Sick Love Zine is an independent platform celebrating young creatives and their work. The zine focuses on fashion, art and culture, and aims at starting honest conversations on issues that affect young creatives while promoting upcoming creative talent.
The zine recently launched an online marketplace for young creatives to help them sell their works. The creation of the marketplace is motivated by the fact that the previous year took a toll on several young artists, who might have been trying their best to get by. The marketplace wants to help creatives advertise and sell their work so they can get the sales and attention they deserve.
Sick Love Logo via Sick Love
Sick Love is founded by Isobel Gorman-Buckley, she also happens to be the editor. Isobel tells us more about Sick Love Zine, the new online marketplace and what they seek to achieve for up and coming creatives.
Hello, we think your platform is very impressive, valuable and necessary. Can you tell us how it was founded?
Thanks so much! I founded Sick Love just over a year ago now, a means to inspire conversations I felt were crucial but commonly brushed over in more traditional art based media. There are so many issues in the creative industries and so many interesting opinions coming from the youth that creating a platform where people were encouraged to express them seemed crucial.
It began as a website and Instagram featuring articles and imagery from young creatives expressing these opinions, but has quickly developed into a multi platform project offering workshops, events, print zines and more!
We noticed that you operate a zine, is the market place an extension of your publication or it stands independently?
The marketplace is part of Sick Love. Sick Love is a digital zine at its core – consisting of mainly opinion pieces and photography – but has extended past a traditional zine structure to best support the young creative community.
What is the inspiration behind the establishment of the online marketplace for smaller artists?
One of the issues that affects young creatives the most is the inability to support themselves financially. As a platform dedicated to voicing the issues that affect young creatives, we thought the marketplace would be a great way to begin to tackle this!To do so, we sell carefully selected products that we think Sick Love readers will love to try and support smaller artists financially!
What problem do you think your establishment can solve?
We hope that the marketplace can begin to drive sales towards these artists so they can continue to sustain their practice, or at least offer them some visibility from the site.
More generally, I hope Sick Love can offer young creatives a platform for their work whilst remaining socially conscious and working towards active change in the creative industries.
Isobel Gorman-Buckley, Editor and Founder of Sick Love
Is the marketplace open to entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world ?
We are UK based and so are most of our customers, but we are open to supporting international artists! Sick Love is for everyone.
As an up and coming platform, what do you view as challenges?
The main challenge of running a smaller platform is definitely finance! I have so many great ideas that are currently not feasible because we don’t make enough money, I’d also love to be able to pay everyone who published on our site. For the moment however this isn’t possible.
We think the idea of your market place is pretty sick! Can you tell us how people have approached the idea of the marketplace, I.e. in terms of reaction and reception?
It has received a great reaction so far! We had loads of people submitting their work to be listed on the site (which is still possible! Email submissions@sicklovezine.com if you’d like your art featured on the site) and had a fair amount of sales for such a new project.
We are still looking to boost sales for the artists and will be working on this over the next few months.
Is the online market a paid or free platform?
Free! We take a small percentage of each sale to help us sustain the platform but there is no cost to list on the site. We want to keep our content as accessible as possible.
Are there any long term or short term goals?
Short term – boost marketplace sales. Long term – make Sick Love a sustainable platform and offer an increasing amount of support to young creatives.
What are your hopes for the online platform?
I hope that Sick Love and its marketplace can help foster a community of socially conscious young creatives and begin to make active change in the creative industries by allowing smaller creatives to platform their work and their voices, as well as offering them advice and support .
This has been fun. We are impressed by your platform and wish you the best
Thanks so much! Make sure to follow the Sick Love Instagram to keep up to date with our latest projects!