VILLAGE LIFE
SERVICES
WRITING, EDITING, PROOFREADING
CONTENT STRATEGY AND IDEATION SUPPORT
OVERVIEW & CHALLENGE
A shopping centre magazine that’s free for customers, and focused on community, families, and local business owners. On paper, it sounds straightforward. In reality, walking this line can be a tightrope. Lean too far into promotion and you lose credibility. Play it too safe and you're forgettable – just another glossy competing for attention in a saturated market.
St Ives Shopping Village had an established in-centre magazine, but it needed a refresh – something that aligned more closely with the village-like appeal of the centre itself. Something that felt less like retail content and more like the kind of magazine you'd actually want to read, keep, or share.
Engaged by the team at Factory One, our brief was to elevate the VILLAGE LIFE magazine while keeping it warm, welcoming, and genuinely useful to the St Ives community.
OUR APPROACH
We went hyper-local. Rather than writing generic shopping centre content, we interviewed store owners directly – bringing their voices, expertise, and perspectives into every story. The local beautician's take on spring skincare. The café owner's morning routine. Medical and wellness retailers who don't usually get meaningful coverage beyond a quick mention.
For the community in St Ives – these individuals aren’t just business owners. They're local experts and part of the local fabric. With this in mind, the Spring edition was structured around the season, ensuring every feature, angle, and headline felt timely and relevant to readers' lives. Short features, but with substance, dynamic headlines that make you stop before turning the page, and editorial choices that prioritise the reader over the retailer.
This is where HIMMEL's journalism roots came into play. Knowing what angles matter. What questions unlock real insight. How to shape content so it engages, informs, and inspires without drowning readers in text.
RESULT
In taking this approach, we’ve written a magazine that balances promotion with genuine community storytelling. One that makes the shopping centre feel like a village you belong to.
This strategy has resonated strongly with both our client and the community, with the Spring issue We’ve transformed high-end retail content into a storytelling approach that celebrates every part of our day to day lifestyle. 2,500 copies of the magazine were delivered to the centre itself while the remaining 17,000 copies were distributed to residents within the local area.
"This project allowed us to return to what we love most – long-form content and journalism. We’ve done our best to avoid creating something that reads as advertorial content or thinly veiled promotion, and rather focused on storytelling that serves the reader first,” says Alana Wulff, founder of HIMMEL. “We asked the right questions, found the angles that matter, and created something people actually want to read – that’s what good magazine content should be, and we can’t wait for the next issue.”
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