Two is better than one when it comes to membership magazines for the interior design industry in the U.S. and Canada.

Not only is North America one of the biggest markets for the manufacturing of interior design-related products and materials, but it’s also how the industry refers to itself. “Manufacturers in the U.S. typically have a North American territory—not a U.S. territory,” said Randy Fiser, CEO of the American Society of Interior Designers, and the same goes for its Canadian counterparts.

That’s why both ASID and the Interior Designers of Canada (IDC) felt that it made sense to mimic their industry’s market by creating a magazine “that reaches on both sides of the border,” Fiser said.

The new bimonthly membership magazine, which is yet unnamed, will debut in late summer. ASID and IDC are hoping to generate excitement and engagement by crowdsourcing name ideas from their members. But the biggest contributor to the vision of the new magazine will be its newly formed editorial advisory committee, composed of both American and Canadian influencers and decision makers, Fiser said.

“That editorial advisory committee is going to be very responsible for making sure those [magazine] stories are pushing the envelope for design, that they’re hard hitting,” Fiser said. “They will explore topics that are tough for the industry to then wrestle with … and really assess what that means for people in the profession as a whole.”

In addition to better serving readers, a single magazine will also create a better value proposition for advertisers. Currently, advertisers have to split their resources between the two magazines or only put their ad dollars toward one publication. Plus, the ability to raise circulation numbers with one joint magazine will “give the manufacturer advertisers a better opportunity to use their resources at a higher level,” Fiser said.

Both groups hope that the merged magazine will be a useful resource to relay their message that interior design is not just furniture placement, but that “the true value of interiors is what it does for the people who occupy the space,” Fiser said.

However, this magazine isn’t the first time the two groups have collaborated. In May, ASID and IDC cohosted a two-day summit in Toronto, in which key concerns around migration, culture, and diversity were discusses. Both groups also hosted separate events focusing on design students and the emerging workforce, in which they invited each other’s members.

“Those programs’ successes really led us to believe that there was a greater opportunity to do things together than there was individually,” Fiser said.

 

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