What does your business do?

Izzie + Sky was a concept born in November 2014. We originally wanted to create a blog full of our adventures – including photography, art, music, fashion, recipes, and DIYs. After that idea fell flat, we decided to turn our blog into a digital creative magazine. Today, Izzie + Sky Magazine is released quarterly on the digital publishing platform Issuu. We feature cool creatives we find online, as well as photography, music, art, recipes, fashion, and DIYs. What we find is that our magazine is different from others because we feature people who don’t have big followings - they’re your everyday creators. We feature them because we find their work or what they’re about to be inspiring, and we want to share that with others so that they can be inspired too. Our goal is to share our inspirations with as many people as possible in hopes that we can inspire people to create and chase their dreams as well. The whole magazine is created by us, Becca and Kathryn. Becca is the magazine photographer and graphic designer. Kathryn provides creative direction, writes, coordinates all features, and provides fashion direction for photoshoots. What’s cool is that we met on the internet almost five years ago and we’ve been best friends ever since! Our goals and passions are similar and we’re a killer creative team. We’ve already been creating Izzie + Sky for a full year now, and we have already expanded and grown tremendously. Looking back at our first issue (which was still killer) shows how much we’ve grown, and not just in terms of page count (which has increased by about 88). We just released our fourth issue in October, with our fifth issue set to release by the end of January. We are fully committed to keeping our magazine alive, as we are both extremely passionate about the project. We can’t wait to have a studio somewhere complete with a brick wall, lots of greenery, and a couple of cute little kitties running around.

How would you use the grant money?

Any money we receive will be used on purchasing physical copies of the magazine to disperse, marketing initiatives, a website, promotional/advertising materials and any expenses associated with activities relating to the production of the magazine (such as travel expenses). We also want to make the magazine an LLC, which is something else that requires funding in order to make our magazine as large as we are seeing it becoming. Additionally, after printing, we want to ask local shops if they would be interested in selling some of the magazines. Printing costs are expensive. We’ve looked into printing with local shops, but we cannot afford the printing costs currently – especially because we want to print on heavier paper, instead of typical magazine paper. This is an extra expense, as we don’t want our magazines to be a “look through and throw away” type. We want our magazines to last for a while and be something you can always look at and gain inspiration from, similar to a book you’d keep on your coffee table.

What would the grant enable you to do that you can't now?

Right now we want to expand our magazine. That's something that we can't do without funding. Printing is expensive, and a main way to get our magazine out there is through printing so that we can disperse it. Right now, most people read our magazine on the Web. We’re totally cool with that as we want as many people to see what we’re about as possible, but our end goals involve physical copies. For right now, our main goal is to sell 100 magazines to different unique readers within the next year, meaning we want our magazine to expand to different people versus one person buying 100 copies. We would love to have our magazine in small local shops in and around our hometowns, as we’re really big on supporting local businesses. Once we gain some exposure, we want to have some companies be interested in advertising with us so that we could keep expanding the magazine and making each issue better than the last. We want this to be a career, but first someone needs to have faith in our project so that we can get it off the ground.

If Idea Cafe's Grant helps your biz reach greater success, how will you "pay it forward" to help others in some way?

Our goal is to give artists and creatives that we find that initial exposure. We love that we don't feature "famous" creatives, as it allows us to profile people just like us -- people who have a talent that they love putting to use. We feel that we've already helped so many creatives share their stories, and we want that to continue for years to come.