A conversation with Standart editor-in-chief Luke Adams. Interview by Arjun Basu

—

THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT FREEPORT PRESS.

On today’s show we’re creating a storm in a coffee cup about everyone’s cup of joe. We’re spilling the beans about your morning brew. You’re going to hear a latte puns about your cuppa, your high-octane dirt, your jitter juice, your elixir, and by the time we’re done you will have both woken up and smelled the coffee.

Luke Adams is the editor in chief of Standart, a magazine about a bean that was first cultivated in Ethiopia in the 9th century and within a few hundred years had many of us hooked. It is a subject obviously and extravagantly rich in history, lore, and possibility.

What it is not, however, is a paean to what Luke calls “cutting-edge coffee-making geekery.”

Rather, Standart is about growers and roasters. It is about cafes and third spaces. It is about culture. It is, in other words, about you, the coffee drinker. It attempts to bring together a disparate potential readership around a singular subject, one that not too many actually talk about. Because while cafes encourage conversation, that conversation is rarely about what we’re drinking. Even when it’s a “damn fine cup of coffee.”

“We decided to embark on more of a kind of slow journalism route as opposed to anything newsy. We think that the fetishists will still find something interesting in what we’re saying.”

Arjun Basu: So before we get to the magazine, what’s your story? How did you get here?

Luke Adams: Where do I start? I’ll start maybe post university, because that’s the first thing that’s relevant. So I studied English at uni and after almost failing it in secondary school, and I’m not really sure why I wanted to study English after that, but I did, maybe for the challenge and my passion as far as print goes is really obscure.

Travel writing from between the wars, late Victorian poetry before they were afraid to conform to meter and rhyme schemes, and English comic writing novels about village life involving spinsters and vicars and their goings on and that sort of thing. I’m, in terms of print, I’m really somebody who’s tastes were formed by studying English at uni for so many years.

After uni, I took a job consulting on educational pathways in Moscow, Russia, of all places. In order to brush up my Russian ahead of a PhD that I wanted to embark on that was going to be comparative English, Russian literature and was abruptly sent back to the UK when the Russian ruble crashed overnight following their annexation of Crimea in 2014.

So that was a very abrupt exit. And then I was working very part-time in a coffee shop to try to wash the taste of having to work in this consulting gig in London out of my mouth because I absolutely hated it. I was living in Oxford, but commuting to London three days a week, which is pretty hellish, particularly in the winter.

And one day when I was sweeping the floor or something in the coffee shop, I received a copy of, I think, issue one or, perhaps issue, two of Standart. And I had a look at it and loved it straight away. The art direction, the concept and the print quality were certainly nothing like we’d seen in the coffee industry at that point.

And what I really liked about it at that point was that it focused not only on coffee, but on the culture that surrounded it using coffee as more of a sort of jumping off point for exploration of other cultural phenomena as opposed to an end in itself. If that doesn’t give it away, I wasn’t there at the very beginning of Standart. We’re now almost 40 issues in.

And at issue two, I got in touch with our founder, Michael Molčan, after having received this unsolicited copy of Standart to ask whether they might need help with proofreading ahead of their next issue. He said, “Why not?” I said, “Right-o!” And, as of issue three, I was full-time and have been ever since.

Arjun Basu: So what’s the story with Standart? I want to say something really witty, like what came first, the coffee or the magazine, and obviously the coffee did, but how did it start?

Luke Adams: The idea, which was not mine as I say, but our founders idea, was to produce a high quality independent print magazine to celebrate the culture of specialty coffee, which at that stage in his part of the world, which was Central Europe, was burgeoning very quickly. And I think the reason he recognized that it might be an industry that could be served by a high quality publication was that it—coffee—itself had a way of bridging communities across the world in a way that most other common interests don’t.

And it was also a very happy common interest because perhaps the only other thing that bonds people so easily and readily in print magazines is perhaps politics, which is often pretty nasty. So it was a sort of wholly positive thing that we could focus a print magazine on. And it was also an industry or sort of cultural touchpoint that attracted people from all sorts of walks of life, creative work, that kind of thing.

So it was owing to all of that really that we thought it was a good thing to start and why we’re never really out of ideas to cover in the magazine. Because we, despite it being a magazine about coffee, which might seem restrictive, it’s really about the people who drink coffee and what they get up to.

Arjun Basu: So this is the vision statement, or perhaps it’s the mission statement of the enterprise, but it’s not the editorial mission statement:

This is not just a magazine for the “Coffee Elite.” We aim to bridge the gap between those who work in the coffee industry and those who simply love coffee and the culture that surrounds it. Reading Standart should be like visiting your favorite cafe and striking up a chance conversation.

I’m amazed that no one had done this before. Cafes are noisy because people are talking. Even today in an age of everyone working on their computer, or on their laptop, or on their phone, or have headphones on, it’s still a noisy place. And magazines are always looking for an audience and cafes have an audience right there, and they’re not all thinking the same thing, obviously, but they’re there. Okay, so this is more than a magazine. I think this is an attempt to bring together a community that already exists. Having said that, coffee lovers there are what you call the elite in the other one, but there are those obsessive coffee people who have taken it into almost a fetish, and then there’s everyone else. Sure, a lot of people obviously drink coffee. There’s a lot of demographics there. So what’s yours?

Luke Adams: While we try our best to offer a little something for everybody, because our thinking is that for the real geeks and fetishists out there, there’s a lot of content that is aimed at them already that can be found online that can be updated more quickly. Those trends can be kept up with, instantaneously, which is something we can’t really do with a quarterly print only magazine.

So we really thought that was a space in which we couldn’t really compete or offer anything new. So we decided to embark on more of a kind of slow journalism route as opposed to anything newsy. In doing so, we think that we can target a pretty broad demographic owing to the fact that the fetishists will still find something interesting in what we’re saying.

And we have that hook for them, which is coffee and coffee geekery but is going to hopefully surprise them and give them something perhaps unexpected that they don’t find on the blogs that they routinely read and follow. And then we have a readership that is interested in coffee enough, maybe, to pick up a magazine and have a read about it, but who might get something, again, unexpected and something more than they bargain for in some of the stories that we publish.

So we like to think there’s something in there for anybody who might frequent a specialty coffee shop. You go there because you need your caffeine fix or you like the space. But you can. The opportunities for conversation are literally limitless in a space like that.

And that’s been true ever since the foundation of the first coffee houses, probably in the Middle East and then later on in Europe and then in the United States. But I think in the United States there was—

Arjun Basu: —Yemen

Luke Adams: —in Yemen, yeah, I think there was a lot more, there’s a lot more emphasis on caffeine as a sort of stimulant for labor in the United States historical context than there was perhaps in Europe, where people were just doing nothing and sitting around just discussing uprisings or the color of their opera pumps or whatever in 17th century London. Whereas in the States it was really a sort of fuel.

Arjun Basu: It was fuel, exactly.

Luke Adams: Yeah. Yeah.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. So we touched upon the history of the cafes.

I was actually listening to, I’ve been listening to the Empire Podcast and in their series on the Ottomans, they do talk about coffee and the first coffee houses: the beans going from Ethiopia to Yemen, and then the first coffee houses. It was founded there and then it just rapidly went up from there up to Arabia and the Levant and then into Europe. First Vienna and then it’s fascinating. I recommend that episode to everyone. So we’re talking about the cafe historically, and it’s always been a gathering place for all types. You talk about revolutions and politics being discussed there. I’ve always thought that there’s a direct correlation between the number of coffee houses and the potential for revolution anywhere. And or independence movements or something. So much so that it’s been the subject of crackdowns and suspicion by authorities and government types in the past. So the cafe is a meeting place, but I’ve always felt that cafe culture and coffee culture were two different things. Am I wrong?

Luke Adams: No, I don’t think so. Cafe culture there, there’s an overlap there for sure. But cafe culture’s changed dramatically just because I would venture to say a majority of people these days, at least in London, who step into a coffee shop on their daily commute and not having a conversation with anybody.

They’ve got their headphones in, they have their ApplePay or whatever. Some people are just ordering through an app. It’s changed dramatically in that respect. Whereas even 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago that was not the case. Every single coffee you bought, you had a, however brief, a conversation with the barista. If you were a regular, they’d usually be checking in on what you’d been up to that week. You’d have a brief conversation. Maybe they’d point you in the direction of somebody whom they had just met and whose interests they thought might align with yours.

And that’s how conversations would start. That still happens for sure, but I think significantly less than it did. And I think that in itself illustrates maybe the crossover between cafe culture and coffee culture, but also their separation. And there’s a massive coffee culture or a culture of coffee consumption outside of the cafe that’s really gone nuts since the pandemic for obvious reasons. And we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of home brewers or coffee heads that drink the majority of their coffee at home as opposed to in the cafe. We’ve seen those demographics change in our own readership over the past five years dramatically.

To the extent that I think home brewers now account for something like 70 or 80% of our readership, whereas before that would’ve been significantly lower and almost split with copy professionals or baristas. So yeah, it’s been a big change.

Arjun Basu: Where is your readership?

Luke Adams: All over? I think the largest chunk of the readership is certainly in the US, or North America generally, but concentrated mostly in the US. And then Europe, but predominantly Western Europe. The UK on its own, represents a large chunk of our readership, and then Australasia—we distribute and ship everywhere. But those are where the largest sort of chunks of our demographic are.

But it’s interesting to note the change in the demographics and which locations are becoming more represented among our readership. And that’s mostly Central, South America. As I say, we’re everywhere, but we’re moving kind of eastwards across Europe as well, so that those readerships are increasing too. And then I think we have a subscriber on the Falkland Islands or something. We’re in very odd places indeed

Arjun Basu: Can only imagine the shipping cost to the Falkland Islands. So you have the sub mode—people don’t just receive the magazine. They can, if they are members, get a bag of coffee.

Luke Adams: Yeah. That was again, I wish I could say that had been my idea. But it wasn’t, it was again, our founder’s idea and I think it was, it’s a sort of a win on all sides of this arrangement because we don’t charge anything for that placement.

So it’s really an opportunity for a coffee roaster to advertise some of their coffee and the fact that we have quite a large readership. It’s often the case that they will choose a really banging coffee. So it’s good for our subscribers. They get some really interesting coffee that they might not encounter in their local, even specialty coffee shop.

So an odd variety or weird process or something that’s even maybe more expensive per pound than what they’re used to drinking. So it’s good for them. And it’s good for us because it keeps our readers hooked on a drug as opposed to just a magazine. So it’s always good to have a captive audience.

Arjun Basu: And I noticed the advertising in the magazine is really for high end stuff. In the last issue the grinder the $900 manual grinder. Selling ads is never easy, but you’re really the only game in town. So how many people come to you? Do the roasters come to you to be included, or do you seek them out after you’ve had a good cup? How does that work?

Luke Adams: I think in the case of the roasters that provide the coffee sample to subscribers, usually we’re approached. Or it comes about organically. We might know somebody who we have a conversation with at a coffee trade show or an expo or something, and it arises very naturally and organically.

Advertisers. It’s also, we’re probably approached, but that might be because we have so few advertising slots, which was something that we have maintained from the beginning, that we didn’t want to become a magazine, half of whose contents was filled with adverts. But we just didn’t really want to do that. And for other sort of boring reasons, like staying under the weight thresholds for global air mail from our fulfillment center, we couldn’t have too many more pages.

We needed to keep it underweight. So we decided that we wanted a balance that was where the advertising was not taken away from the contents. To go back to your question, I think we’re approached more often than we approach advertisers possibly for that reason. And Arjun you also mentioned the fact that we’re the only game in town.

I don’t want to overlook anybody unduly, but I think we’re probably the only consumer kind of focused coffee magazine. There are some really successful and reputable coffee magazines that are aimed more at the trade in the industry. But yeah.

Arjun Basu: Did Starbucks have a magazine for a while? Didn’t they try to?

Luke Adams: Good lord. Maybe. I don’t know.

“We don’t publish any of the contents from the magazine online, but people can go online and discuss the contents or ask for brewing recipes or tips for coffee shops.”

Arjun Basu: So the magazine, I’m interested in how it comes together because it is, like you said earlier, it, the lens is coffee, but it’s the world really, and it feels like an intersection of science and culture in many ways. Even hospitality. Does that sound right? So how does an issue actually come together to make it feel cohesive?

Luke Adams: I think it used to be random and slap dash and really I needed to just make the call as to what kind of intuitively felt right as contents that would work together. But for the past, say five or six years, we’ve concentrated each issue around a central theme. But it’s for internal use only, more or less.

So we have a theme that we use internally to guide. The way that we seek out contents and maybe decide what article’s going to fit in which issue and whether we should push an article back to an issue who’s where it might align more completely with the other contents in line with that theme that we’ve chosen. So we tell, of course, our contributors what this theme is, and we really encourage them to treat the theme in an incredibly tenuous, abstract way.

That’s more interesting because it’s what sort of holds all of the contents together and provides a bit of glue so that the reading experience too, to at least some extent feels, more cohesive than it might otherwise without a sort of unifying theme. So that’s one of the ways that we decide which contents are going to fit together to form a cohesive whole. We tend to work with pretty, pretty long lead times, so I’m probably thinking roughly three issues in advance. So I usually know more or less what’s going to be published over the course of the next year.

So it’s pretty rare that we’re floundering about trying to make our deadline or going too crazy in that way. Of course, sometimes it happens. But we tend to plan ahead and try to plan those themes at least a year in advance so that we can plan some of the more complicated logistically speaking pieces, which involve traveling to coffee producing countries and hiring armed drivers and that sort of thing to keep our photographers and our contributors safe. So a lot of it requires a lot of planning and as I say, our approach is more of a slow journalism approach than perhaps some other magazines. So we can afford to work with pretty long times, which feels

Arjun Basu: Ironically appropriate to coffee. Coffee is, I mean it’s fuel, but it’s also you go to a cafe just to. Exit the world for a bit and, sure, while you’re fueling. Coffee is an interesting item as, or product I mean because it’s both. And I feel like Standart and the industry, it mirrors it because coffee is both this artisanal thing grown by individuals picked by hand. But it’s also a world of Starbucks and Costa, these massive brands. So there’s this mass market that exists as well, and then, the coffee makers, like the Sanka and the Folgers of the world. If you want to, if you want to call them real coffee, but then you have the independent cafes, you have the places that we’re picturing in our heads as we’re talking right now, the local roasters. But in a chain cafe, you can feel the indie influence even, because even at Starbucks you can choose, it pushes terroir, which you don’t get like at a McDonald’s, yeah. You don’t like, you, like At McDonald’s, you don’t care about the provenance of the food. If you’re eating there, they don’t assume you have an opinion about your burger or about the quality of the meat, or that you’re even an expert. But coffee is this big business.So how does Standart approach the more mass aspect of it?

Luke Adams: That’s a good question. I think, How do we do that? We try not to. I can’t ignore it. Sure. So we try not to. We used to call ourselves Specialty Coffee Magazine, and we did away with that a few years ago because there were stories that we wanted to tell where specialty coffee was not accessible, for instance.

So we really had to go back and say, “No. Coffee culture is enough of a niche for us to be operating within.” So we do look at coffee practices, coffee culture, coffee consumption outside of strictly specialty coffee, but mostly in places where specialty coffee is not a huge part of the market or accessible at all, particularly in producing countries.

And that looked like something that we really wanted not to overlook. We wanted to try to be as diverse and global in our reach as possible. And also it’s much more interesting to cover coffee consumption practices in countries that we’re not used to seeing on film or when we travel, in Europe or North America.

So that was a way that we at least treated mass or non-specialty coffee in a way that we didn’t in the beginning. And I think it was a good move. We address some other aspects of the mass market coffee industry, mostly looking at how unsustainable it is. I guess that’s one of the sort of themes that we don’t even need to concentrate on, including in the magazine, because you can’t escape it. You can’t avoid it.

Arjun Basu: So I was reading the story about Timor-Leste in your last issue. And it touched on almost everything you talked about. The way the culture, coffee, was imposed, obviously, because coffee and colonialism go hand in hand as well. And then how there wasn’t really a coffee culture there. The trouble it caused I didn’t even know coffee came from there. So I was very happy to read that story. And now the start of like actual cafes, because people never went out for coffee, and that story to me now that you’ve said everything you’ve said it, it feels like a Standart story.

Luke Adams: Sure. That’s the goal. Yeah.

Arjun Basu:So when you send someone out, when you send a writer out to a place or they come to you with a pitch,how do you mold that then into the Standart story? Because, there’s two ways of going that could become a very Travel+Leisure story and say oh, here’s the beauty. And that’s not what this is obviously, and it could become a business story, but it’s a cultural story really more than anything.

Luke Adams: Sure. I think one of the ways in which I try to edit a piece or bring it in line with what we like to publish in Standart is to focus on the differentiating details of the stories as opposed to the common ones.

And what I mean by that is, to me, it’s boring to go to a city or a country and talk about the sort of commonalities it shares with other cities and other countries and other cultures. I ignore that and get to the real differentiating factors of a place because that’s more interesting and it will teach us more about the story that we’re covering.

So sometimes it’s as simple as that to focus on, the differentiating detail as opposed to something that makes a place similar to somewhere else. The other thing I like to tell writers is in every story, ideally, there’s at least one, ideally a few little snippets of information that are unexpected and interesting enough that the reader of that article will want to go to the pub or whatever later and share that little snippet or factoid with their friends, regardless of their interest in coffee. So that usually works to introduce those sort of sparkling details that really bring a piece to life. And most of the time in my first pass of editing, when I receive a draft, it’s mostly me asking for more detail, almost always before I start trimming stuff.

It’s really trying to get that richness of detail there. And including as much of it as possible. So every article has a real kind of texture. And yeah, I guess that’s more or less how I operate. We’re very lucky to work with writers who don’t always need too much direction in these respects.

Arjun Basu: And the other thing I was, I guess I was worried about, because you’ve been around for a long time—and we’ll get to your 10 years—but there’s a part of coffee culture that feels like a lot of math and measurement and science. This sort of obsessiveness to it, and it makes it very easy to parody almost. You have these, and they’re almost always guys, with the scale at home and, measuring it, it’s almost become a marker in a kind of movie where you have the, if a guy is in his kitchen weighing his coffee, he’s a certain kind of person. I have a machine downstairs and I do my coffee at home, but I’m not obsessive about it. I’m just obsessive about cleaning my grinder. But otherwise I’m not really obsessive about it, but I think at the end of the day, we have the same thing in common and that’s just, we just like that cup of coffee. Absolutely. So how do you satisfy all those people?

Luke Adams: The short answer is you can’t satisfy all of those people all the time. I think on this question we come down on the side of trying to cater towards a more accessible point of view than an exclusive one.

But that’s not to say that we don’t include this sort of geeky stuff for people who want to learn. We just try to make even that geeky stuff, approachable and accessible. And sometimes, we have wonderful contributors who are at the cutting edge of sort of coffee making geekery. And I always ask them to introduce maybe a note of humor or sort of a reverence about what it is they’re looking into so that it doesn’t seem exclusive or something that not everybody can do.

Because as you say if I put 15 grams of coffee into my coffee maker or whatever, as opposed to 15.6, and I put 255 grams of water as opposed to 260 as the recipe calls for, if I’ve got good coffee, my coffee’s still going to taste great. So I tend not to be too exclusive about it. Also, I’m incredibly lazy, so I haven’t changed the setting on my grinder for about five years.

Arjun Basu: “Cutting-edge coffee-making geekery.” It’s just a great group of words put together.

Luke Adams: I hope I don’t get into trouble for that.

Arjun Basu: Some of the things about your magazine surprised me because it is, like you say, it’s about everything and then in the latest issue you have a whole thing about bathrooms. There’s a photo essay about these spaces. I wasn’t quite expecting that, and I think it made me think of the title of your magazine in a different way and like you’re standing up for an aesthetic component to it that you would maintain. It was like a demand, almost. Like we can do better. Sure. Yeah. How did that come about? That’s just crazy to see.

Luke Adams: We had a photo essay many years ago that was entirely celebratory with regards to the loos or, as my grandmother would insist, laboratories, of different coffee places across the world.

And we thought that we wanted to try to do that again given that our design was not quite looking back. You always feel this way, but we felt like we’d improved so much in terms of our art direction, photography. Our network of photographers was much better than it was when we first published that photo essay that we wanted to recreate it.

But we also wanted to do something a little bit new and we thought it could be fun to juxtapose the sort of front of house and back of house of a coffee shop and just focus on those overlooked areas as a sort of rally and cry for our industry colleagues to make sure everything is presentable all the time.

I think that the UK is a special case in having absolutely revolting toilets in every public establishment. So we just wanted to have some fun and we thought at first of juxtaposing both those images with the price of a flat white, and just thought okay, if you’re going to be charging, four pound 50 or something for a flat white you’d better have a clean bathroom for your customers to use. So it was slightly naughty, maybe that photo essay, but we like to throw that sort of stuff in every so often.

Arjun Basu: I actually loved it. It was naughty, you have to always be reminded of the end result of drinking coffee and that is a trip to the lavatory. So 10 years, you guys have been around for 10 years, which is incredible. And you celebrated it by publishing a lovely book.

Luke Adams: We thought about the concept for that book a fair bit because we knew for a relatively long time that we wanted to do something to mark the 10 year anniversary. And we’d thought about a sort of just a selection of the past 10 years of our best essays and that sort of thing. But that felt a little bit lazy. It’s just reusing old content and we wanted to introduce a kind of fresh angle or make it special in its own right.

So the first thing we decided to do was to reprint a selection of those articles, published over the course of 10 years, but to ask the authors to reflect now on that piece that they wrote maybe 7, 8, 9 years ago. Whether they changed their opinions about anything they’d written, whether they couldn’t possibly face reading their own writing of 10 years ago, that kind of thing. So that was one way in which we thought we could celebrate the past at the same time as offering a kind of reflection on the present.

So the book is separated into three parts. The first part was the one I just described, which was a selection of essays published over the course of 10 years with author commentary from the present day. The second section was an attempt to reflect visually, as best we could, to distill our editorial approach to Standart in a way that we thought represented how we feel about it. And that culminated in sending a single photographer around to various European cities.

“We have wonderful contributors who are at the cutting edge of, sort of, coffee making geekery.”

Arjun Basu: Oh, that’s what happened. Okay.

Luke Adams: Yeah. Going to various coffee shops selecting what she thought was the best seat in the house and then taking a seat and simply sitting there and zoning out and observing what was going on around her. So she was looking out from some coffee shops that offered a vantage onto a junction or something. She was watching people cross the road, watching people walking to school, looking at strange outfits that people were wearing.

So it was about how a coffee shop or just the moment of drinking a coffee can really become an avenue by which you can explore everything else that’s going on around you that’s not actually about the coffee. So that was our kind of conceptual take on how to represent our editorial perspective over the past 10 years. And the third section was a selection of illustrations that had been published in the magazine over the first 10 years.

Arjun Basu: Very well done. And it just made me wonder if there are more books. Or what the future holds for Standart? Where does it go from here? It continues to publish a magazine, I’m sure, but does it go any further?

Luke Adams: The magazine will certainly remain, at least the plan is for it to remain our core product and our sort of flagship product. About four, four or five years ago, we launched a sort of online community that was open to subscribers. So we’ve gone digital in that sense. We don’t publish any of the contents from the magazine online, but people can go online and discuss the contents or ask for brewing recipes or tips for coffee shops in whichever city they’re going to be holidaying in.

And that’s been growing very steadily. To the point where we need to start to think about how we can develop it even further and make it even more fun and try to offer even more value in that sphere. It started out as something that we thought was for sure going to be valuable as a way to help to connect our readers, but now we’re thinking what else we can do in the digital sphere to, to offer even more value.

One of the things might be online exclusive articles or sort of web workshops, maybe live interviews, which we haven’t done before. All of our interviews are just transcribed and edited and printed. There are various things we’re thinking about doing digitally while keeping the sort of focus of Standart itself on the print edition.

And books. That’s something that we’ve also thought about doing over the past couple of years. One of the bonuses of putting together this 10 year anniversary book was to test how we would go about producing books for maybe other coffee brands or in partnership with coffee brands or other coffee companies, just to see what our capacity was like internally, whether we could manage it without too much stress or wanting to kill each other.

Some advancements to the digital side of things, and then maybe a few bits and pieces of merch, which we have some things in under discussion at the moment, which could be fun, collaborative things with people we’ve interviewed in the past. Some artists that we’ve interviewed, some musicians and that sort of thing. That’s what the future holds. But that could change at any time. So that’s just a sort of preview of what we’re thinking.

Arjun Basu: Is the online community from all over the place as well? Does it mirror your readership or, and are those two, one and the same, or are they actually quite, are they actually different?

Luke Adams: Pretty well because at the moment the online community is only open to subscribers to the print magazine. That being said, we do have a sort of trial, vaguely restricted membership, that people can sign up to online if they get a trial issue of the magazine.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, you have this community that you’ve created, or that you found because it existed already. And you’ve given them an outlet as well to reach out and talk to each other. So you’re in an admirable place as a business because you own the discourse. On a very broad and popular item. There’s a lot of leverage I think that can come out of that.

Luke Adams: Yeah. Let’s hope I don’t wake up one day feeling especially villainous and try to sort of exploit it in some way. But I should say I’ve been referring to this online community. My colleague, our marketing manager, will have my head if I don’t say that we actually have our own app now, so it’s now a standalone app, which is essentially the online community, but I’m supposed to refer to it as an app, I think.

So it can be found on the app store under Standart. So it’s easy to find, yeah. We’re envious of the subreddit on coffee because they have something like 3 million subscribers or whatever, and they’re a very active community. But onwards and upwards. Maybe we’ll get there one day.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. Every community starts with Reddit and then it radiates out of there. So I always end the shows by asking my guests about three magazines or media that they love right now and would want to recommend.

Luke Adams: I mentioned Apartamento earlier. I really have liked them for many years and they’ve been a constant source of inspiration for us, particularly in our interview pieces, how to photograph people, how to capture their personalities If somebody’s a little sort of shyer expressionist, you throw a puppy into the frame or something and just watch them interact with an animal. So they’ve been great. And I just love them for their execution of concept. It’s such a simple concept, but they execute it incredibly well. I also like their approach to advertising.

I like MacGuffin very much. They’re mostly for their obscure, tenuous, unexpected approaches to the themes that they select. That’s something that serves as a great source of inspiration to me personally, because that’s what I try to do with coffee. So they’re fantastic at that. And their print design is amazing. Graphic design is top notch. The format of their magazine is chunky and huge and lovely, and it feels like a real treat.

And the other one I hope you won’t mind my saying is a side project of my own called another print magazine called Valet, or I suppose in North America you’d say “val-lay”.

I won’t say too much about it, except it’s a literary magazine after my own taste, which may or may not be to anybody else’s taste, about, vaguely, about men’s clothing. So yeah, I hope you’ll let me get away with that one.

Arjun Basu: I will look it up for sure. It looks lovely. Thanks Luke.