The Airy, Minimalist KINFOLK Is Now Far More Than a Magazine — Have You Noticed?

Five years in, KINFOLK's business keeps diversifying, and its ideas have stretched from lifestyle into the far more industrialized world of fashion. Almost none of which is happening in China.

When KINFOLK launched in 2011, its editor-in-chief Nathan Williams probably never imagined the magazine would carry this much weight within a few years — at the start he was just throwing dinner parties with his girlfriend in college and putting out a magazine about "slow living" on the side. Yet in the five years since, KINFOLK — 8.25-point type, pages full of airy white space, a look all its own — became a red-hot lifestyle quarterly.

Today it is distributed in more than 100 countries, with Russian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese editions, among others; each issue of the English edition prints 80,000 copies. The team has begun running plenty of ads in the magazine. It has also opened a consulting firm, started a clothing brand, and plans to move its headquarters to Denmark. If you haven't been watching closely, that is enough to surprise you.

The move to Denmark, especially, may strike people as unthinkable — since its founding KINFOLK has been bound tightly to the city of Portland. Now it no longer seems to need the Portland label. How did all this happen?

You have to start with how KINFOLK grew up.

In 2008, Nathan Williams was a student at a university in Hawaii. He often invited friends over for dinner, photographed the gatherings, and posted the pictures to his blog. Those distinctive photos and quiet portraits were a hit online, and by 2011 his blog had more than 60,000 regular readers. Nathan and his girlfriend Katie realized they might be inventing a look that had not existed before, and decided to build a print magazine on it. Two weeks after graduating, Nathan quit his job at Goldman Sachs in New York, moved back to Portland, and started the company with his girlfriend and two other friends.

In an old South American language, "Kinfolk" means family. From its first issue in June 2011 the magazine was built around recipes and food, but it soon reached into photography, travel, home life and every other corner of lifestyle.

Besides four issues a year, the KINFOLK team in Portland holds a gathering every month — a signature event since the magazine began. Each one draws 6 to 20 people, who pay $50 to $80 a head. Themes have included harvesting honey, making jam and vegetarian workshops. The editors plan the whole evening and prepare handsome packages for the guests, with invitation cards, hand-drawn menus and posters.

"The gatherings matter a great deal. We don't only want to write about a way of living, we want to live it," Nathan Williams said. As circulation grew, these offline gatherings spread from a small circle of creative types to a much wider crowd.

"A lot of people have copied KINFOLK's style. Around 2011 it felt like the start of a whole aesthetic of living, something that defined its moment," Zhang Lin, editor-in-chief of the Chinese edition 《KINFOLK 四季》 (Kinfolk: The Four Seasons), told QDaily. The copying she means is the flood of KINFOLK-style pictures on Instagram: people liked to arrange their food carefully on the table before eating and shoot it from straight overhead. On Instagram the magazine became known to more people through hashtags like slow living, Japanese style, minimalism, Portland and long wooden tables.

As the magazine's name spread, Nathan Williams and his team went looking for business beyond it. Riding the magazine's momentum, they registered a company called Ouur Media, which mostly does creative consulting for corporate clients. It also shoots short films and plans publications for them. Zara, the British home and clothing brand Toast, the home brand West Elm and LG Electronics have all hired Ouur.

In 2013 KINFOLK also opened a shop in Tokyo called Ouur, selling men's and women's clothing and housewares — a product line launched with the Japanese home brand Actus. Ouur sells only to Japan for now, but the photos show clothes that are plain and unfussy, mostly basics in cotton and linen, in black, white, gray and beige — a look being taken up in many parts of the world. In 2014 Ouur opened an online store.

Founding Ouur showed KINFOLK's ambition. The independent magazine's momentum had not slowed, yet this arts-and-letters publishing team refused to stay in publishing and stepped into retail. Print magazines earn thin profits, after all, and the market keeps filling up with more lifestyle titles. Clothes and housewares that stand apart from the magazine round out the brand, and running an online store opened up more options for what KINFOLK could do next.

Given those changes in the business, KINFOLK decided to change more — it would go to Europe, to Copenhagen.

In October 2015 Nathan led the creative team in renting a space there and named it kinfolk gallery. This would be KINFOLK's new European headquarters. Besides holding the offices, the huge space will host dinners, art exhibitions and fashion shows, and if needed it can serve as a location for the magazine's photo shoots or turn into a temporary shop.

"Quite a few brands will show up inside kinfolk gallery. In that sense the new Copenhagen headquarters will be something like a showroom," Zhang Lin said.

KINFOLK's own website bears her out. It lists 16 brands working with kinfolk gallery, among them the lighting designers Apparatus and Lambert & Fils, the audio brand B&O, the wood-flooring maker Dinesen and the furniture company Paustian — all of them involved in designing and building the Copenhagen office. Photos on Instagram show the space taking shape; once it opens, it will likely become a shared display case for those partners.

Nathan Williams gave his reasons for the move in an interview with Dezeen. "We'd wanted a European headquarters for a long time," he said. "Three-quarters of the magazine's production and printing actually happens in London, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Many of the photographers, painters, stylists and set designers who make content for us live here too. My colleagues and I also hoped to find a better balance between work and life in this city."

In 2008 Monocle named Copenhagen the world's most livable city and its best design city.

"If you look closely at the magazine, you'll see that since last year's summer issue the covers have felt much more like fashion. The big photo spread at the heart of each issue is going that way too," Zhang Lin said. "KINFOLK's strategy from here is to move toward fashion and a higher-end sense of design." Seventy percent of KINFOLK's readers work in the cultural and creative industries, according to the magazine's figures. Clearly they want a base in Copenhagen so they can draw on more of the fashion and design worlds. The move really does help the business.

How KINFOLK makes money has in fact shifted several times since it started.

At first it worked with a Los Angeles publisher called Weldon Owen: KINFOLK planned and edited the content, and Weldon Owen distributed it through its established channels. The partnership taught the team a great deal. "We learned everything about publishing there — proofing, choosing paper, sitting in on meetings with the distribution department," Nathan said. After seven issues together, the KINFOLK team struck out on its own, took over every step from editing to distribution, and began keeping all the profit from publishing the magazine.

Back then KINFOLK made a point of running no ads, and Nathan sounded bold about it: "Ads would eat up the magazine's content and the reader's experience. We won't take ads." But circulation alone earned little, and the position did not hold for long. In 2015 ads began appearing in the English edition.

The Chinese edition, Kinfolk: The Four Seasons, started carrying ads with last year's autumn issue. A few longtime readers complained. "I still liked it better without ads," one Chinese reader wrote on Jingpin Media Group's Taobao page.

"So there are ads now. A little disappointing, but I understand — magazines have a hard time surviving these days. I hope you keep getting better, and put out more bundled sets," another buyer said.

Zhang Lin, for her part, finds nothing surprising in it. "Once a magazine's content and quality mature, thinking about making money is perfectly normal." According to a person familiar with the arrangement, the Chinese edition must negotiate with the American KINFOLK team and pick advertisers together before it can take an ad, and it splits the ad revenue with the American side.

Jingpin Media Group acquired the rights to the Chinese edition of KINFOLK in March 2014 and called it 《四季》 (Four Seasons). The American team requires the Chinese edition to match the U.S. edition 100 percent. The Chinese team has six people today: four on editorial work, two on marketing and business planning. Most came from inside Jingpin Media Group and had plenty of magazine experience before this. Kinfolk: The Four Seasons has been publishing for two and a half years, and both its operations and its editing have settled into a fairly steady phase.

On the mainland, besides buying the magazine on Taobao, readers can find it in more than 360 places across more than 55 cities: boutique hotels, restaurants, cafes, fashion multi-brand stores. Jingpin Media Group's in-house channel-development department is experienced, which is how the magazine reached so many venues. Unlike a news magazine, KINFOLK is not tied to the moment, so its sales curve looks more like a book's — if an issue is good, someone will buy last year's issue this year. The first issue and this year's spring issue sold well; the best seller has passed 150,000 copies in total.

Like the British travel magazine Cereal, lifestyle magazines usually keep a tight grip on their foreign-language editions, and KINFOLK is no exception. It requires them to match the English edition exactly. That leaves the Jingpin team almost no room to create: it can only put out the occasional booklet, showing a bit of invention in the supplements it calls "book in book," or air its own ideas on Weibo and WeChat.

The team has also set up something called the Four Seasons Travel Club: readers who join and subscribe to all four issues of the year get extra benefits. Jingpin is in talks with Ouur as well, and has not ruled out bringing an Ouur shop to China.

Lately it has been promoting the book The Kinfolk Home hard. Since 2014 KINFOLK's editors have picked a theme each year and published a standalone book; the newest is The Kinfolk Home, published in Chinese as 《Kinfolk 家居》. Nathan Williams visited the homes of 35 creative people and wrote down their philosophies of home life. Jingpin Media Group has to buy the Chinese rights to the book separately.

An earlier book, Kinfolk Table, about table culture and the dinner tables of creative people, was a hit — but Jingpin was not the licensed producer or distributor of a Chinese edition.

By circulation and by the readers it aims at, KINFOLK does not sit high in Jingpin Media Group. However hard it pushes into fashion and design, for now it remains a niche magazine.

Niche or not, KINFOLK has not moved slowly these past five years. It is reaching into retail, design and much else. What is interesting is that however far it goes, it still wants nothing to do with digital publishing. From the day the magazine was born it has urged people to put down their phones and spend more time with family and friends, and that has become one reason people buy it — though in real life the reason may not go much further than consoling themselves.

Cover image: ouurcollection