We have wanted to meet Michal Molčan in our Žurnáli for a long time. This twenty-six year old guy from Nitra is destroying all prejudices that print media is dead. In a world where the internet is defeating one big publishing house after another, Michal is successfully and with vigor going against the current.
If you wander into one of the many London bookstores, or find yourself in a coffee shop in the center of Tokyo, you will most likely come across Standart magazine, which he is the one behind, on the shelves. A coffee magazine that is published in more than eighty countries around the world – in English, Russian, or Japanese. And it only exists in print.
Michal and I talked about how Nitra is building a magazine dedicated to coffee culture distributed all over the world on a Wednesday evening at Fach in Bratislava. The planned twenty-minute conversation eventually turned into more than an hour-long debate about coffee, work, and life in general, which perfectly illustrates how this pleasant person was able to bring the Slovak dream to the world.
However, the very beginning of the magazine came as unexpectedly as Michal's first encounter with fine coffee.
“It all developed quite organically from relationships and collaborations with people I gradually got to know. My first “professional” interaction with coffee came when we were organizing TEDx conferences in my hometown, Nitra. In the process, I discovered that I really enjoyed organizing events. Also, at the same time, I started to like the world of coffee and noticed that there weren’t many events happening in this field, except for maybe a few classic business exhibitions.”
"In Bratislava, we started organizing Coffeefest coffee festivals, which then organically expanded to Prague and Vienna. However, I began to realize that if you organize an event, you don't have a tangible result of your work. I wanted to come up with something that I could contribute to the coffee world, and at the same time that would leave a lasting impression. I combined this with my passion for print magazines and discovered that a print magazine in the style of The New Yorker or Monocle in the global coffee world, surprisingly, does not exist."
"Another advantage of print is content management. The limits of print and its closed format give us the opportunity to control the reader's experience. We accompany it with articles that we think are well connected, have a contextual connection. So it's not just about individual articles, but about the magazine as a whole. This is something you can't achieve in digital."
"I think I'm good at thinking in perspectives, systems and structures. Setting up the business, marketing, partnerships. When it comes to design, I always had a direction in my head that we wanted to go, but then someone else had to take that direction and do it well."
Standart is sold all over the world, and thanks to it, Michal has looked at different corners of the planet. Where did the coffee scene amaze him the most?
“Anyway, things are still improving in Slovakia in terms of fine coffee. I like that excellent coffee shops are starting to emerge here outside the capital. Many baristas are returning to Slovakia from abroad and opening their own great establishments in smaller towns like Banská Bystrica or Liptovský Mikuláš.”
Despite the rising trend, however, we still buy coffee from large producers around the world, not local ones. What is the problem, why do people still have prejudices against fine coffee?
"I think the stumbling block is that many coffee pros try to forcefully hammer into people's heads that premium coffee is better. I like it when it has a more natural process. Coffee must first and foremost impress with its taste, if a person doesn't like it, then the fact that it's premium means nothing, and that's where it ends. People need to be convinced to give it a chance, to taste it.
At the same time, what I think, paradoxically, works against specialty coffee is the word “specialty coffee”. A friend of mine from Copenhagen told me that he doesn’t like the term specialty coffee, even though it is more or less codified, which can be called specialty coffee. However, this name often creates a barrier between the barista and the customer. It can be a bit intimidating – specialty coffee is coffee for you specialists who are interested in coffee.
Just like someone who is interested in cognac drinks a special cognac that is several times more expensive than regular cognac. But with coffee, it is completely different. Whether you buy it at Starbucks or in a coffee shop with specialty coffee, the price is more or less the same. However, the terminology suggests that it is something special, expensive – which is not the case at all.
"That's why people are still willing to buy year-old coffee that's been in a can, even though it's essentially the same fruit as a carrot. And you don't buy a year-old carrot, you buy fresh, ideally locally grown. Coffee that's been ground and on the shelf for two years is definitely not going to be good."
“We therefore want to show through magazines that fine coffee should become the standard. That buying coffee from a local roaster is not something out of reach. So that we can consider fine, sustainably grown coffee with a minimal carbon footprint as something available everywhere. This is also indicated by the title of the magazine and its pun on the words standard and art . By the way, the title also contains a somewhat humorous analogy to the Czechoslovak heritage – the standard “socialist” coffee blend.”
"Standart is a magazine that focuses on the lifestyle around coffee. It focuses on stories, reports, interviews," Michal begins his story."When it came to the topic of a coffee magazine, we didn't want to make a magazine just for the professional public or for a closed community of coffee enthusiasts. On the contrary, we wanted to bring the world of fine coffee closer to the general public and show that having good coffee is not rocket science. That quality coffee is the same food as quality carrots or quality milk, not an unattainable luxury for the consumer. We wanted to make this approach visually interesting and educational in terms of content through a combination of different topics. That's why we try to cover everything from new coffee shops to socio-economic-social topics related to coffee, such as salary transparency or gender equality. We try to go deep and not just on the surface." Before the question flashes in one's mind, why publish a magazine at all in this day and age, the first thing that comes to mind is, why publish a magazine about coffee?
"I got into coffee like any high school student, in the context of a need for caffeine. At that time, I didn't see it as something I could enjoy, and I also never worked with coffee outside of school. However, I liked to hang out in cafes, ideally after school (laughs). I really liked the atmosphere in cafes. It's not fueled by alcohol, there's no noise, there's an intelligent and pleasant mood that brings together different types of people.
At the same time, when I first came to a specialty coffee shop in Prague, I suddenly realized that this social element could be enriched with something else, the coffee itself. When I first tasted their coffee, I didn't believe that it was possible for coffee to taste like this. That was the moment it all started.”
"However, I consider the greatest personal achievement to be that Standart has outgrown me. Over time, as we grew, it became clear that it was no longer just about something I do and other people helping me. On the contrary, I had to add people to the team who are much, much better in their expertise than I could ever be. That is why I am very happy that I am gradually starting to feel like the "most unnecessary" member of the team, who, of course, corrects everything in the right direction, but is no longer the only face of the magazine."The magazine has been based purely on physical content since its inception. Nowadays, many would say that a physical magazine without an online version has no future. However, Standart does exactly that, and its successes are crushing all critics of traditional paper. "When we started in 2015, we saw that everyone was doing digital. And some better than others. However, very few of these media have the budget to pay a professional photographer or a journalist who writes for the New York Times. And that stems from the fact that a business model in digital is not easy to create. Of course, whether it's print or digital, the most important thing is the product. It has to be interesting enough for me as a customer to read it.
However, most digital magazines operate on online advertising, which is their main source of income, which makes the magazine dependent. We said to ourselves that if we went digital, it would be difficult to come up with a sustainable business model, while, on the contrary, in print it had a clear direction. The magazine has its own price tag, it is sold on the “street”, but we found that we do not have to rely only on bookstores, we have dozens of cafes that sell Standart as part of the sale of coffee accessories. Thanks to this, we have created our own distribution network that few other magazines can imitate. The second branch is subscriptions. We have a warehouse in Berlin, from where the magazine travels to the world. And the third part is sponsorships and partnerships. We always have an exclusive partner for a given issue. By not being dependent on this money, we can choose partners who fit the magazine and at the same time have a similar philosophy and quality standards as us.”
“Probably Tokyo. As for the coffee scene, fine coffee doesn’t have a long history there, but the precision and dedication to the craft that the Japanese have helped them rise to the top relatively quickly. In general, any service there is incredibly professional, friendly and has a unique charm. My absolute favorite place in the world, though, is New York, which is known for its really bad coffee, considering how big the city is. There’s an interesting paradox there, New Yorkers aren’t willing to spend money on coffee. But, of course, that doesn’t mean there aren’t great cafes there.”
"I have drawers full of ideas. I divide it into the near future and the more distant future. We would like to expand our team with new people in the near future, because there are many opportunities, especially in America and Europe, that we can seize, but we haven't had the capacity to do so yet. We are looking forward to many collaborations outside the coffee world, such as working with Emirates or Lufthansa so that our magazines appear in their business lounges.
The more distant future is the already mentioned Standard China, we are also thinking about the South Korean Standard. And then there are several ideas within the wider hospitality world, where there is room for a completely new product.”
