Off the beaten path...
Rebecca Darwin isn’t one to follow the typical path.
During the recent Hurricane Matthew evacuation ordered by Governor Nikki Haley, she admits it was “pretty cool” driving down the wrong side of the highway when eastbound lanes were reversed on I-26. In fact, for the Columbia, S.C. native who spent 25 years building a successful publishing career in New York City, it seems taking alternative routes has been more the norm than the exception. And it’s paid off big time.
Darwin, who returned to her Palmetto State roots in 2004 and three years later founded the award-winning, Charleston-based Garden & Gun magazine, served as guest speaker at the popular Daniel Island Speakers Series event on November 9. In her opening comments before the packed ballroom at the Daniel Island Club, she described her unlikely entry into the world of publishing. Darwin got an undergraduate degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and planned to go to law school - but once again veered a bit off course from the plan.
“When I was at Chapel Hill, a lot of the friends I met were from the northeast, particularly New York City,” said Darwin, dressed in a classic gray dress accented by an elegant string of pearls. “And I decided that I wanted to go and live in New York after I graduated from college and before I went to law school.”
She opted to do a gap year in the Big Apple and enrolled in what she described as “a funky little school” called Tobé-Coburn School for Fashion Careers. For the young creative spirit hoping to have a little fun in between educational gigs, the digression was monumental.
“It was the most incredible year of my life,” said Darwin, her audience captivated by the story. “The hardest life in terms of school, but it really was a detour that set the path for the rest of my life.”
The new direction led to an internship at GQ Magazine and ultimately a full-time job at the publication for Darwin when she graduated from Tobé-Coburn. She never made it to law school and instead stayed in New York for a quarter of a century building what she calls an “amazingly wonderful career.” Darwin’s impressive resumé would include being appointed the first female publisher of The New Yorker, publisher of Mirabella, and marketing director at Fortune.
A divine detour
During her years in New York, Darwin also met her husband, Cress. But another re-routing would come in 2000, this time led by Cress, a television producer who decided he wanted to become a pastor.
The couple moved to New Jersey so he could attend Princeton Seminary. While there, they lived in student housing and Darwin “stepped off the track for a while” to start a family. By 2004, they had a two-year old daughter and another one on the way. That year, Cress got a call to come to Charleston to become pastor of Second Presbyterian Church on Meeting Street.
“So 12 years ago, I found myself back in South Carolina, and the preacher’s wife!” said Darwin.
Shortly thereafter, Darwin remembered walking the beach at Pawley’s Island with a good friend, who suggested she start thinking about starting a “New Yorker” of the south.
“I said, ‘I’m not doing that, no way, never happening,’” Darwin recalled. “And I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I thought about it …We have Southern Living, but I don’t think there is a magazine that really spoke to a sophisticated group of people who travel and who lived a very good life.”
She considered the purpose of other lifestyle magazines - like Departures, Travel and Leisure, and Vanity Fair.
“If you think about those magazines, they mostly talk about things in the north or northeast, New York particularly, or the west coast, and I thought there really isn’t something here in the south and we need a voice of our own, so it just kind of sat there in my head.”
It stayed percolating in her mind - until the day she struck up a conversation with her friend, Pierre Manigault, chairman of the board of the Evening Post Publishing Company. Manigault asked if she’d like to start a new publication called “Lowcountry Living” - to be published every other month and inserted into the Post and Courier. Darwin said yes.
Although the publication was well received, she began to think bigger.
“I took a look at it and really decided that newspapers do what they do very well and magazines are a different discipline,” she said. “So I said to Pierre, what if we start a new magazine division of the Evening Post Publishing Company?” Darwin wrote the business plan for what would become Garden & Gun, received backing from Manigault and J. Edward Bell III, and launched her new magazine in 2007. They did four issues that year - and they were placed on newsstands up and down the coast and across the country. The debut did not go unnoticed. Among the 700 new publications in 2007, Garden & Gun was named the #2 hottest magazine launched that year.
“People are so fascinated with this magazine,” Darwin told the crowd. “That it is kind of doing things differently in this day and age, and is meeting with success.”
What’s in a name?
Many ask how the magazine got its “silly” name, added Darwin, and she is happy to explain. The “Garden & Gun” is actually the name of an old club in Charleston, originally located at the site of the present day Charleston Place Hotel. The club later moved to the Hank’s Seafood building, where Darwin held a launch party for the magazine some nine years ago.
“It was kind of a wild and crazy club,” she said. “I was never there, but I guess it was like the Studio 54 of Charleston more or less! When I told people we were going to name the magazine Garden & Gun, old Charleston was like ‘Oh! You’re kidding me. You do know what went on there, don’t you?’ And then in the next breath they would say, ‘But we all went there!’”
To Darwin, the name has an even deeper meaning.
“‘Garden’ is a metaphor for the land, which is really what everything in Garden & Gun is about,” she continued. “The music, the food, the culture, all comes from the land. And of course, the sporting life comes out of the land, too. And that’s the ‘Gun’ piece of it. But I (also) loved it because it said male and female, and I really wanted this to be a dual audience magazine, and, like a crowd like this, where you mix it up and have great conversation.”
A culture gets its voice
The magazine makes no secret of its mission and purpose. Printed on each and every cover of Garden & Gun, beneath the title, are the words “Soul of the South.” Take a gander at its pages and one of the first things you’ll notice is the paper it is printed on. It’s thick and hearty, almost brawny - like the content it holds. From articles about everything from Texas barbecue to Carolina Trout, Loretta Lynn to Matthew McConaughey, trend-setting stylists to avid outdoorsmen - you’ll find stories documenting the people and places that are currently shaping the South.
“We’re storytellers,” said Darwin. “We talk about artisans, and craftsman, and chefs, and sportsman, and musicians. We tell their stories, their experiences, and we’re about a place, and a pride in that place. And as a result I think we have really done a lot to lift the view of Southern culture on the national playing field.”
It is clear Darwin herself could easily be among the featured subjects on the magazine’s pages. Garden & Gun has survived the now infamous 2008-2009 economic bubble burst - only to emerge stronger and better than ever, with a devoted and loyal audience.
“We did everything we could to keep this magazine going through very, very dark days,” said Darwin. “Magazines are not for the faint of heart. It’s an expensive business and it takes quite a while to make money.”
But it did start reaping rewards - and along the way, Darwin realized just how meaningful the magazine had become to its readers. She remembers writing a letter to readers to explain why they had to skip an issue during one of those trying years to regroup and reorganize.
“In hindsight, I think it was one of the best things I ever did,” she said. “Because it built this incredible trust that we still have to this day with our readers. I think they believe what they read in the pages of the magazine and they know we’re authentic and truthful.”
Others in the publishing and business world would agree. Recently, Garden & Gun received a coveted National Magazine Award in General Excellence by the American Society of Magazine Editors. The publication has also been named one of the top 25 fastest growing companies in South Carolina, and the Garden & Gun team is often cited by national and trade media as an example of a company that is bucking trends.
“What I think we’re doing is producing a good old fashioned magazine that has a real connection with its readers and I think we’ve proven that if you give people something that they want to spend time with, they will,” added Darwin. “It’s really quite simple what we do at Garden & Gun.”
For Darwin, who next year will celebrate the magazine’s 10th anniversary, success has come with a variety of lessons learned. Among them - the importance of thinking big, learning from mistakes, taking risks, never sacrificing quality, and surrounding yourself with the best people. A little help from above never hurts either.
“Being the preacher’s wife is not what I signed up for when I got married,” said Darwin. “It was the farthest thing from my imagination, but I have to say if Cress had not done what he did, I wouldn’t have come to Charleston and I don’t think there would be a Garden & Gun. So I believe there is a little bit of divine intervention that came into play.”
It is an uncharted course that she is clearly happy to be walking. And as Robert Frost reminds us in his famous poem, for Rebecca Darwin and her beloved Garden & Gun, taking the road less traveled can often make all the difference.