The "herstory" behind skirt!® Part 1

Editorial note:  Today we will begin a series by skirt!’s founder, Nikki Hardin who tells the “herstory” behind skirt! magazine, skirt! books and skirt.com.  This retrospective comes at a time of great growth and promise for skirt!  We hope you enjoy taking a look at just how far skirt! has come.

In 1994, I was living on a tiny island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, broke and bored with being a freelance writer and longing to have something to read that reflected my life and the lives of the women I knew. So with no capital, it only made perfect sense to throw caution to the wind and start a magazine. After all I had no money, no collateral unless you count a rusty used car, no business plan and no prior experience in the magazine industry. Plus I was planning to start a liberal, feminist-oriented magazine in a bright red southern state, and I was 50 years old, an age when I always thought I’d be settled in a career, not taking a chance on a crazy idea. But it wasn’t the first time I’d gone out on a very shaky limb.

I was born in a rural town in Kentucky and went to small town public schools where I was always chosen last on the playground, failed to develop large breasts in high school and ached to be popular. I eloped on a Greyhound Bus with my boyfriend, when I was 17, just two weeks out of high school, and I was divorced at 27 with three kids to support. Instead of going to work for the post office, as my mother hoped I would, I took the most impractical route and started college when I was 29. I spent the next five years as a single mother and starting-from-scratch student.

If you drew a picture of my career path after I graduated, it would look like a road under construction, with plenty of detours, washouts, dead ends and exit ramps. Nothing in my past had prepared me to start and run a business, much less one that made money. I’m what The New York Times once referred to in an article as an “accidental entrepreneur.” I’m not daring or adventurous or brave. I’m shy, cautious, afraid of change (I even hate to change the clock in my car when Daylight Savings time rolls around) and risk-averse.  Skirt! became a braver, bolder version of me, the woman I’d like to be, the woman that many of us wanted to be. In that sense, it’s both aspirational and inspirational.

The idea for skirt seemed to come out of nowhere or the universe or my subconscious, as I think all good ideas do. One day I was complaining to a friend about my life, my crappy career, being a failure, wanting more. He asked me what I would do if I could choose from anything at all, and I said, “Start a magazine for women”. Then do it, he said. I can’t, I protested, I’m 50. I don’t have any money. I don’t know how. I wanted it to be easy, and I was scared. I thought of a million reasons NOT to answer that calling, but the idea wouldn’t go away. I started talking about it to friends who urged me to do it. I’d take a few steps forward and then get discouraged and they would all lift me up and drag me along behind the idea. Without them, I would never have made it.

When I started skirt! In 1994, there wasn’t anything around quite like it, especially not for women. Our mission was to have a publication that spoke to all sides of a woman’s personality, so that’s why we sometimes describe it as part feminista, part fashionista . If we had an ideal reader, her name would be “Martha Steinem” because most of our readers are kickass liberals who also like to shop and cook and don’t think wearing lipstick means you don’t have a brain.

People were amazed at the first issue because no one had seen anything like it before. It was fresh, very bold, somewhat controversial. It was designed to look much slicker than a local free publication and the ads were meant to be just as stylish as the editorial, something no one else had bothered to do. Almost immediately, we established an emotional connection with our audience, because they sensed we were authentic, not a corporate product or an advertorial vehicle. We were passionate about what we were writing and living and believing, and it came across in print. Skirt! was the real deal, and it was speaking to women with real lives. Suddenly we were reaching women readers and consumers more effectively than daily newspapers or other publications that were much bigger and better financed.

Click here for Part 2 – skirt!® is embraced by women in other markets and in other products.