How a Magazine-Selling Store Owner Became an Instagram Influencer
By: Anna Ben Yehuda Rahmanan
Tags: Magazine, Publishing, Magazine Covers, Small Business, Celebrity

The story of Casa Magazines, the New York City magazine store that simultaneously is the heart and is at the heart of the West Village, is a story of serendipity. A lot of things had to happen at exact moments in time, in exact places, to an exact group of people for the shop to open, catch on and become a fixture in the lives of New Yorkers.

First, there’s the cast of characters led by the most memorable of them all: Mohammed Ahmed. The 69-year-old co-owner of the shop, who hails from India, landed in New York in 1980 and worked at a magazine store on Lexington Avenue until 1995, when he purchased the West Village business alongside a partner, who, until this day, remains very much behind the scenes.

Then there is Happy David. The 38-year-old moved from the Philippines ten years ago to study jewelry at the Fashion Institute of Technology. With a background in media in her country of origin, David’s knowledge about all things magazine expanded when she started working just a few blocks away from Casa, at a clothing boutique. In 2010, she stepped into the store on her way home from work and met Ahmed and his employees for the first time. A friendship unlikely by any standard blossomed into a relationship that can only be defined as familial. David was officially part of the Casa family.

“All of them have this amazing feeling of always just making you feel at home, like they’re your friends,” says David. “After work, they’d let me stay there and just read and talk. It became like a refuge. I learned later on that they were really the cornerstone of the whole Village.”

As she recalls it, she wasn’t the only “adoptee” of the Casa clan, Ahmed always open to provide help to those in need, offering to fix up resumes, affix job postings to the wall or simply connecting customers in mutually beneficial ways.

The store owner’s disposition is palpable upon the first conversation with him: affable, friendly and no-nonsense, Ahmed seems unperturbed by the changing world and industry around him. Of course, he isn’t blind to the seismic shifts that have come to define the magazine world but, he says, worse comes to worst, new jobs will be found.

It’s Ahmed’s personality and dedication to his craft (because, let’s face it, selling magazines has become the craftiest of all crafts) that have, in some way, extended the reach and, likely, the lifespan of Casa. That, and his friendship with David, who has taken it upon herself to kick off Ahmed’s social media stardom by curating the store’s Instagram account.

Which brings us back to serendipity. In 2017, while hanging out at the store, David noticed journalist Malcolm Gladwell walk in. “He came in and we started talking about print and how it’s so sad,” she remembers. “Mohammed was also telling me how their sales have really gone down. They used to sell 600 copies of the New York Times each day, and now they hardly sell 100.”

While talking to the two men, David made a realization. “I looked at the both of them and was like, wait a minute. This is a moment!” she says. “We should Instagram!”

Although someone — another Lost Boy of the Casa family — had started the account, it wasn’t updated. After posting the picture with Gladwell, David — who takes care of the account for free, out of love for Ahmed and the store — began maintaining the social media channel, an effort that has yielded nearly 22,000 followers to date (according to her, at the time the Gladwell photo was posted, @casamagazinesnyc only had about 30 followers).

The feed is more than a collection of celebrities seemingly drowning in the 2,500 glossies that the store carries on any given day, although the likes of Julianne Moore and Justin Theroux are regular staples. The most liked photos aren’t, curiously, the visually striking depictions of the approximately 400-square-foot store or pictures of the latest magazine drops. The essence of the account is, very clearly, Ahmed. He is the most loved subject on the feed.

In an ironic, almost bizarre and, well, serendipitous, turn of events, Ahmed has become the perfect subject of the magazines he tries so hard to sell. So much so that, today, in the midst of the global, coronavirus-mandated quarantine that has virtually stopped all businesses from operating as they once did, New Yorkers have rallied around him, hoping to keep the business afloat by professing their undying love for Casa on social media.

Of course, coronavirus or not, the magazine industry is suffering, a fact that hurts more profoundly when analyzed with numbers in mind. “We used to make money,” says the store owner, reminding that sales have been cut to a third of what they used to be a mere half decade ago. “Now, we’re hand to mouth.” According to him, in addition to raising the store’s profile (and his own), David’s Instagram work has resulted in a 1% increase in sales to customers coming from abroad.

David has helped with a variety of other potential money-making schemes, from window takeovers (for a flat fee, companies can rent out an entire window overlooking 12th Street and adorning it with myriad copies of their titles) to block parties (Gather Journal hosted a successful one). And yet, all these efforts point to the same question: why should folks keep reading magazines?

“Because some people don’t want to get the stress on their eyes,” replies Ahmed in the honest, matter-of-fact tone that contributes to his uniqueness. “Magazines are easy: you turn the page, you feel the smell. That’s what people taught me about them. The new generation? They don’t know the smell of a magazine.”