Offsite Interview Series: A Conversation With Taylor Bruce, Founder of Wildsam Field Guides
As part of an ongoing series to gain insight into new perspectives, we interviewed a few bright minds of other makers, creatives, and innovators behind pioneering new businesses and ideas throughout the country. This is the transcript from our stop in Texas where we sat down with Wildsam, and boy did we have ourselves a good time.
November 4th, 2015 — Austin, TX
Taylor Bruce is the founder and editor of the brilliantly curated and beautifully designed Wildsam Field Guides. In just a few short years, Taylor and his team have published a series of pocket-sized books taking you on a journey through America’s greatest cities (seven to date).
A far cry from your traditional travel guides of “must-see” attractions and touristy neighborhoods, Wildsam is for those that want to dive deeper into the heart and soul of a place. Hand-illustrated maps, historical letters, and interviews with taxidermists, street artists, and chefs are just some of the things you’ll find inside.
Taylor was kind enough to meet with us before heading out of town, and we caught up over coffee at their office in Austin. In this interview, we learn how they paved their own path and gained early traction, and how they’re helping people create lasting memories.
Derek: To kick this off, can you tell us about the story and inspiration behind Wildsam?
Taylor: Yeah. I spent about 8 years in magazines, freelance and staff, mostly travel writing, but a little bit of music. In 2009, I left a full-time staff role, I was living in Birmingham, Alabama and moved to New York to do a masters in fiction writing. It’s one of those things that was in the back of my mind, to dig into a bit more of a creative writing project. So I left staff work and did the MFA at Brooklyn college for about 18 months.
Towards the end of that year and a half, I had been working on a novel, but it wasn’t ready to send out or anything. I took about an a month and a half off and I had some open time. I can’t point to the exact time but in that 6 weeks, towards the end of the year, two sides came together.
It was like my magazine brain, all about travel, was packaging stories together through the format of a magazine. And my fiction writing, short story brain had just been reading all the great writers, and they sort of merged.
The idea to do all of these books about American cities kind of came to the surface, and what the book (the Nashville book was the first) was intended to do was sort of fit a hole that I saw for me. I love to travel, I think that travel guides are kind of lame, and that really didn’t make sense to me.
And so, literally it was just me, sitting in a coffee shop over the course of a couple weeks kind of sketching out, ‘what would be the perfect book about an American city?’ I wanted to do American cities because I was thinking about people from other countries that don’t know how to travel in America. They go to Orlando or Vegas, and maybe New York, and they miss these great cities like Charleston or Savannah.
The magazine part of me created this table of contents. I decided on Nashville and just phoned up a bunch of friends that were doing interesting stuff up there, some writers, some not, and started work. And six months later, we had a finished Word doc, and then started working with a designer to build out what it’s like. “What is this brand? What do we want it to feel like? Who’s the target reader/traveler?” It was very much bootstrapped, I didn’t have a big plan of going to do these cities and launching digital apps and all that stuff. It was like, no, let’s just do one and see what happens.
We printed 2,000 copies, sold in six shops in Nashville (only one of them was a bookstore) and sold out in three months. We threw a big, fun backyard party, and it was very much friends of friends of friends, and it kind of caught on. That was three years ago, three years ago in October, when the Nashville book came out. And so pretty steadily, like every six months, we put out a new city. So that’s kind of where we are. Number seven will come out in a few weeks.
You guys published on your own to get started, can you tell us a little bit about that?
So publishing, historically, is kind of this big, slow moving monster. The way it works is that you pitch an idea or you send a manuscript to a publishing house. It takes months and months for someone to show interest, and then if they sign you or pick up the project, it goes into this 12–18 month holding pattern before the book is on the shelf. Then it goes into this distribution network with Amazon, the Barnes and Nobles, and it just gets lost. I’m not interested in waiting two years for something.
I also wasn’t necessarily interested in having a bunch of people weigh in. Part of the fun of doing this was I could do something that was in my own voice, and my version of building a piece of furniture. I’m not going to distill whiskey, or paint a canvas, but that’s kind of what I can do.
I don’t use the word self-publishing. Self-publishing, to me, is kind of like, my uncle wrote a novel and printed 50 copies, and gave them to everyone for Christmas. We hired a design firm that does high, high end magazine and book design. We hired copy-editors from our magazine days, and the writers were award winning folks.
So we essentially started a small publishing house. I just didn’t really know that’s what I was doing.
I learned all the ins and outs, like how do you cut down your per unit print cost, what does it look like to warehouse, what is an ISBN number, what is the Library of Congress, and stuff like that. Which was kind of interesting, but the big sort of lesson was, hey, the publishing industry is the cruise ship, and we want to be on the small boat.
We just signed last month with the largest book distribution company in the world to get our books out into all bookstores. That’s something that maybe would have happened sooner if the book had a more formal publishing path. But I don’t think the brand would be what it is if we had done that. Because I don’t know where you first encountered Wildsam, but it probably wasn’t a bookstore. It was probably a store like Imogene & Willie or something, which was intentional.
Can you elaborate on your strategy for gaining early traction, while also staying true to your values?
The first thing was, let’s create something that we’re totally over the moon about, that we love the way it looks, the way it feels, it’s editorial sensibility. The stories and the mix of highs and lows, stories that show the bright and beautiful side of the city, and stories that show the darker, broken side of the cities. That’s the first thing, make something that I’m not afraid to have my name on.
But then the second one, it was all about, for me, where people encountered the book. I’m not a savant in terms of getting a half a million followers on Instagram. That’s not me. And so I knew that we were going to be encountered in stores, that’s how people were going to learn about Wildsam. I tried to think through, what are the places that I go when I’m in Austin? What are the stores that carry brands that I love, whether it’s boots, or flannel shirts, or whatever.
For the first three cities that’s kind of what we did, we found like those four or five stores in Nashville, the four or five in Austin, San Francisco, and just took the book in. Usually, those places are in the book, so that’s an easy conversation starter. They pretty much get it, there’s this resurgence in bespoke print, whether it’s quarterly magazines or nice coffee table books, and we sort of fit in that world.
We’re not a magazine, but we’re not a travel guide either. We are, but we kind of live in between. We were super particular about what stores made sense. I sort of view that as a sales channel, but it was also marketing. When people encounter Wildsam for the first time, and they see it sitting next to a certain type, like a Public-Supply journal, it’s like they connect. “Oh, yeah, those sort of fit together.”
It’s been said that there’s been a shift in valuing experiences over material goods for our generation. Can you speak to that?
I can speak to what I think. I don’t know if I would say there’s a shift from, “I was interested in material goods but now I’m interested in experiences.” I think that people are still interested in goods, I mean people still buy clothes, they still buy food, obviously.
I think we’re more interested in what’s going on behind that. We want to buy something that’s maybe going to make fewer purchases, or have a little more meaning behind it than just filling our drawers and shelves with stuff. That’s how we are. We don’t have a whole lot of things in our house, but we like all the stuff we have. There’s a new book out, it’s by a Japanese author that talks about how you shouldn’t own anything that you don’t absolutely love. Have you seen this book? (editor’s note: book is titled The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo)
In terms of the experience thing though, I don’t necessarily put experience versus material with what we do side-by-side. But I do think people value experiences within travel, they value a different kind of experience. I like to think of it like, people are less interested in a weekend trip and more interested in a travel experience that they are going to be telling stories about for years to come. And it’s easy to miss the mark on that. You come to a city, and I’ve done it, where you end up staying a hotel that feels like it could be anywhere, you go to a restaurant, and you sense like, man, I’m just not in the flow of the true side of Austin, if that’s where you are.
That’s what we aim to do, to give people experiences — whether they are expensive or free — that really feel like you could only do that there, or it’s coming from the heart and soul of that place.
I don’t think a ton about about material goods. I think it’s easy to say that, I think it’s a popular sentiment. But I don’t know if it’s actually true. I bet we probably spend more money now than if you lived twenty years ago. I mean, I’ve talked myself into buying stuff that’s maybe a little more expensive saying that it’s nicer, it’s better made, it’s a cool brand, it’s small batch… I mean there’s a nice bottle of bourbon, and it’s like I could have gotten Jack Daniels that’s twice as much, for half the cost.
I love the new Day Off series that you guys are doing for your blog. I wanted to spin that question on you. What is your ideal 24 hours unplugged and away from work?
In Austin? Good question. I’m so in Charleston world right now, where do I even begin…
Austin is so huge. I love coffee. So I would start the morning without my phone, with a book that I’m skimming, I’m probably not doing deep reading. Also a journal because my thoughts would be kind of running around. I’d be at Figure 8, which is over here on the East side. Then I would go from Figure 8 to one of two swimming holes in town. One of Austin’s greatest assets are this network of public swimming spots. One’s Barton Springs, and if you do one thing in Austin, it’s Barton Springs. It’s this classic kind of throw back to like a 100+ years.
I’d either go there or I’d go to Deep Eddy. I kind of like Deep Eddy these days, even this time of year. Because the water temperature stays the same, the water would be like 68 degrees. So if it was January, and it’s like 40, the water actually feels really good. But, today, it would be totally fine to go there. So I would spend a couple hours there.
I would do happy hour at Gardner, which is a friend of mine’s new restaurant. It’s on East 6th. I’d sit on their patio, have a couple of drinks and some snacks. My favorite way to eat out is to go to a couple of places, rather than just camp out at one. So I’d go to happy hour at the Gardner, then I’d do dinner at Sway. It’s a Thai place near our house, and because we have a ten-week-old, we’d probably be home by about 9:00.
What does the ideal scaling of the business look like? Does that involve technology, more guides, etc.?
Honestly, we still wrestle with that. We don’t have a set definition for the next two or three years. I will say on the technology front, because that is the question we get most often, “Why haven’t you guys done an app?” I still think, and I thought this when we first started the company, travel is unique.
It’s a unique industry in that people want to have that experience that I was describing to you, it’s not just another random weekend trip, it’s a few day’s that you’re going to be talking about for 20 years. You’re gonna have stories from your time in wherever, it’s just like a life long memory. We try to think like, is there a magic to that? Can we crack the code? Are there common threads to those types of experiences?
One of them I think is story. Whether it’s meeting someone, or knowing the story of this neighborhood. So if that’s true, I’m not sure that technology is the best conduit. I think it can be a detriment. For instance, if you’re like, let’s go to eat dinner somewhere tonight, and you guys are sort of arm-wrestling with your iPhone on who is going to figure it out. This magazine app says this, and this travel app says this, and you’ve just sucked the spontaneity and the vibe out of that experience. I haven’t encountered a travel app or even a magazine website that doesn’t kind of end that sort of suspension of disbelief if you’re talking about literature.
I don’t think technology is it for us. I do think that we’re obviously limited to seven cities right now, and we’ll do three more next year, so we’ll be at ten. We’ll be four years in and have ten American cities. I think getting more people in the fold, so that we can do cities faster but at the same quality, is important. We want to do 20 cities in the next three years. And we’re going to launch a second series that’s not American cities next summer. I think that helps to just sort of scale when you have more. The distribution deal was important, we need to be in more stores. We sell in 100 stores right now. We want to be in 500. I’m not trying to build Lonely Planet. Our scale is very small in comparison to that.
What keeps you motivated?
That’s a good question. That stuff’s been sort of shifting around the last 2 and a half months in an interesting way when Booker was born. I would say, outside of that, every new city is motivating. That’s one of the fun parts about what we do, it never gets old because you finish and then now it’s like all right I’m off to LA. But it’s like, I don’t know anything about LA. It’s just totally refreshing again, and we’re on to a new series of books, and that’s more refreshing.
The newness of it is motivating. The new places and covering more territory is motivating. I’m surprised that I’ve gotten as excited about the back end of business. It’s like the non-creative part. I mean it’s creative trying to figure out, how do we unlock this thing, how do you market? How do we talk about what we do?
That stuff has gotten really interesting for me. It can get a little stressful sometimes when you dwell on it, but that’s motivating.
I’m motivated by growing the business and growing a team. I really would love to have a team of like 7-10 people, have a good office space, and have other people rocking-and-rolling on the kind of things that we do now, and me getting to sort of float around amongst them. Yeah, those are a few motivating factors.
What does your morning routine look like?
It’s early these days. I get up before the sun, make coffee. We usually have a couple hours at home, pretty low key. Coop, my dog, will be up. I drive into work… Austin has pretty bad traffic, so I kind of weave around through a couple of different neighborhoods. I’ll usually stop at one of two coffee places on the way and normally get to the office about 9.
Do you have any sort of meditative practice — writing, reading, walks, meditation itself — anything like that?
Not enough these days. I set out at the beginning of the year to read the first 30 minutes of my work day, every day, and I failed like two weeks in. I would probably say the two meditative things I do is: 1) Coop comes to work with me and I walk him every day. There’s a Greek saying, I forget the phrasing of it, but is translates to “solved by walking.” It’s the literal movement, to get your blood flowing.
And 2) in the winter, like the two months of winter we have, it’s building fires. So that’s kind of like my nightly meditation.
What do you do when you feel like you’re losing focus?
Tangibly, I’m a sticky note person, so I make lists. So if I’m losing focus, kind push things aside and create a new, a fresh, “okay, what do I need to do right now?” And just sort of list it out in bullet points.
Given that we’re in Austin, I’m changing up the next question a little bit, though very similar. Do you think that a taco is a sandwich?
No. I don’t think it’s a sandwich.
But why? Really it’s kind of like a sandwich wrap.
I guess because there’s no bread involved.
Tortilla?
And you never put beans on a sandwich. I don’t think. Bean, egg, and cheese is my go-to breakfast taco. But it’s a breakfast taco. I eat more breakfast tacos than I do lunch tacos.
Yeah, well, there’s a great selection of those here in town. We’re gonna have quite few after this (laughs). This has been a lot of fun, Taylor. Thanks so much for chatting with us.
Thanks for having me. Enjoy your time in Austin.
And thank you for reading! Big thanks to Taylor Bruce for hosting us and making the time, and to Phil Bator for making sure we enjoyed the next few days in Austin. Be sure to check them out on Instagram and pick up a copy in their online store at wildsam.com.
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