With so much digital media available at one’s fingertips, some people say that “print is dead,” but Aleiya Olu doesn’t buy the idea—and is doing her part to fly the physical flag. Words and images on paper can have a special impact, she believes, a conviction born from her work as both a communicator and creator—a partner at a leading marketing agency and running her own noteworthy design company.
The result is Periodicals, a “labor of love” magazine store in Detroit with an eclectic selection of titles that since opening last year has been named one of the 10 best places to buy magazines in the metro area. “It’s so fantastic to have a shop that caters to and carries so many unique offerings,” wrote a five-star Yelp reviewer. “This isn’t your typical grocery store magazine rack, it’s shelves of inspiration and true art via print.”
“There is something to that tactile experience of reading a magazine.”
There’s nothing wrong with digital media, says Olu. “I think it’s wonderful. Getting information to people really quickly is amazing. But there is something to that tactile experience of reading a magazine and going back to it . . . there’s something just about touching and feeling a magazine where it just feels different, something sensory.”
It’s not just a matter of aesthetics, though. Print can put things in historical and cultural context that you lose when clicking on individual digital articles, Olu adds. Pick up a copy of, say, Architectural Digest from 1979, and you can see all that was happening at that time. “So, in terms of interiors from an Architectural Digest point of view it’s a really important archive.”
Olu personally curates Periodicals’ 200-title selection across culture, fashion, music and more, a task she likens to “an Olympic sport.” Some are mainstays and others she will carry a specific issue she feels is important. She is looking for “magazines who are talking about things that feel really relevant and feel really right now. Sometimes I order magazines that I’ve never heard of before, and I’m always pleasantly surprised.” The store offers a concierge service to help customers discover new titles.
Creative roots
Magazines have long been an important part of Olu’s life; as a teen, they were where she first learned about hip-hop. Husband Amani had his own magazine when he was a teenager, and when the couple met later, “magazines were something we always bonded over.”
The idea for Periodicals grew out of Olu’s other activities. She works with Amani at Olu & Company, the marketing firm he founded in 2012 whose clients have included Gucci, Detroit Art Week and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She also founded From Us to You, an interior design agency, and has seen some of her work showcased at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Olu’s creativity draws on her Detroit roots. “I was inspired by the fact that so many of our parents and grandparents came from the South and sort of created a new culture in Detroit,” she says. “Growing up, I always had to push the contemporary. That’s why I loved magazines, because I was always interested in what was hot, what was next . . . I never wanted to feel like I was behind New York or LA. I just refused to buy into this idea that we get things last in Detroit.”
If print magazines emphasize permanence over digital, her furniture—including the cherry oak Lyndon Chair featured in a recent New York Times arts article—does so even more. Solid wood pieces will “last forever,” she notes, “not a veneer where the wood is just a really thin sheet on top and the inside is some sort of composite. I really wanted furniture with integrity.”
When the Olu & Company team in Detroit (there’s also a New York office) moved into a new home that everyone liked, she wanted to make use of a neighboring location that could “engage with an audience outside of just our client base and the people that we invite to our events and people that we work with,” she explains. “We wanted to have a shop that was sort of reflective of our business. We really believe in publications, and we really believe in magazines and print media . . . for us to really live our ethos, we wanted to put money back into the magazine and print industry.”
Periodicals has more in mind than just promoting print. Olu hopes that encouraging people to engage with physical magazines will be the first step in helping them slow down more generally. With that in mind, the store also carries a range of self-care products, from arts material and journals to incense and green teas.
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“It’s hard for retailers because the margins are low on publications,” Olu says, so supplementary products are important for survival. “A lot of the magazine shops I love in New York, they’ll have the gamut of magazines, but then they’ll also have Lotto and cigarettes. While we’re not going to do that, we do know that having candles and office goods and other things that people love and collect and like to keep in their home does supplement the low margins of publications.”
Connecting threads
For all the challenges, Olu sees the magazine industry as “incredibly resilient. You have writers who really want to see their work in long form. You have editors who are really dedicated to sharing a creative point of view and editorial point of view. To me, they’re almost like creative directors in fashion, where they’re using a publication to communicate something really specific. It’s almost like an art piece.”
In time, Olu hopes to open Periodicals in other cities, and also dreams of hotel locations.
Marketing, retailing magazines and designing furniture may sound like three wildly different things, but for Olu there is a common thread. “One of the main things I’ve learned is how to make everything connect,” she says of her diverse business interests.
“Because I designed it, Periodicals sort of has the touch and feel of From Us to You.” The trick is “how to make everything connect, how to be dedicated to a singular idea in the form of multiple businesses.” When you can answer that, she says, “it absolutely makes it easier to make decisions and decide if a direction makes sense or if a certain event makes sense or working with a certain client makes sense.”
Juggling her different interests while working alongside her husband is “a blast, it’s so fun,” she says. “We always have to figure out at what point the workday ends, and it never does, really. It sort of bleeds into everything.” Dealing with business challenges “really allows us to come together and figure out how to do this with finesse, how to handle things with grace,” she says. “I think the businesses really teach us a lot about how to manage a relationship and how to manage a home. If you can run multiple businesses with your partner, you can really get through anything.”
From an interview with Ashley Reid
ALEIYA OLU: MY WAYMAKER
My husband, Amani. I always had so many ideas and things that I wanted to do, and when we met, I think we both saw in each other real partners, because we’re both really ambitious. Anything that I’ve ever brought to him or been curious about, he’s like, “Let’s just do it; we’ll figure out how we’re going to pay for it or how we’re going to do it later, but really it’s about getting your ideas out into the world.” I really feel like he was one of the first people in my life that was—this sounds so cheesy—“You could do anything.” And so, since we’ve been together, we’ve been doing it, we’ve been doing the thing and doing the thing successfully.
