When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping.

That’s what Mandi Norwood, 40, did when Mademoiselle, the magazine she left her native England to edit, folded – just a year after she had moved to New York with her husband and two daughters.

“I absolutely love to shop. I’m thrilled by the retail moment,” she said, recalling her frequent trips to any outlet from Duane Reade to Barneys.

While she was out of a job, she was filling her closets (and her husband’s, and her daughters’) – and refining an idea for a new shopping magazine.

After doing her homework among the racks and shelves of Manhattan’s department stores and boutiques, she met with the president of Hearst, Cathleen Black.

The meeting generated a lot of excitement on both ends. “Literally two days later I was in the office nextdoor to hers,” Ms. Norwood said.

The debut issue of Shop Etc. hits New York newsstands tomorrow (its official sale date is August 17), 18 months after Ms. Norwood landed at the publication, with a rate base of 400,000. It will come out two more times in its first year, then 10 times in 2005.

Ms. Norwood’s concept is to save women in their 30s time and money by covering all the things they have to shop for on a Saturday afternoon in one magazine. “It’s three-in-one: fashion, beauty, and home.”

“Product is the celebrity,” she said. She explains that while a teenager needs to see a celebrity endorse a product, the Shop Etc. woman is looking for the information that will help her make informed choices on what to buy.

Earlier this week, Ms. Norwood sat in her new corner office, a model of calm and composure, dressed in a light-blue J. Crew suit, a Ralph Lauren T-shirt, and rhinestone-studded Stuart Weitzman shoes.

While Ms. Norwood looked per fectly at ease, she admitted that, “I don’t think I’ve had a full night’s sleep for about four months. I’ve tried desperately to make sure the magazine is looking fresh and inviting; that takes 24 hours worth of thought, the kind of thing that wakes you up at 3 o’clock in the morning and keeps you from falling asleep again,” she said.

The hard work is just beginning. At the close of the first issue, she said to herself, “There was a moment of ‘God, can you believe it?'” And then just as quickly, “God, got to get working on the second issue.”

When she needs a break, she still opts to shop. She was delighted when the Shops at Columbus Circle opened a few blocks from her office.

“If I do want to go bury my head in a cashmere sweater for a little bit of light relief, I can literally leg it over there and scoot around J. Crew and [Hugo] Boss and the new Calvin Klein lingerie store in there, it’s just lovely,” she said, in her British lilt.

She hasn’t yet gone shopping with her boss, Ms. Black, but they have shared some shopping moments.

“We’ve been in the car going somewhere and she has remarked on a shoe that I’m wearing and I’ve remarked on the skirt she’s wearing. I think that can be very bonding.”

On weekends, Ms. Norwood shops (and bonds) with her husband and two adolescent daughters. They are enrolled at Marymount School, near their Upper East Side home. Her husband, Martin Kelly, is a prepress project manager for Hearst Magazines (his office is five floors up from Ms. Norwood’s).

“I always teach them that it’s better to buy one really great thing than a bunch of things that are just rubbish and to kind of hold out for the best. If you have your heart set on something and you go into a store and they sort of have it but it’s not quite right in the pattern, you hold out for it. Of course that drives my husband absolutely nuts and we wind up spending the whole Saturday on the hunt for the perfect thing.”

She tries not to spoil her children. “Luckily – or unfortunately – they have an eye for quality, but I don’t just give them everything they want. They have to save for things and put money aside for things.”

And they won’t be using the “beauty” portion of Shop Etc., either. “I think they are just the essence of beauty, so I’ll be trying to dissuade them from wearing makeup for as long as possible.”

As for what goes in her magazine: She must believe in it. “If I look at something and I really think, ‘C’mon, I’d never pay money for that,’ I can’t put it in.”

One item that she deliberated over for the first issue was a $750 pencil skirt. “We had this big discussion about it…. Did we really think that this pencil skirt is worth $750? I can tell you if you put this pencil skirt on, mummy tummy is gone forever. It’s flattering, it’s like a bandage. It’s worth $750.”

“Fashion nonsense” won’t clutter up her pages. “It comes down to being in my bedroom as a [pimply] teenager looking through the magazines and feeling I’m never going to be a part of that world,” she said.

One of her pet peeves is bad service. “That is the thing that just kills me. If I’m in a store and I’m giving them my money that I worked really hard for and the service isn’t there, I’m just, I just, want to, you know, (laugh) you just want to kill them. I find it so insulting.”

In Shop Etc., Ms. Norwood hopes readers will find answers to the questions they may not be getting from salespeople on the floor. “One of the things I’ve really tried to make come alive in the magazine is that quality of service. To say, here’s a pair of shoes and this is the sizes they’re available in, and the colors, and this is why we love them so much.”

If Shop Etc. has a flaw, it’s that it diminishes some of the joy in discovering a treasure amid the piles of pleated khakis. After all, isn’t part of the fun of shopping the mystery, the unexpectedness?

Ms. Norwood understands that the thrill of the “find” is difficult to capture in a publication that focuses exclusively on beautiful things. She described the kind of shopping highs and lows that are hard to recreate in a magazine:

“There can be days when I might go out and everything works. Literally every store I go into has the exact right thing, they’ve read my mind and it’s right there. And then there are the days when they’ve stopped making that foundation, don’t have the shoes in your size, and that dress you wanted looks like a big horror,” she said.

“And then there are really great fate moments: I’d been in Barneys and I’d spotted a dress. I couldn’t try it on, didn’t have the time to try it on, but I did have time to obsess about it. So I went back and they didn’t have it. I said to one of the sales assistants, have you got it, and she said, no we have not. Then I bought something else on the same floor, and just as I was buying it, out comes this guy with an armload of these dresses that had literally just turned up from Chicago. You have that sort of sense of fate, it was meant to be.”