New magazine, Kazoo, focuses on girls’ brains, art & sports, not beauty

Last month a photo of two magazines went viral. The magazine on the left is called Girls Life and the magazine on the right is Boys Life.

The cover of Girls Life features a pretty young girl in makeup and promises you’ll read articles about “Your Dream Hair” and “Wake Up Pretty” “My First Kiss – real girls smooch and spill.” On the cover of Boys Life, the words “Explore Your Future. Astronaut, artist, firefighter chef – Here’s how to be what you want to be” replace a cover model and there are images of a firefighter’s helmet, a microscope, a human brain, a calculator… You get the idea.

This disparity is exactly why former Condé Nast editor, Erin Bried, started Kazoo, a new magazine for girls ages five through 10.

“I have two daughters,” Bried said, over Skype from Brooklyn. “I was going to the bookstore with my five year old one day. We were looking at the newsstand for a magazine for her to read and we were faced with a wall of magazine covers with little girls wearing makeup and stories promising, ‘How to get pretty hair’ and, ‘How to have good manners.’ My five year old is more into pirates than princesses right now, so we left the store empty handed. She was totally bored, I was seething with anger! A few days later on the way home from school she said, ‘Mom, did you know that [outer] space is for boys?’ And my jaw dropped. I was so surprised to hear her saying this already, in pre-school. It’s not okay with me. I know we can do better for our girls. I know we can do better for all of our kids.”

Kazoo to the rescue

Bried’s spent her entire career writing and editing glossy magazines, so she knew what she had to do. She created Kazoo, something that doesn’t already exist on newsstand shelves.

“We cover art and nature and science and tinkering and travel and sports. Not at all hair or manners or princesses or anything like that. Not that there’s anything wrong with that stuff, there’s just so much more we can offer our girls.”

Like inspiration from successful, smart and talented women:

“Every story in [Kazoo] is either inspired or developed by top woman in her field. So in our first issue, for example, we had Alison Bechdel, who is the MacArthur Genius award winning cartoonist, do a story on how to draw a cat. In our second issue we had Catherine Opie, whose works hangs in MOMA and all these major museums all around the world, talk about how to take a picture. Then we gave the readers a tutorial on how to make a camera out of a juice box. We have a writing lesson from #1 New York Times bestseller, Jennifer Weiner. In every issue we have a maze where our readers get to lead a woman of historical importance to her destination. So in the first issue we have a maze featuring Diana Nyad and the readers get to take her from Cuba to Florida, mapping her historic swim.”

Unlike most magazines, there isn’t even a single photograph of a person in Kazoo. Instead, people are illustrated.

“I wanted our readers to be lost in all the stories. We have science experiments and recipes and activities for them to do. I didn’t want our readers to come to the magazine and see a picture of another girl doing what they’re doing because I didn’t want them to compare themselves to anyone else. I want them to be lost in their own mind, in their own experience and never be made to feel that they don’t look the right way, they’re not acting the right way.”

Bried started Kazoo with Kickstarter funding, because she wanted to gage if there would be any interest in the magazine. $171,000 later, Kazoo was the highest funded journalism kickstarter campaign of all time.

Click here to subscribe to Kazoo!

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