Culturs magazine, and yes it is not a typo, Culturs (intentionally without the e) is the print component of Culturs Global Media that is the brain child of Elleyne Aldine, formerly known as Doni Aldine.

Aldine is on a mission and so is her team, company, and all the media and products they produce.  Her audience is a reflection of herself.  In her new ad campaign, she defines her intend for Culturs’ audience.  She writes,  “My intent for my audience is that they don’t feel defined by what the world says that they should be, that they understand who they are, and they fully embrace and immerse themselves in that, and defy what society tells them they should be, and just be themselves.”

Transformation is the word that defines her current world today.  Everything is in the state of transformation, personally, as well as all the media and products related to the Culturs Global Media: from the magazine, to the podcasts, video, website, and last but not least the immersive experience she is providing her audience, now her members.

So, join me on this Culturs journey as I revisit Ms. Aldine and discover all the progress that she was able to achieve since she started Culturs eight years ago.

So without any further ado, here is the lightly edited conversation with Elleyne Aldine, founder, publisher, and CEO of Culturs Global Media:

But first the soundbites:

On 2025 for her and Culturs: “It is the year of transformation for me personally and for the magazine.”

On the meaning of transformation: “The transformation is the way we do things, which ironically, is the way we’ve always wanted to do things. And so many publishers are starting to do it the way that we’ve envisioned since the beginning.”

On exploring all the media and products for her VIP members: “Of course, we have the magazine that has the destination, the history, the story of the place. In addition, we have the podcast and the videos, and then a playlist for that destination. So fully immersive sensory experience.”

On why print?: “To me, print had its place. It is your luxury experience. It is being grounded.”

More on why print: “It is sitting and spending time for self-care with yourself with a cup of tea or in the tub or out in nature or laying on the couch, really experiencing what you’re doing instead of rushing through a million pieces of content on your phone.”

On the misspelling of Culturs: “It’s so funny, actually, now that you say that. People haven’t done that recently. In the beginning, they would always try to add the E, or even when I would spell it, I wouldn’t say the name. I’d spell it first, and I’d say, no E, Culturs with no E.”

On Culturs audience: “The world may try to define you. But, you know better.  Culturs is the place where culturally fluid people who crew up meaningfully experiencing different countries or cultures can feel seen, heard and understood.” 

On her intend for her audience: “My intent for my audience is that they don’t feel defined by what the world says that they should be, that they understand who they are, and they fully embrace and immerse themselves in that, and defy what society tells them they should be, and just be themselves.”

On why she changed her name: “I received a certification in Kabalarian philosophy, I knew the philosophy of names are important, it depends on when you’re born, and the energy of the name, and how it affects you.”

On what keeps her up at night: “Doing right by my team and my community.”

And now for the lightly edited conversation with Elleyne Aldine, founder, publisher, and CEO of Culturs Global Media:

Samir Husni: As you start your eighth year with Culturs, a lot has changed in the magazine, in your life, and in the digital. You said this is the year of transformation. Tell me about it.

Elleyne Aldine: It is the year of transformation for me personally and for the magazine. I definitely don’t want to do things the way we’ve done it in the past. It’s time. As organizations and as people grow, you should do things differently, right? If you want to continue growing, you can’t do it the same as you have.

One of the biggest lessons I learned in having this magazine, at each stage, I had to let go of people who weren’t going to work for the next stage. And I remember that was the one of the hardest things for me when I started. Because when I started and we were a philanthropic organization.

We didn’t really turn into a company until a couple of years ago. It was really about getting this message out to the people, and I funded it myself. We had a lot of supporters, but everybody worked for free. You can imagine the guilt when we were getting to the next stage, and I was going to have to let go of some of those people.

Because my pitch to them was, imagine being able to do this into the future and be part of this. And then, not even two years later, I’m like, I don’t think this is working.  I don’t think I said it to them like that.

But in my head, that’s what it felt like. So I had to get over that. And of course, I’ve done that two or three times since then. As we get to the next level, certain people aren’t going to be appropriate for the next level you’re going to, and so on and so on.

My team right now is amazing. And I am changing how we work as a team. If the team cannot work that way, they won’t be able to go to the next stage with me.

Samir Husni: What are the practical steps you are doing with this transformation?

Elleyne Aldine: I was considering going back into stores. So we were in stores until two years ago. Two years ago, we had a lot of things go wrong.

We had a severe bot attack on our website. It ate up our email list, which had half a million people on it. In the end, we had to scrap the whole site, everything we did, every cyber company we worked with,  the site never got clean.

So we had to just trash it all and start over. And we’ve never quite recovered from that. But it’s taken a long time.

We’re just now launching the new version of the site. And at that same time, we stopped being on newsstands. We’d pay to be at the front of the newsstand. We’d pay to be in a premium position. And I would get all these calls and emails from people, we can’t find the magazine.

I went to this store and this store and this store, because we had a list on our website. And it wasn’t there, or they said it was sold out, or they didn’t know what I was talking about. So I thought I’m tired of wasting all this money. We pulled out of stores.

I was told that the newsstands are not the gold standard, but I think the reason I was thinking of it, you know, we had, as you saw, the writer producer of Captain America Malcolm Spellman, CEO Emil Pinnock, and Jimmy Chris on this last cover, and they expected us to be in stores. And I’m like we’re in some stores, but we’re not widely distributed in stores. I think the public still expects that’s what’s profitable, or that’s what’s means you’ve made it.

The transformation is the way we do things, which ironically, is the way we’ve always wanted to do things. And so many publishers are starting to do it the way that we’ve envisioned since the beginning.

Which is, we have a membership with three packages. They’re all we call them our Insider, Platinum, and VIP packages.

The Insider package is all media.

Members have access to our new podcast, our beautiful video channel, our digital experience, our print magazine, and our web experience. So this year, part of that transformation is every single one of those experiences is different.

You go to read the same story, but you have a different experience on every platform. The photos might tell the story on one platform. And the story angle may be different on the web. On digital, it might be an immersive experience. But each one of those for the same story is very different. So we have our Insider package.

Our second package is our Platinum package, which is media and products. Every quarter our members get a physical package to their door to immerse their senses in global culture.

So every single issue, we have a destination that we focus on. The next one is Jordan. And I’m super excited about that. In that package, we have an award winning dinner party kit. In every location, we work with professional chefs, we just had Michelin star chefs out here in Colorado in December for one of our experiences.  We work with the chefs and create a dinner party kit that gives you the invitations, thank you notes, the menus, the recipes, everything to throw a dinner party for five people, except for the food.

Then we create a sense of global bath and body that emulates the location that we went to. So it’s reminiscent, if I were there, this is what it would smell like. And we do a set of greeting cards for that location.

Of course, we have the magazine that has the destination, the history, the story of the place. In addition, we have the podcast and the videos, and then a playlist for that destination. So fully immersive sensory experience.

That’s the media and the products. That’s the Platinum membership.

When you get to our VIP plus experience, which is the third package, it actually pays for itself. It’s our most expensive memberships, the packages go from around $350 to almost $1,000 a year.

The VIP plus members get the media, get the products, and they get our experiences. So for each quarter, we go to a new destination that will be featured in the next year magazines. We invite up to 10 of our audience to come with us.

And in the VIP plus package, you get a 10% discount off of those experiences. So one trip could pay for it for your entire subscription. So now all through the year, you get to experience every single destination.

You might just go to one or to multiple experiences. This year will be in Fiji, Morocco, and South Africa. We’re doing three this year.

So yes, those are part of the transformation. It’s how we deliver what we do. It’s how we talk about what we do.

And then internally, it’s how the team views what we do. You know, I just had a team meeting yesterday. And I said to them, you do social to bring more people into our community. You do design to bring more people into our community. You do editing and storytelling to make sure people feel one in our community.

Instead of focusing on the tasks that people do daily, it’s really about the key performance indicators (KPIs) and what are they delivering? Because if we don’t deliver for our community, and if we don’t make sure our community stays vibrant, and continue to bring in members, then we won’t be able to design or do social or video or writing. So that’s part those are all parts of the transformation.

Samir Husni: Excellent.  So tell me, let me go back eight years ago, when everybody was falling in love with digital, you decided to produce an ink on paper magazine. Why?

Elleyne Aldine: For the same reason as what people are seeing now. I got to tell you, it’s been very, very satisfying to see that what I was trying to say to people then, they’re starting to realize now? It’s the same as these packages I’m telling you about.

This has been the vision from the beginning. The only thing that’s added is the podcast. I didn’t think of podcasts back then. We’ve always been about the products. We’ve always been about the places. Same with print.

To me, print had its place. It is your luxury experience. It is being grounded.

It is sitting and spending time for self-care with yourself with a cup of tea or in the tub or out in nature or laying on the couch, really experiencing what you’re doing instead of rushing through a million pieces of content on your phone. People are starting to realize that. As you know, at the time I was teaching at university, and I’m sure you saw as well, Gen Z and now Gen Alpha, they were embracing print.

It was funny. I thought, okay, I’ll go to digital. We’ll do all the syllabi and everything in digital. Every semester the students will say, are you going to give us a copy? Give me a copy, please. Or we went to a digital book, and they went to the store to buy the print, right?

I had firsthand experience, my own lived experience in this is a tactile sensory grounding experience that you can’t get with digital. Digital will overload your nervous system. It will give you more content than your brain really can consume, add to anxiety instead of remove it. Print was a no brainer for me. I love paper.

To this day, we just had our launch in Beverly Hills for the last issue, and there was a printer there. We launched the magazine, and we only had a few copies of the magazine that we gave out to specific people. This gentleman walked up and he said, may I feel your magazine? I said, you must be a paper person.

He said, I’m a printer. I said, well, I’ll warn you, everyone says this is glorious when they put it in their hands. He put it in his hands, and he felt it, and he said, is this coated? I said, yes, it is.

He said, is this UV coating? I said, yes, it is. He really enjoyed it, but what’s interesting is he’s a connoisseur, but the everyday public has the same experience. They may not know the terms.

They may not know how we did the printing, but they have the same reaction he had, and that’s why I did print back in the day.

Samir Husni: So how important is the quality of printing and paper?

Elleyne Aldine: I won’t say the name of the magazine. It’s something that I enjoyed when I was a child, and I was disappointed at the quality of the paper, the quality of the design. Of course, the writing is still excellent, but there’s some magazines I subscribe to, that I still love, but how they squish the editorial into these little spaces, and so there’s really not that experience for the beautiful design and the airy feel that actually helps your brain be more open and relaxed, right? So, and it’s a big name, I was disappointed to see that that’s how it is now.

Samir Husni: You’re transforming, and a year from now, you and I are having this conversation. How would you tell me this transformation have gone?

Elleyne Aldine:  Ayear from now, I will tell you. Okay, so our goal is to add 100,000 new print subscribers this year.

I will say that we have surpassed that goal, and I will say that we have more people thriving in our community than ever, meeting up in person, going on these experiences. I had mentioned experiences. It’s not only the travel, but it’s the launch that we had in Beverly Hills where 200 people came to a theater and listened to a fireside chat with the cover stars, where we had our celebrity global ambassador, Yara Shahidi, where we introduced her to the public, where we announced the Alchemist Awards, which will be the cross-cultural awards.

There’s nothing else like it, and we gave our first three awards to launch the awards, which will actually happen in November in Colorado. I will tell you that because of experiences like that in our cooking experiences and our travel experiences, that people are coming together more than ever, that they are understanding other people more than ever. It’s a good thing.

I was reading a recent article in The New York Times about five fashion magazines that are indies and thriving. Three out of the five have similar content to Culturs. They’re talking about fashion, which is a piece of what we do, but one of them had an African bent to it, and another one had an international bent, and I said, well, look at this. So, in a year, I’ll say that even more people understand the value of why what we do is so important.

Samir Husni: Did anybody ever tell you misspelled Culturs?

Elleyne Aldine: It’s so funny, actually, now that you say that. People haven’t done that recently. In the beginning, they would always try to add the E, or even when I would spell it, I wouldn’t say the name.

I’d spell it first, and I’d say, no E, Culturs with no E, and their brains couldn’t, it was like, what? And even as they typed it, and I’d say, no, it doesn’t have an E, and they’d say, I didn’t put one, and then I’d look and say, oh, okay, and they’d take it back out. So, in the beginning, yes, but no, I haven’t had anyone say that recently.

Samir Husni: With this new transformation, with this new membership opportunities that are out there, whom are you trying to reach?

Elleyne Aldine: As we continue in the process of transformation, we have a new ad campaign that focuses on our intended audience.  As you can read on the back cover of the magazine and in the inside front cover, we define our audience as, “The world may try to define you.

But, you know better.  Culturs is the place where culturally fluid people who crew up meaningfully experiencing different countries or cultures can feel seen, heard and understood.”  That in short is our audience. Those are our people, that’s who we’re trying to reach.

Samir Husni: Is there any question I should ask you, I didn’t ask you, you would like me to ask?

Elleyne Aldine: What’s your intent for your audience with my story?

Samir Husni: Okay, what’s your intent for your audience with your story?

Elleyne Aldine: My intent for my audience is that they don’t feel defined by what the world says that they should be, that they understand who they are, and they fully embrace and immerse themselves in that, and defy what society tells them they should be, and just be themselves.

Samir Husni: So tell me, being yourself, you changed your name. Why?

Elleyne Aldine: There’s a couple of practical reasons, one being that another person with a similar name doesn’t have great credit, and I got tired of getting intertwined with them. But also in 2000 I discovered the Kabalarian philosophy, and it talks about the energy of names.

When I got married, which was that time, that’s why I discovered it, I changed my name two years later, and instantly felt the effect of it, and didn’t like the effect that I felt. And then I remembered back when I was young, my name changed when my mom, after my parents were divorced, and I had a similar experience where my life changed overnight. In that time, it changed for the better.

In my married time, it changed for the worse. Once I received a certification in Kabalarian philosophy, I knew the philosophy of names are important, it depends on when you’re born, and the energy of the name, and how it affects you. But it took me until now to really lean in and say, I’m tired of… Actually, it’s similar to what I’m saying about Culturs.

I don’t want to be defined anymore by what society says. I got tired of people mispronouncing my real name, messing up my old name, telling me what my name should be, because people would shorten my name all the time. I absolutely loved my birth name, but everyone would shorten it.

So eventually, I went by Doni, because I thought, okay, they’re going to shorten it to D-O-N-N-Y. I will shorten it to something that’s a little more exotic that I love. So I went with D-O-N-I.

But I’ve never liked that name. I can’t stand that name. So I decided I would have a name that I love, and if anyone didn’t like it, they could kick rocks.

Samir Husni: My typical last two questions are, one, if I come to visit you unannounced, what do I catch you doing to unwind at the end of the day?

Elleyne Aldine: To unwind at the end of the day? You catch me studying Spanish.

You catch me leafing through a magazine. You catch me meditating or sitting on the bed or on the couch and staring at the fire or staring at the wall.

Samir Husni: And my last question is, what keeps you up at night these days?

Elleyne Aldine: You know, nothing ever keeps me up.

No problem sleeping. That’s what happens when you run really fast. What keeps me up? Actually, doing right by my team and my community.

I really wanted to fill a space for people who didn’t have anyone paying attention to them. So I want to make sure that we keep our promises.

Samir Husni: Well, you’re doing a great job and you are keeping your promises. Thank you.