Customer Story: The Knot

Known for its modern fashion sense, socially-conscious approach, and incredible resources, The Knot has been a source of support and inspiration for all things wedding-related to more than 25 million couples worldwide. Stemming from the top wedding website and app, The Knot magazine offers everything engaged couples need to plan their wedding: inspiring ideas, thousands of photos, style tips, expert advice, and more.

As part of our ongoing Customer Stories series, we recently sat down with Jessica Safavimehr, Editorial Operations Manager at The Knot. We discussed Jessica’s work in building the audience of The Knot magazine, which is both printed and published on digital newsstands every quarter, and how Issuu has supported that digital growth.

Welcome, Jessica! Can you tell us about your organization and what you do?

The Knot specializes in helping people plan their unique weddings, assisting with everything from setting (and sticking to) a budget, finding vendors, announcing their nuptials with invitations, creating a registry, and more. Our goal is to provide couples with everything they need while planning, and we’re there every step of the way to help make their day truly special. What some people may not know, however, is that The Knot is just one brand underneath the larger umbrella of The Knot Worldwide, a global company with brands in 16 counties that help people navigate and enjoy life’s greatest moments. From the proposal to the wedding day, creating a home to starting a family together, The Knot Worldwide is really about celebrating all major milestones.

Can you talk briefly about your digital magazine and the effort required to put it together?

The Knot magazine has a team of eight, and because we’re a pretty small team, we wear many hats. For example, to produce everything we need as a digital magazine, some of our editors are also simultaneously working with the digital and e-commerce teams. We pride ourselves on producing high-quality content, and that requires a major effort on all ends.

We publish issues quarterly since our content takes time to produce; we focus on in-depth interviews that we feel can really help our readers. This includes everything from longer lead times, which ensure we can have the most impactful interviews, to an extra step at the end where we embed videos from certain interviews straight into our digital content. This gives our readers the opportunity to hear directly from the source and watch the full interview along with reading our piece. We always shoot our own cover, and typically also have shoots for the fashion and accessory features inside the magazine, which requires meticulous planning and thoughtful execution. It’s a pretty constant, ongoing cycle, and so as soon as we release an issue, we’re already working on the next one: talking to industry experts, conducting interviews, and planning shoots.

How did you initially discover Issuu? What problem were you looking to solve?

The Knot has been publishing on Issuu for the past nine years, and one of my big responsibilities coming onto the team was reaching a wider audience. Although we were already using Issuu when I joined The Knot, we weren’t utilizing all of its features. After attending a demo of the Issuu product, I learned more about interactive features that could not only help us reach a wider audience but also heighten our content.

Now, we’ve begun taking advantage of Issuu’s interactive features. For example, we’ve made our featured stories clickable on the front cover, which gets readers past the Editor’s Letter and straight to the content they want. The embed feature has also given us the opportunity to make our magazine more engaging and stand out from print. In the Spring issue, we included a behind-the-scenes video from our photo shoot with Sydney McLaughlin, the Olympian. The video lets readers watch our Q&A with Sydney and hear her talk about her relationship, wedding planning, and how the Olympics fit into all that — a really cool viewer experience where our readers could feel they were really talking to an Olympian.

Have you gotten any feedback on your digital magazine?

Our internal teams have shared that our digital improvements have been a big success, and naturally, we’re all excited for the future of our magazine. Following our Spring issue featuring the video with Sydney McLaughlin, we’re working to incorporate more videos and multimedia into the digital issues; we recently hired an editorial video director to support that vision and make it a reality.

From sharing our digital content on social media and being able to reuse it multiple times in various formats across channels, we’ve been able to reach more viewers, increase interaction, and drive viewers to our site — a huge win across the board for multiple teams.

How was your experience using the product?

When I joined the company, I learned we weren’t taking full advantage of Issuu’s features. Once I attended a product demo, I was able to easily understand the full range of features and consider using them, which was really helpful. It was exciting for me to be able to come back to my team and ask, “Is this something we want to try?” And with each issue, we’ll continue to do more of that. It’s also been really helpful to analyze our statistics and see what people are clicking on and what pages they’re going to in order to inform our content strategy.

Do you have anything else to share with our readers?

I really think you’re going to enjoy what’s coming down the pipeline for The Knot magazine. We’ve really leaned into deeper content, expert interviews, and things like wellness and sustainability that we’re seeing as relevant topics for our audience. We want to make it easier for everyone to find what they need to celebrate life’s big moments from all angles.