With more of a whimper than a bang we quietly turned five years old last week. The main reason for the lack of fanfare (apart from our abiding modesty and humility, of course) was the fact that… well, it completely slipped our minds.
We know that five years doesn’t sound like much of a long time. And in the scheme of things of course, it’s not at all, but it is an important milestone for us.
You see, when we started out in early 2006, we figured that we’d either be dead broke or rolling around in cash Scrooge McDuck style by now… and while the reality is that while we’re personally erring toward the ‘broke’ end of the spectrum, between our six stores and our website, as a business we’re becoming more profitable with each and every day that passes.
Nope, we won’t be retiring to an island in the Caribbean any time soon but we will continue to be selling printed media for the foreseeable future.
You see, there’s one really important thing that we didn’t know five years ago: there are about 8,763,392,392,001 easier ways to make money than by selling magazines. The fact that we’ve made it this far at all is a testament to the incredible balancing act of tenacity, determination and blood, sweat and (a few) tears that have gone into the last half decade.
Along the way, there have been times where we’ve only had enough money in the bank to keep the lights on for another two or three days. Yet thanks to the the loyalty of our customers and patience of our investors, we’ve always managed to emerge from the precipice of each financial disaster stronger, healthier and more robust than before.
Five years ago Wooden Toy was still free, Frankie was a niche outsider title and all but the biggest nerds would have looked at you blankly if you talked about a ‘tablet device‘! Some magazines have come and gone, our Managing Director left the business, we opened 8 stores and closed two of them, we’ve been told on just about a weekly basis that print is dead, we opened up the 3rd Floor selling t-shirts and stationery (and realised that we suck at selling t-shirts), we opened up a Sydney store and we’ve got plenty more exciting projects in the works that we’ll let you all in on soon.
But enough navel gazing and reflection; we’ll save that for our ten year anniversary blog post. By then, of course, blogs will be totally redundant and we’ll be appearing before you like a holographic Princess Leia informing Obi-Wan Kenobi of the indignities being inflicted upon The Empire. Or maybe just beaming it directly to your brain… but whatever the case may be, we look forward to it.