Kaye Symington- Head of Marketing- Newspaper Club

Welcome to the latest episode of Inspiring Futures. My guest today is Kay Simington, who is the head of marketing for the newspaper club. Welcome to the pod. Thanks, Ed.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, like your little job, your head marketing, what's newspaper club to those who never heard of it. Well, where do I start? Well, about me, I've been uh in marketing for about uh 20 years now. It's been a long journey.

I've um always worked at the scrappier end of stuff with smaller teams, always kind of uh pushing things forward, working across every single area of the marketing team. So partnerships, content, social, you name it. Um and newspaper club are a really wonderful company that I had the joy of working with in 2018 and have come back to now because I love them so much. Um we print newspapers, it's kind of as simple as that, but the bigger mission, I suppose, is to keep this medium alive and make it as easy as possible for anyone to make a newspaper wherever they are in the world.

That sounds great, very clear, very clear and straightforward. So all the people who follow trends and call themselves trans experts talking about um, oh, now is the rise of analog with AI and digital, but newspaper clubs have been going for a while, right? Yeah, absolutely. We've been going since 2009, and it's we always laugh because we keep hearing these conversations.

So when I started, I got really excited when everyone was saying 2026 year of analogue. And the old people that have been around in our team for a lot longer were about like, yeah, you know, we've heard this before, maybe every two years or so it kind of comes back around. But I mean, it's just it's it's one of those really interesting things. I think newsprint in particular has just such a lovely feel about it.

It doesn't, it's not necessarily necessarily nostalgia, because I don't think a lot of people have had newspapers in their life and the people that were printing for our younger audience as well. So it's not like they grew up with newsprint, it's that newsprint itself is inherently special and a really interesting medium to play with. I think that's the reason that people are kind of coming to it. I was gonna say more so, but you know, it's kind of been consistent.

Yeah. So um do you have you found is have you have you do you keep growing? Is it is it peak newspaper? Have we reached peak newspaper or is peak newspaper around the corner?

I I don't know if there's is it is a peak newspaper. Yes, we are continuing to grow year on year. We find new audiences that want to print with us. And I think the reason that there isn't like a point where it stops is that it's such a versatile medium.

Like we print for so many different people, like you know, from big brands to um small companies to creative agencies to um you know mum and pop stores to massive subscription businesses, and then also to people that are just like printing things for their wedding or printing things for their birthdays. You know, it feels like just before we go into the deep world, let's explain to the uninitiated who don't know what a newspaper is, what a newspaper is, and what people actually print.

So there's some very specific, there's some very specific criteria that describe a newspaper, right? It has to start. Yeah, I would say so. Like I think it's sort of if you were coming to it completely fresh, it's basically a big folded sheet of paper, right?

That's the minimum requirement that you need. Is like a it can be different sizes, but at the end of it, it's a big piece of paper folded in half and it's got writing and pictures on it. And really, what newspaper club prints it kind of pushes the boundaries of what newspapers are. I think in traditionally, newspapers are a masthead at the top, they are information, it's got lots of writing on it, it might have the occasional picture to break it up, it's got subheaders, it's had a big editorial team behind it.

Like that's kind of traditionally what newspapers are. But what we print is yes, we have some of that, but then we also might have some people that have printed like a full page of just one big image in the cover. Um, it might have posters in the middle, it might um not have any writing at all, or it can be really dense and packed with lots of data and knowledge and people using it for pull-outs at events and conferences and stuff like that. So, really, we've even had colouring books, and um, you know, one of our biggest companies that we work with at the moment is called Sun Sunday Club, and they print just the puzzles from a newspaper.

You know, it's just like it's so vast. Um I hope that explains what a newspaper is. I don't know if it does, it's quite a funny thing. But then again, we got there's a certain some certain things like um paper.

Right. Yeah, so we got some paper types that qualify as news newsprint. Is that what it's called technically? Newsprint?

Yeah, newsprint. Which tends to be a certain type of paper, right? It's a certain type of paper, it's a thinner type of paper. We tend to live in the sort of 52 GSM world of paper, um, but we print lots of different kinds.

We wanted to make sure that our newspaper was recycled, so that changes how newsprint looks. So we have different things. All our newspaper newsprint is recyclable, but only one of it is recycled because when you recycle paper, it gets brighter, it gets whiter. You know, it's got it's had a process put on it.

Um, and so that's our ATGSM. So that's feels really different, it's got a higher density to it than the sort of typical 55. You can kind of see the split. And then and then printing it, how you print how you print on newsprint.

So we pr we have two different types of printers in our our company. We print digitally for smaller orders, because we wanted to make sure that, like we're saying, anyone can print a newspaper. So we print from one copy to thousands and thousands of copies. If you're printing these smaller ones, like one to a thousand, we can print it in our digital printers.

Um, they're like kind of those high quality printers that you would kind of typically see in a sort of big printing situation, but then we have our web offset press, which is a beauty, and it fills up honestly, it's the the entire size of a warehouse. I wasn't hadn't really experienced the world of large printers before I had started a newspaper club, and I was blown away by the size of this uh big printing press. It's huge, you know. It's like what you would see in the films where you get the paper goes in, it flies across the ceiling, it's getting printed, and then it comes out all hanging up, like it is that sort of um quite uh uh uh uh imposing tool experience.

Yeah, it's a lot like it's very mechanical. Yeah, and wherever you look in it, it's doing something different. And so like a thousand newspapers come off the press in a minute, so it's fast, yeah. Like it's really fast, so you can see, and there will always be someone like tuning the ink, someone packing up at the other end.

You know, there's a lot of people involved in that process as well, which is really nice. So, um, with that, you get a better quality or a different quality? How did you describe so I would say it's different, the it just really depends on what you're looking for. Digital printers are crisper, the traditional printers are not as crisp, I would say, but they come with this really lovely, like slightly different experience, like the edges of the paper.

You can see where the the tools have clamped it. There's a little bit like a little bit like analogue film and uh yes, that's exactly it, yeah. Yes, and it's got like you know, it's got like little holes in it, it's the the edges of the paper serrated where it's been cut, it's got like a whole other kind of warmth to it, but and then the digital printers are just like kind of crisper, they're really it's much better maybe for photography, although we've printed a ton of photography traditionally, but it just has a slightly different feel to it, different texture, a different tone.

Um, so what we've done is because it is different, is that we wanted to make sure that everyone can see what it's going to look like before they're like before they say even think about what they're designing. So we do these, we have sample packs that are full sample packs, so you can see every paper type, how the ink looks, all the different colours, how they look with the different printing techniques on the different paper, all these sorts of things. And I think that's like the key to just making it as simple as possible for you to visualize it because you know we're speaking in the abstract right now, like there's no visuals here.

So and it's just really important to kind of get them in people's hands. So, how how does that how does that actually work? How how does it you they they have to make they make an order for a sample pack? Or yeah, it's super simple.

Just go to the website and just click on our free samples button, fill out your details, and we'll send it out to you. There's no obligation, it's just it's just free. So that's part of your that's kind of part of your marketing, in a way, right? It is, it's a massive part of our marketing.

I think it's it's really important. It's like probably the backbone of everything that we do is getting these samples out into people's hands. Yeah. Um, so do do you how do you think about um the audience?

Because there's a bit we're gonna talk about this for probably in the rest of the podcast. The the sort of um earlier this week earlier this week, I was uh I was visiting cannabis stores in New York because it's the legal, it's the biggest legal market in the world. Yeah, and uh I was like the people who uh who are the advisors are called bud tenders. Oh really?

Yeah, like a bartender nice, right? Right, exactly. Yeah, and I was asking them um what percentage of people know what they want, like and they come in and they know what they want, and what percentage, you know. So I think it's the same with like newspapers, like what percentage of people are first timers?

They've never made a newspaper before, and what people are repeats, what percentage are repeats, would you say roughly? Oh I think it varies between it's like kind of in the 50-50. Oh really? So we get that's amazing.

It is, it's like we get a lot of people coming back, and I think what we've seen is that people are kind of coming in, they might do a smaller order, so they might print in our digital presses initially, do a smaller thing, then come back and print on the trad press. What because that's in your thousands. So it kind of gives them they've seen it, they've tried it out, they've they've given it to other customers. They're comfortable with the yeah, they they're familiar with us, they know how how like high quality everything is, and they're just like, right, okay, I can make the investment into it.

So we have a lot of returning customers, but then all we're just constantly you know looking out for new people to come and print with us. So that's like we try and balance everything out with what we do with our marketing. So is search important? Search is really important, yeah, AI search is really important.

Oh yeah, exactly. You've seen that already. Yeah, we've seen that already. You know, a lot of people we have this little form in our samples pack um where people fill out and it they just say they could say don't want to tell you, but most people tell us where they've heard from us, and there'll be like Claude's coming up a lot now, Chat GPT.

Um, we're seeing that more really in the last kind of three months this year, really. Yeah, and we've also paid social is still really important for us. Again, I think what we do is so visual, it every every part of it so getting the look and feel right for those paid social ads is still really, really important to us. We really, really put forward an importance on storytelling.

It's kind of feels obvious, but like making sure that we're telling our customers stories because they're so varied, like taking it back to what's at the heart of why do people want to print stuff, and really it's it's a celebration, really. Whether it's maybe making films, right? We did we talked last time and you said you didn't right. So you have these sort of user telling people who people who've made newspapers who kind of somewhat surprising, you know, because then seem a little non-traditional talking about how they made the newspapers.

That's right, is that right? Yeah, that's exactly exactly. It's fine. So what what we've always done, we've always done this in a lower scale, but this year we decided actually we're going to make films, and they're trying we're trying to have they're almost like little mini documentaries where we go, we interview a customer.

The one that we did recently with was with um Ronan, who's the creative director of a brand called Selassie. She um opened London Fashion Week this year. She's been printing with us for the last I feel like it's two to three years. Um, an incredible woman who um really kindly invited us into her home and and let us kind of film with her for the day, talking about um her inspiration behind her collection, but and how that transpires into newsprint, all the work that she's done in order to build the story that goes into that newspaper into the collection, and then thus the whole experience for her audience when they came to her show.

Um is really good, it's really nice. Um, that's our we've got a couple of new members in our social team, so that's nice to you gonna make more of these films. Oh, definitely, definitely for nothing, like you know, it's just I think we all know video and social is still really important, and I think having our customers tell our stories always going to be vital. I think we can say how brilliant our newspapers are all day, every day.

But if someone comes along and says, I love this and I've been printing with you for years, and the experience is great, my customers love it, you know, that's much more powerful. Yeah, is that something you see, like community on social? Oh, yeah, definitely. Like we were having a conversation with someone who I'm trying to we were kind of trying to get them to be a partner for us.

So we we do a lot of partnership work, that is another big part of our brand. Um, we kind of have three or four partnerships a year, it's something that we just started doing last year. And we worked with Super Mundane, we worked with um Johnny Mowitt, who's a graphic designer here in Glasgow, we worked with um Raisa Pardini, who's a big type designer, and just asked them, gave them an open brief, said, Here's here we'd like to give you this print credit. What would you like to make with it?

And that's like a blank canvas, a blank canvas canvas. So one was a one was a type designer. Type designer, graphic designer, um sort of more of an illustrator, and then a small shop. Um, and then this year we've got more lined up in that similar vein.

I think they are graphic designers are like the the core of our audience, it's because generally, you know, they'll be involved in the process of the newspaper at some point, whether they're the people that suggest the that newspaper, they're going to be designing a newspaper, you know, that sort of thing. Like they're still like the core audience that how much how much is how much of that has changed? Like, you know, Canva's whole mission is to sort of democratize design. Well, do you know what's quite interesting is how many graphic designers are using Canva.

That's what we've seen. Yeah, we were really surprised. So about I think two, three years ago. Um, I'll probably be wrong in that, but uh before my time, um, newspaper club used to have this um tool called Arthur that lives on our site.

Um, and it was so handmade, it was quite old, um, and we had all these templates on it. People loved it, but it just it it didn't work. Well, luckily, Canva came along just at the time where that was just like we just we're just gonna be developing it forever. But Canva came along, we shut that down and then set everything over to our Canva templates, and it's been so fascinating to see who uses them.

And when you see them pop up, people might use the template as the basis for their design, or they take like little bits of it and then develop it further into something else. You can still spot that it's ours, you're like, Oh, that line there, that's definitely came from our template. But um, like today I spotted one from a school who was printing a student-led newspaper, and they had made like an arts and music newspaper, and it was based on our uh vintage template, and it's really nice to kind of see that like not in I think in our minds we thought it would be more the people who are celebrating birthdays or celebrating um weddings that would be used in these templates, but it's really is everyone.

So, I mean that accessibility and the sort of barrier coming down, basically saying you know, you don't need to be a graphic designer, you know, it obviously helps. It does help. It does help, but I think there's also like a an aesthetic thing that is important to some people that is maybe not important to every audience. Yeah, um, you know, and we care a huge amount about it, but there's some audiences that just want to get a message out there, and actually just having a big bit of text on a bit of paper is enough for them.

Um so I think it's quite interesting to see that. I think um so we we can see all our orders or or even just PDFs that have been uploaded that are ready to go to order, and it's just every single day the variety is interesting. So um do you do you think of things like awards? Is that like something you've ever thought of, or is it just too overwhelming?

Uh I'd love to. Like I would be lying if I said that we hadn't thought about it. We thought actually about um applying for one for a customer service team because I feel like they are just the backbone of our business. They every newspaper goes through them, they're all art school graduates, so they know how design works, they make sure that everything looks good before it goes to print.

They're like without them, we'd be nothing, like they're just amazing. And so I was trying to apply for award for them at the end of the last year, but we just don't have time, like they're so intense to fill out the forms and everything like that. And um, I was just like, okay, this year we'll do it. What about what about what about um newspaper of the year?

As in Oh, like us running our own yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like a like your own maybe. Yeah, like the Oscars of Newspaper like the Oscars of Newspaper Club.

Oh, yeah, I'd love to do that. Well, I run um in my spare time laugh at spare time. You have to um I run Glasgow Print Fair. Um, interesting.

What's that? What's that? It's uh Scotland's biggest mark like print market. So that means it's just people selling um either Have you had a printed matter here in New York?

Yes, I'm dying to go. So this is Glasgow, you run Glasgow's. This is Glasgow's equivalent, right? I feel terrible even saying that.

But yeah, so but what we do is we have an open application process for that. Usually every year we get about 300 applications, and me and my co-founder Jane, who I run it with, uh I've just said it takes us days to go through them all. So the actual idea of opening up the newspaper events does fill me with fear. Uh yeah, newspaper awards fills me with fear a little bit because it's just such an intense process, but it is a great one.

I do like it. So you're talking about um when you do the print show, it's like artists and publishers and different Yeah, that's right. We get some like apparel in there, you know, like any if it's pretty zine publishers and stuff like that. Yeah, zines, um like a lot of kind of just straightforward artists as well, that are kind of like kind of low like in print, there's kind of like two different there's like modern stuff that's kind of been designed, and then it happens to be printed, and then there's like the the sort of master printmakers, like the people that are doing like in-depth lithograph printing or woodworking.

Detailed artistic, yeah. It takes like one print, like the whole process of creating the the um my goodness, creating the the actual design itself takes months, and then there's the peop there's people who are maybe like just kind of have designs that they print. So we have like a whole vast array of of people that kind of fit into that category that we kind of choose between. What about uh a newspaper like a Comic Con for newspaper?

Oh my god. Be great, wouldn't it? There's like a new there's a new event just opens in London. I think it was just last weekend, and it was um just food magazines.

Oh wow. And I'm just big enough they have enough food magazines that they could do they yeah. Well it was um mag culture. I don't know if you're aware of them.

There's a sh a store in London, but Jeremy Leslie, who runs that is like sort of like our beacon, he's like the the godfather of print magazines in the UK. And um he was just saying that his food section is just absolutely groaning, like it's like the thing that people are just kind of really interested in at the moment, and they're just publishing a lot of these sorts of um magazines. Yeah. So let's let's so let's talk about the the different um the types of newspapers, like the different use cases.

So you've got um we tried last time we were trying to break them down. You've got we didn't get we didn't get very far, but we got the sort of um you got the professional portfolio. Yeah, that's one group, kind of like the the graphic designers, the photographers, yeah. So we kind of try and break them down in a way that's like manageable because what actually happens when you start to scrape away the surface, they all blend into one another.

But our kind of main categories are you know our celebration customers who are weddings, birthdays, funerals, even you know, we've got kind of covered the whole spectrum of kind of life events, I suppose. And then that's it, birth, uh baby announcements, gender reveals, like we've run the whole gambit, every everything really I think that you can do in that sort of space we've printed. Um, and then then we've got our kind of creative agencies who we've touched on before. So that's people that are kind of like printing work for their clients, maybe they're doing impact reports, maybe they're PR agencies that are printing um like press books for their clients and stuff like that.

Um then we've got arts, which is quite a general broad stroke. So that's like photography, filmmakers, uh, art institutions, um, like takeaways for events and newsletter style updates. Anything to do with the arts. Anything to do with the arts we've printed for.

Um so it's like our kind of big audiences there are like uh an art gallery in Paris who wanted to do like an annual newspaper looking back at their year. So that'd be something that they send out maybe to their um sponsors. What's the other word? I want to say sponsors, and that's not right.

What do you do with patrons? Patrons or people on their mailing list, or yeah, exactly. Um we also printed for like an a symphony orchestra who wanted to send out again a newspaper to their members. Um, and then another big category for us is like education.

So art students are maybe printing portfolios, they're printing for their degree shows, they're maybe printing for group projects quite often. Um what we've seen, which was really cool, was there's this um I'm gonna now forget the name of it. Big institution in Switzerland who they did a group project, but what they did was they did a collaboration across fashion, photography, graphic design, and then they printed their newspapers. There was like a school, an art school when they did whatever.

Yeah, um, but yeah, so it's just really cool to see that sort of like collaboration and that kind of thread through like goes through most of the newspapers that we print. Is there some sort of collaboration in there? But then also universities print them to get like kind of like I want to say they're not like prospectuses, they're more like aimed right at students, and it's like come come to this university, it's really cool. We've here's all this groups that we've got.

So it's like a marketing. Yeah, like a marketing tool. So that's cool. And then our other, I mean, there's so many big groups, so these are kind of our top ones, and then fashion.

So look books for new collections, fashion week, like um, so this time of year is really busy for us because we've just come through all the big fashion weeks, and we're heading into the grad show season, lots of people getting all their projects lined up. So, yeah, it's it's fast, and that's just like the top five categories. Um, but what about so what do you think? Um digital email, CRM, it's so easy and it's free practically.

And now someone's making a decision that they're gonna do some. What do you think goes through that? What is it that they're thinking about that says I've got to make a newspaper? Yeah, you can you could see you can see the sort of more celebratory things as being okay, this is a special thing, we're getting married, we want something.

So I think there's two things. I think there's two things. One is that it's like there's a big rise in events at the moment. I think post-COVID things just people just wanted to come back, and so we're seeing more and more events kind of start up, and what newspapers are a really good giveaway for those putting kind of one-to-one like connections, and I think the way the world does at the moment, people just want to be together, like they want to share things, and I think brands are seeing that, they're printing things experience, they're kind of creating experiences now for their customers, which kind of ties into the next point, which is emails are really easy and they're really easy to abuse, and so think about how many emails you get in your inbox a day.

People are just so fed up of seeing so I'm not saying it's one thing or the other, like I don't think you should have an all analog marketing strategy or an all digital like digital marketing strategy. I think it's the blended approach, is always the best. But I think like we work with a photographer called Max Hempel, he runs an agency in LA, and he had spent years building his career. He did have a newsletter online, he used to send out emails all the time, and what he wanted to do was just try to be do different things and come up with different reasons to get in touch with people.

And one of the things he decided to do was to print a seasonal newsletter with his um updates to some of the photography work he'd done, a little bit about what he'd been up to, and then like a playlist and stuff. Like, and he had a bit of fun with it. So it was kind of like that newsletter, but in physical form, and he sent it out directly to creative directors he might want to work with, or um people who were on his mailing list already. He kind of used it as like a cold calling device, and he said that the response that he got from that was more than he had got from any emails that he'd sent.

He got like a new piece, new job for 50, like a $50,000 campaign. He had three or four referrals from it, like just that sort of thing of just breaking through the noise of online. That's where print is really, really helpful. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

And I mean, what about uh can can people break the rule is it possible to kind of break boundaries and do you how far can you push? That's what I love the most, is when people really break the boundaries. So there are limitations, there's things that we just cannot print, like content in the margins, because referring back to when we have print the the printer holds on to the newspaper at certain points, so you just can't print it. There's nothing there's no it's technically impossible.

It's technically impossible, cannot do that. But what we've seen are things like so obviously we have pagination limitations, so on our minis, for example, you can print between 16 and 64 pages. So if you want to do an 120-page mini, we can't we can't do it. But what um there's this great uh graphic designer called Kaija Stal.

She's based here in London, and she um consistently pushes the boundaries of what we can do with newsprint. So what she did was she wanted to print 120 mini, she got it unbound un unbound, so unstapled, and then put the two lots together and then put a big elastic band around it so it just doubled the the size to make it like a kind of big chunky pamphlet. And then um there's a photographer who has printed with us a lot called Jack Davison. He wanted to know him.

Yeah, well, about a year and a half ago, we got this like strange inquiry. Like, we wanted like 2,000 unstapled minis to come through, printed in the Chad press, and we're like, Oh, this is interesting. And we rarely know where things are going, we kind of have to work it out after they've gone out. We're like, what is this?

Absolutely fascinating, watching, waiting to find out what it was. And he took it and bound it in this beautiful higher um paper stock, higher quality paper stock, you know, that kind of very chunky you mean took the took the newspaper and bound uh the outbound. Yeah, yeah. And it was foil stamped on the front, and he just took what was like uh a kind of like his newsprint has this sort of like what's the word?

What's the opposite of ephemeral? Um like kind of like throwawayableness about it, like it's temporary a newspaper, it's designed to not last for that long, but then turning it into something that's like permanent, like elevated it into this like art book, which is just so cool to see, and it is stunning. I managed to get one, it's all sold out now, but I managed to get one. And then Kaija again.

Was it the what was it the project the A to Z project? Yeah, that's it. The kids the kids' book. Yeah, it's so cool.

It was so cool, and I can't imagine giving it to my kids. It's so dark, like it's really cool. Um then uh Kaija again printed tabloids and bound them with leather, and they're like 300 pound art books. Like, you know, there's there's not really much like we obviously didn't do the binding, but our print print the people that run our print uh printing press are always up for a challenge as well.

So I had um someone get in touch to say they were doing an exhibition at a hotel. Could we print banners for them on newsprint, like big long banners? And we were like, yeah, sure. Like generally, if if you ask, we'll try and work out.

Like, we're always happy to kind of do these little rogue projects to try and work out actually, is it possible? It's always fun to to see. The the the ink, the way the the the way the ink goes in the newsprint is like important like consideration, isn't it? Designers, um yeah, you need to be aware of like the ink quantities that you're using.

So, like a very, very dense, dark ink you need to be mindful of because it can smudge, and it's kind of so what we do is we always make sure that kind of our customers are aware again. That's why we have this amazing part of our service team. Yeah, the amp pack, but also the customer service team check the the levels of the colours that people have used, make sure that they aren't going to smudge, and if they are, they'll get back in touch with them and say, just so you know, this might increase the chance of this ink smudging.

Is that if you're okay with that, then we'll go ahead and print this. But just to make sure that they're aware, just because it'd be such a disappointing experience if that wasn't what you were kind of primed for. We've we've working so hard in our ink process. We even have a little computer gadget guy that's in there now.

It's just like this little robot fighting quite a bit. Oh, you are you're talking about um screen screws people's screens are not calibrated, so they don't so they don't see color right? Yeah. So we've got like a whole bunch of kind of new stuff that's come in that's just made everyone's lives a lot easier.

So it means we've reduced waste, we've reduced you know everything in that sort of area. What what percentage of triage, like the custom you said your customer service team, um what percentage do you think is triage like if you didn't have the customer service team would be end up as a mistake? I have no idea. I have no idea.

I don't think that much. I think people are pretty self-sustaining. Well, that's good. I think like there's but they do they are there, there is like a there are there as a safety net, right?

They're safety net, their safety net because it's but also you know, we're taking people quite often people who have not printed something before. Yeah, exactly. Taking them through a whole experience who where they they're not familiar with newsprint, they're not familiar with its quirks and and personality that the newsprint itself has. They're printing some for the first time, they're maybe investing money in print.

So, like, you know, having all these things to make people feel as safe and secure as possible, I think, is is vital. What other surprises have you found in the you talked about these really nice creative projects? But how often do you go, wow, they're making a news? So it's that something comes across and you go, I can't believe they're making a newspaper.

Do you notice that those ones that are like Yeah, yeah, I do notice. Kind of wild, just kind of wild cards. We have a few wild cards that print with us regularly, and I will not name them. But uh they uh there's just some really interesting projects that I think, oh my god, they've got a readership for that.

And you can see that on the front of it there's a cover price as well, so you know who's selling them and who's giving them away. You talking about like like interest interest groups, people have Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think.

Nah, I'm not gonna say that. The ones you can name. I can't say many. Oh, okay.

We can leave it, we can leave it. No, I think like you know what's really nice is I think that there's there's like I think there's only been one newspaper that we've ever said we're not gonna print that. Um we very, very rarely get involved in what's actually been printed. Yeah, that's interesting.

But what about just any like any just normal like accommodating any like normal situations? Normal stuff. Um although actually, this is this is totally I my mind's gone here, but and I don't even know if that's really the question. But like um there's this really amazing group called the Anarchist Gardeners Club.

That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Yeah, it's amazing. It is such a really interesting newspaper to read because it blows my mind to realize that there was things like there's only three seed companies in the world, so all your seeds come from the same place, like things like that, and you know, so I learn a lot from reading our newspapers, but then and they're a really cool small community-run organization, they sell their newspapers, the newspapers come back and give them money to run their clubs, yeah.

So that's the interesting thing. You got like you got like a little you know, I mean, there's it's another little snapshot at sort of this whole idea of what a community is, because this community the the newspapers being used as a as a communication tool, yeah, whether that's like family community, or whether that's a village, or whether it's a church, or whether it's a a gardening club, a gardening club exactly. And um, like we we mentioned, I mentioned earlier the Sunday Club, which is a subscription, and that's a community of people who kind of just want to be offline and they want to have that sort of like it's Sunday, I'm putting down my phone, I'm having a coffee, and I'm gonna do public.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I think that's that's huge. And one thing that we get asked quite a lot, and it's something that I think we we tried to do in the early days. Yeah, we tried to do an app called Paper Later, which was your subscriptions printed.

So if you were subscribed to it wasn't Substack, then I think it would be a a blog or or Twitter, and you could print those tweets on a on a newspaper and get it sent to you. That was like one of the when newspaper clubs started, that's kind of came out of that like London startup scene where people were kind of doing experimentation. Yeah, yeah, they were running a lot of blogs, yeah. It was like a way to way to aggregate, it was a way to aggregate content in a way that it was just so disposable.

So suddenly you'd have the opposite, which was like, I think I've got a permanent record. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Well, that's the very first newspaper we ever printed was a collection of people's like friends and family's blogs and tweets. Like that was what um Russell and Tom and all that made. That was what where the idea came from. They were like, What if we make something permanent from all of this?

And then they discovered actually this newspaper printing is actually really difficult to do for a normal person, and um, but they also found out that basically all these printing presses are sitting doing nothing during the day, and it's not until midnight when an editor sends over the final. But there's all this all this excess inventory uh capacity, yeah. That's when we guys step into. But now it's different.

Now it's different, yeah. That was their that was what we did for years and years and years. Um, but now we work exclusively with one printing press, which has really changed things a lot. It means that we can make improvements all the time.

We're working with them every single day. And really, I think about 80% of the stuff that they print now is newspaper club. I don't think they really do much in the way of other orders. Um they it means that you know our quality is consistent.

If there's any problems, we can fix it in one area. You're not trying to fix it. So much easier than managing a bunch of different devices. That sounds like a real nightmare that working out like who's got capacity and yeah, I I really pleased that I don't need to think about that now.

Yeah, no, I mean that's that's that's a that's a different world. Are you you are global, but you have global competitors. So I mentioned I printed a newspaper and I did it in with somebody in France. That's right.

Do who who did you no, don't say don't say, don't give them the air type. No, we of course we do, of course we do. Like if you think about it, but there's newspapers been printed all over the world for like the last what two centuries? It says as well as that.

Yeah, um so you know, I think it's great. I'm uh it makes me happy that people are printing newspapers. I don't care really where they're doing them. Obviously, I want them to print with us, that puts dinner on my kids' tables, but um yeah, I think the it yeah, there's there are competitors.

I think what we've tried to do is just make it as easy as possible so that there's like as little friction along the process as you possibly can. Um the elements of the customer journey, like you know, the sample pack through to like shipping costs. Yeah. Um yeah, exactly.

We try to make it as affordable as possible because um we also, you know, our US tariffs are all included in the price, you don't need to work it all out. It's all these like little things like that that I think is really helpful. Um I was gonna say, like, you know, we have those templates, we've got you know, all these little tools that are in place that just try and make that experience as as easy as possible. Um and I think that it's it's just yeah, it's like just making it as simple.

I don't know not really more I can say about it, but that's uh yeah for sure. But yeah, I think it's there's a there's a reason that there's competitors is that people want to print newspapers. Yeah. Do you see costs go do you see costs going up?

Is that just like Yeah, I think inevitably we've we're we're um our printing press are really great at like just foreseeing these things. So we've kind of like ordered in ink, we've ordered in our paper, we're kind of hunker ready to hunker down for more. Getting ahead of the curve. Yeah, so we're kind of we're okay.

So I think the biggest leap has been in delivery costs. I think you know, obviously fuel prices go up, delivery prices will go up. But so far, so good. It feels like it we've not had had that impact.

It's just making sure that people our our job, you know, in marketing is to make sure that people know that the prices that they're seeing is the prices that they're gonna get, and you know, like kind of still saying that you know it's not gonna go up, we're not gonna surprise you with an increase or something like that. Um and what do you see as your your biggest challenge as a somebody who's in charge of marketing? Biggest challenge is just for well specifically about in the team is like we just need more people in our team.

There's so much that we can do. Um because we are just kind of like so prior to half people. Was that prioritization? Yeah, but um I think that it's getting new people in, encouraging more people to print.

I think like I think the scary thing that happens when there's any sort of like world event is that people the first thing that kind of goes off of print people's radars is print because it feels like an extravagance. But actually, I think that what we can show is that it's it's actually not, it's like crucial marketing, um, and it really cuts through. The noise of a lot of other stuff, so kind of saying, you know, if you're going to do this, here's how you can do this, and that's what I'd really like to do.

More of is a bit more education about distribution and a bit more education about like getting the most out of your newspaper, that it's not just that one print moment and it's gone. That it's like we printed a newspaper for ourselves last year for the first time, and we did it kind of maybe a bit opposite. So we made exclusive content for the newspaper. Um, we launched it at a newspaper stand at Holburn Station in London.

We did billboards, it was part of like a kind of wider campaign. But then what we did is we took that content and we've used it as part of our marketing content in our calendar for the rest of the year. That's blog posts, emails, uh, partnerships, all that sort of stuff, all came from that newspaper. So kind of teaching people that it's not.

Explain explain that. Explain what you did exactly. So you you So we wrote the content exclusively for the newspaper, which is all about why newspapers are customers, yeah. It was our interviews with our customers and case studies top tips, yeah.

How to make a newspaper, why print is important. There's uh an interview with Trey Seals, who's uh type designer. We did a project with the American type design. Yeah, yeah.

He's amazing. He's amazing. And he did a collaboration. I'm taking us off.

Obviously, on a tangent, it's Friday afternoon. I'm taking you in a tangent, but like uh they uh we did a newspaper for an exhibition with them, but what they did was is kind of what inspired us is that they had used the the look and feel of the newspaper to inform what the actual exhibition would look like, so that then that that newspaper could travel and that so therefore the exhibition could travel. You didn't need a museum space to have that exhibition. You could be a small library in Tennessee, and that exhibition could come with you there just in the form of the newspaper, and it was this really powerful um breakdown of how typography and the civil rights movement in the US and and how they all kind of work together and where we are now with it all.

Yeah, I got I got something like that. There's a photographer called Matt Black, he did this thing called American Geography, it's about poverty, and um, it comes in a kit, it's actually really for schools, and you can take the pieces apart and put them on the wall. That's exactly it. Yeah, so same idea.

And so we love that concept of the newspaper of not just being something that exists as a newspaper, but as something that could be used, you know, as a poster to inform our social strategy for the next year. So that was like we designed the newspaper, we came up with all these like new ways of using our our fonts and our design and all our little elements into that, that then informed, you know, how our billboards looked, how our um email newsletter would be planned for the next six months, what our social content would look like, the partners that we set up for the photography in the newspaper.

That was with Super Mundane with a person that didn't. Oh, do you know you need to know Rob? He's great. He's uh he's a graphic designer here in the UK, he's a bit of an illustrator, he just has big, bold, like kind of word-based work quite a lot.

But he also writes, he's a poet, he does performances, like he's just one of the kindest, friendliest people I've ever had the joy of working with. Yeah, so so you made it how many how many newspapers do you print? These are all you're giving them away, right? You're giving this is away for free.

We printed, I believe, about 5,000. And these where are people where are people picking them up? There's a you said a newsstand in Holburn. A newsstand at Holborn.

We did uh so we also did um this is a sort of like hyper-local thing where we chose our top tech five cities in the UK. We made so we did a partnership with Birmingham Design Festival and we changed one of the interviews in the newspaper wherever it went. So if it was in Birmingham, we had an interview with Luke Tong, who's the director of Birmingham Design Festival, in Glasgow. We had an interview with the local graphic designer in Cardiff.

We had did it with the Printed Festival, which is like a sort of print fair, um, etc. etc. Like we kind of just changed it out. Yeah.

Um and so we sent them to these sort of big festivals, we sent them to co-working spaces, artists' workspaces. Um, we had the drop at Holborn, and then we obviously opened it up to any customers that wanted to get one. Um, and it's been great as a marketing material, it's just something that if I'm going to an event, I'll take a stack of newspapers along. Yeah, people get something they can take away.

Yeah, um, it's just it's really nice. Yeah, it seems like a it seems like such an obvious I mean you can sort of see it and also sort of uh some people always want something, especially in London, right? You're going, you're commuting around. Right.

Do you think it'll translate as well in um New York? I'd love to do that. New York it would, yeah. New York it would be great.

Um I would love to do a US edition this year, um, and bring it to New York at the end of like kind of fall time. I think that'd be cool. Yeah, yeah. You've got to think about like how you're gonna do it and just like is it gonna be New York?

Is it gonna be a US one? What's yeah? What about celebrities in News? Have you is that something that because you know I don't know, it's like influencers, um anyone do anyone, anyone doing getting involved in making their own newspapers in that scene?

The sort of two different areas we've seen celebrities kind of doing it for their brands. So like Ariana Grandi printed for REM Beauty, which is her beauty brand. We had um Stella McCartney, obviously for a fashion brand. Um who's the other one there?

Oh, that's terrible. Who's in uh the adventures? Scarlett Johansson printed for her beauty brand, and then um we also like Victoria Bacon, like kind of people that kind of have their own. It's interesting, beauty, like because beauty you always think of them being like they want the absolute like highest quality of photography, and right and that's because that's the joy of the ATGSM, honestly.

Really? You can get it, you can get it really high. You can get really, really, really high. And then the um we had a couple people print on our salmon, which is kind of like the Financial Times, it's like really old school, and that's just cute, right?

Because it's that kind of peachy, yeah, yeah. So I guess what they call it. Yeah, it's nice. Um, but then on another end of the scale, then we also have like um musical artists like um Olivia Rodrigo printed a newspaper for her fans and it was very fandom focused.

That's really cool. Interesting, and they gave it out at our concert in London. And we've just printed for Mumford and Sons, and it was lyrics, so people could hand them out at a listening party. Um we also printed for Jonas Brothers, like it's sort of people that are kind of very into their fandoms, which I think are is what's really keeping the music industry afloat, right?

It's like really intense musical fans, and and so these newspapers work really well in that sort of like fan era, like that sort of not DIY punk, but it's almost in there, and it's also got like that, it seems like you cared a bit, you you put a bit of care and attention. Yeah, yeah. You were saying earlier about you want to get people to the one of the things I think I heard you say was get more out of their newspaper when they're when they're at making them. And I was trying to work out what what I meant.

No, well, not what you meant, that's how you how you were thinking about it. Because to me, one of the things like we talked about the fact I made one, right? And of course I told you that, and you will not everyone knows I didn't make it with you, but the next ones I will. I know it will the next ones I will.

But I'm I was thinking I was just it's back to your point where you were talking about your own marketing plan, where you were going, we're making all this content, we're gonna do this, this, and this, we're there. The newspaper, it just it lends itself to thinking ahead. What's your next one gonna be? And if you do you know what I mean?

If you think if you think about like one, well, it maybe think about three. Yeah, yeah, that's so true. You know, think about it as a series, think about the longevity of it and how and how you can get people involved. One of the newspapers we printed recently, um for Lonely Hearts Club, I don't know if you've seen it.

Um it's uh like a dating site. It's just dating. But old school, back classifieds back of the newspaper dating, but the whole newspaper is that with some interviews about finding love and things, but on the whole, it's like looking for love. Is this for over fifties or is it for no young, young people?

I say young, 30s, it's young to me, right? Very young in my younger so it's like old school, classified, classified, looking for love. Come and meet me at such and such, or like uh I'm are you uh green eyed, dark haired, interested in um books. I don't know.

You got you got you see, you got you're sitting on a like a fascinating archive of of of culture. You're sitting, you're kind of you're seeing all this stuff, um um, all these little things that are happening that in in analog, like what you know, I know the trend hunters they all talk about analog, but you're in the sort of micro okay, we've we it it's analog, but these people are doing it. Actually, it's really fascinating. It's like what it's just it's uh the whole analogue thing is warmth, right?

And I I think I think that's like quite an abstract term, but it's human, it feels human, it feels like a human has made it. I know not necessarily off a big print and press has a human made it, but it feels like someone has thought about the design, it's not it's it's had space, right? Like design for a phone, you're so limited to your designer for something something in print, you've got like a bigger thing, and it's been designed specifically for their readers, it's not designed for like a general audience.

That newspaper's going to a specific person, it's not it's like that move away from like mass media to like one-on-one, yeah, what micro community like it's that shift that we're seeing, and that's really exciting. And I think that um I think when people say oh it's a return to analog, what we're seeing is a return for many people to become publishers, it's many people to become like producers of creative work rather than it being held in the hands of a few. Yeah, but also people wanting to connect and form those connections through newspapers in a way that is not digital, it's a very different means.

And I think it goes back, and I guess it really goes interesting because it sort of goes back to that event. Like I think things that blow my mind is I I live now right next to like the second largest park in New York, and it is inundated with birdwatches. Oh really? Yeah.

Oh, really? See, this is it, people are just looking for stuff that just takes them away from a screen. And I'm thinking bird watches, birdwatches are like 50 year olds, but they're not, they're like 20-year-olds. Yeah.

They're all 20-year-olds, and and uh I'm sure some of them are making newspapers. Yeah, well, I would personally really quite love to see a newspaper about Birdwatch, and I think that'd be pretty cool. That to me is like the cool angle for like a New York newspaper, is you go find the niche. You go find these people who could make newspapers, right?

And you do a newspaper story on them. Oh, that'd gladly. That sounds great. Yeah.

So you can help us plan the New York. I'd love to do that. Yeah, that'd be a really interesting project. Um, be totally on my street, and yeah, I think it'd be really that'd be really, really fun.

Oh, that'd be great. I love it. Brilliant, thank you so much. Thank you.

This was a great conversation. I could keep this going all day. Yeah, yeah. Um I'm gonna stop, I'm gonna stop recording.