Nicole Burnett is the founder and publisher of Pretty Nostalgic, a British vintage lifestyle magazine. If you haven’t yet seen this gorgeous publication, take a look. It is a visual feast of British handmade and vintage loveliness, packed with delicious photos, illustrations and writing. Nicole has been on a fascinating journey to get to where she is now, bringing all the pieces together to put her in the perfect position to publish this magazine. Why not take a moment to read this and ask yourself what would YOUR magazine be about? ~ Beth
Nicole says, “I still know very little about the publishing world, but I think that’s a good thing. I am trying to break the mould of traditional magazine publishing and as I don’t know the rules it’s not a problem for me when I break them! I am loving it – I get to be creative, can follow through on whatever ideas I want and work with totally amazing people. Every 8 weeks we produce a beautiful magazine and as soon as it goes to print I get to start all over again – I have a very low boredom threshold, but will never tire of this!”
1. How are you leading a life ‘doing what you love’?
Looking back, I think this is what I should have been doing from the very beginning, but I couldn’t have done it without the experiences and people I have met over the past 20 years. Now I am doing the perfect job at the perfect time in my life. I have had a fascination with historical objects and design from an early age and the founding of Pretty Nostalgic was an evolution of many things coming together. It has allowed me to combine everything I enjoy doing and hopefully build a very successful brand and business from it too.
2. What did you do before this?
I studied History of Design and Art History in University before doing a Masters and training in museum curatorship. I specialised in social history and spent many years working in museums, but was eventually worn down by the fact that I was working within institutions such as local councils which didn’t appreciate the collections they had or the work museum staff put into them. I left the museum world and set myself up as Museum Consultant and freelance history teacher. I had always collected old books and ephemera, and then started collecting artefacts so that I could help excite primary children about the past and I really enjoyed teaching.
I also used to do reminiscencing workshops with the elderly. That was really rewarding and I learned more about social history and real people than I could ever have learned from books. Soon my collection of objects grew out of control!
I love going to bootsales and auctions. When you are trained to spot historical objects – they just seem to leap out at me from the most unusual places, I feel I have to give unloved and abandoned old things a home and I can’t resist a bargain and soon I needed another reason for collecting. Pretty Nostalgic was initially the name of my vintage dealing business. I organised vintage fairs called the Pretty Nostalgic Home Show where I lived, but instead of renting stalls to other dealers, I had so much stock that I would fill it all myself. Then I spotted a small stand for rent in my local antique centre and took a gamble there. Pretty Nostalgic became a little vintage stall, but within a few months of trading I had met Sarah, another dealer in the antique centre who specialised in painted furniture. My vintage china, glass and linens worked very nicely against her furniture and we had big ambitions. Within a few months we had moved into the largest shop in our town which had lain empty for over a year. We had almost 4000 square feet of retailsspace which we filled with stock. We also rented space to other dealers and artisan makers and opened a tearoom. It was a very busy time for us, but after 6 months of opening we both felt we could do more.
3. How did Pretty Nostalgic come about?
I was an avid magazine reader and had been for years, but was getting quite fed up of the lack of original content and the sort of features which I wanted to read. I was also distracted by the conflict between the editorial content of magazines and the advertising which seemed to be taking over. The final turning point came when I was sent a copy of a newly launched vintage magazine who wanted us to advertise with them. Inside British handmade artisan goods were being promoted alongside Chinese imports which were a fraction of the price. As I was working with artisan makers every day in my shop, I could see how hard it was for them to make a living. Even educated customers would comment on the price of their goods compared to the High Street, when I knew that the makers were still charging way less that they should have been in order to run a sustainable business.
After looking again through the magazines I had been reading I realised that this was the case everywhere and it gave us the push to start a magazine of our own. Pretty Nostalgic was reborn as a magazine inspired by vintage living and which only featured or promoted British made goods or genuine vintage. I worked at pulling it together while Sarah kept the shop running, which helped raised the funds to get us to print. We started our own publishing business, wrote and published a book and published the first issue of the magazine all in 6 months – we had no time to stop and think. After the third issue of the magazine was printed Sarah decided she wanted to concentrate on the shop and not the magazine and so we split the businesses and I have been running it alone since September 2012.
4. Why do you do what you do?
I think I have done exactly what I have wanted to do – or rather what I enjoy doing – all my life. I have never seen the point of just working for money and having my own magazine is the perfect way to keep me entertained. I am terrible when I am bored or when I don’t have enough to do and I am very bad at relaxing. I always have loads of ideas, love researching, writing, styling and collecting objects together for photo shoots and I also love meeting people and finding out what gets them excited. Pretty Nostalgic is a home and lifestyle magazine which is inspired by the past just as I am and it aims to encourage creative and sustainable lifestyles, which is how I really try to live too.
5. What challenges did you have to overcome when establishing the magazine?
Oh lots – I knew nothing about writing a magazine or publishing – the nearest I had done was putting on museum exhibitions, so basically I see it as a 2-dimensional museum rather than a magazine. Rather than following the rules I just do what I want. I found a wonderful team who could make it look and read as I think it should, but I also wanted them to have a strong connection and input to it to. I have a great printer who helps work though practical issues. The magazine team and everything we have done has come together though serendipity and chance meetings which has worked out brilliantly.
I have tried to stay focused on what I want the magazine to be rather than looking at what other magazines are doing. There are many elements to running a business which I find really boring and they are my greatest challenge, I hate admin, filing and doing accounts and while I am coping, I don’t enjoy it at all but someone has to do it. I just have to make sure that I have enough fun and creative things to do too. Income generation is also a challenge for us and it is a problem of my own making as I decided that Pretty Nostalgic would only ever feature and promote new goods that were made in Great Britain or those which were genuinely antique, vintage or upcycled. As a result I effectively ruled out any revenue from many of the firms which advertise in magazines, leaving only the small businesses with no advertising budgets. We have gotten around that by not having traditional advertising, but instead having a directory which British companies join for a year. This means we can help promote them and work with them to help their business to grow.
We are very interactive and co-operative, and work alongside our contributors and advertisers. We really feel that we are producing an artisan product too, but instead of it being a cushion or a bag, it is a magazine.
6. Pretty Nostalgic is gorgeous to look at, read and hold in your hands. How did you decide on the aesthetic and branding you wanted?
I wanted a magazine which people wouldn’t want to toss aside after a quick glance through. I wanted something more substantial and more of a book than a magazine. If I was going to put such a huge amount of time, effort and money into printing a magazine I wanted it to look good and be something worth collecting and referring to.
I wanted the magazine to be as environmentally responsible as possible so we print onto thick uncoated forest friendly paper in vegetable inks, which accounts for the lovely smell of Pretty Nostalgic which readers always comment on. The size of the magazine was worked out with our printer, it is 24cm x 24cm and these dimensions fit perfectly onto a roll of paper so there is no waste whichever way around the pages are printed.
We wanted to help support traditional printing techniques and needed the quality of print to be the best it can be, so we are litho printed rather than digitally printed. The magazine is then ‘perfect bound’ rather than stapled, so it should look good for longer. The quality of design is vital for me and I don’t like the stark uncluttered look of many independent magazines. I like detail and colour so my designers are told to be as creative as they like but to avoid white/blank space as much as possible.
Every image in the magazine is either produced in-house or commissioned by us from a designer/illustrator or photographer and I will not allow the use of photo library images in any of our features. I love to use images from my own picture archive within the magazine and we take every opportunity to cram in details and embellishment for our features. None of our features are designed with standard templates as they are in other magazines. Instead they are each designed as stand alone artworks in their own right.
My team are amazing at coming up with new ideas on how to illustrate a feature, and they make and sew many of the page layouts themselves and then photograph them rather than designing the pages with computer graphics. I don’t think many readers realise how much time and effort goes into each page, but we do, and for us it’ what makes Pretty Nostalgic special. I think our attention to detail is paying off as almost everyone who subscribes then goes on to order all the back issues of the magazine so they can collect the full set. That is just lovely.
7. Creating a regular magazine means you constantly need to find new content and ideas. Where do you turn for inspiration?
Finding great content is absolutely no problem at all. The whole team is bursting with ideas and often we feel frustrated that we can’t do them all at once. We work very closely with our subscribers and readers and they give us lots of inspiration. We go out and about and meet people at fairs and there are passionate people all over the place who are doing amazing things. I am not interested in off-the-peg articles written by journalists or overblown press releases from PR companies. I want to dig a bit deeper and feature the people who wouldn’t think they should be in a magazine – those who are being creative by doing what they love to do. They are the people I want writing in the magazine.
We can help them tell their story if they are not confident writers, but no matter how good a writer you are if you are not totally enthused (obsessed?) by what you are writing then it just isn’t going to work – readers can smell a fake.
For more factual content, I use my archive of vintage and antique books which I have been collecting for over 20 years. I have thousands of old cookery books, household management books and books on all sorts of other subjects. Books fill my house and I love sharing pearls of wisdom and snippets of life from the past. Pretty Nostalgic is about recapturing the spirit of the past, of strong communities, self sufficiency and a pride in a job well done. My archive can provide many features well into the future, and of course I am always adding to it as I will always be a collector and a researcher at heart. Passing on what I discover is so rewarding.
8. How have you extended the brand beyond the printed magazine, and what else are you planning?
I see Pretty Nostalgic as far more than a magazine. I want it to be a huge brand – but it has to work to very strict principles. I believe in total fairness and transparency with everyone we work with and see no reason why a successful business can’t be run with a strong moral code.
Pretty Nostalgic is about creating a like-minded community. We have written a pledge which explains what we stand for. This is based on our core beliefs that we encourage others to follow. The heart of the pledge is to ‘Spend wisely, waste less and appreciate more’. We have to set an example by living in a socially responsible and sustainable way too.
Our first Pretty Nostalgic Event called the Gathering is on October 26 (this Sunday) near Bristol, in the UK. It is a chance for makers to sell their wares, but more importantly to meet customers and show them what they really do. We have demonstrations, skill sharing sessions, talks and performances. It will be an opportunity for a whole variety of like minded people with different passions and skills to get together and show what they do. I am looking forward to a summer event too and hopefully taking the idea all over the country. I also am looking at expanding our printed product range into new bookazines, books and stationery – so many ideas and not enough time!
9. What aspect of the magazine are you most proud of?
I am so proud of the quality of the content in Pretty Nostalgic. My team create such well researched, well written features, find the best people the work with and then make it look beautiful. Just flicking though each issue of the magazine gives me enormous pleasure as even at first glance it looks totally different to any other magazine out there. Each new issue of Pretty Nostalgic looks totally different from the last.
10. What does success mean to you?
I know it sounds like a cliche but I really am not motivated by money. Having said that I would like Pretty Nostalgic to be counted as a ‘successful’ magazine. I would like people to appreciate it for what it is and I would really like it to give pleasure, to inspire people to look at life differently and make the most of what they have. I hope it gives people confidence to live the way they want rather than the way we are constantly being brainwashed to be.
If you would like to find out more about Nicole and Pretty Nostalgic you can visit the website and follow on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
GIVEAWAY
PRIZE: A copy of the Nov/Dec 2013 issue of Pretty Nostalgic, shipped anywhere in the world – there are TEN prizes available!
TO ENTER: Answer this question in the comments below: “What is your best tip for spending wisely, wasting less or appreciate more?” Please be sure to include your full name and country in your comment.
DEADLINE: This giveaway will close at 5pm GMT on Tuesday 29 October 2013. Any comments left after then will not be counted. THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. THANK YOU TO ALL WHO ENTERED. THE WINNERS HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED HERE.
THE SMALL PRINT: There will ten individual winners who will be chosen from the entries after the deadline, and announced on this blog shortly afterward. The competition is open to anyone over 18 anywhere in the world. There is no cash alternative. Our decision on the winner is final and no correspondence will be entered into. By entering you agree for your email address to be added to the mailing list of Do What You Love but you can unsubscribe at any time.
