A conversation with Broccoli founder Anja Charbonneau

Anja Charbonneau would be the first to admit she didn’t have a strategy in mind when she launched her dreamy celebration of all things marijuana, Broccoli magazine, back in 2016. Having worked as a freelance photographer and writer, and then as Creative Director of lifestyle favorite Kinfolk, she started Broccoli with the simple idea to explore Portland’s then burgeoning cannabis scene and its culture.

Fast forward to today: Anja Charbonneau oversees a publishing conglomerate that produces a number of magazines, books, and something called “oracle cards”—while also spearheading an advocacy group, and a whole lot more.

If anything has changed, ironically, it’s that the last edition of Broccoli was the last edition of Broccoli. Yes, there are new magazines on the way, and new books, and new ideas to explore, because Anja Charbonneau does not sit still, even while sitting atop her nascent empire.

From cats to mushrooms to artful snails to all things celestial, Broccoli publishes stuff that tastes great and that’s good for you and your soul.

Arjun Basu: So your story has a lot of twists and turns. I’ve been calling you a conglomerate in my head so it’s probably going to come out at some point, but how did you get from photographer, and then writer, and then you ended up at Kinfolk. Let’s talk about that.

Anja Charbonneau: Yeah, absolutely. So honestly, it was the world of blogging that led me into photography. So I really enjoyed sharing things online. I was in that wave of late 2000s, early 2010s fashion blog community, and everyone was a DIY photographer at that point, all taking outfit photos and things like that.

And that led me to shooting photos for other people, for small independent designers and local stores. And then that kind of led into photography as a bigger part of my life, so that was my main job for a while. And the kind of happenstance events just spiraled, and I saw a job listing for the art director role at Kinfolk, and I realized, Oh, I’ve been doing all of the things that an art director does, but just as a photographer. Location scouting, casting, styling, all of these things that go into making beautiful images, except for the art director, you’re just not the one clicking. You’re not hitting the button on the camera.

So I felt like I had the skill set and took a chance on applying and they really took a chance on me because I’d never had the job before. And I also was not a graphic designer, which they really hoped that they could get.

Arjun Basu: I was hoping you would get to that because that seems to be a prerequisite for an art director job, but I guess you learned on the job.

Anja Charbonneau: I did not learn. It was a little too late for me to learn without really investing the majority of my time into learning design and I also realized along the way that I don’t want to be a designer. I don’t want to be in that space. I had another skill set and yeah, I was lucky enough that I could make that work on its own. I find it so much more satisfying to collaborate with designers who are experienced and talented.

Arjun Basu: And then you start Broccoli.

Anja Charbonneau: I worked at Kinfolk for four years, so when I left I was the creative director and we were split from Oregon and Denmark making books, magazines, all kinds of things. And working remotely that far away from your team, it just wasn’t really making sense anymore and working at Kinfolk, I honestly felt like making a magazine is so hard. I would never do it. Obviously it’s so tricky. We were a small team, so we got a little bit of a glimpse into the business and how challenging logistics and things like that could be, but didn’t get, obviously, the full picture.

But I had a sense that it was quite difficult and really did not think I would do it. But then living in Oregon in 2016, 2017, the cannabis industry was booming. We were one of the first states to come online in that industry and the first state and even city, in Portland, to have designed brands and stores that were showing a different perspective on what that space and that plant could look like.

My husband was working in cannabis and still is, and he was the one who nudged me, “Don’t you want to make a weed magazine? Wouldn’t it be so great?” Because the ones that were in the shops still looked like the old version of what you might picture. Or they were very industry-focused, not accessible to people who were just normal.

So it was a real whirlwind of timing and a big risk that I don’t think I would have taken if another entrepreneur hadn’t been pushing me to try and like believing in me from day zero. So yeah, then Broccoli started in 2017 as just a single, free magazine, and now we make so many more things. It’s crazy.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, so I want to get to that. Broccoli was a jumping off point, but before that, you were at Kinfolk for a while.What did you bring over from Kinfolk that you’ve applied to Broccoli the empire?

Anja Charbonneau: I worked with really great editors and we had so much fun bringing in vast, multifaceted, international perspectives into every issue. Broadness of contributor base and broadness of expression. That was something that we really cared about and we’re pushing at the time that I was there to expand in the magazine. It went through many different creative evolutions, so that was a fun process.

And then on the other side, I think that I’ve been able to execute some of the dreams and visions that we had there but never got to make real, like we definitely played with the idea of making other titles with more specific focuses.

They did eventually release a kid’s magazine called Kindling and that was something we were talking about, even back in 2015. So getting to explore other titles and spin things off is an idea that started there that I’ve happily been able to try out on my own.

Arjun Basu: So when did you realize that you had something more? We’re going to get to the fact that Broccoli isn’t around. I’m looking at the last issue. But when did you realize that you had something more or that more things should be created? I mean for someone who has just said making magazines is hard, you’re not really “proving” that.

Anja Charbonneau: Well, it’s definitely hard, but I think so like most things in this type of world there’s the creative side and then there’s the business side. So from a creative side, we had a lot of ideas. We were like, let’s make more stuff. And then on the business side, I don’t think one magazine, one title, only publishing the issues, is ever going to be enough to sustain a business and make it your job.

So it was pressure from both ends. We tried some merch-- like a lot of people turn to merch. It’s hilarious how much people will be willing to spend $20 on a tote bag, but then they’re stressed about $15 for a magazine. So there’s psychology to the kinds of ways people spend money.

We tried the merch, and we were kind of like, Okay, this is cool, it’s fun to have a water bottle, it’s fun to make socks. But every time we were learning to make a brand new category of item, and the learning curve was so high because it was our first time.

We don’t know how to make socks, we don’t know how to make water bottles, t-shirts, anything with sizes always really intimidated me. At the same sort of point, we were like there’s also books, and books are almost magazines, and they’re made of paper, and the same printer can make them, and it’s the same skill set that we already have to make those.

So we did two books in 2020, and that was our first other publication spinoff from Broccoli. One of them is a book called A Weed is a Flower and we expanded on our vision of the floral theme in the cannabis space and used some shoots from our magazine, commissioned a bunch more, put it into a book all around that theme.

We also collaborated with one of our art contributors, a couple named Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland, who make tiny snail miniature art. We had them in issue three of Broccoli. We collaborated with them for an event in 2019. They made these amazing reading room dioramas for a big event we had. And we just had so much fun collaborating with them, and they had such a huge body of work, so many fans, and it’s playful and fun and weird and perfectly Broccoli-esque.

Arjun Basu: Snail art.

Anja Charbonneau: Yes, so the books are called—they’re Snail World and Snail World 2.

“I don’t think one magazine, one title, only publishing the issues, is ever going to be enough to sustain a business and make it your job.”

Arjun Basu: Snail World 2 is my favorite book title that I’ve come across recently, because that means there was a Snail World 1! And Snail World 2—it’s like those movie franchises, they get to like part seven and you’re like, “I didn’t know about the first six!” But here’s Snail World 2.

Anja Charbonneau: Totally. And Snail World 2 is a perfect sequel because it's bigger, longer, weirder, freakier. So it’s everything that you would want a sequel to be. But I just loved working with those artists and they were so great to collaborate with. We had a good rapport. We’ve never met. It’s always been email.

So I said, “Hey, would you like it if we published an art book for you? It’s your book, we’ll design it, you can tell us if you like the design or not.” like a real collaboration and a real chance for them to get to make their book, their vision without the kind of pressure from what a larger publisher would do. Let’s make it into a snail art but self help journal, like that kind of stuff that they force on things that they just don’t—they can’t handle art for art’s sake unless you’re a huge famous artist. There isn’t a lot of space for that in publishing.

So Snail World was a huge success. It’s still selling really well. It’s just so fun and strange and the attention to detail that they’ve put in is incredible. It’s so much work. You can just see the hours and hours of labour that they’ve put in with these tiny scenes and their pet snails.

So the success of that book really showed us, like, Okay, we can make books. And people will want them, even if it’s not the thing we thought we were making, which was originally a weed media company. So that was like the first crack in the glass. Now we’ve fully busted through.

Arjun Basu: I would just think that a Snail World calendar would do really well. And I’m sure you’ve thought of it.

Anja Charbonneau: I’ve always been intimidated by calendars because you have to sell so many before the end of the year.

Arjun Basu: I know, they get old, but I’ve taken to calling you the conglomerate publisher of magazines, and we’ll get to all the different magazines, and books, advocate with the coalition, those cards. I keep thinking I’m going to find something new. I know there’s magazines coming, and we’ll get to that. I guess it’s all been organic. It really is, “I want to do this. Let’s do it.”

Anja Charbonneau: That’s true. I think whenever you start something, you don’t know what it will turn into. You can have the best business plan, which I did not have, or a great grand vision, which I also did not have, and you might still find yourself going in a completely different direction.

Because you are going to be influenced by the feedback, the surprises, the momentum. In different directions that you couldn’t know, you couldn’t predict. When we released Broccoli, it was a free magazine and we were trying to do that model of surviving off of advertising and letting the people and a large distribution kind of push that forward.

That only lasted until about issue four and then we flipped it into a normal product. So we’re like, We need to start treating this like a regular product. Because at a certain point, people don’t want to keep putting a free magazine in their stores because someone will walk in, take something for free, and walk out.

And that's a little annoying, which I totally understand. But I think that helped us a lot, because that level of experimentation allowed accessibility and wide distribution. And for something like a cannabis magazine, that was weird and unusual. You wouldn’t bat an eye quite as much now, because it’s been so much more normalized over the last eight years.

But that helped us a lot, and yeah, you’re right. The vision has evolved. I don’t think we really knew that we were not going to be a weed media company until maybe 2020. In my mind, I feel like that might’ve been where things changed a bit for me. 2021 was when Mushroom People came out and that once again, said, Okay, well, if you have this and you have this and the book and this magazine and this other art book thing, what is it?

And I don’t think I knew yet still. And only in the last, I think, two years have I really started to accept and embrace, We’re a publisher now, we are not a brand with one magazine and one product and one message. We are encompassing all of these different things and trying to make that into its own entity that people can understand.

The lucky thing that we’ve had is that even though it can be really hard to explain in one sentence, like, Why do all these things go together? What is the common ground between a snail book, a weed magazine, a mushroom magazine that’s not about psychedelics? What else have we done? Oracle decks? Like, why do these things make sense together?

Arjun Basu: Catnip.

Anja Charbonneau: Catnip, yeah, exactly. A cat magazine. I can’t even quite articulate it the way that I wish I could for my little elevator pitch or whatever. But the reader and the audience get it. And the kinds of stores that buy stuff from us and the people will place these orders with these disparate items in it. And I’m like, Okay, it does make sense! Because a lot of it is about the editorial sensibility, the aesthetic, and the appreciation of nature that runs underlining all of it. The creatures in it, the plants. So there’s something that kind of hits people in the right place, even if it’s not obvious at first.

Arjun Basu: I was just trying to think of the Venn diagram of all of this stuff, and then I added the new things, which we’re going to talk about. And I actually thought it was tight as a Venn diagram. There’s a big space in the middle that you occupy. You found your audience and they do trust you because of this equity you built up through everything you’ve done so far. You care about similar things. You’re working on a ... I don’t want to call it a music magazine because I don’t think that’s what it is. Heartbeat, which is dedicated to the art of listening and sonic curiosity. So what is that about?

Anja Charbonneau: Yeah, this was like the quickest decision we’ve made to do something. It was actually kind of inspired by hearing that Pitchfork was being folded into another major publisher and no one knew what that meant. And I think it’s still a question mark, not that it’s like the be-all end-all for media, music media for me or anything, but I was like, Oh, what a great opportunity for someone to show up and make the music media that they’ve always been wanting.

When things like that happen, you see a lot of people’s experiences and memories and critiques and praises. And I think a lot of people expressed, like, Well, it was never really what I wanted anyway. Like, Why were the reviews so important anyway? Or whatever.

And I was just like going on Instagram stories and talking about, Okay, this is an opportunity. If anyone wants to grab it, this would be cool. Because it’s a space with so much to talk about. Music is part of everyone’s life in one way or another. And I was like, I don’t want to do it, but someone else should.

And then I went to bed and then the next morning I was like, What would it look like if the Broccoli editorial team tackled this subject? And, me and my other two editors, Stephanie Madewell and Ellen Freeman, we just get in our chat and suddenly we’re bouncing all these ideas back and forth about what it would mean to us to do a magazine about music and sound. And then we were like, Let’s just do it. So it was a quick decision, of course, then a long editorial process.

But yeah, I think the magazine is really about music, sound—which includes sounds from nature and just sound in general—and then how the way the things we hear makes us feel. So there’s a very emotive quality through everything.

We’re talking a lot about memory, talking a lot about history, we’re talking about nature, science. So just like every other Broccoli magazine, we’re coming at the subject from more angles than you might anticipate. Lots of different formats and really tapping into what’s personal about it and not what’s a PR story.

Because of course in print, it’s useless anyway because everything’s always late. But the process has been really cool and it’ll come out probably, I think around July. So I’m really excited to see it come to life.

“It’s hilarious how much people will be willing to spend $20 on a tote bag, but then they’re stressed about $15 for a magazine.”

Arjun Basu: As you were saying that, I was thinking of the book I’m reading right now, which is Sings Like a Fish. And it’s about how fish hear. They’re talking about the nature of sound and the roundabout way that science—they knew that fish could hear since Aristotle, but they didn’t know how, because they don’t have obvious ears. But anyway—

Anja Charbonneau: —Yeah, that would be a great Heartbeat story.

Arjun Basu: It would be. That’s why I brought it up. I should have said that. Okay, and then you have Sun & Moon.

Anja Charbonneau: We’re in our wildcard era, I think, because Sun & Moon is also just an idea that kind of just got thrown out quickly, randomly, and then we’re suddenly like, Oh, absolutely, let’s do it.

So I’ve, for a while, wanted to do a magazine where it’s two themes in one magazine and the kind where you have two covers and the other one’s flipped, reversed, where in the middle you meet and then you turn it around. I think that’s such a cool format. I had a storybook as a kid that was—I think it was like Peter Pan and Little Red Riding Hood mixed, that format, and I just loved it.

So Sun & Moon is a celestial magazine. So we’re going to talk very strictly thematically around the sun and the moon. When we were building out our run sheet of stories, we had two columns that Stephanie called “The Cosmic Balance Run Sheet,” because we wanted the themes and the ideas to mirror each other in a way that wasn’t just super obvious, but in a subtle way that the reader might not notice directly, but it’ll be like percolating in the background as they’re reading.

I think all of our writing is in for that, all of the commissioned essays, and I’m about to do a big art submissions call, which is always exciting for me because I do all of the art commissioning. So that one is a real experiment because it’s not very obvious who the reader is. I know who the reader is because I know they’re in our sphere and they are like clearly interested in the mysteries of the universe, but it’s not something that—

Arjun Basu: —They fit in that Venn diagram I was talking about.

Anja Charbonneau: They do, they do. It’s not as clear as Catnip, you might not be like, My sister loves her cat. So I will get her this magazine. But I think people will really enjoy it and I’m excited. And yeah, it’s interesting, the Venn diagram. I think a really cool example we have of that is the oracle decks that we’ve been making, which were inspired originally by Mushroom People magazine. We thought like we learned so many interesting things about mushrooms and people connect to the concepts in the mushroom world very deeply and apply them to our human nature.

There’s a really nice parallel with a lot of that stuff. And we were like, Oh, this would make such a cool oracle deck. And just in case someone isn’t familiar, it’s like the tarot has a structure and they’re all the same story and the cards have the same meaning no matter who makes the deck, generally speaking. Oracle decks are cool because you can make up your own system. So you can make them about anything. They can be creative prompts, they can be introspection tools. They’re very open ended and you don’t really need any kind of real historical knowledge except about the subject you’re writing about.

So we were like, great, let’s make a mushroom oracle. We worked with Bethany van Rijswijk, who was an artist in Mushroom People for the art, and then our editor Ellen wrote all the copy. That was also really popular, and since then we’ve done different themes like seashell and flower, crystal, we have a celestial one coming out, and we’re working on a fairy tale one as well.

It’s interesting because for me I visualize these almost like a Zelda gameplay map, as you’re unlocking different environments. So we have the beach for the seashells, and we have the mountains and the underground—it would be like an upstairs-downstairs kind of thing with the crystals—the mines, you have the forest for the mushrooms, you’ve got the sky for the celestial one. It’s like we’re unlocking a map every time we have something new released. And I like the way they interact, I think that’s really fun.

Arjun Basu: Now there’s an adjacency or a connection to Mildew as well. Is there not?

Anja Charbonneau: Absolutely. So Mildew is a magazine made by Ellen Freeman, our editor. She is like a secondhand master. It’s like she only buys used secondhand items. It’s just like her style. It’s great. And she’s such an incredible editor and writer.

And because that’s one of her greatest passions, the secondhand world, she decided to start her own magazine. It’s so good. It’s exactly like a Broccoli thing, but extra Ellen. And to me, that’s perfect because I love her vision.

Arjun Basu: Why did Broccoli—why did the flagship stop? Why was the last issue your last issue?

Anja Charbonneau: That’s a great question. And there’s so many different reasons. I think that in one big way, it was just time. I know that’s not a real answer. We made 20 issues across seven years. And I was just getting bored, which is a big part of the reason. I wanted to make other things. I didn’t necessarily see it growing much beyond where it was because we could not commit the kind of energy to the brand the way that it used to be.

And to be totally frank, I haven’t used cannabis in a long time. And so that part, I didn’t think would have an effect because you never really needed to use weed and to be a weed person in order to enjoy the magazine. But I think I started to feel like the storytelling was getting stagnant for me. And that’s a little bit of reflection of the industry as well, because once things became more normalized, there was a bit of repetition in state to state or country to country.

They were all going through the same thing on different timelines. And it was feeling harder for me to find what was feeling exciting or what was feeling new. And I just wanted to direct that editorial energy to another place. Plus it’s so expensive to make magazines So we can do more with these big, kind of, one-off or once every couple year titles than we can to have that pressure of releasing on a schedule, twice a year was where we were at. It was just too much of a burden there as well.

All the little signs were coming from all the different directions. It was a few issues ago that I was thinking like, Okay, I don’t think this is going to go on forever. And that’s probably for the best. And I think it’s beautiful because I think, for one, 20 is such a wonderful big round number. It feels like a real accomplishment. I love what we’ve done. I think the magazine is really special and it has meant a lot to a lot of different people.

And I think it’s a great reflection of the way that magazines are time capsules and they are reflections of a moment in time, whether that moment is a period of nine months that you make a magazine or it’s seven years. And it’s capturing that bit of culture and that bit of that moment in time. And to me, that’s really special. And I love it more now that it has that end cap on it. And I like to know that we did it.

“Whenever you start something, you don’t know what it will turn into. You can have the best business plan or a great grand vision and you might still find yourself going in a completely different direction.”

Arjun Basu: Your editor’s letter, when I read it, I highlighted it. I’m going to read that paragraph, but the metaphor of gardening is just so apt given everything you’re planting, and germinating now. You wrote, A thoughtful gardener rotates their crops, giving the soil time to replenish. Certain plants nourish the earth, creating a cycle that sustains. It’s no secret that we’ve been tending other fields, creating books and magazines that are worlds of their own, and our publishing projects will continue to grow. If you’ve loved the stories and art you see here, you’ll find those same sensibilities in our other titles, but with their own special twist. This whole idea of the garden—I know I’ve been calling you the conglomerate—but that’s the same thing. It’s actually a much nicer way of putting it than a conglomerate. You have a field and sometimes you have to keep it fallow.

Anja Charbonneau: Absolutely. And I think one of the really special things that has allowed us to evolve in this way and keep putting things out that are strong and that are appreciated by the audience is that our editorial and design team have been exactly the same for a long time.

There are a core five of us who have been together since day one and then a few years ago, we had a second designer join us and it’s been years that we’ve been working together now. So from the, like, editorial effect that the reader experiences it’s all coming from the same place and it’s all been coming from the same place and will continue to come from the same place.

So I think that from that alone, we have earned and can keep trust from the readers that if they liked one thing, they’ll like another thing. And from my perspective as a person running a business, it’s like I’m the luckiest person in the world, because having that level of experience and trust with the people you work with, you cannot buy that, you can only hope for it.

And if you’ve got it, you just pray you keep it for as long as possible, because they’re amazing, and it’s just so cool that we’ve known each other for this long, and have been successfully working together for this long.

Arjun Basu: You guys are all in different places, right?

Anja Charbonneau: They live in the same city, but they’re still far away from me.

Arjun Basu: That’s why it worked.

Anja Charbonneau: The benefit is they don’t see, they don’t get the like off-gassing of stress, if I’m stressed out about something as the business owner. But then the downside is that we don’t get that kind of beautiful, creative energy bouncing around. We do our best on the mediums that we have, and when we do get to get together, it’s so wonderful. But yeah, that part helps. But it doesn’t work with everybody, because I’ve certainly worked with people long distance, where I’m like, This is not working. We’re not speaking the same language.

Arjun Basu: Back in 2019, I read a lot of interviews you did, and you did talk about the difference in magazine culture between the States and the rest of the world. We don’t really have a major magazine culture in the United States. But in Europe they’re still very successful and they’re still very present. The same in Asia as well—everyone buys magazines. So it seems to be a North American problem more than anything else. And you also, in that same interview, you talked about cost and you brought it up again. Has there been a convergence at all, do you think, or is it the same issue, or maybe the other side has come true in Europe and Asia?

Anja Charbonneau: I think largely it’s still true. You’re not going to find many newsstands and environments like that in the US. We actually just got a new store that opened in Portland called Chess Club. I’m not sure if you’ve seen them before, but they probably have well over 200 different independent magazines.

And it’s an amazing store. They do all kinds of community events. And it’s like a miracle that they’re here. It’s so rare, that style of retail is so rare in the US. . There’s also a really cool shop in the desert in California called Hi Desert Times. And I think they’ve been finding some good success with the magazine-forward model as well. So that’s really cool to see.

On the retail side a lot of the people that we wholesale with are like what you might call, like, the “shoppy-shops”—the little boutiques with candles, home goods, they have maybe a couple books, but a lot of them are getting into selling magazines as well. Just a small selection, but it helps. It helps remind the public that magazines exist, independent magazines are a thing that you can support, that are good and interesting, because they don’t have the luxury of having something like a magCulture shop that everybody knows about over there. They’re quite lucky.

I hope we’ll see that grow more. I know there’s so much sentiment and discussion online amongst people in media. Many Americans are not sure where to turn because the digital media landscape is so bleak and the dream of becoming a writer as a career is really fraught. I guess we’re slowly trying to show that it’s possible to have a print-based business or to be in publishing in a way that is different from the models we’ve been shown.

So there are ways to make it work and it’s just hard to figure out. I certainly have been trying to figure it out for this long and I feel confident that we found a model that works and I would love for other publishers to just copy the model, make other books, make other print things.

You have to make other stuff if you want to survive. One magazine just won’t be enough. But not everybody should be running a business either. So I think there is so much beauty to be had in a creative project that is just a creative project. Like it doesn’t have to be a business and not everybody wants it to be.

So I think that’s something that’s really important when you’re starting to ask yourself that question: Do I really want to run an e-commerce, international logistics company, or do I just want to make a cool print project with people I admire once or twice? Like, that’s great too.

So back to your original question, I think that you’re still going to find a lot more presence of just an awareness that independent publishing is a whole cool industry in Europe versus the US. But I think it is slowly just creeping into the public consciousness a bit more amongst the audiences that we care about.

Arjun Basu: For a long time I said the only brands that understood magazines that would support them were luxury brands because they’re both so sensual. But now we’re seeing that young people are coming around to magazines because they didn’t grow up with them. The magazine’s like rotary phones to them, and they’re like, Wow, look at this! And it’s something you can really sink your teeth into, and no distractions. There’s traction. People always bring up vinyl and cassettes but I think it’s actually different because I think it’s bigger than records. But that could just be me; I have obvious bias here.

Anja Charbonneau: Yeah, there’s certainly a hunger for it. And The conversation around getting offline, ditching social media, investing more in physical objects and print, it’s a popular topic.

It’s not that the desire isn’t there, it’s that people don’t know where to get that stuff, or they don’t even know it exists. So I’m always telling people to look at Stack or MagCulture if they want to just get real quick proof that there’s at least five or ten different independent magazines that speak directly to the things they care about. Like they’re there. They’re just not sure where to turn, I think.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. If there’s a typical reader of Broccoli stuff. Who is that person?

Anja Charbonneau: It’s funny we were just talking with someone who’s starting a new magazine about what the audience can look like. You have the fantasy reader where you’re like, you usually imagine someone like you. Like maybe they have a cat, they like plants. They’re probably around my age like anywhere from late 20s into early 40s probably. Have some type of creativity in their spirit whether or not they consider themselves an artist. Things like that, right?

But I think the kind of surprise is always that a lot of people aren’t those things, but they just admire that stuff. Or like, I mean with the cat thing, it really does have a broad span. It depends on the subject, too, so I think a lot of people do fall into the obvious category. But then, I used to get emails from people who would be like, 65 year old retired master gardeners who found Broccoli and they were like, I never thought I’d see something like this. This is great. Nice job.

It’s like the unexpected ones are cool. I think that’s one of the things that I miss about throwing events because we haven’t done one in a while is that you get to see truly who the people are that are interested in what you’re doing. And often you’ll be surprised and usually in a good way.

Arjun Basu: When you were distributing the magazine Broccoli for free, was that just in Portland or was your distribution zone further afield?

Anja Charbonneau: Yeah, we were doing it all over. So we had a pretty open door policy. If someone wanted copies, we would send them to them. We did a bit of direct outreach, but we were really lucky to get some good press in the beginning that kind of snowballed. We’ve got a lot of incoming requests and we were sending them all over the place. And that was good until people started to feel a little annoyed by the free product model with people just coming in and grabbing something.

**“A really cool example we have of that is the** **oracle decks** **that we’ve been making, which were inspired originally by *Mushroom People* magazine,” says Charbonneau**

Arjun Basu: Especially in the cannabis field, I was just thinking about the advertising because that’s tricky given the legislation around cannabis.

Anja Charbonneau: When you mentioned earlier, you said something about luxury brands and that’s like where the backing often comes for print magazines and it’s been interesting because in the advertisers we’ve worked with and the brand partners we’ve had it’s almost the total opposite.

It’s like independent companies, new companies, small businesses. So there’s something special about that because I’m like, Okay, we’re on the same level. Like we’re all just doing the same thing in our own fields. And in cannabis it’s been interesting because it’ll depend almost entirely on which state is receiving the investment money at the time.

So like for a minute, it was Oregon. For a minute it was California. Right now the New York money is probably starting to dry up. Canada was never really an option because the laws you guys have are so restrictive on advertising. So the money would bounce around and you had to pay attention to who’s being funded.

And of course it’s probably the same investors running from state to state, but also independent small businesses that were doing it themselves. We’ve always had very friendly rates to people who are like, just DIY-level businesses who aren’t getting the big investment funding.

So those have been really special partnerships as well. But yeah, the cannabis world has always been so volatile and like always will be, especially while it’s still federally illegal here because the rules are so confusing.

Arjun Basu: My favorite ad in all of your publications comes from Catnip.

Anja Charbonneau: I think I know which one it is.

Arjun Basu: And it says “Get high with your cat.”

Anja Charbonneau: Yeah, Puff Herbals. They make herbal smoking blends.

Arjun Basu: And I just thought, This is where I think the whole Venn diagram thing started to form in my mind.

Anja Charbonneau: It’s so good and I’ve had Catnip people ask me if the ads are fake cause they’re so funny.

Arjun Basu: That one, it’s a takeoff on a Virginia Slims ad. And it’s yeah, it is funny.

Anja Charbonneau: Yeah. There’s an art to ads for sure. And I think that something that’s been cool, people will also ask us if we tell advertisers what their ads should look like. And we’ve never needed to do that because I think it’s a really fun chance for those companies to try to flex their design and show what they can do and express themselves in a different way.

And because the standard was set high from the beginning with Broccoli, like they know they’re trying to put their best foot forward and be playful and be interesting. And that’s like a perfect example. But I love the idea that there are people out there right now that are flipping through Catnip and think that it’s just all made up. Like the hemp cat litter, the—

Arjun Basu: I always say ads in most mediums are intrusive, but ads in print are content if you do it properly. Which is why Vogue September issue is still a thousand-page doorstopper. You don’t get the TOC till you’re like on page 300 or something. So, three magazines or media that you’re really excited about now that you want to tell the world about.

Anja Charbonneau: I knew you were going to ask this question because I listened to the podcast and I should have thought of it. Okay, I have to shout out Mildew because their third issue is almost sold out and it’s fantastic. The whole concept of the magazine is that it’s about secondhand and creative reuse. So it’s not exclusively fashion.

There’s also just stories about the way that old things can become new again. And I love that. There’s a wonderful story in there that was quite emotional about a group that will help you finish unfinished knitting projects. So a lot of those circumstances are, like, maybe a parent or a grandparent was making something for you and they’ve passed and you’re left with this unfinished thing and there’s like an organization that can help you finish it. It’s really sweet.

Ellen and her designer Corbin LaMont, their approach to design has this thrift store chaos energy to it where you don’t know what you’ll see on the next page. It has that kind of wild energy to it that I really enjoy.

Let’s see, I bought a bunch of new magazines recently. I bought the nature issue of Fukt. And have you seen the cover of it? It has, like, wild die cuts all over it of these little sort of roundish leaves. And so you can bend back the pages to make it come to life in your own pattern. I just think that’s so fun. I’m not sure if I want to bend them because it’s going to not get back on my shelf very effectively. But I really liked that.

There was a piece in it about an illustrator who focused on root systems and only illustrated them and they’re so detailed and crazy I almost wish the magazine was like a bigger page format for those images alone. That one is pretty cool. And then what did I just buy? I just bought a couple books. I’m always buying books. Does this happen every time people?

Arjun Basu: There are two kinds of guests: the ones who struggle through it, and then the ones who have prepared.

Anja Charbonneau: I didn’t prepare, obviously. I’m going to shout out a book that I’m seeing on my shelf right now that I’m constantly chasing emotionally called Unicorns I Have Known by the photographer, Robert Vavra. And we have constantly put in effort to try to find this man and see if he still has the photos because there are these total fantasyland unicorn images that I would love to republish into a book.

Oh, but that actually reminds me, so maybe a better one that’s recent. So we’re about to start working on the new issue of Catnip. So we’re going to do a volume two. And I was at the used bookstore, And found a book called Cat Flexing, and it’s all about workouts where you use your cat as your dumbbell. So you’re like weightlifting your cat. And it’s an early ’90s book, all the photos are in black and white.

Arjun Basu: It sounds like an early ’90s book.

Anja Charbonneau: Absolutely. So it’s a woman just like holding this fluffy cat in different workout positions.

Arjun Basu: Does she have big hair?

Anja Charbonneau: No, her hair is pretty chill, actually.

Arjun Basu: Okay. Okay.

Anja Charbonneau: Not over the top. It’s not like a jazzercise vibe. It’s actually quite comfy. They’re very like sleek and chic photos. But then the cat is, like, big and fluffy. I haven’t done the Google search yet, but I’m going to look up the author and see if she’s around and what we might be able to do with the book because it’s so fun, so novel. And, I’m not sure if she’s serious or not. So I would like to find out.

Arjun Basu: Maybe you can use her for an ad in the second issue of Catnip.

Anja Charbonneau: Absolutely. We did a cat books feature in the first issue. So this would be a real great addition to a second, if not a full feature, because I love to find archival stuff. And if the photographers are around, then oftentimes they’ll be down to reissue things.

Arjun Basu: Thanks for doing this.

Anja Charbonneau: Yeah! Thank you so much. It was fun.