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Great Jones Cookware and the Illusion of the Millennial Aesthetic
The model of business success in the millennial era is that of dismantling social structures to suck up cash from whatever corners of life can still be exploited.
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
For a while, the DTC playbook was golden: Start with a commodity product, something like dish soap or underpants. Give it a modern design and wrap it in minimalist packaging. Include a pastel background in the impeccably staged product photos, which splash across a Shopify-powered e-commerce site flanked by sans-serif fonts, punchy copy and a messa... See more
Hal Koss • The DTC Party’s Over. What Happens Next?
sari added
Cultural products and consumer habits alike increasingly conform to the structures of digital spaces.
Kyle Chayka • How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines
Keely Adler added
The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were
... See moreAnna Wiener • Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
And it sounded like a giant contradiction — a slick, Red Antler-crafted brand called Brandless? — which made it a popular topic for discussion. A lot of industry people seemed to want to see it sink.
The New Consumer • The end of Brandless
sari added
In the 2010s many of our public spaces started to be molded, physically and literally, by the market advantage of luring patrons looking for highly Instagrammable shots. Businesses that once paid large sums of money to have photographs taken for advertisements that cost even more to run now had access to an army of free labor, taking pictures for f... See more
Freddie deBoer • Review: Kyle Chayka's Filterworld
sari and added
A decade or so ago, brands shifted from increasing value of their products through utility, competitive comparison, and creative advertising to endowing products they made with aesthetic, sustainability credentials, a story of artisanship and provenance, and/or a community in order to give their products identity and singularity. (Virgil Abloh made
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