Where To Buy Magazines For Your Vision Board Party [updated 2023]

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

This post was originally published June 27, 2018.  Updated:  December 4, 2023

Vision board parties and workshops can be a time to celebrate your wins for the past year and get super excited about the year to come. As the host, you want to make sure your attendees have all the inspiration they need to effectively map out all of their goals.

A vision board is used to visualize everything that you want to accomplish so if someone wants to become a ballerina, you should have magazines that will speak to that.

If someone wants to change their financial situation (ex. make more money, invest more, save more or anything else that concerns their finances) then you want to make sure you have lots of money magazines on hand.

If you are hosting a large vision board party or workshop with 10 to 30 people attending, the number of magazines you need can really add up.

So, where exactly do people find 20-50 magazines? If you are just going to pick up 50 magazines from Walmart, Tesco or Hypermarkets (which can cost anywhere from 4.99 to 7.99 per magazine) the cost can escalate quickly.

Here's where I get my magazines from for super cheap:

Option 1: don't buy magazines

Instead, ask attendees to bring their old magazines to the party.

In the invitation, make a note that attendees are encouraged to bring old magazines. After people have RSVP'd, send a follow-up email a few days before the event starts reminding them to bring their magazines. 

I've done this several times in the past and each attendee has shown up with at least 2 or 3 magazines that were just lying around their house collecting dust. Some people will even show up with 10 or 20 magazines. This will be one of the easiest (and cheapest) ways to put together magazines for the party and everyone shares the cost.

Option 2: ask your doctor's office or local nail salon 

Doctor's offices and nail salons will typically have several magazines in their waiting room or lounge area.

This one could be a little scary because it's always difficult asking people you may not know for stuff, but this strategy does work. The next time you go into the doctor's office, simply ask the staff to give you a call when they swap out the magazines seasonally.

This doesn't always work, but when it does you can end up with 50 magazines for free for absolutely no effort fees ( other than the gas you spend driving to the doctor's office to pick them up).

Option 3: the thrift store

Now, I'm a girl who loves the thrift store - aka second-hand store. Seriously, tons of what I've bought in the past year or so has come straight up from Craigslist or the thrift store. #Shameless

The thrift store is an amazing place where you can get the exact same thing that you can buy at the store for a super discounted price - that includes magazines. My local thrift store has the most amazing assortment of magazines for about $0.15 each. Now I don't know about you but these magazines typically cost $4 to $7 in the store and I can get them at $0.15. #NoBrainer

Option 4: Amazon

This shouldn't be a surprise. You can buy literally everything on Amazon, magazines included.

I prefer to subscribe to a magazine because you can get an annual subscription for anywhere from $3 to $20 (usually special pricing during the first year) and receive one magazine per month for the entire year. (Sometimes you can receive a new magazine twice a month or every other month, it depends on the magazine's publishing schedule.) 

Using this annual subscription strategy, you can stack up 12 magazines by the end of the year for less than $20.

Related Post: What Magazines Should I Use For My Vision Board? Effective List of Do's and Don'ts

Option 5: Offerup (or local buyer/seller Facebook groups)

OfferUp is an online marketplace where you can connect with local buyers to purchase things that they no longer need or want.

Often, people will have collected stacks of magazines through the years and when they're ready to just clean out their house or maybe if they're moving they literally give them all away.

Finding one of these deals is rare but if you join the platform you can land a huge number of magazines in a short amount of time. 

Option 6: Walmart/Target bookstores

Under no circumstance do I recommend anyone going to any of these places to purchase magazines.

You will end up spending an exorbitant amount of money for the same thing that you can get for super cheap with proper planning.

The only acceptable reason to spend $7 per magazine is if you're in the car on the way to the party and you realize you don't have A N Y magazines and the only thing on the way between you and this party is a big-box store. In that case, definitely venture in because you cannot show up at a vision board party with no magazines. Short of that you should always plan in advance to get magazines at a cheaper cost.

Option 7: YouR LOCAL LIBRARY

Libraries have evolved into amazing community centers and repositories of knowledge. Talk to someone at the circulation or reference desk about whether there is a book and magazine sale happening soon. You could score an amazing deal.

There you have it. Plenty of ideas to start your magazine search. Magazine people articulate what they want into images and quotes and it follows them throughout the year to help them visualize what they want to become that year. Your job as the vision board party host is to make sure that each individual has the inspiration they need to build the vision board that will transform their life. Happy hosting!

Want To Start Planning Your Vision Board Party? 

• Check out the Vision Board Party Starter Kit here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cyrene is a fun and accomplished workshop facilitator, learning and development guru and Human Resources professional. Being at the helm of Thrive Lounge has been a long-time dream. Through vision board workshops she plans to accomplish two-way learning. Sharing her vast years of knowledge to motivate and encourage others; while simultaneously getting the reward of great energy, ideas and questions to ponder back from each group. A super win-win. Please join our Thrive Lounge community so you too can benefit!

How To Build A Vision Board Party Business

When I started Thrive Lounge, I had no idea it would grow to be the Vision Board powerhouse that it is today.

In fact, Thrive Lounge actually started out as a monthly women’s meeting where we invited women out to set goals and talk to each other about any struggles we were facing.

Honestly, I was going through life changes and I needed all the support I could get.

It wasn’t until a full year later when I realized that most of the things I put on my Vision Board had come true and I was looking forward to the person I was becoming. That feeling was so exhilarating that I wanted to share it with everyone (literally, everyone).

That’s when I started to host Vision Board parties for myself and became a speaker at other’s events. I learned very quickly that Vision Board parties are in demand and there’s a huge opportunity to create a Vision Board party business from where ever you are in the world.

What is a Vision Board Party Business?

A Vision Board party business takes the love, inspiration, and clarity-inducing ambiance of a vision board workshop and makes the event profitable and repeatable for the host.

Why Create a Vision Board Party Business?

Many of us have amazing stories of trial and triumph to share with the world. Your story can inspire someone going through the same struggles because you made it out of the darkest of times. And you came out a better and stronger person. You can help others find their way out too.

A vision board party business can help you turn your unique story and passion into a motivation for others to turn towards a pathway of clarity….. and make a profit doing it.

4 Types of Profitable Vision Board Party Businesses

The key to a Vision Board party business is that these events are profitable and sustainable. That means the host creates a professional and transformational experience for their guests while making a profit in the process.

That is what distinguishes a business from an expensive and time-draining hobby. You can use any of these business types to build your business:

Hosting One, Large Vision Board Party Every Year

Many companies host in-person events such as conferences or live workshops. It’s perfect to get your audience together all centered around a common theme to really focus deeply on the topic you’re discussing. In this case, they’ll be focusing on getting clarity on their purpose and vision.

This type of Vision Board party business can be a bit stressful since all of your revenue will come from one big event each year. However, if you already have a large audience that is excited to attend your event you’ll be able to fill the seats and can spend your time curating a beautiful event.

Hosting Several Intimate Vision Board Parties

Planning one large event can be very stressful, especially if you’ve never hosted anything before.

You can get started by hosting smaller events more frequently throughout the year. This will help you establish yourself as an expert and build your audience. In a smaller intimate setting, you can have more face-to-face time with each person that shows up to your events. You’ll be able to learn more about them on a deeper level than you would with a large audience.

Hosting Virtual Vision Board Parties

One of the highest costs you’ll encounter hosting Vision Board parties is the cost of the space. This cost alone can account for up to 50% (or more) of your entire event. Virtual Vision Board parties are held entirely online and take people through a similar journey.

Through a virtual Vision Board party, you can completely skip the costs of food, drinks, materials and space costs. However, you’ll have to work a bit harder to create a safe and authentic space because that’s a bit harder to do when you’re not in person.

Become a vision board party speaker

You don’t have to host your own Vision Board events to have a lucrative Vision Board party business. In fact, it’s possible to build a business simply by speaking at Vision Board parties hosted by businesses, schools, and nonprofits. Many events are searching for speakers each year to fill their roster and are happy to pay for a qualified speaker.

If you are great at public speaking and have a compelling story to share, this might be the perfect route for you to take!

How To Get Started Hosting Profitable Vision Board Parties

Find your target audience.

Before you begin hosting events, you’ll have to find the audience who you want to serve. Knowing who you’re serving through your events can help you to ensure that you're hosting your events at the right locations, talking about the right topics and marketing the event in the right places.

Set an event date, time and location.

Once you know who your target audience is, you can set the date, time and location of your event in a way that works for your audience. For example, if you’re hosting an event for college students, you don’t want to host an event on a weekday when they’d be in class. Likewise, if your audience is working professionals who also wouldn’t be available during the day. However, weekdays might work perfectly for retired adults.

Invite your target audience to your event.

You can’t have an event, workshop or party without attendees so you must take your time to invite people to your event. You can start by creating an email list of people that might be interested in your topic or finding them on the social media channels they hang out on.

Pro-Tip: Vision Board events can be any time of year but October through January are super popular as the year comes to a close and people are starting to think about their plans and goals for the New Year.

Create an amazing vision board party experience.

This is the MOST important part of your Vision Board party business. After making sure that you have people to attend your event, you have to WOW the heck out of them. Make sure that they leave your event excited about their future and have crystal clear goals for their next steps.

You want them to be fired up about attending next years event….and hopefully they’ll want to invite some friends.

Rinse and Repeat.

Once you have some experience hosting your first event, it’s time to rinse and repeat. Take everything that you learned from your first experience to host another event. With each event that you host, you’ll gain more experience and you can use that information to curate a more transformative experience every single time.

Hosting Vision Board parties can serve as a great outlet to share your story and inspire your community to reach their goals. It can also be very lucrative if you run your Vision Board parties professionally and truly help people find clarity, direction, and purpose.

Want To Start Planning Your Vision Board Party? 

1. Download the FREE vision board party planning checklist.

2. Craft your inspiring vision board workshop talk with our FREE High Impact Storytelling Journal Prompts. 

3. Plan, promote & host your first (or next) professional & profitable vision board workshop with our signature course, Sold Out Vision Board Parties.

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This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cyrene is a fun and accomplished workshop facilitator, learning and development guru and Human Resources professional. Being at the helm of Thrive Lounge has been a long-time dream. Through vision board workshops she plans to accomplish two-way learning. Sharing her vast years of knowledge to motivate and encourage others; while simultaneously getting the reward of great energy, ideas and questions to ponder back from each group. A super win-win. Please join our Thrive Lounge community so you too can benefit!

How to Nail Your Vision Board Party Invitation

When I started on my goal-getter journey, I wanted a community to share it with. I wanted to help friends (and myself) reach goals with support along the way. I wanted people I could lean on in difficult times and I wanted to be that same type of support for others.

That’s why I decided to host my very first vision board party for my friends.

I sent out a few text messages, telling them to show up at my house with their favorite choice of food for a potluck vision board party.

That strategy for inviting people was apparently not very effective because I had a total of three attendees…. including myself. #FacePalm

Although we had a great time, three attendees was not ideal because I wanted to make a larger impact. I wanted to help LOTS of people change their live, but I could only do that if LOTS of people showed up.

Over the past few years, I’ve learned how to host a vision board party where people are excited to show up and share their goals, connect with other women, tell their stories and start a new year - refreshed.

It all starts with inviting the right people who will be interested in your message, and inviting them in a way that gets them really excited to attend.

What to Include In Your Invitation

When you're creating your invitation for the vision board party, you want to make sure you include all the necessary information.

WHAT A VISION BOARD PARTY IS

Vision boards have become popular in recent years, but many people still have never heard of them. If your friends don’t know what a vision board is and what it does, it’ll be harder for them to get excited about coming to the party.

EVENT INFORMATION

• Date

• Time

• Location

WHAT TO BRING

If you’re asking your guests to bring anything to the event, then make sure you let them know that right in the invitation.

For example, if you’re hosting a potluck, then make sure they know to bring a bottle or dish, ask them to send over any dietary restrictions and make a public list where friends can add in their selections.

You might also want guests to bring their own magazines to the event because a large number of magazines might be difficult to come by for a larger group.

Related Content: What Kind of Food Should You Have at a Vision Board Party

Related Content: Where to Buy Magazines for Your Vision Board Party

PRICING

If you have spent money up front to rent a large space so that lots of friends and family can attend, or if you are providing the food and drink, or purchased vision board materials, it might make sense to ask guests to pay a small fee to come to the party.

In your invitation, make sure guests know what they need to pay in order to attend the event and let them know exactly what they’re getting for their money. Finally, give them a way to pay for the cost of the event.

ANY PRE-WORK YOUR GUESTS SHOULD DO PRIOR TO ARRIVAL

Sometimes hosts like to give their guests a workbook to get them thinking about the goals they want to set for the New Year. If you plan on giving your guests some pre-work leading up to the event, include the link to the pre-event materials in the invitation or let them know how to access them.

When you include all of the necessary information upfront, then your guests won’t have any confusion about what the event is, and they’ll know why they should be excited about attending.

Delivering Your Invitation

The next thing you need to think about is exactly how you are delivering this invitation to your guests.

In my experience, texting your friends is not always the most effective way to show that this event will help them reach a new level of success.

The invitation is a direct reflection of what the event will be.

When your guests receive an invitation that feels special, well-thought-out, organized, and warm, they’ll believe that the event will feel that way as well.

Over the years, I’ve seen some great invitations, here are my favorites:

CUSTOMIZED PRINTABLES

When I’m looking for something specialized and adorable, I head straight to Etsy. Here, you can get creators from all over the world to customize a beautiful template of your choosing with your specific information on it.

This is a great option for people who do not have the time or design skills to edit their own invitations. You simply choose your template and send over your event information to a creator and viola!

You have beautiful invitations that you can print out and send to friends or download and email in a few days.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Vision Board Party Invitation by Aurora Graphic Studio

Vision Board Party Invitation by Blue Bird Designs

CANVA PRINTABLE

If you have some experience with Canva, you can also purchase vision board party designs that you can customize on your own.

This gives you a lot more flexibility with what information is included in your invitation, what pictures you use (if any) and you can even add your own event colors.

Customizable Canva Printables by Vision Board Shop

FACEBOOK EVENT

I’m a huge fan of the simple Facebook event. Most people are on Facebook anyway so having your event information there makes it super easy to invite friends to attend.

Here’s an example of the vision board party I hosted in 2019:

Facebook Event Invite

EVENTBRITE LINK

Eventbrite is a well known website for finding local events. Anyone can go onto Eventbrite and create their own event and it will immediately become available to your community.

This is a great option if you’re hosting a larger event in an event space because anyone in your community looking for events can find you. If you’re asking for a payment to attend your event, eventbrite does have a very simple payment system that collects your payments and deposits the money into your account right after the event.

Here’s an example of the vision board party I hosted in 2018:

Eventbrite Vision Board Party Invitation

Vision board parties are a great way to get your friends and family thinking about their goals. The invitation is the most important piece of the puzzle because it’s the first impression that people have about the quality of the event.

Make sure you always send out an invitation that truly reflects the beauty, inspiration, and positivity of your upcoming vision board party.

Want To Start Planning Your Vision Board Party?  

1. Download the FREE vision board party planning checklist.

2. Craft your inspiring vision board workshop talk with our FREE High Impact Storytelling Journal Prompts. 

3. Plan, promote & host your first (or next) professional & profitable vision board workshop with our signature course, Sold Out Vision Board Parties.

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This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

---

About the author

Cyrene is a fun and accomplished workshop facilitator, learning and development guru and Human Resources professional. Being at the helm of Thrive Lounge has been a long-time dream. Through vision board workshops she plans to accomplish two-way learning. Sharing her vast years of knowledge to motivate and encourage others; while simultaneously getting the reward of great energy, ideas and questions to ponder back from each group. A super win-win. Please join our Thrive Lounge community so you too can benefit!

How to Make Money Hosting Vision Board Parties

It definitely seems like vision board parties just popped up out of nowhere, right?

About four years ago, a good friend invited me to my first vision board party. At the time, I thought it was some woo-woo voo-doo that would never work.

But I was struggling in my life (going through a whole quarter-life crisis thing) so I agreed anyway.

That’s where I learned just how powerful vision board parties really are - and from that moment on, I never started a year without creating a vision board.

And I wanted to share vision boards with… EVERYONE.

So I started hosting my own vision board parties (naturally). Sometimes I made money, other times I didn’t but I consistently learned what worked and what didn’t work year after year.

After my fifth vision board party, I had a good handle on exactly what I could do to ensure I made a profit- Every. Single. Time.

Keep Your Costs Low

You can increase your chances of making money by not spending that much money in the first place. There are a lot of fancy things you can add to a vision board party to make it super fancy (like a venue, amazing decor or inviting expensive speakers) and those fancy things will cost you fancy money. You’ll have to sell enough tickets to be able to cover the cost of everything you paid for upfront - and then make a profit.

Related articles: How Much Does It Cost To Host A Vision Board Party

Marketing

No matter how much energy you put into planning your vision board party, you’ll need to sell tickets to be able to make any type of profit.

That’s where marketing comes in.

The more tickets you sell, the more opportunities you have to actually make a profit with your party. You can sell tickets through marketing on social media, email, building partnerships, working with affliates or talking to people you know.

All of these actions put together will expose more people to your event - and increase your odds of selling more tickets.

Pricing

Pricing is one of the most important focuses of your event - because if you price too low, you won’t break even on your expenses (or make a profit). On the other hand, if you price too high, people will not want to purchase tickets to your event.

Related articles: Vision Board Party Planning: How To Set Ticket Prices For Your Event

Value

Your event has to totally deliver on the promises you made in the marketing material. If you tell people that you’re going to tackle their financial hardships, you have to make sure that you address their money woes to a point that they feel energized to go home and tackle their goals.

The benefit of hosting a super high value event is two-fold. When people are able to walk away from your event feeling like you helped them make a real change in their lives -they’ll want to come back again. They’ll also start to tell their friends about the event.

That means in the future you could charge more for that value.

You now have fans that will be interested in a future event from you.

You also have people who will go out and market your event for you because they’ll be telling their friends and family about it. #winning

Making money with vision board parties is totally possible! All it takes is a bit of planning, budgeting and providing enough value to your attendees to help them reach their goals.

xoxo

Want To Start Planning Your Vision Board Party? 

1. Download the FREE vision board party planning checklist.

2. Craft your inspiring vision board workshop talk with our FREE High Impact Storytelling Journal Prompts. 

3. Plan, promote & host your first (or next) professional & profitable vision board workshop with our signature course, Sold Out Vision Board Parties.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cyrene is a fun and accomplished workshop facilitator, learning and development guru and Human Resources professional. Being at the helm of Thrive Lounge has been a long-time dream. Through vision board workshops she plans to accomplish two-way learning. Sharing her vast years of knowledge to motivate and encourage others; while simultaneously getting the reward of great energy, ideas and questions to ponder back from each group. A super win-win. Please join our Thrive Lounge community so you too can benefit!