Experimenting at Issues magazine shop
Almost as soon as she opened Issues magazine shop in Toronto, Nicola Hamilton identified two distinct types of customer: “They would come in and either they would take this huge sigh, their whole body would relax, and they’d look at us and say, like, ‘Thank you for doing this. I’m so glad this exists.’ Or they’d walk in the door and look at us, and go, ‘What is this place? Can you make money doing this?’ And our standing response at the beginning was, ‘We don’t know! We just opened, so we’ll see!'”
Three years on, their answer has probably changed a little bit. Because not only is the main Issues magazine shop still operating out of its original West End location, it has also been joined by a kiosk in the East End, as well as an annual popup in Vancouver, and a wide range of cultural and promotional events that bring independent magazines into people’s lives.
I’ve never visited in person, but I’ve been interested to watch from afar via Instagram, and I wanted to speak with Nicola for the Stack podcast because I love the innovative approach she takes to selling print magazines. Anyone who has been involved with selling magazines will be familiar with the frustrations of distribution, and she is experimenting with finding better ways of working within those constraints.
For example everybody hates the practice of tearing the covers off the copies of magazines that haven’t sold, so Nicola introduced collage nights, inviting people into the shop to make their own artworks out of unsold magazines. (“The contract says you have to destroy the remains. So we interpreted that as cutting them up and making art out of them.”)
Similarly, the shop has a consignment programme, in which they take 10 titles on sale or return as a way of testing them in the shop for three months at a time. At the end of that period they have a good idea of whether the magazine will sell at Issues, and they’re also able to feed back to the publishers, letting them know what they sold, and what they need to invoice for, making the whole process more controlled, more accountable, and easier to manage than doing everything ad hoc.
As you’ll hear in the episode above (or the video embedded below) Nicola is an extremely driven and determined person, but she’s also clearly a massive fan of print publishing, and totally committed to helping more people discover great magazines. It was really interesting speaking with her, so I hope you’ll enjoy hearing about her various different intiatives with the shop, as well as her design work, consultancy, and teaching.
If you’d like to hear more conversations with magazine makers, just follow us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and we’ll be able to keep on delivering new episodes to you as soon as they’re ready. And of course the best way to stay up to date with us is to be like Nicola and subscribe to Stack – sign up today and we’ll start sending you our surprise magazine selection every month.
