By Stacy Lee Kong

‎If you’ve read a Canadian magazine at any point in the past decade, you’ve likely seen Nicola Hamilton’s work. The designer has worked on Best Health, Xtra, enRoute, UofT Magazine, Chatelaine and The Grid, in addition to teaching, creating art and, most recently, opening Issues, an independent magazine store in downtown Toronto. Hamilton chatted with Friday Things about the (by now decades old) idea that print is dying, the process of starting a brick-and-mortar retail business at the height of the pandemic and what she sees for the future of media.

What made you decide that you were going to open a store?

I wanted to see it exist in Canada, specifically Toronto. That’s the short answer. I’ve worked in this industry for 10 years making magazines, so I'm tapped into the independent magazine scene internationally because they're the coolest places for inspiration. And, I find that people that take the risk of making the thing, who really indulge in the print magazine-making process, just so fascinating. So, when I travel, I seek out those titles and those magazine stores because I want to flip through things physically in real life. But we haven't had a store like that in Toronto, maybe ever. The independent scene didn't exist in the same way 10 years ago when we did have magazine stores all over the place, right?

Were you thinking of any particular stores when you were conceptualizing Issues?

Yeah, definitely. I love Under the Cover in Lisbon; I think they do such an incredible job in a tiny, tiny space. Casa Magazines in New York, which is an institution—I aspire to have that kind of energy and to exist for that amount of time and to just love it as much as they love it. MagCulture in London, England is definitely the one that has had the most influence on me, both because the shop is amazing and because it is so ingrained in the independent magazine scene. The founder, Jeremy Leslie, and I have spent time together a couple of times, and I called him really early in this process and asked for all of his wisdom, which he gave me openly. That was really incredible.

I feel like a store devoted to independent magazines is the kind of thing media people will talk about forever, but not necessarily take that step and actually make happen, so I'm very curious: what made you say, ‘Okay, I'm gonna do this’?

I don't know, besides the fact that I am a doer. The second I speak it out loud or tell someone I respect that I'm going to do this thing, I must. One of the biggest things for me was that I expected someone else would do it. And, I think we all spent some time during the pandemic thinking about what it was we wanted to do with our days. Not what we had to do with our days or what we'd been doing, but what we actually wanted to do, and the idea of building a community rooted around print journalism objects that I love so much just made me happy. I felt really fuzzy inside thinking about that.

And I guess one of the other things that I haven't talked about so much is I teach editorial design at George Brown College and Humber College, and trying to get students to go look at magazines was really hard because there wasn't anywhere they could go to find that inspiration. And I started noticing how they were looking at the exact same six titles because they were all going to Indigo.

One of the most exciting things about opening a physical space was the idea of packaging and magazine team collaboration. The industry is so fragmented, but I don't encounter many people in magazine land that I don't adore having a conversation with and having a clubhouse for the illustrators, photographers, designers and writers to come together is not something I've ever really experienced. The one time those folks get together is what? The Magazine Awards? Maybe? So, that part has been so fun. Some of the conversations we've been overhearing in the shop are the things that I missed about the water cooler at Rogers.

Wait, what are you overhearing?

For me, it's moments when a younger illustrator gets to encounter an illustrator they really, really look up to. Those moments are so fun. Or when somebody comes in looking for research on a project, we can feed into that. I think about being in a large publishing office, and you're trying to figure something out while you're making a coffee in the kitchen and you're talking to somebody from a different magazine who can feed in an idea that wouldn't have occurred to the team actually working on it.

That is my favorite thing, and what I miss most about working in an office. The hard thing about freelancing is that I don't get to have those random conversations. And, I'm proud of what I do, but I know it'd be so much better if I could just chat with somebody occasionally because I think vibing off of one another like that just elevates everything.

Yeah! And it makes us excited to do that thing we do, right? I think over the past few years, or for as long as print’s been ‘dying,’ it's been hard. It's getting harder. We're asked to do more with less, and we're pretty pessimistic about it. And we sort of feed into each other's pessimism. But at the end of the day, what we do is pretty fucking cool.

When did you first get the idea for Issues?

You know the place where you put the special ideas? Like, ‘Oh, this would be so fun, but I don't know that I could pull it off. I don't know if it makes sense. I don't know if it would work.’ The ones you’re sort of scared to say out loud? It was one of those ideas for about five years. I would joke about it or say, ‘How cool would it be if someone else did this?’ Then, in April 2020, I was like, ‘I'm gonna do this.’ And I emailed Jeremy Leslie and magCulture immediately because I knew if I was going to do it, I needed to do it right away. I had to start, or I’d miss the moment, get distracted, or something else would take precedence, and I wouldn’t follow through. We opened in July of 2020, so it took about 14 months of active work.

I have no insight at all into what it takes to open a store, so I'm very curious about what that active work entails. Like, what's the process of making a store?

For me, a good chunk of that process was trying to verify the business model because I knew nothing about retail either. It was me trying to figure out how you actually bring product in. How do you price things? What does the magazine retail landscape actually look like?

Sidebar, it sucks. Canada is worse than anywhere else. It's awful. I actually went through Futurpreneur’s business plan-making program. You get funding through them, and they have you work with a mentor who checks that your business plan is feasible, makes sense, and can give you some insight, which was helpful for me to validate my thinking. But it was also super challenging because the mentors are middle-aged white guys in suits who don't quite get it. They were like, ‘This is probably not a good idea,’ and I was like, ‘I don't care.’ That was probably eight months of trying to poke away at it, asking questions, talking to as many international magazine retailers as I could, talking to folks that have done it here, talking to distributors to figure out how to actually bring those things in. It was the research phase, I guess.

Then, once my business plan was given the green light, that's when it got fun but also terrifying because that’s when you have to start spending money. I had to start looking for a space, but the fact that there have been so many cannabis stores in Toronto means for all of the spaces under 1,200 square feet, the rent was really high. I think I started looking at spaces in August 2021, and we didn't sign at least until March. I was also very specific about the neighborhood I wanted to be in, and I was doing all of this part-time, so that was part of the reason, too. We got the space because Dave Bidini at the West End Phoenix was looking for space at the same time. He saw this place and sent me a text saying, ‘Hey, it's too small for me, but I think it might work for you.’

That’s so great, and I like that it plays into that sense of community you were talking about, too. Issues is not just selling magazines; it’s also clearly becoming a hub for media. And, it's nice that independent media in Toronto is helping one another out.

That’s my hope! I feel like there are so many people doing interesting independent media things who aren't exposed to the interesting media things other folks are doing because there is no place for us to go to access that info.

Exactly. Are you already thinking about what else Issues could do beyond sell magazines or what other functions the space could serve?

I'm still feeling my way through it. Step number one is figuring out how to get enough product in here on the regular. We’ve had moments where the store felt really empty because we sold way more than I anticipated. We're already doing field trips, so we've had groups of students in here, the entire team from Hambly & Woolley, a design studio on the east end, and Detox Market’s marketing team. We’re doing a couple of pop-ups. In the long-term, I want this place to host workshops. What those workshops are, I don't know yet.

‎I have big dreams—like, will Issues become a publisher one day? Will we be able to figure out how to support other independent projects and startups? That would be incredible. But I don't have the answer to that. I have many long-term aspirations, but I'm trying to take it one step at a time.

It’s cool to hear that you’re excited about what Issues could be, though, because, to your point about negativity and the constant conversation about print being dead, just being happy and excited about the state of media is kind of rare.

It's funny, that’s the thing that I'm asked in a lot of the conversations I’ve had about Issues. I was pretty negative about it for years because the people around me and above me were negative. Like, the environment gets like that and we commiserate with each other, and that cycle continues. But you know, for all of this ‘print is dying, media is disappearing,’ there are so many parts of the business that haven't actually changed. For years, working as an art director, my assumption was advertising sales weren’t working and that's why we couldn't move magazines. Now that I'm on the other side of it, I don't actually think it's an advertising or editorial problem at all. I think it's a retail distribution problem.

Tell me more about that!

So in Canada, we have three magazine distributors that I'm aware of: We have Magazines Canada, which distributes Canadian magazines within Canada. Great, wonderful. We have Disticore, which is a family-run operation out of Oshawa. Also pretty good. Then we have The News Group, or TNG, who has all the contracts for airports, Shoppers Drug Mart, grocery stores—all of the big places where newsstands still exist. They don't care about independent magazines. They're only looking for big contracts.

The interesting thing is that retail margins in Canada are half, if not less than half, of the traditional retail margin in the States or Europe. There, your retail margin is typically 40%. TNG’s percentage for retailers is 15%. So, that's really shitty. You know why there haven't been any interesting magazine retailers? Because you can't actually build a business on a $6 magazine with a 15% profit margin. I make more money bringing magazines in from Europe. I pay for shipping, pay the duties and still end up with a higher profit margin than what they would offer me.

And the reason they get away with it is that, at some point, there was a shift. I don't understand this history at all because I'm only a year in, but at some point, there was a shift towards [saying], if the magazines don't sell, at the off-sale date, the retailer can return the magazine for their money back. So, you're not encouraging [people to think of] magazines as design objects that you can keep around.

And it definitely encourages conservatism, too. Because if you know that if things don't sell, you're going have to refund the retailer, you're certainly not going to take any risks or do things that might be contentious. It's going to be the mass marketification of magazines all the time. So… where do you think Issues fits into the future of magazines?

I mean, I'm hoping that we become a bit of a catalyst, to be honest. I'm hoping that the exposure to what is happening in the independent media elsewhere in the world sparks inspiration for people here who have an idea for a magazine but haven’t realized that it's doable. I hope that we can be a bit of a connector for folks, like an art director who really wants to start something on their own but doesn't know where to start from a writing perspective, and we can connect them to a customer who really wants to do something themselves and comes at it from an editorial perspective.

‎I also have this theory that lack of exposure to these magazines is one of the reasons we believe that they’re dying. We are launching more magazines than are closing on a global scale every year, and seeing them sparks a different energy. To break that cycle of bad news, bad news, bad news, people have to take risks, right? So, to me, figuring out how to make Issues work [can] inspire somebody to take another publishing risk. My dream is in three years, I want to be carrying so many more Canadian-made independent magazines.

Issues is located at 1489 Dundas St. W. in downtown Toronto, and can also be found on Instagram and TikTok.

Thank you for reading this week’s Club Friday Q&A! Still looking for intersectional pop culture analysis? Here are a few ways to get more Friday:

💫 Subscribe to the (free) weekly newsletter, or join Club Friday, our paid membership program. Members get early access to Q&As with pop culture experts and Friday merch, as well as other fun perks.

💫 If you’d like to make a one-time donation toward the cost of creating Friday Things, you can donate through Ko-Fi.

💫 Follow Friday on social media. We’re on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and (occasionally) TikTok.