Why print? For the brand that’s all about swimming, the answer is that people want to hang on to the content experience. And that’s reason enough to find success.
In a world of here now, gone in a flash digital content, one brand has decided to provide its customers with a collectible experience of their passion. And in the process, a fantastic magazine is born.
“We think people are going to want to keep these as sort of a record of the sport,” says co-founder and editor-in-chief of SwimSwam, a website dedicated to the world of competitive swimming.
“A history of the sport and who were the biggest athletes and what were the best storylines of any given year,” Keith continues in an interview with Samir “Mr. Magazine” Husni.
Husni was so impressed with the magazine that he added the title to his list of the 30 Hottest Launches this year. And he asked Keith, with all the great content available online at SwimSwam.com, why go with print?
“We launched the website in 2012,” Keith explains. “I’d had a previous website and Mel Stewart, one of my partners, who is an Olympic gold medalist in swimming, was looking to start something and we saw that our visions aligned. And the baby of that came out to be SwimSwam.com and we were like most people, we thought print was dead. Why would you print a magazine when you could have real time stuff up on the web forever.
“Fast forward four years later and all of the magazines were still around,” Keith continues, “and what we were hearing from all of our advertisers was that our competitors were getting a certain percentage of their money because they had a print magazine and people liked it. And so we decided that we’d give it a try and we thought that we could do it better than what was already in the market.”
More and more brands are discovering how important a printed magazine can be to their brand publishing efforts, giving them a platform to tell the kinds of stories you just can’t get across digitally. It’s why branded print is thriving, and attracting the tribes that brands seek.
“We set up a table at the Olympic trials in June this year in Omaha in a local restaurant near the pool and had magazines there for sale,” Keith notes. “We had a lot of people come up and buy the magazine there, but we had more people who were already subscribers to come up and tell us what a great magazine it was and how much they loved it.”
For the folks at SwimSwam, we see gold in this print venture, and wish them all the best.