May 14, 2020

Meet Rashod Davenport of SUAVV Magazine in South Atlanta and Riverdale

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rashod Davenport.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Rashod. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I started SUAVV Magazine with my younger brother out of frustration. At the time, there were no magazines that we felt spoke to us as a culture and in our voice. We would have to buy sometimes $80 worth of magazines every month to have the totality of what we wanted from a magazine. We sat on a floor and ripped up all of the magazines and put them back together as one magazine and had a vision of what SUAVV would be. Today, we continue that vision by doing some of the most uplifting, encouraging, and entertaining articles possible.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Oh My Goodness, NO. LOL Creating SUAVV has been one of the most challenging, frustrating, time-consuming endeavors of my life. In the beginning, we didn’t have mentors and at that time, there was no such thing as an Online Magazine. There were blogs and print. So we had to hit the ground hard and show publicists and businesses that we could produce the same interviews that any print magazine could do. But we spent a lot of money making mistakes. We had to pull back from the magazine a few times to restructure it because something would be off or wrong. We’ve had people hack our site and delete it when we would announce controversial stories. I’ve had computers crash and erase an entire magazine layout on the publish date. It was very challenging for us to secure advertising placements. There is ALOT that goes into having a digital magazine and we were not prepared for it.

SUAVV Magazine – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
SUAVV started off as a Black Men’s Lifestyle Magazine. Since then, we had started an online radio show (before podcasts were a thing), currently developing a YouTube channel, and working on building SUAVV Media Co. as a whole, which will house many things from digital media to live events. We are known for giving Black Men a true voice. SUAVV has always had a great lineup of celebrity features and cover stories as well as looking for the next best thing in our Next Up section. We, as men, are so much more than what media shows. There are emotions. There are struggles, there are successes, there are concerns, there is the uniqueness that is never really celebrated. That’s where we come in. We can listen to JayZ for hours and also dance to a Lady Gaga song. I’m most proud of what we have been able to create through the years of learning our own company. Now, we have a full understanding of what we have in our hands and how we can live our purpose through it. What sets up apart from other magazines is our authenticity and personality that goes into the magazine. We love to laugh and if we are laughing in an interview with our guests, you’ll know because we will tell you. If someone is crying in an interview, you will know. We’re just real.

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
The proudest moment of having SUAVV was the day that Nelson Mandela had his office call me so that he could speak to me briefly and tell me that I was doing something great and to stick with it. I had been emailing, postal mailing, and calling his office every other week for about three years to request an interview. He had been pretty ill and wasn’t doing interviews. But, I was just hoping for a glimpse of light in there to squeeze in an interview. I got off of that phone call crying because I realized what resilience would do. After that, I feel there is no one I wouldn’t be able to have access to.

Pricing:

SUAVV Magazine has an app being created that will be $1.99 per issue to view fully.

Contact Info:

Website: www.suavv.com
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: instagram.com/suavvmagazine
Facebook: facebook.com/suavvmagazine
Twitter: twitter.com/suavvmagazine

Image Credit:
Michael Letterlough Jr

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Meet South Atlanta Series Sponsor:

B. Octavious Sims: I am an author, screenwriter and half duo of SimGriggs Productions. We specialize in stage plays, films and just overall love what I do. I love doing funny videos and during this quarantine we went through TikTok has been my best friend 😂