While browsing in Barnes & Noble a year ago, Brooklyn writer Erin Bried couldn’t find a magazine she wanted to read with her then-4-year-old daughter. So she decided to create one. Instead of featuring dolls and princesses, hers would teach girls about science, sports and writing, and tell them they could grow up to be an engineer, an artist or the president.
Kazoo launched in July as a quarterly. For its third issue, published in January, Bried—a self-declared progressive—was planning a feature to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s victory in the presidential election. The loss by the first female major-party nominee only reinforced Bried’s vision for the magazine. “Our mission—to celebrate girls for being strong, smart and true to themselves—now feels more important than ever,” she said.
Erin Bried AGE 42
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RESIDES Park Slope
STAR POWER Every story in Kazoo is developed or inspired by women who are tops in their field, Bried said. Grey’s Anatomy creator Shonda Rhimes took part in a Q&A, and award-winning cartoonist Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) contributed a comic. The next issue features interviews with Sen. Tammy Duckworth and writer Margaret Atwood.
GETTING PROFESSIONAL HELP Kazoo started as a kitchen-table operation, with Bried and her wife, literary agent Holly Bemiss, stuffing and addressing envelopes. After accidentally sending a reader an issue her daughter had colored—“The reader sent us a very sweet email”—Bried signed with a fulfillment house. “I’m no longer stuffing envelopes at 3 in the morning,” she said.
She retitled the story “Thank You, Hillary” and included a maze that showed readers “progress isn’t a straight line.”
“In our next issue, we have features planned on how to help someone who is being bullied, how to tell fact from opinion and how to cultivate hope,” she said.
Bried spent nearly two decades at Condé Nast, most of those years as a staff writer for Self magazine. That gave her the editorial skills to launch Kazoo but also made her acutely aware of the risks. In November 2015 she was one of dozens laid off from Self, which folded its print edition 13 months later. Even so, she wanted kids to get away from screens and instead work on puzzles and projects with crayons and scissors. Kazoo had to be in print.
Bried took her idea to Kickstarter, where she raised more than $170,000 in 30 days, making it the crowdfunding site’s most successful journalism campaign ever. The 7,000 copies of the 48-page first issue sold out.
Kazoo is now self-supporting, without advertising, which Bried said she felt would pose conflicts in a children’s publication. Subscriptions, at $50 a year, have grown to 10,000 from an initial base of 2,200, and the print run for the 56-page third issue was 18,000. She keeps costs low by writing and editing the magazine herself, except for a short story and a comic that will appear in each issue, and hiring just two freelancers: an art director and a photo editor.
Her labor of love has already earned recognition: Kazoo was up for a National Magazine Award for general excellence on Feb. 7. Although the title didn’t win, the nomination was an honor for a publication in its first year.
“I have never worked so hard in my life,” Bried said. “And I’ve never been so happy about it.”
While browsing in Barnes & Noble a year ago, Brooklyn writer Erin Bried couldn’t find a magazine she wanted to read with her then-4-year-old daughter. So she decided to create one. Instead of featuring dolls and princesses, hers would teach girls about science, sports and writing, and tell them they could grow up to be an engineer, an artist or the president.
Kazoo launched in July as a quarterly. For its third issue, published in January, Bried—a self-declared progressive—was planning a feature to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s victory in the presidential election. The loss by the first female major-party nominee only reinforced Bried’s vision for the magazine. “Our mission—to celebrate girls for being strong, smart and true to themselves—now feels more important than ever,” she said.
She retitled the story “Thank You, Hillary” and included a maze that showed readers “progress isn’t a straight line.”
“In our next issue, we have features planned on how to help someone who is being bullied, how to tell fact from opinion and how to cultivate hope,” she said.
Bried spent nearly two decades at Condé Nast, most of those years as a staff writer for Self magazine. That gave her the editorial skills to launch Kazoo but also made her acutely aware of the risks. In November 2015 she was one of dozens laid off from Self, which folded its print edition 13 months later. Even so, she wanted kids to get away from screens and instead work on puzzles and projects with crayons and scissors. Kazoo had to be in print.
Bried took her idea to Kickstarter, where she raised more than $170,000 in 30 days, making it the crowdfunding site’s most successful journalism campaign ever. The 7,000 copies of the 48-page first issue sold out.
Kazoo is now self-supporting, without advertising, which Bried said she felt would pose conflicts in a children’s publication. Subscriptions, at $50 a year, have grown to 10,000 from an initial base of 2,200, and the print run for the 56-page third issue was 18,000. She keeps costs low by writing and editing the magazine herself, except for a short story and a comic that will appear in each issue, and hiring just two freelancers: an art director and a photo editor.
Her labor of love has already earned recognition: Kazoo was up for a National Magazine Award for general excellence on Feb. 7. Although the title didn’t win, the nomination was an honor for a publication in its first year.
“I have never worked so hard in my life,” Bried said. “And I’ve never been so happy about it.”
A version of this article appears in the February 13, 2017, print issue of Crain’s New York Business as “Mom’s the word”.
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