“It’s nice to do a nice thing”

On Thursday evening last week a group of Stack subscribers spoke with Andrew Diprose, founder and creative director of Superstore Wilderness, the magazine we delivered as our selection in March this year.

Andrew is a serial magazine maker – he worked for years on UK Wired, ran the brilliant independent The Ride Journal along with his brother, and is now leading the way on Soho House magazine. So I started out by asking him why he’d decided to make yet another print magazine, and I loved hearing him speak about his love for print, his desire to make something big, and how the magazine ended up dictating what it was going to look like. (“The thing morphs and takes on a life of its own… The stuff I wanted to do just for cool design fun kept getting pushed out because it wasn’t right for this magazine.”)

I thought the most interesting bit, though, was when Andrew got onto the subject of money, explaining why it was important to him that he didn’t make a profit from the magazine. Partly it’s because he wanted to do something for charity, donating money to organisations that work in and around the edgelands covered in the issue. But partly it’s because it makes it easier to approach big-name photographers, asking them to provide pictures and explaining that they won’t get paid, but neither will he. Of course that means Andrew would never be able to run this magazine as a way to pay the bills, so instead he approaches it as a pure creative outlet, and something that allows him to do some good with his time.

I hope you’ll enjoy the video below, and of course we’d love to have you join us on a future Magazine Club conversation. It’s open to all our subscribers, so if you’re not already part of our independent magazine club, sign up and we’ll start sending you a different magazine every month, followed by an invitation to talk about it.

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