How Issues Magazine Shop Raised $120K to Prove Print Isn’t Dead

0:00The day that issues became real was the day that I sent an email subject line, I think I'm going to open a magazine store? question mark going to the bank and saying hey I want to open a print magazine store they were like um no hey I'm your host Serena Smith and welcome to Shopify Masters your companion for starting and building a business in 2022 everyone thought print was dead but Nicola Hamilton knew she could switch things up I was like there have to be more people like me who want this so she launched issues a magazine shop, offering a safe haven of curated, independently owned, beautiful magazines for print lovers, making physical media cool once again.

0:40They're like an archive of people's lived experience. Her success is proof that deeply personal retail shops can succeed when founders understand their communities. We want to go and experience something in community that is three dimensions. Nicola is here today to share how to build a retail experience, curate the right products for your niche, and create events that bring the community together. Nicola, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So I feel like we're in the era where what's old is new again. Yeah, nostalgia is king for sure. But like the notion of a physical space with magazines is like almost radical in its conception.

1:21Why in this like increasingly digital world when you could have done it as solely e-commerce, why was having a physical space so important to you? Okay. First and foremost, I think opening issues was like a selfish endeavor. It's something that I really wanted to exist in the city. And so I sort of built the space of my dreams, if that makes sense. So I'm a magazine art director by background. I have helped make magazines in the city for a long time. And when I was like seeking out research, inspiration, looking to see things, it was really hard to get my hands on them here. I had to order them in from elsewhere.

1:55or when I was traveling, I would like make a point to go out of my way to go to the independent magazine store and bring back like 10 pounds of magazines. My suitcases were always overweight or just like heavy, like your carry-on bag gets really heavy. Bad for the back. Yeah, exactly. Not ideal. Not ideal. And so I'd seek out those spaces and nothing like that existed here in Toronto. And so that was sort of the impetus for starting it. And because of that, I wanted a physical location, a place where I could go and actually like flip through the things. I wanted people to experience that feeling that I experienced discovering a new title in a new city in a physical space.

2:30And I think the other thing about it is that magazines are physical objects, right? Like you actually want to hold them. You want to see how big they are in relation to something else. That's something that's hard to sort of wrap your head around online. You want to flip through them. You want to smell paper and ink, right? So having that physical space really meant that our customers get to like engage in real time with the product that we're selling. And they get to discover something new ideally, right? They like come for their favorite. They come to pick up the thing they come to pick up all the time and something else catches their eye.

2:59That element of spontaneous discovery, I think, is so key and important. And it's something that being in real life allows for, I think, in a different kind of way. Given your background as an art director, I mean, you've been deeply entrenched in the magazine world on the production side. Did you take that sort of editorial and artistic approach to building out your shop? Yeah, I mean, I think that background and just having paid attention to the industry for so long meant that I knew what titles I wanted to bring in, right? I understood the landscape. I knew what I was excited about. And I got this really wonderful piece of advice at the beginning to act as my own editor-in-chief of the shop, right?

3:38So to think of myself as the art director or editor-in-chief to be bringing things in and editing our inventory through that same lens. What do I want here? Make it your perspective. It sort of allowed me to already understand the landscape to know and then also be like deeply rooted in the community that is making magazines already, both here in Canada and abroad. Okay, but you carry something like 700 to 800 titles, right? Yeah, we have a ton of titles in rotation. They're not in the store at any one moment. So we have more like 200 to 300 titles on the shelves at any minute because things sort of sell out.

4:12You're waiting for the next issue to come in. So they're not always there at the same time. And lots of independent magazines come out when they want to come out. So they're not coming out on any particular frequency. Or they're coming out twice a year maybe, so not that frequent. So we're often waiting for something. We don't always have them. Even 200 to 300 titles at any given time. I don't care how fast a reader you are. You can't possibly be pouring over every single one of those. I cannot. So what is your curation and selection process? Okay, so I feel strongly that the magazines that we carry should be things that are beautiful design objects.

4:45So they should look amazing sitting on someone's coffee table. Absolutely. They should feel special. They should feel like an object that somebody like put some time and energy into. And in a perfect world, they'd be a really incredible editorial product and a really incredible design product. That's not always true when independent magazines start. You can often tell if an editorial person started the project or an art person started the project. And they usually take a couple of issues to like marry those things together, right? Like the words will be really, really good, but the design isn't quite there yet.

5:14or the design's so good, but the words are a little lackluster at the beginning and it takes them a little bit to sort of get in there. And we're looking at what to bring into our inventory. We're looking at like geographic mix, like where are things coming from, sort of community mix? Like, are we hitting enough communities? Do we have enough queer content? Do we have enough coming out from the Swannow region? Like, are we sort of covering these communities? Are we covering all the topics that we want to cover? So we're sort of looking for that diverse range of things and then also making sure that they're just these like really beautiful products.

5:44I would imagine that this was not the easiest pitch. No. How did you go about getting funding? How did you fund it? How did you seal the deal? No, it wasn't, right? Like going to the bank and saying, hey, I want to open a print magazine store. They were like, no. Yeah. So there was a little bit of that. I have a handful of pals here in Toronto who run their own businesses, and they've been really helpful in sort of helping me move through this because I have no background in retail. I have no idea what I'm doing in retail land. I know magazines. I know our product, but actually like the business part, I know less.

6:18So most of our funding was actually secured through an organization called Futurepreneur, which is here in Canada for entrepreneurs under 40. It's money that comes from the BDC, which is the Business Development Bank. But you actually have to go through a business plan building process with a mentor, Futurepreneur mentor. And so you go through that process and they sort of coach you through it, which is amazing. But that was really hard to do, right? Like you're constantly having to justify your decision. you're constantly having to justify the sort of numbers that you've made up. Like a business plan is fully made up.

6:50Right. You haven't done it yet. You haven't done it. There's nothing like us in Canada. So it's really hard to compare it. Right. You can compare it to places in London, England or Lisbon or New York, but those markets are different. Right. So you present those numbers to your funders and they're like, well, these aren't exactly comparable. And you're like, you're right. But there is nothing that is exactly comparable here. Yeah. Yeah. So you're sort of making your best guess. So that was definitely really hard. And I think the other piece about it that I often share with other people sort of starting a business, starting a retail business like this is the business plan that I wrote for the bank was different than the business plan that I actually had in my brain, right?

7:27So you're writing like the simplest version of a business plan for the bank. So they just wanted to see that there was a world in which selling magazines could sustain itself. So just that retail part where the rest of our offering, everything else that supports the business they were uninterested in during that sort of writing. It complicated it. Those were other streams of revenue that you couldn't guarantee you're making up those numbers to. So like our events programming, my work as a magazine consultant, like those were things that didn't even come into the conversation. It's interesting because it would seem as though those would be almost like the clear revenue paths.

8:02You would think that they would want to see that, but that had to be completely removed from the equation. Yeah, it was easier to remove bit. And I had a friend who ran a store in the same neighborhood that we run ours in who had gone through this program before. And I went crying to her one day, right? Like I was like, this is so hard. And she was like, look, I was actually writing two business plans at the same time. Like she was like, I had the business plan that I knew I was going to like eventually get to you. And I had the one that I had to present to the bank that made sense for them. That was like easy for them to look at and make sense of the expenses and the potential revenue and sort of tick that box.

8:33I had to be really persistent. And that sort of phase was really challenging. And then, of course, like when you get the funding, that's really exciting. But then there's still so much more work to do, right? Like so much more work to do. And then you jump into the real estate part, which also sucked. Can you walk us through your funding mix and how you've been able to make the numbers work? Through Futurepreneur, I got a$60 ,000 loan. So$20 ,000 of that comes from Futurepreneur. $40 ,000 comes from BDC. And then I invested about$60 ,000 of my own money into the business as well. So that was our sort of$120 ,000 that we started the business with.

9:06And the loan that we got is a five-year loan, but they give you one year to not pay it back. So you get your first year to sort of get your feet under you, and you don't have to actually start paying the loan back until year two, which is super helpful, right? Because you can wait until you've actually started to build up some cash. Right. You were trying to prove the thesis that print isn't dead and that selling physical magazines can work. Is it working? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's working. We'll be three in a couple of weeks. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, so we've made it to this third year.

9:39I think it's totally working. Our sales sort of increased year over year, month over month. Our community gets bigger. We have like a really loyal base of customers. We ship stuff all over the world. We've been able to sort of increase the amount of inventory that we're bringing in. Like all signs point to it working. And I think that was the hypothesis. Like that was, I was like, there have to be more people like me out there who want this. There have to be more people who want to spend time with this kind of content, who want to like slow down a little bit, who want this. And so far, I think that's been true.

10:09It's got to be gratifying. It is. It's so, so validating for sure. The National Magazine Awards in Canada, we got three separate shout outs in people's like acceptance speeches on stage, which just like felt so good. It felt so nice. That's a really nice feather in the cap. Yeah. These magazine operators, writers, publishers were thanking you for creating a space for these things to exist. Yeah. Yeah. Or for supporting. So Issues is a magazine store. We sell magazines. That's like obviously the core of our business. But our mandate is to support the people in projects keeping print alive. So we think about that as the editors, the writers, the photographers, the illustrators, like the designers, this bigger community of people who help keep this industry moving.

10:53You know this more intimately than anyone, but I know this to some degree too because in a prior life, as we were talking about, I was a magazine writer. And it's a tough industry to stay afloat in. Absolutely. How has going from being a creative in the belly of the beast on the production side to now a merchant and a wholesaler changed your understanding of magazines? I just have a bigger outlook on the industry, right? I understand these parts of the industry that I didn't understand before. So I understand retail. I understand distribution. I've started to understand the independent landscape even more.

11:32I've started to sort of see the breadth of business models that there are for making print magazines work. And there are so many of them. And most of the independent titles that we're selling have different business models than like a classic or more traditional business model. They're finding ways to fund themselves through events programming, through other projects, through brand partnerships instead of traditional print advertising. They're finding other ways to do it. Has that business plan that you initially put together panned out? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I haven't gone back to look at it properly, which would be a fun exercise to go look at that original one.

12:07But I do think Issues has sort of rolled out exactly as I imagined it would roll out. I sometimes joke that this has been like the easiest project I've ever worked on. There's something like, I know that sounds ridiculous. It sounds ridiculous. But there's something really nice about the way that this has rolled out so organically. Can you say more about that? What does that mean to you? Again, because I have no idea what I'm doing, right? There is no grand plan. There's no master plan for how it's going to work. I don't know. None of us know what we're doing. No, no clue. But it means that I also like don't know what the sort of things I'm supposed to be doing are.

12:40So we've been doing so much based on what the community feedback has been, the stuff we're seeing, what me and my staff want to do, and getting to make decisions from that place. Like, oh, what do we actually want to put our energy into? Or what sounds fun right now? Or what's like a little corner of the community that we can support in the next few months? So being able to make decisions from that place has kept it feeling really light. Can you give me a couple examples of that? So we do all this events programming. And there are a couple sort of key pillars that came up because we got excited about something or there was like a weird little problem.

13:10we wanted to solve either for ourselves or for the industry. So Zine Shine is one of them. And we were sort of like looking at all the zine festivals that happen in Toronto. And most of them require the actual zinesters, the people making the zine to pay for a table and then to go there and work it for the duration of the festival, right? So they have to sell enough product at those to recoup the cost of the table and then also their time. And so we were like, it'd be really fun to support zines. We don't actually have enough room here in the store to bring in zines on the regular, right? Our space is only like 300 square feet.

13:42So we're keeping it quite tight, like very magazine focused. And so we spent a couple of weeks sort of like rolling this idea around and eventually zine shine kind of tumbled out of our brains. So for two weeks, every summer in July, we bring in about 70 zines through an open call submission. We carried it down to a collection we're excited about and we bring those into the shop at no cost to the zine maker. They don't need to be there. We do everything. We ship their zine worldwide because we have that infrastructure, thanks to Shopify already. And so we're able to do this to sort of build this event around it.

14:14And then we just take a percentage of sales on what they've sold. And that works out really nicely for us. It works out really wonderful for them. And it adds something new to the landscape. The other program that kind of came up that way is our collage nights, which have become wildly successful, like beyond my imagination. The last time I was in this room, we were hosting one here at Shopify for the staff. Yeah. Full circle. I love that. It is. That's really funny. So part of owning a magazine store is that when the magazines go off sale, when they pass their off sale date for some distributors, not for everyone.

14:43And we try to avoid this in all instances, but we can't for one of our distributors. You're meant to rip the cover off to prove that you're no longer selling that magazine. You send the covers back to them and you're meant to destroy the remains. So you're meant to get rid of everything else. No. Recycle it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The book industry works that way too. Yeah. And so it creates all this ways. I'm stunned. And it also like hurts my magazine loving heart. It seems so aggressive. Yeah. Yeah. Destroy the remains. And so the first couple of times we did it, I was like, there has to be something we can do.

15:12Like there has to be like a community group we can donate these to or like something we can do with these. And it took a couple of weeks, but I was on set. So I run the store, but then I also magazine Art Direct for a couple of titles. And I was on set with a friend of mine who's a hair and makeup artist, but also a really talented collage artist. And I sort of looked at her. I was like, Alana, would you ever host collage workshops? And she was like, well, I was hosting collage workshops before the pandemic. And I just haven't had a space to do it. And I was like, would you do them at issues like regularly?

15:38And she was like, yeah, let's try it. And Alana's hosted almost 100 collage workshops now. It's pretty bananas. In January 2023, we started. So they've been going for sort of two and a half years at this point. We do them for corporate clients. We do them for private birthday parties and stuff. We do them open for other people. And they've been really popular. And I think it's back to the same reason why Issues is succeeding, that we have this like craving for tangible experiences, tactile experiences. Like we want to go and experience something in community that is like three dimensions. This is something that's been coming up in a lot of the interviews, just this like ache for something that feels real, tangible, connective in real life.

16:24You see this on the entrepreneurial journey all the time, too, that like the idea starts with one thing and then something else blossoms out of it. Totally. Is that how the collage events have felt for you? Yeah. I mean, I think the light bulb moment was the like, oh, we can make artwork with this. Like we can we can bring people in and make art with these leftover magazines. Like that counts as destroying them. I think no one stopped us yet. So I think that was the light bulb moment. But then to also watch that sort of grow and blossom and more people want to come and then gain popularity was also wonderful.

16:58Like it is. It's validating, I guess. Yeah, I think that's also so beautiful. Like hearing that these magazines are supposed to be destroyed when you know how much work has gone into them is like painful as a creative. It is clear to me that you're taking a very holistic approach, philosophical approach to the whole thing, which is like honor the work. I think it's intuitive, right? Like I think there's something about like how does this feel? Does this feel like the right moment to do that? Do we have energy to do it? How is your energy split? Because you're running the shop. You're also still operating as an art director for magazines, right?

17:37This is one of yours? This is one of my babies, yes. Can you show that? Look, it's so beautiful. Where am I showing it? I was like, where are the cameras? It's so beautiful. You function as an art director for magazines. You're a magazine consultant. You're still wearing a number of hats. Yes. How is that energetically for you? How are you managing your time? You don't look overwhelmed. I don't feel overwhelmed. There's days, don't get me wrong, there are days where I'm very overwhelmed. But I think because so much of it is intuitive, so much of the work I'm doing is like work I really enjoy doing or work that's like fulfilling in some way.

18:07I also am someone who I get the feeling you are too, who like, likes spinning a lot of plates, who like, likes variety in my work. And so that helps. But no, Issues is now, three years in, we are like a retail store. And we're also like an events organization, I guess, like our events have become like a large part of what we do. So we run Zine Shine. We run the collage nights. We run bigger collage parties with like artist hosts. We run a photography portfolio review for photographers to meet sort of commercial reps and art directors. We run the same program for illustrators. We're hoping to run a little mini magazine conference later this year.

18:43So like we have this events thing. And then we have the issue studio, which is sort of where all of the kind of consulting work, the art direction work happens. So the studio arm is in partnership with Stacey Lee Kong and Jelani Morgan, who are both really, really skilled in their area of magazine making. So Jelani is a photo editor, photo director, incredible photographer himself. He has work that's part of the AGO's permanent collection. And Stacey Lee Kong is an editorial director, writer, cultural critic herself. So together, the three of us are doing that kind of work. And I think there are like people to rely on in all of those spaces.

19:15So my staff at Issues is incredible. and we have three people who work at the store part-time. Sabrina has been with me since the day we opened. Sabrina is a photographer and photo assistant. Mitchell joined shortly after we opened. Mitchell's an illustrator, an animator, and fine artist. And then Melly joined us just last fall. Melly's a poet, a writer, and an arts facilitator. So they kind of come at it from different angles, but they're also so good at just like doing the work, like helping make everything happen. In the store, also our events program, and they have a couple of events that they each own.

19:47And Mitchell was huge in sort of developing Zine Shine. And then, of course, on the studio side, Stacey and Jelani really help make that happen. You have to make sure you're like looking after yourself. I think it's really easy as an entrepreneur to burn out, right? It's like super, duper easy to end up in a space where you are just exhausted because there's so many things to do. And like if I could not enter my email inbox for like an entire day, that would be so nice. How dreary. That's not something I can do, right? There's no one to sort of pick up the slack there yet. So I sort of bounce between all of those things as I need to.

20:19I think scheduling is important. I joke that Google Calendar invites are my love language. If it's not in the calendar, it will not happen. I will not get there. So I think it's just like the scheduling. It's the time management stuff. But then I think it's also just the doing, right? You can sit around and think about something forever. But if you just move into action and start doing stuff, it might not be right the first time. But you can fix it the next time. It might not be right the first time, but tell me if you agree with this. It changes your relationship with yourself. And that is motivating in its own right.

20:54Yeah. Like, do you mean like the idea of like, you've done it, you've put it out there and now. You've done it, you've put it out there, you've done the courageous thing, you went for it. And then the doing of it gets easier. Totally. You know? Yeah. I think that's like something I've learned from my sort of place as a creative or an artist, right? Like once you put something out into the world, it's not 100 % yours anymore. And so you can actually shape it and mold it with a little bit of distance. And I think that's probably true of our like business babies also. Like once an idea is out there and people start responding to it, you know, you either see response to it where you're like, okay, cool.

21:24Like people want this. Like let's double down. Like let's do more. We're moving in the right direction. Or you start to see like a little bit of criticism of it. And sometimes you're like, I don't think they're right. You trust your own gut instinct. Or something pops up and you're like, ooh, I hadn't thought about that. Like that's interesting. Let's explore that. And I think one of the most magical things about issues, which I sort of did by accident, again, because I have no idea what I'm doing, is that so much of what we do is kind of in conversation with our community already. And that part's been really fulfilling.

21:51What is your relationship with customer feedback and the extent to which you take those notes or don't? Yeah, I think it's been different at different moments. So like when we first opened, we were taking lots of sort of feedback, lots of requests from people on the kinds of magazines they wanted us to carry. So people would come in and be like, oh, my God, I've been trying to get my hands on whatever this title is for so long. And we'd be like, yeah, OK, we'll add it to our list. And we would bring those things in. And just because someone wanted us to carry something didn't mean they were going to come in and buy it.