helen siwak, editor in chief, marketing, communications, vancouver, bc, west coast luxury, publisher

Helen Siwak (ELL Comms) on 3 Decades of Entrepreneurship & the Future of Independent Publishing

Born and raised on the Canadian Prairies, Helen Siwak’s creative spirit was shaped by an early love for storytelling and an insatiable curiosity about human experience. Drawn to the vibrancy of the West Coast, she relocated to Vancouver and immediately immersed herself in the city’s underground arts and culture scene. There, she launched In Hell’s Belly, one of Vancouver’s first independent publications blending art, activism, and culture — a platform that spotlighted alternative voices long before the digital era made storytelling accessible to all.

Her career evolved through artist management, film production, and entertainment law, where she developed a sharp understanding of narrative, image, and impact. By the late 1990s, Helen was writing, producing, and appearing at major festivals including VIFF, TIFF, and Cannes. Her work as a journalist and interviewer connected her with global figures such as Giorgio Armani, Pamela Anderson, and Martin Sheen, solidifying her reputation as a perceptive voice who could move fluidly between celebrity, culture, and community.

Creative at her core, Helen continues to approach every project as both art and strategy — transforming stories into experiences and elevating conversations that define the evolving West Coast cultural landscape.

helen siwak, editor in chief, marketing, communications, vancouver, bc, west coast luxury, publisher

COMPANY BIO

EcoLuxLuv Communications & Marketing Inc. (ELL Comms) is a Vancouver-based independent media and strategic content company built on a single core belief: publishing is not just editorial — it is infrastructure for business growth.

Founded by media strategist Helen Siwak, ELL Comms develops hybrid digital publications designed to function as scalable marketing assets for the founders, brands, and industries they serve. Its flagship titles — Folio.YVR Luxury Lifestyle Magazine (2019) and Portfolio.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine (2023) — blend long-form storytelling with measurable digital distribution across newsletter strategy, press syndication, and international content licensing.

Folio.YVR is Canada’s only digital luxury magazine officially partnered with the Luxury Lifestyle Awards under the World Luxury Chamber of Commerce, surpassing 4.5 million reads in 2025. Both titles licence content to news agencies in Korea and Asia, extending their reach across international markets while maintaining a refined West Coast voice.

In 2026, ELL Comms launched a media brokering division and entered a national strategic partnership with Retail-Insider.com as an official business development partner. ELL Comms also holds editorial leadership across several independent titles in Western Canada.

At ELL Comms, content, distribution, and visibility are all instruments of deliberate strategy.

helen siwak, editor in chief, marketing, communications, vancouver, bc, west coast luxury, publisher

IN HER WORDS

“Calgary in the 1970s was the Wild West, and I had a front-row seat. At six years old, I was already earning — my mother would lend me out to babysit neighbourhood kids while she and the other mothers “drank coffee,” and I ran errands for nickels, bought cigarettes for adults, and did whatever it took to keep the peace at home with my two younger brothers and sister. Every time we moved — and we moved often — I mapped out which neighbours kept snacks out and made sure we played there. One summer, I converted to Protestantism for the duration of a free camp, collecting bus rides, meals, and Jesus pencils with equal enthusiasm. It was resourcefulness, not mischief, and the distinction mattered even then.

Near the end of Grade 4, we relocated to Olds, Alberta, where my father’s carpentry work had six of us living in a four-person trailer while he built and sold houses. The third one became ours. As newcomers, we were shunned and bullied, and with no allowance and no options, I noticed the mini-mart paid refunds on bottles and cans. My brothers and I worked the ditches and streets until our mother found out and shut it down — embarrassed by our hustling. I did not understand her pride. The hustle was the point. That gap between what is available and what is needed, and the willingness to close it by whatever honest means are at hand — that has been the operating principle of my entire life.

ARRIVING WITH NOTHING

I was twenty-four when I arrived in Vancouver in 1990, in the middle of the night, leaving an abusive relationship behind with a suitcase and a cat. I knew one person, and a month later, he left for Hawaii. When the landlord arrived for months of unpaid rent, I found myself on the street with a cat hidden in my coat, buzzing building after building in the West End until a landlady took a chance on me for $275 a month. That basement room was my first real home in the city.

I registered with every temp agency in the city. Typing over eighty words per minute kept me in steady contracts across accounting, law, security, warehousing, and trade show modelling. Each placement added something to the toolkit. None of it felt like a career at the time. Looking back, it was the most comprehensive training I could have received — an unscripted education in how industries operate, how people make decisions, and how to read a room before you speak.

THE MAGAZINE THAT STARTED EVERYTHING

The idea for In Hell’s Belly came the way most good ideas do — from noticing a gap. Commuting daily from the West End to UBC, where I was working as a secretary under Dean Robert Silverman in the Classical Music Department, I would arrive with newspaper ink on my hands and skirt and think: someone should produce a transit-friendly publication that did not destroy your clothing. Then one afternoon at the bus loop, I spotted a flyer on purple paper — a collective looking for writers and photographers to launch a magazine. I attended the meeting, found a house full of sleepy high schoolers, and walked away with a different plan entirely.

Using the photocopier, glue sticks, and markers available to me at UBC, I built the first issue of In Hell’s Belly myself. I found affordable printing on the East Side and learned, through the printer’s guidance, how to prepare a mock-up for camera, select paper stock, and produce Vancouver’s first offset-printed, half-fold underground magazine dedicated to the alternative music and arts scene. At one point, we printed on hemp paper — likely the first publication in Canada to do so. Two thousand copies distributed every six weeks through tattoo parlours, cafes, and galleries. It was scrappy, self-funded, and entirely mine.

helen siwak, editor in chief, marketing, communications, vancouver, bc, west coast luxury, publisher

THE EDUCATION OF HARD LESSONS

Publishing led to artist management, and I threw myself into it completely — managing and touring bands across every genre from hardcore hip hop to alt country, writing grants, producing music videos, and doing anything and everything the work required, earning the title “Managrrrr” from the musicians I worked with. The momentum was real and building — right up until days before a scheduled meeting with Warner Music in Los Angeles, when September 11, 2001 brought every US opportunity to an abrupt halt. Broke, I took a weekend moving contract at entertainment law firm Heenan Blaikie and within a week had pitched and secured a filing system contract. With the artist management experience and access to free legal advice now at hand, that contract birthed Realia Music — a fully digital music licensing company covering more than ten thousand titles that represented indie musicians only.

After years of trying to rebuild music licensing for independent artists and exhausted from my inability to change the status quo, I sold it for $1 and quarterly commission. Weeks later, a Vancouver music supervisor representing two high-profile television series called wanting access to the catalogue. I told them I had sold, hung up, and cried. Then I boarded a flight to Europe. Months later, from Greece, I discovered the buyer had parked a mangosteen juice company on my URL and shut the catalogue down entirely — to eliminate competition. That was my introduction to due diligence. It remains one of the most expensive lessons I have ever paid for, and one of the most useful.

FIVE YEARS AND A DIFFERENT KIND OF EDUCATION

What was meant to be a month-long hitchhiking trip from Paris to Istanbul became five years of living in Greece, trying to figure out who I was and what I actually wanted from life. I felt I was failing horribly. Then I found animal rescue, and it saved me.

Three years on the ground with the women of Friends of Animals Néa Filadélfeia taught me empathy and purpose in ways nothing else had. The work was grueling and at times horrific — a precursor to pushing change through the court systems of a country that considered strays vermin to be exterminated. It was also the first time I had applied my full skillset to a problem I genuinely cared about, with everything I had. I had found my passion, and I understood for the first time what that actually felt like.

What returned to Vancouver was a married woman with four rescued companions. What greeted us was a city that had changed completely in five years. Film had left. Heenan Blaikie had imploded. My husband could not work legally for two years. I did what I had always done — I found an opening and moved toward it. Kitsilano Kitty’s Closet, a thrift and designer resale operation on Craigslist, kept us afloat alongside Vit Vit Vegan, a weekly plant-based meal service that fed both our ethics and our survival instincts. That combination of luxury resale and conscious consumption turned out to be the perfect education — positioning me as a credible voice in the luxury space just as Vancouver’s Luxury Zone was beginning its dramatic build-out and Retail Insider’s Craig Patterson dropped an opportunity into my lap, taking on a correspondent role for the fledgling VanCity Buzz, now Daily Hive.

A MODEL BUILT FOR NOW

This led to writing for Boulevard Magazine, Montecristo, StyleDemocracy, and Retail Insider, and understanding the structural problems of traditional media from the inside. Advertisers were paying for placement no one read, digital readers were navigating paywalls to access content they did not trust, and editorial quality was being sacrificed for digital volume. Attending VIP openings for Dior, Prada, Chanel, and YSL along Alberni Street, I began designing a different kind of publication — one that worked for the consumer, the advertiser, and the publisher simultaneously. Ad-free, delivered directly to inboxes, built for genuine connection. Folio.YVR Luxury Lifestyle Magazine launched in 2019 as that solution.

Portfolio.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine followed in 2023, and the model has continued to evolve. The turning point came after meeting Neel Singh of Tropoly following a PR event. For years, I had been educating clients on a hybrid publishing model they had no existing frame of reference for — an exhausting process that often meant carrying the financial weight of that learning curve personally. Finding a collaborator who understood both the vision and the mechanics of how AI and automation could support it was transformative. I once believed I did not work particularly well with others. It turns out I simply had not met the right ones.

WHAT THE WORK HAS TAUGHT

I have never had a mentor in the traditional sense. My path moved too quickly and too unconventionally for that kind of relationship to take hold. What I had instead was range — skillsets accumulated across industries that most people following conventional career trajectories never encounter. That breadth became the thing I offered others.

During the pandemic, I worked with a dozen individuals to establish and sustain digital presences, and watched several of them — particularly those building plant-based food companies — move from farmers markets into Choices and Whole Foods, from small-batch production into co-packing agreements, and from local tables to large-scale conferences. Watching people build something real, with the right foundation under them, never gets old. That work remains among the most satisfying of my career, not because of what I contributed, but because of what they built.

The advice I give now is the same advice I wish someone had given me: incorporate early, open a dedicated business account, track every connection, and research everyone you let into your circle. Due diligence is not optional — it is the price of admission for anyone serious about building something that lasts. Google shows you what people want you to see; add the word “scam” or “court case” and the picture changes. The BC Court Services site and Business in Vancouver covers ‘who is suing who’ regularly and these exist for a reason. Use them. Manipulators are skilled and patient, and most of us are trusting by nature. I learned that the hard way. I would rather you did not have to.

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Folio.YVR EIC & Publisher, Helen Siwak, wearing J. Schlumberger design | Photo: Emily Lin

THE LEGACY BEING BUILT

Legacy, for me, lives in two places simultaneously, and I do not think it is possible — or honest — to separate them.

The first is personal. I arrived in this city with nothing and rebuilt from the ground up, more than once. The full-circle nature of where I have landed — back in publishing, but with three decades of hard-won knowledge informing every decision — is not lost on me. The storytelling instinct that produced In Hell’s Belly on a photocopier at UBC is the same instinct behind Folio.YVR and Portfolio.YVR today. The legacy I carry personally is one of resilience — proof that survival and purpose are not mutually exclusive, and that the long way around is sometimes the only way that holds.

The second is structural. Through ELL Comms and the semi-automated digital publishing system being developed in partnership with Tropoly, I am working toward something that extends well beyond my own titles. The vision is a portfolio of licensable and franchisable digital publications, regional Portfolio.YVR issues launching across Canada’s key business centres by 2027, and a scalable framework that puts independent publishers, entrepreneurs, and community voices back in control of their own narratives. Corporate media has held that power for too long. The legacy I hope to leave through ELL Comms is one of democratization — returning professional publishing infrastructure to the people who live, work, and build within their own communities, and proving that when creativity, technology, and strategy work in harmony, independent media does not just survive. It leads.”

Author Profile

Helen Siwak, EIC & Publisher: Helen Siwak is the founder and publisher of Portfolio.YVR Business & Entrepreneurs Magazine, a digital-first publication dedicated to sharing the stories of British Columbia’s most dynamic entrepreneurs. Through Portfolio.YVR, she highlights innovation, creativity, and business leadership across the province, offering an authentic look into the people shaping its economic and cultural future. As the founder of EcoLuxLuv Marketing & Communications Inc. and with a background in strategic communications and digital brand development, she collaborates with small to mid-sized businesses, and global heritage houses to strengthen their storytelling and digital presence. Always focused on growth and connection, Helen continues to expand Portfolio.YVR as a platform for meaningful entrepreneurial storytelling.