How a runway helped pay for a magazine

I planned those shows and kept Stella's accounts from a string of home offices, all at the mercy of highly priced internet. Stella ran for five years because I kept finding new ways to pay for it.

Last Monday, I wrote about the gap I could see from the shop floor in 2012. Today I'm opening the ledger underneath it, in shares rather than invoices, because a share travels further than a sum.

I'll start with the bill. For every K1 an issue cost me to make, about 30t went to the printer and the freight, with round numbers standing in for mine. Stella's writers, the photography, the design, and the fuel and postage for distributing to retailers shared the other 70t.

Then the cover price came back to me in smaller pieces. For every kina a reader paid at a retailer's counter, about 67t reached me, again rounded for illustration, and the retailer or the distributor kept the rest. The printer wanted money before the press ran, and retailers paid after the copies sold. A magazine living on its cover price lives on the printer's timetable, and I wanted Stella living on mine.

So, I gave Stella four ways to earn. Readers paid at the counter and subscribers paid Stella direct. I sold pages to advertisers and in 2014 I added RUNWAY.

RUNWAY doubled as Stella's birthday party each August, and I built it to earn three ways at once. Sponsors and partners put their names on the night, guests bought tickets, and designers paid to show their collections. I worked with talented curators and trained models, and we rehearsed to perfection, so the shows ran smoothly, whatever chaos was going on behind the curtain.

The creativity was what excited me most. RUNWAY gave young people a reason to picture a business in fashion and clothing, in hair and make-up, in photography and in sound design, and we folded dance, art and culture into the spectacle. For one night, Stella stepped off the page.

The market was new, and many designers arrived with the samples they showed and little stock behind them. Only a small number broke through to a label people could buy. I loved watching all of them try.

My marketing department was Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and back then it cost me only my time. I used them for four jobs. They gave me audience numbers to put in front of advertisers. They filled my seats and brought sponsors to RUNWAY. They moved copies off shelves and signed up subscribers. And they found me talent, because designers, models and contributors saw Stella online and came looking for me.

Recently, I went looking myself, at what publishers in bigger markets keep from the same cover price. Warners, a British printer and distributor, works its example for new publishers at 50 per cent of the cover price back to the publisher, with the other half split between the retailer, the wholesaler and the distributor.

In the United States, Howard White reported in 2017 that wholesalers took 40 to 45 per cent of the cover price, and 50 to 55 per cent once retailer display payments came in. What I took from both is that a publisher selling through a distributor keeps about half of each copy's price, or a little under. I kept about 67t in the kina, because I distributed most of Stella to retailers myself.

Frab's, an Italian shop that stocks independent magazines, went a step further in 2021, and I found it the most useful of the three. It costed a model independent issue from the cover price down. After tax, printing, contributors, marketing, packaging and administration, its publisher kept a margin of 5 per cent. That 5 per cent is the clearest picture I've found of why every stream beyond the counter mattered to me.

My audience was the asset, and RUNWAY was how I earned from it while the cover price stayed put. The magazine gave my event its credibility, and the event gave the magazine its breathing room. Each stream steadied the others, so I could ride out a slow advertising quarter or a late-paying retailer.

The one line the mix left for last was mine. I paid the printer first, everyone else second and myself last, and I called that commitment. I'd call it a founder's blind spot now.

What I'm still collecting is how other Pacific founders built their mix. If you ran a magazine, a festival, a market or a show out of Port Moresby, Suva or Apia and you paid for it several ways at once, send me the shape of it and I'll run it beside mine.

Stella taught me to read a business by counting its streams. I still run my own money that way.

The same contribution started at 25 and 40, and the gap that opens between them

Best

Amanda

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