The Story 

Written in 2020.

It was spring 2013. My co-founder and partner Jody and I stood gawping with knotted stomachs as the lorry was unloaded. A pallet of boxes stacked a metre tall and just as wide, each containing 20 copies of our very first edition, was plonked in the middle of our single-lane one-way street. We stirred from our daze panicked and began fighting through the cellophane wrap holding the pallet together and dashed to get the boxes indoors as the traffic built up.

The delivery lorry pulled off, and suddenly, it was just us and them.

We took a box cutter and readied ourselves for the moment of truth. It’s a funny thing seeing something that’s occupied months of your life in the digital space come to life in paper and ink. First came elation. Then a sense of achievement. Then disbelief that we’d done it. Then the realisation it was, well, real. And then came the smell, an intoxicating scent of inky goodness that flooded our small flat with the heady reminder that we now had to sell these publications. The issue was, we had no distribution, no customers and absolutely no clue what we were doing. But at this point, there was no turning back.

We packed up suitcases full of boxes, enlisted family members as foot soldiers and headed to London. Jumping on and off tubes, we hit up all the stores we believed may be interested in selling our publication. Crikey, it was a nerve-wracking experience, rock-paper-scissoring who had to go up to the counter and pitch this piece of ourselves. What if they said no? What then?

Remarkably though, they didn’t. They all said yes. And with empty suitcases, we headed home, ecstatic.

Also remarkable was that people were buying copies from our online shop. It was a basic little website that a friend hashed together for about £150, so God only knows what about it inspired people to part with their cash.

By the end of the month, we’d all but sold out of that pallet.

So we reprinted. And then those sold out too.

We couldn’t believe it.

To lay some context, although we had creative backgrounds, we began Another Escape with no experience in publishing and just £3,000 startup cash. We hadn’t intended to start a company with that money; we’d worked hard to save it to travel the Balkans in the summer of 2012. But a couple of months before we were set to head off, Jody managed to turn his tibia and fibula into a splintered, shattered mush fooling around with a friend. After surgery to bolt his leg back together, there’d be no walking for six months let alone jumping on and off buses and trains. So that was that.

It was a recession. The job market was shot to shit. So why not start a business, we queried with naive optimism. And that’s just what we did while moonlighting to keep the wheels turning as we sussed things out.

Roll forward to when we’d sold out of our reprint of volume one, and we had a decision to make. Were we going to take this seriously and commit to the business? Or were we going to endeavour a different course? 

We went for it. We quit our jobs and worked our arses off to get the business off the ground. And oh boy, were we skint.

Particularly in those early days, there was a lot of blagging it. And there was always this niggling fear that we were about to be found out and shamed as imposters. At meetings, we were never what people expected, twenty-something-year-olds a bit on the scruffy side. But screw it – did it really matter? The proof was in the pudding, right?

So we cracked on, learnt on the fly and tried to absorb as much knowledge as we could about this independent publishing game. Unbeknown to us, we released our first volume just as the appetite for independent publications was on the up. People were hungry for quality printed content with limited adverts that spoke of a lifestyle and set of values – that spoke to them as readers rather than on behalf of advertisers. Indie publications were doing just this. We were doing just this.

Why not publish quarterly or monthly? The two of us could hardly keep up with putting out a biannual. We powered through the grind of our publishing schedule, and twice a year, we bid farewell to our friends for sometimes months at a go as we entered a deadline period.

Looking back, it seems like madness. The late nights, the weeks and weekends that blurred into one, the batch-cooked meals eaten for days simply to save time so we could get back to work. The greying hair, the greying skin and sunken eyes. But we believed in what we were doing – we believed in the value of the messages we were putting out into the world. We still do. And for better or worse, this was part of the sacrifice.

The years rolled on. In fact, they disappeared before us – completely evaporated. And yet we were still busting our hump on this project. It wasn’t just the content creation that took time; it was all the other things that kept the business afloat. Working at capacity and with limited bandwidth, we often chose to channel our energies not into making a more lucrative business but into continually making the product better, the storytelling better, the reader experience better. It made for lean times, but we were proud of what we were creating. And we’ve loved seeing our publication evolve over the years as we’ve upped our game, become more focussed on our mission and connected with more and more people.

We became better storytellers. Storytelling has always been at the heart of what we do – visuals and text coalescing on the printed page to convey narrative and meaning. And our editorial processes on the whole became more refined. We became more efficient and more skilled. Certainly, we were no longer imposters.

We evolved as people, too. This was, of course, inevitable, but yet it wasn’t something we anticipated. We’d never given the eventuality much thought, to be honest – we just dove in and knuckled down. But incrementally, without realising it, our worldview began to shift.

Another Escape’s remit naturally led us to people who have fostered a deep connection with nature. They welcomed us into their lives, shared with us their knowledge and invited us to see the world through their lens. To them, we are forever thankful.

Each of them has a niche and in-depth knowledge and understanding of a topic, and as collectors of their stories, we began to gain a birds-eye view of how these topics interweave. Zoomed out, we could see that you can’t talk about, say, ecosystem health without talking about fungal health, without talking about microbial health, without talking about human health, without talking about food systems and resource extraction, without talking about large-scale ecological and climate disruption, without talking about our broken relationship with the natural world. It’s all one.

The question became, how do we heal this broken relationship? To us at least, the answer seemed to begin with a simple act: get outside. And when out there, open your eyes to how incredible the world is, appreciate it and watch it at work. Observe all that has evolved over aeons that keeps life ticking over. Be curious and inquire. Gain knowledge and build understanding. Be a participant, not just a spectator. Experience the awe and wonder. Feel a part of nature. Feel connected. Interconnected. Interdependent. Because, we figured, once we feel this, we’ll surely be driven to become active environmental stewards and to live more regeneratively.

The two of us examined this question in relation to our own lives. We’ve always considered ourselves environmentalists and outdoors lovers, yet despite this, we realised our relationships with the living world needed work. We are, after all, a product of our culture – a culture that has an inherent and entrenched disconnect with nature.

Inspired by those we’d met and worked with, we slowed down to observe, to question, to learn and to participate. And when we did, we found that we got so much more out of our outdoor experiences. They became more enriching and nourishing.

A lot of outdoor culture revolves around egos and metrics. For us, being outdoors isn’t about that. Outdoor activities are a means to access these places – an excuse to be out there, even. For us, being outdoors is about fostering a connection to nature. And what we found is that as our connection to nature deepens, it doesn’t just determine how we behave out there, it governs how we lead our lives entirely.

Wow. But once you know, you know. You can’t unlearn. So we better act, we thought. With that came the weight of the responsibility to retell our subject’s stories in a way that would land with impact and inspire people in the same way we’d been inspired.

We figured if we could successfully tell these stories and channel these messages in our content, not only could we motivate people to get outdoors more and become active environmental stewards, but we could nudge them in a direction that will, hopefully, change the way they see and experience the world. That’s pretty powerful shit. That’s when we’ll start to affect real change.

A big task, perhaps. But it’s worth a punt, right?

But it’s not like we’ve ever believed we can single-handedly save the world. But we do believe that we can be a touchpoint for change on people’s journey and that it is often the arts and media that initiate the groundswell for cultural change – something we so desperately need now.

Our evolution is reflected in the evolution of the content we’ve created. And it has dawned on us that as we’ve personally gone on this journey, we’ve taken our readers on it too. We’ve grown and evolved together. Which is insanely cool.

As we tell our story now and reflect on those early days – and that first pallet of publications, which seems so piddly compared to the numbers we’ve printed in recent years – we realise how far we’ve come but also how much more room for growth there is, both for us personally and professionally.

We’ll be forever grateful to all the people we’ve featured and worked with for shaping us as people. And we’ll be forever grateful to the community of readers and supporters who have egged us on, sent words of encouragement and told us how Another Escape has impacted their lives – this is what has always kept us moving forward. And of course, also to everyone who has lent us a helping hand along the way.

We reflect on the highs so far. And there have been some serious highs. Landing our first stockist and the rush that came from someone believing in our product. Working with Patagonia, a brand that we’ve held in such high regard forever, for their ethics, their approach to business and their mission, and getting to tell the stories of their 1% For The Planet grantees, grassroots activists working on the frontlines. Being published in Chinese and distributed throughout China – just wow. And of course all the big and small moments in between.

With this, we look forward to the next chapter.