Conversation with Serena Guen of Suitcase Magazine
Suitcase Magazine is a multimedia travel magazine founded by Serena Guen in 2012. A business woman and philanthropist, Guen started the magazine from her dorm at New York University. Suitcase continues to re-imagine the travel space with experiential flavours. At 27, she is already on the committee for UNICEF's Next Generation London and has aced the world of publishing.
The Journey
I took my first steps in 2012. I was studying at the NYU at the time, and it was the first time I was living abroad after a stint in Paris. These cities were so exciting for me; I really wanted to explore them. But I just ended up having a terrible experience, because I was trying to maximize my access to the university resources and ended up using resources like TripAdvisor. It was very touristy. There are only so many times you can go for a picnic on the banks of the Seine in Paris. Or visit the Empire State Building in New York. It was very difficult to find the best of local life, like that cool restaurant, a cool bar or a great gallery that you’d really enjoy. I had to spend hours, researching. I got to experience an amazing part of Paris, just because I met and was able to hang out with French locals. So, when I moved to Paris the second time, I felt like it was so ridiculous; I thought that it was really unfair, and that people should see this side of the city that was being so undersold. I thought that it would be really cool to create some kind of platform for people like me, and also for the locals to be able to share interesting spots, -- like their favourite places to go eat dinner, shop clothing, etc.
But before that, people coming to visit were always asking me if I had any tips for them, and I sort of just started writing these mini-guides for my friends (I'd done all that research and thought that it might as well benefit someone!). They started sending it around to their friends, and eventually someone sent my guide back to me, saying: “Oh, I found the best guide ever for Paris, you have to use it.” It was my guide. And I thought, oh okay, I guess there's a market for it.
I didn't start out thinking that I wanted to start a magazine. I just knew that I wanted to create content that would be really practical (I think that was missing from the market back then) but also very beautiful *(because that was another missing piece). I have always loved the way people collect the National Geographic through generations, and how it also translates really well on Instagram, which makes one hopeful. And I thought that if we focussed on photography -- rather than just terrible press imagery -- but also made it easy to navigate these different places through pictures, then maybe we could open up the world to a lot more people. And maybe they wouldn’t be very scared, and wouldn’t go back for the same packaged holidays every year.
So with all these considerations, before we started with a print magazine, it was more like a coffee-table book. The idea was to create timeless content so that you could read an issue from three years back, and it would feel like a book about places with stories and other unforgettable things. Then we decided to go online, because it is so much more practical; maybe you're on your mobile, and you're navigating a city, and maybe you want a city guide and map format. We're building a new website at the moment. It’s exciting. And then we also started a creative agency a couple years ago. Like most magazines. (Laughs).
Inspiration
I think my inspiration for photography was definitely the National Geographic; I don’t think that there’s anything else like that for our generation. I think they were onto something with photography. And then I suppose I was looking at something like the Condé Nast Traveller and thinking that, despite it being such a massive reference, and people still loving it and using it, there's a lot missing in the kind of articles that they're covering. It's very focused on hotels -- but the way people are traveling nowadays is so much more holistic. They want to keep it around family, may be go to a Michelin Star Restaurant one night. It's that mix of high and low culture that really makes the case. And I suppose what took us so long -- about seven years -- is that we've grown slowly and organically. And I think one of the reasons why we didn't just grow superfast is because we didn't have these points of reference from someone else who had done it really well before us. For us, it was like carving out a new way.
Background
I grew up in London. My mom's half-Italian, half-English, and my dad's half-German, half-Tunisian. I should be speaking loads of languages; but I only speak English, and very bad French.
I have family all over the world, which is really nice. And then when I was going to university, my father actually convinced me to go to the States -- since he grew up in America. I studied Liberal Arts. No one in England knows what that means. To me, it was like a mixture of history, philosophy, politics -- more like global culture. I think that set me up really well for what I'm doing now, because it taught me to look at everything from a global perspective.
Independent Journalism and the New ‘Design Age’
I think that independent magazines are definitely going to stay for a long time. A lot of independent magazines were launched in reaction to mainstream media, which had gone completely downhill by doing anything or everything – even stooping to the level of sharing pictures of naked celebrities -- just to get the traffic or the ‘likes’. They had lost all integrity. And one of the reasons why the independents became so popular was their focus on quality. And because they worked hard to attract a genuinely like-minded community. So I don't think being niche is such a bad thing. I like to think that we're more… . We don’t target a specific age range, and it’s more about the mentality. And I think that's also very reflective of how people are traveling now, actually looking at things. This reflects even in the way people do internet marketing nowadays, not targeting, say, an 18-year-old who lives in London and likes makeup.
I think Instagram is an amazing platform as long as its algorithms stay the same and doesn't become like Facebook, where it's like a pay-to-play type situation. It gives so many brands opportunities to grow with basically no money, but only with a bit of creativity and knowhow. I think that, in the context of travel, it's really interesting. The founder of this magazine called Tiny Atlas has written quite a few pieces about travel and Instagram. She's been running campaigns, talking about what travel is, and isn’t. We need to balance our Instagram account between keeping our integrity and teaching our audience something new. Obviously we need to keep growing; we have targets and need to hit our numbers. We are a business after all.
I think the most interesting medium for independent magazines now is probably the newsletter. I think what's so special about newsletters is that they're so intimate. It's like having an interaction with someone one-on-one. There's a lot of opportunity here to do something really interesting with one’s brand. And also, when you grow that, you own it; it's not like it's on another platform where things might change, from where people might drop off. You own that audience. Like a diet community.
The Traditional and the Contemporary
I think it depends a lot on the platform on which consumers are looking at the content. For example, a lot of our readers are young professionals. They don't have loads of holidays and they're doing loads of weekend breaks. That kind of content which is shorter, snappier – maybe they don’t have that much time to research it – is much more suited online. So when we do the print issues, it's a lot more about going off-grid on longer journeys and crazy adventures with the stories. And that's also reflective of how you feel when you sit down and read something – you're in it for the long haul. That’s why we do features. We've featured Paris in this current issue but of course, we are looking at it from a different angle.
Is the work curated, or is it more instinctive?
We're trying to make use of the things available to us. We use data to find the places people are looking to travel to. We make sure that the base is covered first. Mexico's hugely popular, and Japan. So do we have enough content for those destinations? But then it's also interesting to look at it like this: if you like Berlin, what could be the other cities that you might not have thought of going to, but would also like, that we could cover? And so I think the print edition is really good at introducing those new destinations. We have a column online called ‘Destination Inspiration’. It’s about those off-grid, upcoming places you might not have heard of or thought about. We like introduce it to our readers like this, starting off with a small article, and then maybe we do a guide.
India
I've been to Rajasthan and only really been to Mumbai. And then I went up to the mountains -- to Vana. I went there two years ago when I was far less stressed, and now I really, really think that I need to go back. I think the space is incredible. It's so nice that you go there and you leave your electronics at the door. And the food is amazing. It's so much easier to be healthy in such places, but you come back to London and you're like, “OK, I don't know if I can ever recreate this.” I’d really love to go to Kerala. I'm a big foodie. So anywhere there’s good food, I am good.
Migration Shaping Cultures
I think the thing we do best is being ‘glocal’ – global and local. It’s a terrible word.
I’ll give you an example of the cookbooks I got here. I’ve worked with the UNICEF and the Syrian crisis for a few years now. I wanted to do something that a lot of people could get involved with. People in the UK didn't know much about Syrian culture and I was looking at so many refugees. The crisis is terrible, but no one was really understanding what those numbers meant. So I put a human face to it. Food being one of the biggest and lowest common denominators, I did an extremely interesting Big Food project, called ‘Cook for Syria’. I researched Syrian cuisine, found a Syrian chef who had migrated and had had a crazy journey. And he helped me on everything. And then we saw this huge initiative first in London, that went to Hong Kong, to Sydney, and to all over the world. The idea was to take Syrian food and use that to inspire what the chefs are cooking here. So we did a big launch party and with lots of famous chefs. And then we engaged with over a hundred restaurants in London, putting Syrian twist on their famous dishes. Through all this, we were able to raise almost a million pounds for UNICEF. We also did two cookbooks. But I think what was really cool was that, after we did that first year of Syrian cuisine like a big campaign, a lot of restaurants have either kept that dish on the menu because it's so popular, or are using Syrian ingredients in their cooking. That was in the telegraph ( local daily)as the food trend piece.
I think it's really nice to be in this position with the Suitcase, to be able to introduce the aspects of different cultures to people that they didn't know about before. I see how genuinely happy it makes them, and how much they like it.
Sustainability
I wish it was something that I had built into my business model before, but we’re kind of retroactively trying to do as much as possible. The magazine is carbon neutral, and the papers and all the packaging are recyclable and from sustainable sources. We made sure that that was covered.
We don't work with cruises because, for starters, cruise ships are three times more polluting than planes. They don't contribute at all to local economies. They’re often registered in countries where the minimum wage is really low, like Liberia, or Panama (I think Panama didn't even have a minimum wage until this year). So they paid their staff almost nothing, while making billions and billions themselves. So we don’t work with cruise liners.
One of the things that we do online is to showcase amazing charities or causes; if there’s a natural disaster, we try and show our readers what they can do to be proactive. These are the things we’re trying to do at the moment. And then I'm trying to do another campaign like ‘Cook for Syria’ for the environment, but I haven't come up with an idea yet.
Steps Forward
We’re building a new website at the moment. We are trying to make it as practical as possible, and prettier too. I think what's so great is that tech has become so much cheaper -- it used to be so expensive to get a website. It still is expensive, but earlier, I could never dream of doing something like what we're doing now. We‘re building things bit by bit, and launching from October onwards.
Travel Experiences
We've built a tech thing on our website where you can build itineraries. I think it would be very interesting to bring in a few different tech partners in order to build up trips. But our readers are definitely looking for that special travel experience, that once-in-a-lifetime thing. And that doesn't always need to be the most expensive trip in the whole world. We’re working on all this at the moment and hope to create them in the near future.