Finally, Berlin has a magazine store worth visiting! That’s because Mark Kiessling and Jessica Reitz (both loyal fans of the printed word), have got together and created Berlin’s first premier magazine store Do You Read Me?! From fabulous Parisian fashion mags to über-cool British style publications to Berlin papers to teeny-tiny fanzines from Copenhagen, ‘Do You Read Me?!’ is a one-stop shop that has everything covered. We’re also very happy to tell you that Do You Read Me?! will be contributing to LEXPOSURE.NET regularly, with a hand-picked selection of their favourite titles! Yes magazines fans, you are officially in heaven!

Hi Mark. So what’s your professional background?

I have a design studio here in Berlin called Greige since 2000. We started with things for Y3 – (Yohji Yamamoto and adidas) and we’ve done the look-books with them for almost 7 years now. Other clients include Absolut Vodka, Coca Cola Light, Smart, Universal Music, Michael Michalsky and the Berlin concept store No.74. We also work on many cultural projects like publications for art exhibitions - so mainly we work within fashion and cultural fields.

That’s interesting that you’ve always been involved strongly with print

Yes this is what we do, it’s almost all print work – from the start to the end, we focus strongly on materials, print quality – we also do a lot of work for PR agencies doing their invitations and coming up with interesting ideas. We also do some interior design, together with Rupert Kopp we did the No.74 adidas store on Torstrasse and I designed the Do You Read Me?! store from scratch. Lee Colwill and I also did the editorial design of the last Achtung magazine issues, No 10 and 11. I probably split my time 50-50 between graphic design and this store now. It wasn’t intended to be like that but a store like this takes a lot of upkeep day to day and both fields of work benefit from each other.

And so how did you and Jessie come together?

Well Jessie was working for Dussmann for 6 years, doing the marketing and management of Dussmann. We worked together on this sort of newspaper newsletter that Dussmann had for a couple of years, that’s how we got to know each other. After that I told her about this idea I had for a magazine shop. I knew she was also into books and I thought we could work together except on magazines. Because magazines are always like niche objects in bookstores and obviously our idea was to get them out of the niche, because there is so many interesting magazines and they deserve their own platform.

I notice that you emphasize that you offer a bespoke service, with customers can make their own magazine box and that these will get delivered. Is that a measure to fight the bad economy?

We wanted to do that from the start – we knew we may have a problem selling the magazines just here in the store alone – so we always knew we wanted a mail-order service and a really bespoke service is even better. Like the agencies and studios all around who need magazines for their daily work and PR, or simply want to have mags around on shootings, for their clients to read etc.