Free and Easy—Booday

(Lin Hsin-ching/photos by Chuang Kung-ju/tr. by David Smith)

“We only publish the magazine to promote our products,” confides Tom Chang, editor-in-chief of Boo­day and creative director at Boo­day Design Ltd.

Chang and his wife Lee Mei-Yu, both graduates of the Department of Fine Arts at Tung­hai University, launched the Boo­day brand in 2003. In the beginning, designing T-shirts was their main line of business, but after their products hit the market, sales suffered due to a lack of money for advertising. “Well then,” they decided, “let’s start up our own magazine to showcase our products!”

Tom Chang, who crossed over into publishing from the field of design, uses Booday to communicate with readers about his brand and attitudes to life, and to open up new vistas for mini-mags in Taiwan.

The first issue of Boo­day was published in January 2004. It focused on the theme of “slow” to express the publishers’ love of the simple, and the attitude that life, like a meal, should be chewed thoroughly and swallowed slowly. The word mogu (“mushroom”) was chosen as the magazine’s Chinese name because, as Chang explains, “A mushroom is a very special life form. It grows rapidly beneath tree branches that lie decaying on the ground. And hidden within the delicate folds under the mushroom’s meaty cap lie thousands of spores waiting patiently for the next big rain.”

Boo­day may have been launched to promote product sales, but at a company where nearly everyone on staff is a young intellectual with professional expertise in design, the magazine’s creators have not been content to just churn out an ordinary product catalog. They’ve gone the extra mile to make something more of it.

Much of the inspiration for Boo­day derives from Arne, a lifestyle magazine founded by the Japanese illustrator ­Ayumi ­Ohashi. Arne is a quarterly just 56 pages long that stresses the feeling of all things quotidian, yet it has managed to interview such luminaries as noted author Ha­ruki Mu­ra­kami and renowned designer ­Sori Ya­nagi. Readers get to know about the lives and work ethic of famous personalities by means of short interviews and visits to their workplaces, or perhaps through photos of them dining, using eating utensils, or strolling along a footpath—all things that make up the ordinary stuff of life.

Booday may not hobnob with elites, but it does do a marvelous job of creating a simple, unadorned feeling much like that seen in Arne.

Booday features a minimalist layout very similar to Arne’s.

Most of the articles are basically “soliloquies” on life—random observations and anecdotes written by staff members after a period of contemplation. Some critics say the writing in Boo­day is too off-the-cuff, as if the authors are simply thinking out loud. They feel the articles lack any rigorous structure, rather like blog posts. But Chang avers that Boo­day was never meant to be anything more than “a bunch of muggles writing a muggly magazine for a bunch of other muggles.” Precisely because the writer and the readers are just ordinary people, people can easily identify with the author, and often think to themselves: “Yes, I've had that exact same thought before.”

Boo­day has a circulation of about 4,000 copies, and printing costs are kept below NT$200,000 per issue. Outside of Taiwan, there are also a lot of readers in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Southeast Asia.

Apart from the superb job it does of communicating feelings and impressions from everyday life, the success of Booday stems even more importantly from its frank and straightforward manner. It has no pretense of erudition, and that is precisely what has earned it a loyal readership. Reading Boo­day offers a chance to slow down for a bit and restore one’s spirit.