Departamento

How it started

In early 2014, together with my friends Cláudia and Sérgio, we found that we could do something around our shared love of independent magazines. We were deeply in love with how rich and fresh their stories were and especially, how tangible they were as objects, as opposed to our digital daily jobs.

So in early 2014 we decided to invest some time on how we could bring independent magazines to a broader Portuguese audience. By November 2014, the project was born. Departamento.co consisted of being a group importer of indie mags to Portugal where we’d suggest issues from every publication we sought to be interesting and pre-list them on our website to assess the level of interest on it. If many people were willing to pay for the issue beforehand, then we’d go and create an order with the publisher to finally import the issue to our Coimbra offices.

Many people developed an interest in Departamento because we were able to provide the same issues they wanted at a great discount when compared with Direct-To-Consumer. If you’re a magazine buyer, you know you usually spend more than you want on international shipping. That was something we were able to drive down quite significantly and still provide a competitive price for independent issues.

On departamento.co, we were very careful with the magazines we wanted to showcase as all of the picks were carefully curated among the long list of magazines we knew at the time.

Departamento.co lasted 3 years, operating as a small non-profit side hustle for all of us - we simply wanted to democratize access to this kind of content and not profit from it. The close-to-zero margins we had were invested to create a better infrastructure for operations.

Result

Departamento stopped its activity around November 2017 for all of its members to focus on their daily jobs, having delivered close to 350 magazines around Portugal during the 3 years we operated. We are grateful to have been stockists (sometimes, the only stockist in Portugal) of some of the most interesting editions of independent magazines. We worked with highly interesting people from Another Escape, Caffeine, Cereal, Courier, Eye, Intern, Kinfolk, Lagom, Makeshift, Offscreen, Printed Pages, Slanted, The Great Discontent, and many more.

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