Though Julie Gueraseva—the founder and creative force behind the vegan lifestyle publication LAIKA—decided to go vegan about a decade ago, her adoration of animals dates back to early childhood, when she and her twin sister had an “obsession with stray cats.”
“One of our favorite things was to look for stray kitties, and feed them, or try to get close to them, and bring some of them home,” says Gueraseva, now 41 years old.
And then there’s that picture of the sisters with a goat at a petting zoo: “We’re dressed exactly the same. We have these pigtails. And we’re both hugging this goat for dear life. I think that love for animals was always really strong.”
Born in the Soviet Union, Gueraseva’s family moved to the United States when she was six years old, after her father’s job at the United Nations relocated them to New York. It was 1981, during the Cold War, and the family settled into an Eastern European compound in the Bronx. Given Russia’s “meat and potato culture”—“That was the structure of socialist Soviet life,” says Gueraseva—she grew up far from vegan. But every summer, she would visit her grandmother, a health-conscious pediatrician, who would serve the sisters salad for breakfast.
“Thanks to my grandmother, the seeds of appreciation for healthy, plant-based, vegetable-based eating were planted in me subconsciously,” says the WeWork Montague St. member.
Gueraseva also loved to draw, taking various workshops—including one geared toward kids held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After getting a degree in advertising design, Gueraseva discovered that “my heart wasn’t really in conceptualizing ad campaigns for corporate type of clients like Campbell’s soup.” So she started moving more in the direction of pure graphic design. “The notion of arranging words and visuals on a page was really appealing to me,” says Gueraseva. “Problem solving and that kind of visual architecture—something more artistic.”
Her career took off, from designing shoeboxes for Candie’s footwear to CD packaging for hip-hop and neo-soul artists. She learned the tricks of the hand-rendering trade from Brent Rollins, the creative director at Complex magazine, who’s designed many hip-hop album covers.
“My whole thing was trying to collect as much experience as possible,” says Gueraseva. “It wasn’t even really super strategic. I wasn’t satisfied staying in one place for too long, and I always just wanted to know: What else is out there? What else can I pick up?”
After a stretch in the magazine world—Teen Vogue, Redbook, Harper’s Bazaar, Latina, and Hallmark Magazine—the idea for her own magazine emerged in 2010. By then, Gueraseva had already been vegan for a few years.
“I started to see a void in how veganism was presented to the world, how I knew it,” Gueraseva says. “It was dynamic and multifaceted, and full of interesting people doing interesting things, and these beautiful animals who are really complex and much like people—they also have these histories, almost like war stories, of survival—and I realized I wasn’t seeing the range of this lifestyle presented in a well-designed, well-executed way that was on par with mainstream publications.”
Her end goal? To “make a really great magazine that just happens to be vegan.”
Founded at the end of 2012, LAIKA is available online, at independent bookstores, and on 50 newsstands around the country. Entirely self-funded to date, Gueraseva launched the quarterly magazine with only $10,000—she was later told you need at least $100,000 to start a magazine—and also found a Brooklyn-based distributor on her own. Cover stars have included renowned vegan activists, from tattoo artist Kat Von D to former NFL player David Carter (nicknamed the “300 Pound Vegan”) and his wife Paige.
“It almost helped going into this with a bit of naïveté and not being aware of some of the harsh realities of entrepreneurship,” she says. “Just learned as I went along. Whenever things feel challenging these days, I think of my open-minded attitude and free-spirited fearlessness of those first few months of LAIKA‘s existence as a reminder that anything is possible and that there are no rules.”
As for the name of the publication, it’s a nod to the stray dog from Moscow that was sent to space and orbited the Earth, but didn’t make it back. Gueraseva says the title refers to “all animals treated unjustly, and also human beings’ relationship with animals.”
“But it’s also a hopeful love letter to a better future,” Gueraseva says, “to a more compassionate future.”
Photos: Emanuel Hahn