The Journey of Starting, Running and Closing Down My Own Online Magazine
Channelling my inner Miranda Priestley, but make the fur faux
I’ve always loved magazines. In my early teens, I’d save my pocket money for the international magazine shop where I’d stock up on US teen mags like Seventeen, YM and Teen VOGUE. I’d pore over each page, reading them over and over, and carrying them everywhere with me until the pages started falling out. As I got older, I discovered Cosmopolitan and it became my Bible, until I graduated to the likes of ELLE. Magazines were a gateway to a glamorous world that I, an awkward bespectacled teenager in a snowy suburb, could only fantasise about. But at the same time, they were somehow relatable: they spoke of hardships and joys in a way that I found myself nodding along to.
Working at a magazine was a dream I’d harboured years before Meryl Streep tossed her coat at Anne Hathaway’s head in The Devil Wears Prada. Seeing my own words - my name! - on the pages of Cosmopolitan was so delirious of a vision that it made my head spin. And I made that dream come true, again and again, after I won a writing competition ran by the Swedish iteration of Cosmo (which has now closed down). “We read your application and thought, ‘she’s almost too good,’ said the Features Editor when she called me with the good news. “‘She’s going to take over the whole magazine.’”
Much as I would have wanted to, I didn't take over the whole magazine - but I did start a long-lasting freelance writing career that spanned publications in five countries, writing in three languages. My work appeared in five national Swedish publications, and I am still a freelance writer to this day. But when I moved to the UK to fully pursue a magazine career, things stalled. Application after application, interview after interview, my glittering magazine career failed to materialise. From being deemed “almost too good,” I couldn’t score even an internship, at the age of 29.
At the same time, I was turning vegan. By embracing this lifestyle, I was slowly but surely rejecting many of the things I’d read and written about in those magazines. I flipped right past the beauty pages, as all the products were tested on animals. The fashion pages were full of leather and wool, and all the restaurant reviews and their descriptions of lamb, fish and cheese left me cold. I wished there was a magazine that was just as glamorous, but closer to my new beliefs.
“You should start one!” said my now-husband. Me, start a magazine? The spark of a new dream started glowing somewhere in the back of my mind. I could see it. I could almost touch it. But I had no idea how to get there.
Enter another magazine to save my dream: the UK edition of Marie Claire and their Inspire & Mentor Scheme, a programme where five women with business ideas got paired with a mentor in their field. I babbled through my interview, eager to explain my vision for a stylish digital publication that was fully vegan. I was also completely honest: I had no capital to invest, I couldn’t afford to take three months off work to focus on this, and I had no idea how to start a website. Upon leaving the interview, I realised that my shirt was also buttoned wrong. So you can imagine my surprise when, days later, I got the email notifying me that I had been selected.
My first instinct was actually to email back and say no, say that I couldn’t do this, I wasn’t up to the task. Boy am I glad I threw that thought into the bin and met up with my new mentor, digital fashion entrepreneur Poppy Dinsey, who was an enormous help in getting me started. Shortly after being selected, I had an idea of how to start my website, set up a domain, recruit collaborators, and make an editorial plan. My own digital magazine was slowly becoming a reality.
There were some inevitable growing pains. I will never forget the night I stayed up until 2am trying to figure out how to connect my hosting to my Wordpress site. I’d had people offer to do it for me if I paid them, but Poppy encouraged me to try for myself. And after crying into my tea for hours, I finally did it! I still remember that feeling of having no one to tell, as everyone was asleep. But the hardest part of the process was choosing a name. I finally settled on Vilda, which meant “the wild one” in Swedish, and had that “V” of “vegan” that I wanted to include in a non-obvious way. Vilda Magazine launched in November 2013, and my entrepreneurship journey was officially real.
In the years that followed, I wrote countless articles and edited many more. I directed photoshoots and recruited writers. I was interviewed in Marie Claire, GLAMOUR, Grazia, and many more. I was nominated for awards, put on magazines’ “inspiring people” lists, whizzed around the world to review hotels, and gifted numerous vegan bags and free restaurant meals. Readers emailed me to say how much our content had impacted them. I got my book deal and released Vegan Style into the world after establishing myself as an authority on vegan fashion.
But there was a darker side to being an entrepreneur.
I struggled financially throughout the magazine's entire six-year lifespan. Vilda was a side hustle alongside a full-time job I love, but which could at times be demanding and unpredictable. I was constantly chasing brand collaborations, and at the same time turning down proposals from brands that either didn't live up to our ethical standards, or were out of line with our aesthetic and editorial voice. That didn't leave a very big pool of potential collaboration partners. One of my missions with the website was to champion small, independent vegan designers – but those brands often had painfully limited marketing budgets, and our collaborations scraped together barely enough to cover the costs involved in running a website (if even that).
So, I hustled - I came up with new ideas to increase our reach and amplify our voice. Write an ebook? Sure, I have time. Run a sponsored giveaway? Hell yeah! Start an online webshop to get affiliate marketing deals? Why not. After a while as an entrepreneur, you start to lose any sense of time. Simply put, whatever day it is, you are working. “Fri-yay” memes were lost on me, because “Friday” was just the day before Saturday, when I would be doing my weekly social media planning. Work time and free time blended together. My mother had to tell me to stop working at Christmas, while the table was being set and I was still editing articles. I checked my magazine's social media comments while having my makeup done on my wedding day, and replied to emails from potential partner brands while sitting in a restaurant on the Amalfi coast on my honeymoon. Five years or so into running the magazine, I could hardly tell where it ended and I began.
It all came tumbling down when I launched a Kickstarter campaign to help us publish a print magazine. The hustling was dialled up to a thousand - I was working around the clock to drum up donations. As friends, family and industry contacts pledged their hard-earned cash to my vision, I was barely sleeping, and found myself over-indulging in caffeine and suffering from heart palpitations. So when I realised that the Kickstarter campaign wouldn’t even come close to reaching its goal, I decided to put the magazine on hiatus - and never found myself returning to it.
When lockdown hit and I, like many others, was left with the deafening silence of introspection, it hit me how much I missed writing. Part of what had initially inspired me to start a magazine was my love of writing – but as a magazine founder, I wasn't doing any of that. I was too busy with admin, promotion, and constant selling, just to keep us afloat. When I did write something, it was haphazardly thrown together, and I now cringe at re-reading some of my old stories. In trying to square-peg-round-hole myself into an entrepreneur, I had lost who I really was: a writer.
Leaving Vilda behind gave me the space to explore writing again. Almost immediately after my book came out, I got freelance writing jobs with several magazines and vegan retailers. All of a sudden, I was getting paid to write again. Slowly, I began finding my voice and eventually started working on my first novel.
After keeping the magazine on standby for years, I was contacted by vegan online retailer Shop Like You Give a Damn, who wanted to buy some of our content. It was with a bittersweet feeling that I let the magazine go, and today some of our top content (like this and this) continues to live in their pages. I’m glad I can trust the mag’s new owner to stay true to their values, which are also my values. Did I become rich from this transaction? Definitely not, but knowing that I started a business that eventually someone wanted to buy is something I’ll always be proud of.
My return to writing has been slow - but steady. I finally feel like I’m connecting with the writer I really am (and Substack is a part of that!). There is still a lot of growth to do, but I’m excited about going on that journey. And part of me believes it’s a journey I could never have had the confidence to embark on had it not been for my adventures in magazine entrepreneurship. I now know that I can do hard things - and that if I really envision something, I can accomplish it.
Photos by me, except those of me. These are by David Camilli.
Thank you for the article. I empathise with your circumstances. Please read my book, Growl, which is about my life's work in animal rights. I used to edit the nonprofit magazine, The Animals' Agenda, in the United States. But, sadly, it had to cease publication because of the economic impact of the 9/11 tourist attacks, the general economic decline, and the advent of the Internet making it possible for anyone to publish similar content to that which I published in The Animals' Agenda.
Very interesting. We are led to believe that success is only monetary or if we have something long-lasting to show for our efforts. But, I've learned and grown as a person from so many endeavors that were just mine to have- that were never meant to be forever or to make me rich and famous. Also, who knows what the future holds?