kind or another—really soon.

If you’ve got any ideas, comments, questions or suggestions, we’d love to hear ‘em!

One of the criticisms we occasionally hear about our stores is that we don’t hold magazines for our customers. In fact, this is only partly true. We don’t hold magazines for customers in Australia, but in New Zealand we’re absolutely happy to do so.

Why the differing approach?

Well, for the first year of our existence on this side of the Tasman, we did happily hold mags. Pretty quickly, though, it became apparent that only a mere 10% of customers would actually come to pick up the magazines that they so desperately wanted.

Different footy codes and mastery of vowel sounds notwithstanding, we’d always figured that Aussie and Kiwis are pretty much alike. Not so, in this case, however: customers in our Auckland stores will pick up their holds 99.999% of the time and for that reason, we’re happy to continue to do them.

Aussie mag lovers, believe us, the situation pains us as much as it pains you.

In most cases, we’re happy to say that you’ll very rarely miss out on the magazine you want.

Barring the odd freak first issue where demand hugely outstrips our supply, we’re pretty good at ordering the right amount of each magazine to each store to match demand (and our suppliers, despite inexplicably sending us hundreds of copies of Overage Nasty Housewives from time to time, actually have really sophisticated algorithms to predict demand and automatically adjust order levels accordingly).

And if you really, really, really want that mag?

Just pay for it over the phone using a credit card and we’ll put it aside for you.