“Hey gang, let’s put on a show” musicals. At the turn of the last
decade, while still in college, two young married couples have
the kooky idea of creating a magazine. A few wholesome—they
are Mormon—high jinks and one social media revolution later,
they nd themselves at the helm not just of a successful publi-
cation, but at the vanguard of a veritable movement, a zeitgeist-
deining, social media–friendly tidal wave that swathes an
entire generation in muted linen, pour-over coee, and grati-
tude. #Kinfolklife #Flatlay #Blessed
There was a lot that appeared in those early pages that
was an accurate expression of the lives of its young founders.
Nathan Williams and Katie Searle met in 2008 while both were
students at Brigham Young University’s Hawaii campus—he
developed a crush on the quiet, luminous girl after passing
the desk where she worked every day. It would take him some
time to get up the nerve, as he recalls, to ask
her to leave her boyfriend and date him
instead. Searle insists she already had bro-
ken things o with his predecessor. But both
agree that she said yes, and then yes again,
a few months later, when he led her into
the forest and, beneath a bower of carefully
strung fairy lights, asked her to marry him.
An assignment for an entrepreneurship
class had the two of them dreaming up an
e-commerce platform, which they called
Kinsfolk & Company, for selling plates and
glasses and other things you might need for
a sweet little dinner party, and that, com-
bined with contributors Williams had gath-
ered through a blog he kept, and help from
their close friends, Doug and Paige Bischo,
gradually morphed, in 2011 , into a tiny, very
DIY magazine, focused on food and the
“small gatherings” they all loved. They had
no publishing experience and no deined
roles at the time; everyone just did every-
thing. “We all lived in married student hous-
ing, so when we weren’t in class, we spent
a lot of time together,” says Doug Bischo.
“We’d go to Nate and Katie’s apartment, and
they’d be at ours regularly. We were always
getting together to cook, and hang out, and
just enjoy each other’s company. We had a
really, really good friendship.” Williams and
Doug Bischo even looked somewhat alike;both of them tall and lean, with short blond hair worn in a neat
side part, and a predilection, even then, for sharper clothes
than might be entirely normal for your average college student.
The theme for the irst issue was inspired by a line from
Thoreau’s Walden: “I had three chairs in my house; one for
solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Williams so
identied with the book that he handed out copies to friends at
his birthday party. Kinfolk volume 1 included an article on ka,
the Swedish coee break so in vogue now, and on teatime—
rituals that would be incorporated into Kinfolk’s oce life. “It
was really simple, really basic, but what I thought was sweet at
the time,” Williams says. “And yeah, it was far too kitsch and
cutesy. But there was this correlation there.”
From the start, Kinfolk pulled in millions of page views,
a response strong enough to convince the Williamses and
Bischos to sign on with a San Francisco–
based publisher to help with printing and
distribution. By September 2012 , Kinfolk
was selling tens of thousands of copies
per issue at a cover price of $ 18.
The two couples moved to Portland,
Oregon, which in addition to being near
Searle’s hometown had the added ben-
et of a large population of aesthetically
minded millennials eager to express their
creative identities through a well-curated
table setting. Yet even once Kinfolk had a
real oce and began hiring a real sta,
the fairy-tale quality remained. “Nathan
would bring in new bread he had baked,” says Nathan Ticknor,
who started working as service manager in 2013. “We had our
teatime. At Christmas, we would all go out and chop down our
oce Christmas tree together.” When Georgia Frances King
showed up to interview for her job as editor, she was invited to
join a sta party held on nearby Sauvie Island. “Everyone from
the oce was there sitting on the beach in the sunshine, swim-
ming, and eating watermelon slices with feta and rosewater,”
she recalls. “I thought, Shit, it’s real.”W
HAT IF YOUR LIFE—maybe shot in better light,
maybe a tiny bit beyond your nancial reach,
but still, in essence, yours—turned out to be
what an entire generation was dreaming of?
“Two thousand eleven wasn’t that long ago, but when Kinfolk
popped up, it seemed fresh and new,” Williams says. “It was
the rst original-concept publication focused on community,
on coming together around a shared table, on slowing down.
I think it resonated because it oered an antidote to the huge
digital presence in our lives. As a company we recognized that
the more time we’re on our phones, the more of an appetite we
have for real connection.”
It was a strange transitional moment for lifestyle magazines.
The great die-o had occurred just a year or two earlier, shut-
tering old stalwarts like Gourmet and Metropolitan Home, as
well as livelier new titles like Domino and Plenty Magazine. A
few of the more niche publications that rose in their wake, like
Modern Farmer and Cereal, lay a couple of years in the future.
But by 2011 , there was denitely a need waiting to be lled, as
survivors like Architectural Digest and Elle Decor shook up their
mastheads and a number of upstarts, like Rue (still around) and“What if your life
turned out to be what an
ENTIRE GENERATION
was dreaming of?”
APRIL 2020 101