Strategic interpretation for globally mobile operators. An independent magazine on business, culture and the connections between them.
A contour line on a map joins every point at the same height. Read enough of them and a flat sheet of paper tells you where the ground climbs, where it falls away, and where you will be walking uphill with a full pack. That is the job of this magazine: to draw the lines that show the shape of a market, a city or a decision before you are standing in it.
Who it is for
Contour Magazine is written for founders, operators and investors whose lives and companies run through more than one country. You might be deciding where to set up an entity, which market to enter next, whether a city still deserves your rent, or what a strike at a port two time zones away will do to your margins by the end of the quarter.
The news will tell you what happened. Contour Magazine is for the question you ask on the way to the airport, the one about what it changes for you.
What it covers
Every piece starts in one of five areas and connects it to a second one, because the interesting part of a story almost always sits in the connection.
Markets & Outlooks, on where capital, trade and policy are heading.
Culture, Power & Context, on the unwritten rules that decide how things actually work in a place.
Narrative & Monetization, on the story a company tells and the price that story lets it charge.
Architecture of Companies, on how businesses are built, where the money flows and where the power sits.
Cities, Life & Opportunity, on the places people choose to live and build, and what those places cost them.
A football club sold to private equity is a sports story until you ask what exactly the buyer is paying for. A missile strike in the Gulf is geopolitics until it reaches the price of fertilizer. That second layer is where Contour Magazine does its work.
How you will read it
Some pieces are observational essays that start from something I saw and follow it until it explains something larger. Others take a single company or system apart to show where the money and the decisions sit. Market reframes take a story everyone already knows and ask what it means for capital, and cultural contrasts put two places side by side, Leipzig and Dubai, Singapore and Frankfurt, to show why the same idea produces a different result in each. Some pieces fit none of these, and they get published anyway.
A new piece arrives roughly every two to three weeks. The pace is deliberate, because each one is researched from primary sources and goes through several full drafts before you see it.
How it gets made
I go to company filings, official statistics, central bank and trade data and the business press of the country in question before I read anyone's summary of them. Footnotes stay out of the text so you can read it as a piece of writing. If you want the sources behind a claim, write to me and you will get them.
When I model a scenario, the piece says it is a scenario. When a scene is a composite, built from many situations rather than one, the piece says that too. Everything else is documented fact or my opinion, and the opinions are marked as mine.
When I get something wrong, I correct it in the piece and add a dated note at the end saying what changed.
Independence
Contour Magazine carries no sponsored content. If that ever changes, a sponsored piece will say so at the top, before the first sentence.
I also run Shepard&Young, a commercial strategy consultancy. Client work rarely appears in Contour Magazine, and if a company I write about is or has been a client, the piece discloses it.
Contour Magazine has a point of view, and it shows. I am an optimist and a humanist, and when an argument rests on either, you will be able to see where.
Who makes it
I am Sebastian Scheplitz. I founded Contour Magazine and edit it from Dubai, and I bring to it more than 25 years in marketing and leadership across Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Today I write Contour Magazine alone. Over time I want to open it to other writers who have lived and built in the places they write about.
Alongside the magazine I write the Between series of books. A World Between Stories is the first.
Write to the editor
Letters, corrections, disagreements and story ideas go to hello@readcontour.com. I read all of them, and the disagreements tend to be the most useful.