Why am I starting another digital leaflet service? Isn’t there enough already? Yes. To be brutally honest yes there are.
You have Guzzle and All Catalogues and now we have created eMags.co.za as part of our services. In a way it serves as a portal for some of our clients to highlight their current print brochures and give them an additional online across various devices.
I have always had a love-affair with taking PDF documents and turning them into digital print editions. Years ago we researched and implemented the first digital brochures for brands like DionWired and Game. Later that was extended to more brands within the retails space as well as a few corporate brochures that targeted specific clients and customers on desktop and mobile browsers.
One of the proudest moments for me personally was when I developed an application for the BlackBerry 10 smartphones that allowed mobile users to access and view the catalogues of DionWired on their mobile devices. For my hard work I was rewarded with a limited edition BlackBerry Z10 Developer smartphone. It was a red beauty. My personal homage to that is to brand the eMags website with the same red of that smartphone. Yes, very sentimental.
Sadly the BlackBerry smartphone brand did not survive the onslaught of the Apple iPhone and multiple other brands who supported Android. I eventually became a full Mac Boy.
Digital leaflet journey
During the same time we started focussing more on a single solution that could scale more easily between desktop and mobile platforms from a single PDF. It became a better solution than simply taking the PDF of your publication and putting that on your website for customers to download. HTML5 became very big in the online world and presented new opportunities to convert the PDF into smaller and faster file sizes that could be search and indexed by Google to rank for results. It simply made more sense.
Over the years we have been involved in several website developments as Brand Barn and the need for digital brochures and leaflets have always stayed with us. But I have always wanted to return to the digital publishing space because of my love affair with it.
We always called it eMags, basically a digital leaflet, when in meetings or discussing digital print solutions. So you can imagine how excited I was when the domain name emags.co.za was available! To be honest, I was surprised nobody has ever registered it and parked it to make money off it in a domain resale. My luck I suppose. I registered it and actually forgot about it until I had to pay the domain renewal again.
The only thing I could do is to take some of my little spare time and start to work with it actively.
Let’s see how this goes…
Update 2021
Covid-19 and lockdown regulations made life harder than we initially expected and growing a new business during the last year has proven to be met with challenges.
We are lucky in the sense that we got through on the other side alive and well and we are looking forward to taking on this journey with a fresh and new approach.
This new approach would include providing South African digital leaflet browsers with a faster and more up to date experience. We are also looking at relevant information that would benefit our website browsers and make viewing eMags a great experience on their mobile devices.
The goal is to give a great service, that has always been the bottom line for me personally. One we will achieve and deliver on.