Customer Story: sisterMAG

sisterMAG is a Berlin-based publication that breathes life into the realm of digital magazines with its inspiring content. Catering to the multifaceted interests of women around the world, sisterMAG strikes a harmonious blend of DIY fashion, handmade ideas, lifestyle content, and beyond, engaging readers in German and English alike.

As part of our ongoing Customer Story series, we delved into an insightful conversation with one of sisterMAG’s co-founders, Antonia Sutter. She revealed how Issuu has been instrumental since their magazine’s inaugural issue 11 years ago, providing a powerful and easy-to-use platform for launching their unique digital publication. By harnessing the power of digital publishing, sisterMAG inspires, attracts, and connects with a global readership, one compelling issue at a time.

Welcome, Toni! Can you share with us how you first discovered Issuu?

Absolutely! Our journey began a little over a decade ago, in 2012. The name sisterMAG originated from a project initiated by my sister who was studying publishing at the time, with her Master's thesis focused on the ideal women's magazine in a digital future. Her conclusion was that in the digital age, with the democratization of content production, anyone could launch their own magazine. To validate this idea, we decided to test it out by creating an issue together. We noticed that many American publications in the decorating space used Issuu, which is how we discovered the platform. Issuu was exactly what we were looking for then, and it has continued to be the perfect platform for our magazine.

Over the years, the magazine has evolved significantly. Initially, it covered a broad range of women-centric topics – from career to food, DIY, sewing, and fashion. We even had periods when we published monthly. Now, we publish once every 3 to 4 months and center our content around the latest fashion designs, sewing, and handmade ideas.

Today, the magazine plays a supporting role in our main business - the sewing pattern shop sisterMAG Patterns - where we sell patterns for clothing. The magazine has become a content hub, providing inspiration to people interested in this area.

Can you tell us about the monetization of your magazine?

Monetization is a critical question for us, and it's evolved significantly since we started - when digital magazines weren't as widespread as they are today. Initially, we adopted a content marketing approach, producing various stories for brands. This evolved over time as brands started asking us to create content for all their channels, and that became our focus during the pandemic. Additionally, during that time, traditional magazines faced monetization difficulties, as people prioritized essential purchases instead. 

As a result, we have since shifted towards enhancing our visibility across different channels to serve as a content production and social media agency. We primarily assist brands in the beauty and home appliance sectors with content creation and growing their presence on social media. This new direction stemmed from our experience as a magazine publisher and our ability to see content from a storytelling perspective.

Which features do you use within Issuu’s platform?

Each issue has a dedicated sub-landing page for easy sharing. The most frequently used feature within our magazine is Links. We design the publication in InDesign and embed all necessary links directly into the file. Once exported using Issuu’s plugin for InDesign, all of our links are automatically detected in the digital Flipbook version.

Additionally, we incorporate Videos, like DIY tutorials, within our publications. We typically set these to auto-play for a seamless and more engaging reader experience.

Finally, we're making good use of the social sharing capabilities, too. Plus, each individual article within our magazine gets its own dedicated landing page, where we Embed the content from that specific page. We definitely use Issuu to its full potential for our content strategy!

Who is your primary reader base and how do they discover your content?

Our target audience is women, with more than half of them being German. However, we have a growing international audience, in part due to our pattern shop's global reach. We've seen customers from over 20 countries purchasing our sewing patterns, and many of them then explore our digital magazine on Issuu.

We initially grew our reader base through collaborations and word-of-mouth referrals from bloggers we partnered with. We actively use social media and maintain a regular newsletter that keeps our readers engaged and up-to-date. We're also quite present in organic search, especially now that we're focusing more on DIY fashion content. 

Do you have any exciting plans for your content this year?

We do! This year, our main goal is to regain stability after going through a big shift in our team dynamics last year; my co-founder - and sister - gave birth. We're planning to release four issues this year and return to our usual publishing rhythm. Being so passionate about magazine publishing, our creative team thrives on this process, so we have already done several photo shoots for upcoming issues. We're also looking to increase our website’s content volume and establish a balance between fresh content and repurposing older content. We've produced around 3,000 articles since we started, and there's so much valuable content from past issues that we want to reintroduce to our audience in new, creative ways. This is one of our significant projects for the year.

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