Covet Garden Out

Today is a bittersweet day because our  decor magazine  Covet Garden is calling it a day after five years and 61 issues. On one hand, we’ve been quite accomplished: we’ve lasted this long in a volatile online environment. We ran a successful Indiegogo campaign to publish our print version, Covet Garden Home. We found readers all across the world and got to do some amazing collaborations with incredibly talented photographers, artists and entrepreneurs.

Basically, Covet Garden was a labour of love. We never lost money. We never really made any either. Having a full-time freelance career to finance a full-time creative career becomes exhausting after a while. And it’s frustrating that all online content is supposed to be free when any other media can charge much higher ad rates as well as cover/subscription prices.

In a nutshell, after five years, we needed to grow creatively, but we were spending all of our non-working/non-sleeping hours trying to figure out how to make money. I do realize that while it’s not fun or creative, it’s necessary. And while it’s somewhat comforting to learn that many others are in the same boat, it’s also discouraging. Online magazines and blogs have value and that requires compensation. Why is that during the five years of Covet Garden’s existence, we are still being asked to provide free content in return for exposure.

You can, you know,  die from exposure.

Of all the things I’ve done in my professional career, Covet Garden is the thing I am most proud of. I believe that the most important factor in our success was that we never wavered from our mission statement — to share homes that were unstaged and decorated by their inhabitants. This did limit our opportunities to do a lot of sponsored projects. At the end, we knew that to grow creatively we need more resources. For more resources we needed more money. Which meant that we would either have to  tear Covet Garden down and retrofit it or  move on to a different venture.

We are moving on. Folks can still peruse the back issues and follow us on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram for the time being. But we’ve ceased production of the online magazine.