Spencer Pugh is the founder of Form & Function, an editorial publication and small-run print magazine for the people building objects worth living with. He spent a decade in marketing and advertising, most recently leading programmatic at a travel and tourism agency, before stepping out on his own to start F&F and run his product-review brand, Spencer Scott Pugh. He lives in Roanoke, Virginia, with his wife and two kids, and is trying, slowly, on purpose, to make beautiful things for a living.

Website →
Instagram →
LinkedIn →

For ten years I made things on the internet for other people. Marketing, advertising, agency work. Most of it lived for two weeks and then disappeared into a content calendar archive. I'd meet with a brand founder for an hour and walk away with a story I could feel in my chest, and then file a 6-minute video built to be skimmed.

What kept bothering me was that the most carefully made products in the world were getting the laziest coverage. A team would spend three years agonizing over an aluminum bezel, and tech publications would put it next to nine other things in a "best of" listicle. The product’s form was beautiful. The product’s function was beautiful. The stories told about them are disposable.

The idea for Form & Function started as the publication I wanted to read. The Kinfolk-shaped hole on the tech shelf. A place where a coffee machine, a pair of headphones, or a robot vacuum could be treated the way Kinfolk treats a kitchen table or Monocle treats a city. With patience, with photography made specifically for it, with a writer in the room, with a print object that earned its way onto a coffee table.

The conviction wouldn't leave me alone: there's a Golden Age of brand loyalty waiting on the other side of slowing down. Customers want in. They want to know who made the thing and why. We're going to invite them in.

The hardest constraint is the one I chose on purpose: print, on a small run, paid for before it ships.

Print is unforgiving. You can't update a typo. You can't A/B test a headline. The photograph either earns its inches or it doesn't. The math forces honesty. A 32-page issue at 5,000 copies on matte stock from a real printer is not cheap, which means every spread has to be worth its real cost. There's no room for filler. There's no place to hide.

That constraint is shaping the product into something I didn't expect. I am aiming for 6-12 brands a year, not a hundred and twenty. One brand per issue turned out to be the right unit, not a roundup. The founder partner pays for the issue and gets the whole feature, not a sponsored sliver. The economics are driving the editorial choices. The editorial choices driving the design.

I keep telling people F&F is built like an object, not a feed. That's the constraint speaking. A feed scales by lowering the bar each post. An object survives by raising the bar each issue. Choosing print before I had a single subscriber meant I had to design a business that could earn it with partnerships, founding partners, the eventual annual, the store down the line. The constraint sets the size, the speed, the price, the standard, and most of all, the answer to the question that runs everything: what doesn't belong in here?

Doing print at all in 2026.

The pushback is reasonable. Just do a Newsletter. Just do a YouTube channel. Just stack affiliate links. The people who pushed back weren't wrong about distribution. Print is harder, slower, more expensive, and smaller. What they were wrong about was the format being interchangeable with what it carried.

A reel is gone in three seconds. A printed magazine sits on a kitchen counter for three months. A founder I want to feature can hand a copy of the issue to their mom. Their team frames the cover. The retailer keeps it next to the register. Print earns its way into a home, and once it's there, it does the work of a hundred posts - quietly, slowly, in a way that algorithms can't compress.

I held the line because the format is the message. F&F isn't trying to win attention. It's trying to deserve it. If we did the whole thing as a newsletter, we'd be a newsletter. We're trying to be a publication, and a publication has weight. Some of that weight is literal - paper, ink, a stitch down the spine. Some of it is the unspoken signal a printed thing sends about what the people who made it believed it was worth.

That's the line: this is worth printing. Everything downstream gets easier once that's not negotiable.

Programmatic banner ads. Affiliate links woven through editorial. The "10 Best" listicle. Sponsored posts dressed up to look like reporting. Pop-up ads. Auto-playing video. Anything that treats a reader's attention as a renewable resource the publisher gets to spend on someone else's behalf.

We also took out the things that look like growth and aren't. The temptation to publish multiple times a week because everyone crowd their pubs with tons of articles. The temptation to cover every brand that asks. The temptation to chase a viral hit. A roundup post would do numbers, and it would also flatten the brands inside it into a grid of bullet points, which is the exact thing the magazine exists to push back against.

What's left is small, slow, and quiet on purpose. Six to twelve print issues a year. One brand at the center of each. Photography commissioned for the feature, not pulled from a press kit. A real writer's voice on every page. A print object you actually want to own.

The thing I keep coming back to is the editorial inverse of the question most publishers ask. We don't ask "what do we add to make this perform?" We ask "what do we remove to make this matter?" The answer is usually a lot. Removing the wrong things will kill the magazine. Removing the right things is what, I believe, is going to make it possible.

Next is more issues, more partners, the F&F Annual that collects the year, a small online store. We'll add a daily-ish digital cadence underneath the print object that respects the same standard. The shape of the business will keep evolving. Anyone who tells you they know exactly what year three of a publication looks like is selling something.

What never changes is the standard. Every brand we feature earns the page. Every photograph is thoughtfully considered. Every word has a human voice on it. We will not accept a partner whose product doesn't deserve the treatment, no matter how badly we need the cash that quarter, because the second we do, the magazine stops being the magazine and starts being a brochure with a logo on it.

The other thing that stays is the audience contract. The reader paid for an object made carefully. The brand paid for an editorial team that takes their work as seriously as they take it. The team got paid fairly to make it. None of those three should ever have to subsidize the other two with worse work. If a tradeoff ever asks me to compromise one to serve the others, that's the signal we're building the wrong thing, and we should walk it back.

Sahand (and his team) at Terra Kaffe. They're making hardware that takes the craft of espresso seriously without taking themselves too seriously, and the design lineage underneath is the right one. It’s the kind of restraint and material honesty that comes out of a studio that actually cares. The more time I've spent with their work, the more convinced I've gotten that this is what tech should look like ten years from now: warm, considered, made to last. @terrakaffe

And Chevy Chanpaiboonrat at Buddy Design Co. She makes small portable mood lamps, and the central design move is a single wind-up key - a physical, mechanical interaction in a category racing in the opposite direction toward apps and voice control and Wi-Fi. That choice tells you everything. Most lighting startups right now are solving for connectivity. She's solving for the small ritual of turning a key with your hand. The lamp she launched straight out of Parsons is the kind of object F&F was built to surface - restrained, tactile, made by someone with an actual point of view about what light should feel like in a room. She just won an iF Design Award for it. Pay attention to what she does next. @buddydesign.co