PUBLISHING COMPANY: Supima creates a fashion magalog for its pop-up store

NEW YORK — When you’ve got an important message to get across, sometimes you need more than one way to deliver it.

That’s why so many image-conscious retailers have turned to producing “magalogs”—a hybrid medium that marries the editorial point of view used in a magazine with the exclusive, store-specific merchandise found in a catalog.

For Supima, the Phoenix-based marketing agency representing U.S. growers of premium pima cotton, the decision to do its first magalog came not long after the decision to do its first retail venture.

“What we wanted to capture in the design of the store [which opened here in SoHo last week] was the purity and softness that are Supima’s brand identity,” explains Buxton Midyette, Supima’s New York-based vice president, who produced the magalog in conjunction with EdMedia. “Our direction to the photographer was only two words long: We told him ‘spring’ and ‘soft’.”

Using only two models—Jenna Danneberger from Elite and Vincent Hoogland from Next—fashion photographer Andrew Yee and stylist Kemal Harris echoed the setting of the Supima store at 72 Greene Street with a white background, bright, soft light, and a minimalist staging that didn’t distract from the merchandise.

Plus just enough quirkiness to convey that the 15 brands being featured in the Supima store—which ranged from Agave to Zooey—were definitely to the fore of fashion.

Following the same thread, art director Joseph Alfieris used an airy, oversized format with minimal copy so that the visual emphasis remained on the photographs—and thus on the merchandise inside them. As Midyette puts it: “With both the pop-up store and the magalog, we wanted to let the brands speak for themselves.”

Going to press only days before the store’s scheduled March 14 opening, 5,000 copies of the magalog were printed. Of those, 1,000 were sent to top editors, designers, and retailers. Another stack was saved to hand out at the store, so shoppers would come away with a beautiful souvenir of their Supima experience.

The rest were destined for a less traditional means of distribution.

“We found five newspaper boxes and placed them at key locations around SoHo,” says Midyette, “for instance, the corner of Crosby and Spring Streets.”

The idea?

Enticing shoppers, tourists, and the heavy foot traffic in that end of SoHo into the store nearby.