How TOMO Mags Is Celebrating the Art of Print in Austin
Meet the Austin entrepreneur bringing back the ritual of browsing — one magazine, art book and coffee at a time
When Vico Tadeo Puentes was ten years old, growing up in a small town in Mexico, he spent his days wandering between two favorite spots: the paper goods store and the news stand. There, surrounded by magazines, comics and stacks of printed matter, he absorbed entire worlds without ever leaving his neighborhood.
“I literally learned it all from magazines,” he said, recalling how publications like Italian Men’s Vogue opened doors to the fashion industry long before the internet made such access commonplace. “I knew who the players were, I knew the industry. It gave me the door without even having to be anywhere other than just a big magazine.”
Now, more than two decades later and settled in Austin, Puentes is bringing that formative experience full circle. This October, he’s opening TOMO Mags, an independent magazine and art book shop at 411 Brazos Street in downtown Austin.
The ritual we’ve lost
“We don’t do rituals enough and all of them are so digitized,” Puentes explained. “You pay your bills on your phone, you check in on your friends on your phone, you’re processing your family tree on this, you’re in arguments with people about politics on your phone.”
His solution? Create a space where that digital tether can be temporarily severed, where the simple act of browsing becomes a form of escape. “I just remember the moments where I would walk in into a magazine shop and sit there and it felt like I took a flight somewhere else just by flipping the pages,” he said. “There’s no notification that’s going to come through at that moment.”
It’s a vision born from personal experience. After years working as a fashion stylist, menswear buyer and eventually Chief Marketing Officer for different fashion brands, Puentes found himself increasingly disconnected from what had first sparked his creativity.
So in 2015, he did something about it: he bought a school bus, ripped out the seats and created Houston’s first mobile magazine shop.
The bus, the pause, the return
For three years, the TOMO bus became a beloved fixture in Houston, parking at art galleries, coffee shops and creative spaces. “I did that over the weekends for a while and then eventually it just really felt like I needed to do more of it,” he recalled.
But when corporate opportunities arose, Puentes made the difficult decision to pause TOMO. “I wasn’t sure of myself as a business person or entrepreneurial person,” he admits. “Sadly enough, it was just traumatic for many years. I couldn’t even go past anything remotely looking like my shop.”
The story could have ended there. Instead, it’s where the Austin chapter begins.
After relocating to Austin for work, Puentes tested the waters with a pilot run of TOMO at Post Houston’s Art Club exhibition last year. The response confirmed what he’d suspected: print wasn’t dead, it was evolving and Austin was ready for it.
“I just went to a conference in New York three weeks ago for independent magazines, distributors and store owners,” he said, still energized by the experience. “My favorite shops were like, ‘you’re the guy with the bus.’ And I’m like, wow, y’all know about me. We’re the crazy people that are doing this when nobody really wants it.”
Except according to Puentes, people do want it. And now more than ever.
What you’ll find inside
TOMO Mags will carry an eclectic mix that reflects Puentes’ wide-ranging curiosity: fashion magazines and architecture journals, art books and zines, Spanish-language publications from Mexico City, Chile and Argentina. There will be stationery, journals and what he calls “design goods” — the thoughtful objects that make a space feel intentional.
“There’s everything from Puss Puss, which is a cat magazine with fashion editorials, to architecture,” he explained. “I’m a very curious person. So there’s magazines from across the board.”
One of his goals is ambitious but meaningful: to make TOMO one of the largest distributors of Spanish-language design and fashion publications in the U.S. “That’s something that I’m really hopeful that I can say sometime next year, if you visit Austin, it’s almost like you went to Mexico City, Chile and Argentina because you found all these cool pieces.”
The shop will also feature a small selection of fashion pieces from designers in Houston and Mexico City, a vintage paper goods cabinet from Mexico filled with pins and erasers and sharpeners and a coffee bar for those who want to settle in.
TOMO is being designed as a community space, somewhere people actually want to spend time.
“If somebody wants to put up a stool and just browse through it, I want people to feel super comfortable,” Puentes said.
There’s also a deeper motivation at play. “Every time I go out, I don’t see myself,” he said, referring to the lack of visible Latino representation in Austin’s creative scene. “Culturally, I don’t see people of color being at the forefront of really creative projects… I do feel like that representation is important.”
The algorithm can’t do this
In an age where social media algorithms keep us in silos, Puentes sees physical magazines as a corrective. Archives of ideas that reveal themselves slowly, sometimes years after the first encounter.
“People that collect publications, books and magazines, sometimes you go back and visit something you had from five years ago, 10 years ago and all of a sudden you’re flipping through it and you’re like, oh my God, that’s why I’m always gravitating towards that typeface,” he explained. “It got ingrained in me 15 years ago.”
TOMO Mags opening soon
TOMO Mags opens in mid-October at 411 Brazos Street, with a grand opening celebration planned for November. The TOMO bus will also return to Austin’s streets, making appearances at the Texas Book Festival and Future Front Festival, and parking at coffee shops and creative spaces around town.
For Puentes, the goal is simple: create a place where people don’t have to book a flight to feel transported.
“If that can happen for a lot of people when they interact with TOMO, then I’m going to be sitting down,” he said.
TOMO Mags is making a case for looking slower, at the printed page, at the curated object, at the ritual of discovery that happens when you’re not being interrupted by notifications. It’s a space designed for the curious, built by someone who’s spent a lifetime proving that sometimes the best way forward is to flip back through the pages.
TOMO Mags opens in mid-October at 411 Brazos Street, Austin. Follow @tomomags on Instagram for opening dates and bus locations.