Shipping a brand magazine to Manila
This spring, somewhere on the South China Sea, there was a container with pallets of magazines in it. Copies of DiWA, printed to mark Tao Philippines 20th anniversary, shrink-wrapped and slowly crossing the world towards a warehouse in Manila.
DiWA is the travel magazine I edit and produce for Tao Philippines, the adventure travel company that runs expeditions through the islands of Palawan. The anniversary edition ran to 12,000 copies, distributed to the Philippines, London, New York, Amsterdam and the UAE. It also carries a feature by me, which makes it one of the stranger entries in my portfolio: writer, editor, producer and, briefly, freight-forwarding hobbyist.
Why a boat company needs a magazine
Tao's product is days on a wooden boat between islands – no itinerary you could print, no rooms to photograph in the usual way, and an experience that guests spend years failing to explain to their friends afterwards. That gap, between what it was like and what you can say about it, is exactly what a magazine is for.
A brochure gets read once and binned. A brand magazine done properly is the thing a guest picks up and keeps – on the boat, in the airport, on a coffee table in London two years later, where a friend picks it up and asks the question every travel brand wants asked: where is this? Print earns a patience from readers that no feed ever will, and for a company selling slowness, the medium is making the argument all by itself.
What "producing" actually means
Editing the magazine is the part people picture. Producing it is the part that fills the calendar: commissioning and wrangling the material, editing everything into one voice, working the design pages back and forth, then the print decisions – paper, format, run size – and then the bit the glamour never mentions, which is getting tonnes of printed matter literally half way around the world. Freight quotes. Customs paperwork. A container ship's schedule, which is a thing you cannot chase.
I run projects like this through my production company, Content Collective, pulling in the designers and photographers each job needs. But DiWA is special to me beyond the work. My son's family is Filipino, the Philippines is the country I write about most and this magazine sits exactly where my journalism and my brand work overlap – some of the same islands I've covered for newspapers, told this time from the inside.
The measure of it
A magazine for a travel brand succeeds when it stops looking like marketing and starts getting kept. We may have shipped the magazine to five countries, but Tao’s guests carry DiWA home to more places than I can track. We know that their partner architecture has already had three direct enquiries from the magazine.
Ellie Fazan edited and produced DiWA, a travel magazine marking the 20th anniversary of the Philippine adventure travel company Tao Philippines. 12,000 copies were printed and shipped to the Philippines, London, New York, Amsterdam and the UAE in 2026. She produces brand magazines for travel companies through her production company Content Collective.