If you’ve passed by the Chess Club storefront in Portland’s Old Town recently, you may have wondered what it sells. A small label in the window gives you a hint — “global magazines.” The store carries hundreds of publications from around the world, with topics ranging from queer periodicals to art and design quarterlies. Owners Andrew Simon and Christy Lai have said that they want the store to serve as a meeting place and conversation starter for people in search of offline connection. Simon and Lai join us to talk about creating physical community in a digital world.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. If you’ve passed by the Chess Club storefront in Portland’s Old Town recently, you may have wondered what it is. It is not in fact a place to play chess. A small label in the window does help explain things – it reads, “global magazines.” The store carries hundreds of publications from around the world, with topics ranging from queer periodicals to art and design quarterlies.
Owners Andrew Simon and Christy Lai told Portland Monthly recently that they want the store to serve as a meeting place and conversation starter for people in search of offline connection. They join us now for just that. Christy Lai and Andrew Simon, welcome.
Christy Lai: Thank you.
Andrew Simon: Thank you. Hi, Dave.
Miller: Christy, first – why start a magazine shop in 2024? A brick and mortar? I guess there was a pop-up in 2023. But still, why start a magazine shop now?
Lai: I’ve been involved in tech for a really long time, so having that deep integration into tech just makes me appreciate print and offline life even more. It’s always been a big part of me growing up and exploring all the offline, tangible experiences versus digital – that was a big part of my culture. Growing up in a small town and having access to magazines allowed me a broader picture into the rest of the world. When I moved to Portland, Rich’s Cigars was the one place that I felt had the access to these periodicals that I love so much. Then the pandemic hit and they decided to get rid of the magazines.
So there was something compelling for me to want to bring that back. And especially during that time I had just started a maker space and was transitioning from a purely digital product design background to doing something that’s more hybrid, like bridging digital and physical. So it just made sense to want to have a space where I made things but then also brought in physical products.
Then I met Andrew through a mutual friend and we’d been talking about it for several years. We ended up living in the same place. He moved into the same apartment building that I’d been living in and that conversation came up again. We [agreed] that this was a great opportunity. Why don’t we just start looking for spaces and make this happen?
Miller: Andrew, why did you want to do it?
Simon: I’ve always loved magazines. I love print. And I’d been teaching high school and college for the last seven years. There was something that I noticed when I put some really cool or interesting magazines in front of my students … they would get excited about it in a way I couldn’t get them excited about anything that I would show them on a screen.
I thought, hey, there’s this big world out there of independent magazines being made right now. And they’re exciting. I think as we’re looking at maybe challenging some of the dependence on digital platforms for news and visual culture consumption, it seems like the perfect moment in our political moment, in our cultural moment, to help people experience the world through magazines.
Miller: Christy, you said that [magazines] were important to you growing up, a window to a different part of the world. What are magazines that stand out now as being really important to you? Touchstones?
Lai: Well, when I was growing up, the magazine Colors, released by United Colors of Benetton, was really important. At the time it was very much like the window into the rest of the world. They literally call it a “magazine for the rest of the world” and there were just so many topics that they covered. It was more cultural than it was art, but it opened up the doors to so many things I didn’t realize were happening around the world but also just creativity. So many of the things that I’m influenced by in my digital life are from the print world or the real life world.
Miller: You said you were in a small town before you moved to a bigger one. So where were you growing up?
Lai: I grew up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Yeah, I was born in Seattle. We lived in Chinatown. When I was 5, my parents wanted to open a Chinese restaurant. So of course, naturally they decided to move us to Coeur d’Alene. So I spent most of my childhood up until the end of high school in Coeur d’Alene. My parents are still there.
Being in this small town, the internet was my way out of this tiny culture, so I had this lifestyle of wanting to be integrated into tech, being online and finding new things through that avenue … but then very much rooted in print. So Colors. I loved Architectural Digest. That was my first intro into my love of architecture.
Miller: As a teenager, you would read “Architectural Digest”?
Lai: As a child. I collected Architectural Digest from grade school up until high school. I had every issue. My dad built a bedroom for me that was just for magazine archives.
Miller: So this goes deep and in unexpected ways too?
Lai: Yeah, so many of these things influenced where I ended up now even in my career and all the things that influence me now.
Miller: Andrew, what about you? What are important magazines from your youth that are the breadcrumbs to where you are now?
Simon: I really liked the magazine George, the JFK Jr. magazine. I remember encountering it as a kid and thinking, hey, this is something cool here, this intersection of politics and culture. I also loved going to Borders, browsing newspapers from around the world and looking in different languages. I think I felt connected to the world through print. I grew up in Portland, but I always sort of thought there’s a big world outside of the Pacific Northwest that I want to explore. And through printed culture was a way for me to do that.
Miller: Where did the name Chess Club come from?
Simon: Well, we’re not very literal, so it’s not an actual chess club. But we like how chess is this universal language that, as long as you understand the rules, you can play. And we thought that there’s something about chess club. It speaks to this place that you go to after school, where the nerdy kids go to continue their intellectual stimulation. And this is what we thought about creating it for adults. This is a place where you can go. You can hang out with like-minded people and seek inspiration.
Miller: But in this world, in this telling, the nerdy kids are also the cool kids.
Simon: Totally.
Miller: Which was not the case when I was in school, but things have changed.
Chrissy, if you walk into the store right now, what are you gonna see?
Lai: You’re gonna see a lot of magazines. It’s very minimal and we designed it that way. We wanted the store to be almost like an art gallery so that the magazines themselves could stand out. So it’s very white – white shelves, white displays. And then on the other side, it’s still a work in progress. We’ve got a mineral water bar, and then that’s also going to be a place for other art objects and other products that will eventually be released.
The big term vision is to work with other artists and collaborate with them on releasing limited edition items. We have a connected maker space design lab behind the retail shop. So eventually, that will become the platform for collaboration.
Miller: Andrew, how do you decide what magazines to carry? If there are 400 or so, I mean, there must be tens of thousands that you’re not carrying?
Simon: Around the holidays was an interesting time for me to understand what we didn’t carry. For example, somebody came in and said, “Hey, do you have a magazine about fishing for my father-in-law?” And I said we actually don’t have a magazine about fishing, but we have a magazine for redheads, a magazine for horse girls, a magazine about the culture of mountains, skiing, snowboarding, queer fashion, satirical fashion, avant-garde.
Miller: But not Sports Illustrated, Guns and Ammo, Cosmo, Glamour. You have Vogue, which is sort of a helpful dividing line there. It’s a little bit more highbrow, a little bit more off the beaten track?
Simon: Most of what we carry is not published monthly. We go with a lot of annual, biannual and quarterly magazines – longer shelf life.
Miller: How would you describe your clientele?
Simon: A lot of professional creatives – architects, shoe designers, graphic designers, photographers, journalists – a lot of students and really a lot of people who are just interested in the world beyond Portland.
Miller: Can you have a sustainable business of selling often expensive, often collectible magazines in a city of Portland’s size? We’re not New York, Tokyo or L.A. There are a bunch of creatives and I feel like we punch above our weight in a couple of very specific sectors, but we’re not a big city.
Lai: The numbers have been interesting. I think it’s known that magazines don’t have a high profit margin, but people are really interested and maybe it’s the times. We’re in an age where people are overloaded by digital, being online, and they want to seek out something that’s more intentional and that’s self-contained. It’s almost peaceful to go into a space and not have an algorithm dictate what you should be buying and scrape your data. You can go and have that freedom to choose and decide what you’re interested in.
I think there’s a lot of interest, but that’s just part of the beginning of the story of Chess Club. There’s going to be more beyond that, but for now, I’m personally surprised at how many people want magazines and how they consistently come back.
Miller: As I noted, your store, which is going to have grander aims for the future, is in Old Town, Chinatown, which is a part of Portland that’s gotten a lot of bad press in recent years. What does the neighborhood mean to you?
Lai: I’ve been there for a long time. My first creative studio was actually one block away from Chess Club on Northwest 5th. My day job is with the company HILOS. So I’m building software that allows footwear designers to design footwear and launch them with on-demand printing. So I spent the greater decade in Old Town and in Chinatown. I grew up in Chinatown in Seattle. There’s something about that area that I just want to help build and revitalize, especially with footwear. That’s what I’m in right now. I feel like this will become a hub of footwear with the Made in Old Town Project and with all these different designers and footwear enthusiasts in the area. That’s going to be the new cultural hub of Portland, I believe.
Miller: Andrew, what does it mean to you to have this creative-focused business in this particular neighborhood right now?
Simon: As a teenager growing up in Portland, I really loved walking around Old Town. I thought that it was a place that spoke to both Portland’s history and a place where immigrants would come, and can speak to Portland’s future as a growing creative city. I’m not giving up on the neighborhood and I think that we’ve had people come into the store who say, “Hey, thank you for being here and for doing this because it’s an important part of building this really beautiful part of our neighborhood.” We’re a few blocks from Lan Su Chinese Garden, and there’s so many important cultural landmarks just within a few blocks of our shop.
Miller: Andrew Simon and Christy Lai, thanks very much.
Simon: Thank you, Dave.
Lai: Thank you.
Miller: Andrew Simon and Christy Lai are co-owners of Chess Club. It is a new-ish magazine store in Portland’s Old Town.
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