Manic Metallic has moved to a paid subscription model.
For those of you who have been with us from the beginning, you probably remember the days when we were just starting out and getting our sea legs under ourselves.
Our humble beginnings involved us writing about topics such as nepotism in the modeling industry, Vogue’s brand story going through a tailspin, the history of fashion illustration, and the relationship that Americans have with nudity.
On social media – which for us primarily meant Instagram – we started by zeroing in on fashion exhibits that we’d attended and did a deep dive into each one along with showing photos from said exhibits.
We did an extensive series on alternative fashion capitals, which is our term for fashion capitals outside of the four that everyone already knows about (New York, Milan, Paris, London). Those capitals included cities such as Amsterdam, Seoul, Bogota, Melbourne, and a host of others. This series was immortalized in 2021 in our ebook Alternative Fashion Capitals: A Survey Of Twenty Cities Of Emerging Thought Leadership. This ebook, which took months to research due to the number of cities included, can still be purchased on our website by clicking here.
2021 was an important year for us for many reasons – chief among them being that it was the year that we got our LLC paperwork done and became an official business.
We covered a variety of female fashion photographers from both the past and present on Instagram and on our website. It took a surprising amount of work, which we were happy about because it meant that there was a lot of female photography talent about which to talk.
Also in 2021, we undertook a project to cover only Asian-American & Pacific Islander (AAPI) fashion industry talent. Our careful research was well-appreciated by our audience.
We started The Manic Metallic Newsletter in November 2021 and The Manic Metallic Podcast in January 2022. For the newsletter, we started with its new and improved redesign in November 2022. For the podcast, we began inviting guests onto the show in 2023 alongside our solo episodes. We now have three seasons of the podcast under our belt and are in the process of recording more episodes as we speak.
Our second product, The Manic Metallic Tech Guide To Creating A Fashion Company, also came out in 2023. The purpose of this information-packed guide was to give those hoping to start their very own fashion company – and those who already have a fashion company but need a bit of extra technical help – the tools for jumpstarting their business from a technical perspective. It is still available and can be purchased by clicking here.
Add in the speaking engagements, organizational memberships, partnerships, and conferences…..and you have an extremely action-packed four years of being in existence (three in business)!
So where does that leave us?
After four years of allowing this work to be available at no cost to our audience members, we realized that it is no longer a viable option for us to continue to offer our articles for free.
At a bare minimum, here are a selection of the activities that we have to maintain in order to continue giving our audience the level of high quality work that they’ve come to expect:
- We have costs that come along with gathering the information to be able to provide journalism to our audience – attending fashion shows, museum exhibitions, trade shows, panels, etc as well as being present in rooms where we can make connections that will continually take our work to the next level with respect to quality.
- We have individual meetings with those with whom we hope to build a mutually beneficial working relationship, and there are travel costs associated with those meetings.
- We have software and hardware that needs to be paid for to carry out our daily duties.
- We have to maintain our web home – and with that comes costs. This includes the domain name, hosting costs, web security costs, etc.
This doesn’t take into account the special projects that we have on our radar for the future: documentaries, photojournalism projects that will involve extensive travel, etc. And it doesn’t factor in the employees that we would like to be able to bring onboard to help us realize this expanded vision of what Manic Metallic can be.
The decision to move to a paid model was still not an easy decision to make. We’ve had many great, in-depth conversations surrounding the work that we have produced over a four-year span. We also still hold a belief that knowledge should be made available to the public because knowledge is power. And we seek to empower our audience as much as possible.
However, the financial cost to produce this work for free and the financial return that we were receiving back into the company were not in alignment as much as a business requires to operate profitably.
Thus, we made the best possible decision and decided to move to an accessibly-priced model. There are two available options for customers: a monthly subscription and an annual subscription. With our monthly option, consumers pay $10 with the option to cancel at any time. If customers purchase an annual subscription, they pay $100 with the same cancellation option.
Here’s a breakdown of the pros and cons of each subscription:
Monthly Subscription ($10/month)
Pros
Full access to every piece of written work that Manic Metallic has ever created, plus a few extras, for a full year
Lower upfront cost
Able to check out our work for a lower cost before making a longer-term commitment
Supporting Manic Metallic’s mission and the change that we seek to undertake for the benefit of the fashion industry, the people in it, and the people who are affected by its actions
Cons
Higher overall yearly cost
Only one month of access before having to remember to renew each month
Annual Subscription ($100/year)
Pros
Full access to every piece of written work that Manic Metallic has ever created, plus a few extras, for an entire year
Lower overall yearly cost
No need to worry about remembering to renew for another year
Supporting Manic Metallic’s mission and the change that we seek to undertake for the benefit of the fashion industry, the people in it, and the people who are affected by its actions
Cons
Higher upfront cost
Manic Metallic has built a close-knit community of people over the past few years who have shown that they appreciate fashion being covered from an intelligent and nuanced perspective. We know that from both the in-person and online interactions that we have had with numerous fashion industry members and others who follow the industry. We see it with the traffic that we get to our website. We’ve consistently been told that our work is high-quality, insightful, and important.
And now we’re asking our audience to contribute to the continuation of our mission to transform fashion into an industry that is more welcoming to all and that cares about having a positive impact on the environment. We envision a fashion industry that respects workers at all levels of the industry and that values human creativity just as we value you – our community members.
You can purchase your subscription to our website here: https://manicmetallic.com/register/
To subscribe to The Manic Metallic Podcast, click here. To follow us on Instagram, click here.
