Airwalle is published by a small editorial desk in Amsterdam. We do not sell consulting. We do not run training. We do not host advertising. We write essays and playbooks, and we send a free Friday note. What follows is the longer version.
Airwalle began in 2020 as a folder of working notes shared between four people who had spent the previous decade in different parts of the same problem. Two of us came from operations roles inside small Dutch family firms — one in horticulture, the other in regional logistics. A third spent eight years inside the strategy office of a Rotterdam health-care provider. The fourth had been writing a quiet column on management for a now-defunct trade newsletter and was the only one of us who had been formally trained as an editor.
The folder was kept on a shared drive and circulated to thirty or so friends. It grew, slowly, into a private newsletter. By the end of the first winter we had two hundred and forty subscribers; by the spring, six hundred; by the second autumn, just over four thousand. At that point we acquired the small domain you are reading and turned the newsletter into a website. We have never charged for any of it.
Our mission, in plain English, is to publish careful, slow, honest writing about how organisations actually work. We want a reader — an owner of a forty-person company in Hilversum, a department head in a Rotterdam hospital, a curious newcomer to a business he has just inherited — to be able to sit down on a Friday evening, read for thirty minutes, and come away with a piece of vocabulary or a piece of method that they can put on their kitchen wall on Saturday morning. That is the whole publication. Anything we do that does not serve that reader, we eventually drop.
We publish three kinds of piece. Insights are essays, between fifteen hundred and three thousand words, on a single idea — how a Monday stand-up changes a small firm, why a strategic plan should be drafted by hand, what makes a Dutch SME read strategy differently from a multinational. Playbooks are longer, more methodical pieces — six steps, eight steps, sometimes twelve — that compress on the final page into a single A4 you can print and tape to the wall. Reader letters are short notes from readers, with their permission, that often turn into the next Insight.
Every piece begins as a handwritten draft on a single sheet of A4. The draft is read out loud at the Monday-morning meeting; if a sentence does not survive the table, it does not survive the publication. The draft then goes to a second reader on the desk, who annotates by hand and sends it back. After the second draft we send the piece to three field readers — working practitioners from different industries, a small panel that rotates every six months — and integrate their notes. The final piece is published when the editorial desk agrees that nothing in it is going to mislead a reader. In 6 years we have issued nine public corrections, all archived on the website with the original passage and the corrected passage side by side.
We are not a consultancy. We are not a software vendor. We are not a training provider. We are not a directory of consultants. We are not a recruitment platform. We do not sell templates, courses, on-line workshops, certifications, or any other downloadable product. The only thing you can do on this website is read, and write to the editorial inbox.
We are also not a platform for unsolicited promotion. We do not accept guest posts. We do not accept “sponsored content”. We do not host display advertising or affiliate links. We do not pass reader e-mail addresses to third parties for any reason. The Friday note is sent from our own server, in plain text, with no tracking pixels.
Airwalle is funded almost entirely by the print quarterly. Twice a year — at midsummer and in the week before Christmas — we send a postcard to every subscriber, asking those who can to support the next two issues at any of three small tiers. The print quarterly is read at exactly cost; the postcards cover the running of the website, the e-mail server and the small studio in Amsterdam. A modest, multi-year research grant from an independent regional foundation covers a single research piece per year, the terms of which prohibit any influence on editorial direction.
We publish a brief annual statement of accounts, signed by the editor-in-chief, on the website. We are happy to answer detailed questions from readers about how the desk operates financially.
The editorial desk is four people in Amsterdam, with a rotating panel of three field readers — currently in Eindhoven, Maastricht and Groningen — and a copy-editor based in Manchester. Photography is original where we can manage it and, where we cannot, drawn from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licences. Photographers are credited in the captions and on the credits page of the print quarterly.
Airwalle is the small canal — the air-walle, the inner walled water — that used to thread through the back of a city before the modern map covered it. We liked the image: a quiet channel that carries traffic the busy main road no longer notices. The name does not commit us to a particular industry, a particular size of organisation, or a particular country. It is meant to suggest, instead, the kind of slow attention we are trying to cultivate on the page.
Reader letters, corrections, requests for permission to reproduce a piece inside an organisation, and questions about the print quarterly all reach the same editorial inbox at [email protected]. We answer within two working days. We do not have a press office, a marketing team, or a partnerships function. The desk is the desk.
If, when you finish reading a piece on Airwalle, you find yourself looking around your office for a sheet of A4 — that is the only metric we ever check. Thank you for reading. The cardamom-coffee thermos in the studio is, in a small but real way, paid for by your attention.