Other than my 3 children, mag nation has been the most amazing thing I have ever been involved with. As those of you who read my first ever blog entry will know, I have put my heart, soul and every ounce of my being into mag nation. I will miss it immensely and feel that I am leaving behind a part of me. The character, tone and values of the brand have been an extension of myself.

Ultimately however, what has made mag nation has been all the customers and supporters who choose to interact with us as opposed to the other options presented to them. To every single person who has ever walked through our doors, bought from us online, tweeted us or simply mentioned us to a friend (including the infamous Angry City of Melbourne Taxpayer), I am indebted to you.

Thanks to all of you for what has been the most amazing journey. One that for me personally is only beginning (I am still just 36 years old), but that is about to enter a new chapter.

Sahil

I just wanted to complement Mag Nation on their phenomenal choice in staffing at the Prahran store. I live just around the corner from the store. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday every week its babes babes babes. Those three fine women are a real calling card for the Prahran Mag Nation and are a big reason I keep spending.A bit too shy to ask to her face. Would Miss Monday be free one night? I think some sparks could really fly,I m a handsome dude and you a total babe. What you say? My emails attached.

That is verbatim folks. Babes, babes, babes eh? Now, I thought we had a guy with a bushy beard working there one day a week.

In any case, I am glad that the author of this missive finds some reason to spend money in our store. Perhaps it may have been preferable if it was because of our amazing magazine selection but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

As for referring to one of our lovely staff members as Miss Monday – well, that has got me thinking… Mag nation staff calendar, perhaps? I vote for being Mr March. I’ll even shave my chest.

NB: To my staff members who are reading this blog. I am being flippant. Please do not polish up your resignation letters just yet, and I sincerely apologise for making you think of your boss and his hairy chest.

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.

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!

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!

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.

Some of you folk, who are much cleverer than we are, live and breathe in this space. Can we ask for your help and advice?

We are looking at updating and improving our site, and in going through all the stats from Google Analytics, we have noticed that our drop off from people entering our cart through to final purchase is pretty high.

What is normal? Does anyone have some benchmarks that they could throw our way?

We thought we would lose heaps of people through the “fill in your details” steps. Subscriptions are a little more complicated than a normal book purchase because you often send it to someone else rather than yourself. However, our drop off at these points in the transaction process is minimal. Rather, most people who do abandon our purchase process do so at the final point of purchase.

That is, they take the time to add a magazine subscription to their cart, signup for an account, provide us with all their details, get to the final payment page, and then piss off elsewhere.

We were really surprised by this. Not so much by the quantum of abandonment, but the point of abandonment. We realise that many people are going to “chicken out” prior to pressing pay, but are there things we could be doing to improve our conversion?

Some of the things we are about to implement include:

• Integrating PayPal
• Highlighting that our payment system is “secure”
• Increasing the size of the Pay Now button

We already changed the colour of our checkout button in the shopping cart from red (part of our brand identity) to green, and saw via A/B testing that conversion from that point increased.

Should we change from “pay now” to “buy now”? Any other clever ideas? Help!!!

If we end up implementing any individual’s suggestion, we’ll happily provide you with a lifetime supply of magazines ala Mr Wonka. Ok, maybe not, but how about a $100 mag nation voucher instead???

Meet Ravi. He is one of the two founders of mag nation. Much less in the public eye than I am (Sahil), he is every bit a driving force of mag nation as is the guy writing this blog. He also happens to be one of the smartest blokes around.

Ravi is a medical doctor. Moreover, he is a Pathologist. So, when he’s not busy building a retail empire, he diagnoses rare diseases in his spare time, which is a useful skill to have in this industry. Okay, not really.

When he migrated to New Zealand from India, the New Zealand government wouldn’t recognise his qualifications. (Which is pretty crazy stuff when you consider that could have taught many of the local doctors a thing or two about Pathology, having dealt with all sorts of weird diseases during his time on the sub-continent. But, I digress…)

Because he wanted a different life for his family, Ravi left India and gave up years of study and a thriving private practise in the process. Unable to practise medicine in New Zealand and with no non-medical business experience behind him, he bought a small convenience store called Mega Mags in Queen St in Auckland. From there, the mag nation concept was born.

This bloke is a rocket scientist. Genius mind. He is also my uncle. And he is incredibly precious to me. My second child’s middle name is in honour of the guy.

When we began to plan what would later become mag nation, he did everything he could to talk me out of it. He told me that I had a real future in the corporate world, family responsibilities, and that I shouldn’t risk everything on a dream. Only when I proved my stubbornness did he relent and welcome me to his world of being broke.

At 55 years old, Ravi is no spring chicken. In fact, a publisher we often deal with referred to him recently as ‘the Yoda of Magazines’. He is known globally (he has spoken twice at Colophon) and there are few people with more knowledge of magazine retail supply than he has. Yet, he is also remarkably young in his outlook.

For a brand that takes such a different and at times irreverent approach, people are often surprised to find out that neither of the founders are in their 20s.

Virtually all the mags that you see in mag nation are there because Ravi decided that they should be and could be. He is the sort of bloke who can memorise spreadsheets worth of data and regurgitate pricing and margins at a moments notice. He is also the guy who when discussing creating subscription terminals in-store and how to avoid theft of equipment, suggested that we glue the mouse to the table. It took him 30 seconds to realize why the rest of us where wetting our pants. We all have our slips.

More than all else, he is a good bloke. If you are going to bet your entire future on a business, might as well be with someone you trust. There is no blame, recrimination or singular credit amongst the two of us. Though all of this is totally irrelevant to the average customer walking into our stores, I genuinely hope you feel something intangible but special when walking into a mag nation store.

If you do, then you are feeling the presence of the Yoda of Magazines.

(‘Ravi Yoda’ illustration by the inimitable Tyson Savanah from our Elizabeth Street store.)

One of these involved refunding one in every 100 customers who purchase a magazine subscription from magnation.com. We did this for the last few weeks leading up to Christmas and it went absolutely swimmingly… scores of happy customers have responded with pure delight to the news that the cost of their subscriptions has been refunded to their credit cards.

The second—the person who buys the most subscriptions gets them all for free—also went well, albeit somewhat differently to what we’d expected. A bit of an experimental promotion, and one that we were never really sure how it was going to pan out.

We blogged about the difficulties of setting up the terms and conditions associated with this offer and trying to protect ourselves (somewhat!) while still making it a fun and interesting promotion. So as to keep us from the mercy of some rogue magazine fiend with a black Amex, we decided to limit it to 30 subscriptions in total.

When you consider that the average sub we sell (across the whole site, mainly imported air freight titles) is $100, then this still adds up to a pretty hefty sum. Then, in the case that two people BOTH took out the same maximum number of subscriptions, we specified that we’d give the prize to the person who got in first.

Did we see a rise in the average number of subs taken out? It’s hard to say. Christmas is an absolutely mental time in the magazine subscription market and when you’re a small, growing business like we are it’s hard to compare one month of the year with that same month in the year prior with any degree of certainty. What’s sure, however, is that most people bought one or maybe two subscriptions. Many of our customers bought three or four subs and a mere two people bought five.

That’s right—the winner of this promotion bought a mere five subs (albeit expensive ones, totalling around $NZD1500).

The feedback we had from many of our customers while we were running this offer is that they would have considered having a crack and taking out as many subs as they could possibly afford… were it not for the fear that some mag hoarding tyrant might swoop in at the last possible moment and take out hundreds of subs, leaving them mag rich and cash poor. Of course, this was never really a possibility due to the terms and conditions stipulated above… but this, nevertheless, this was their fear and it is rarely our place to dispel the irrational fears of our customers.

And so for us, did this promotion make good business sense?

The truthful answer is that we really have absolutely no idea. The point here is more that we tried something a bit different, had a bit of fun and in many ways that encapsulates just about everything that we’re trying to do here.

As for the winner? He had absolutely no idea the promotion was running at all.

Magazines are quite different from this perspective. Traditionally, magazines are not really thought of as a Christmas present. How can you buy for your girlfriend a copy of Vogue Australia in early December when the next one might come out in a few weeks time? Also, many people see magazines as pedestrian. Not the sort of thing that excites when unwrapped. Overall, magazines are seen as a selfish purchase and not the ideal gift.

While this may be true for newsagents, mag nation loves Christmas. We are a gift destination. It is not the mainstream titles that attract people, but those hard to find niche mags that almost replicate the giving of a book. And often at half the price.

Don’t get me wrong. Magazines for “self” also spike at Christmas, especially as people want to stock up for the beach, the plane, or wherever else they may be going, but gift purchases drive our volumes leading up to the holidays. If you have a designer friend, the specialised choices we offer are endless. If you are looking for that perfect something for a fashion fanatic, gaming fiend, petrol head, or tattoo enthusiast, we have just the thing. And these niche publications catering to all these special interests are often unusual, as well as works of art in themselves. Quite different to the stuff you will find in the mainstream locations.

In addition, subscriptions go nuts over Christmas. The idea of giving a loved one a gift that keeps on arriving over the course of a year is quite cool, and immensely popular.

Which is why Christmas is so important to us, compared to most mag retailers. They don’t stock the niche titles which drive gift destination traffic, nor do they offer online subscriptions via a dedicated subscription website.

Christmas reminds me of just how different we are from so many others in this industry. Perhaps this is why we are growing in the magazine category while the others are slowly retreating from it…