IT ALL BEGAN…
choice of name. To me, it means to believe in yourself, to plant your seed and nourish your ideas to the end. And, since I believe in the idea ‘do to yourself what you want other people to do to you’, it was a perfect name for my personal seed as well. The success of the idea was dependent on how much I could lead as an example. The longer I could take care of my own seed, the better I could fulfil other people’s dreams and showcase their seed to like-minded people. The symbol of one small seed represents a germinating seed, a designer chair, a simplified building, morphed typography, or just a character with its feet strongly planted on the ground and the creative mind moving towards an unknown future. It doesn’t matter. Everybody has to see the symbol as best fits him. Once that is done, the symbol has fulfilled its purpose and the seed is planted in their mind, and, hopefully, in their heart too. one small seed was not created to be purely a print magazine. I knew that with a magazine alone, sooner or later I would be stuck in format and accessibility. No, one small seed should have a bigger goal than just being a nice magazine; it had to grow into a brand and idea to which people can relate and in which they can believe, whatever shape that might take. Targeting a new mindset and not a specific demographic, one small seed had to be a New Media platform, beginning with the magazine as a starting point, since a tangible product gives you a better understanding of the underlying idea. But we had to start expanding quickly and extend our showcase online, to fulfil a complete and more holistic showcase of all contemporary artists.
PLANTING THE SEED Well, without contemplating my past too much, I want to say that I’ve always been a strong activist of the ‘believe in yourself’ mantra. Arriving in South Africa from Luxembourg five years ago, I saw that little was done to showcase and promote South African talent. I am not talking about big awards that lots of organisations arrange more to promote themselves than the actual designer or other creatives. No, I’m talking about a dayto-day showcase of local talent, from music to architecture and from fashion to art. Most magazines (except very few) were way too busy showing the world to South Africa, force-feeding them information that sold well overseas and so it had to sell well here as well, since South Africa could not miss any important celeb news, just like their colleagues in The States. No, my idea was to show South Africa to South Africa, and to the world. To me, showcasing local means talking to your community. It is making people proud of who they are and what is happening in their own country, since pride is key for better self-esteem, which leads to better quality and better competition. It is essential for reaching your full creative potential, individually and as a country. The seed, which means the vision to believe in yourself and in who you are, had to be planted in South Africa first. And so, one small seed was born. Many have asked me about my 68
one small seed
Nevertheless, print was the start that proved not to be the easiest choice. The joy in receiving our first issue, printed in four thousand examples at the time, was indescribable. The smell of the printed paper in the office was comparable to a breeze of fresh air in the Swiss Alps, let me tell you. This moment of joy and pride was quickly exterminated when the first problems of distribution, displaying, delivering, circulation figures and all the other things that nobody told me of, started to bring me to the sour smelling reality of independent publishing. If designing the magazine and putting it together was not a hard enough task to accomplish in our 2.5m² office in Bo-kaap at the time, who knew that independent publishing could have been so hard. For those of you who don’t know, advertisers want to see ABC figures (they certify your circulation), before they buy advertising, which we could only deliver a year after being a quarterly magazine. The distributors (the ones who deliver the mag to the shops and collect the back issues) are not so eager to work with a new publication, especially not one so niche. Major retail shops also did not allow you to have magazine stands or branding if you’re not part of big publishing companies. These are just a few examples of what it meant and, to a certain extent, still means, to be independently published. This did not stop me on my task, however, since I strongly believe that anything worth going for is never easy.