I Have No One to Send this To.
A newsletter from your friend that's been trying to put you on for months.
Full transparency, I can sometimes have a real “pick me” energy about me when it comes to what I follow and keep up with on the internet. It started when I got way too into college football my junior year of high school and would start verbal arguments with boys about the AP Top 25 Poll. I’ve reformed myself a lot since then. When I’m chatting with my gals it’s all about finding what’s uniting us in our girlhood that week, so please let me indulge in sharing the things that I’ve seen on the internet the past few days that I can’t send to anyone!
Chris Heyn and Hallie Batchelder were sipping Martinis in the West Village this weekend.
I’m sure there’s some Reddit thread that I can find about this, but this isn’t snark. I’m genuinely obsessed with this duo. I feel like there’s two camps of NYC influencers on my fyp. There’s the full-timers and the part-timers. Hallie is a full-timer and Chris is a part-timer. I’m not sure that the duo is anything significant. It seemed like they were just grabbing drinks in the West Village together this weekend. But for me, Hallie posting up with him intros Chris into a pretty new audience for him.
I haven’t followed Hallie super closely, but I’ve been following Chris for a while now after being hooked by his aspirational and aesthetic content. The best way I can describe his page is a mix of video dumps with fire back tracks, office fit checks, and answering follower questions. He’s basically the dude version of the classic lifestyle and fashion influencers that we’ve been following as girls for years. Based on his content, he would probably hate being described that way, but I think it’s something unique and admirable. He’s really honest and vulnerable with his followers when giving advice. With all of these reports about how young men are struggling, hopefully he inspires more content like his on the TL. Because I’m not his target demo, I had no one to send this to. Maybe after this crossover I will.
The Retail Therapy Podcast is probably the best part of my Sunday.
We need more Sunday content. Senior year of college I would have terrible Sunday Scaries - for obvious reasons, so I typed the literal phrase into Spotify and found this podcast. It was Will, one of the hosts of Retail Therapy, reading a small piece of writing about the little things that honestly put me at ease. One Sunday, the “Retail Therapy” pod was posted to the Sunday Scaries page - I think Will and his co-host, Barrett, were talking about “balletcore” or something. I was hooked. Two millennial dudes talking about internet trends and fashion in a way that was extremely unserious and entertaining. They’ll talk through topics like new Gen Z trends, the cocktail of the season (even though they’ve started drinking less), fashion it-boys that they label as “babygirls” (namely, Jacob Elordi & Paul Mescal), and their seasonal In/Out lists (my personal favorite). After listening every week for about two years now, I’ve learned a little bit too much about menswear and millennial group dinner culture from this pod. I’ve tried time and time again to put different friends onto the pod, but it seems like a lot of my friends either listen to podcasts that are educational or produced by Barstool. (Yikes)
The SSENSE Creative Director choose your own journey instagram post is sending me.
Nike’s new CEO started this week.
I think sometime last year, the guys on the Retail Therapy pod were discussing shoes that were on their watchlist and brought up that Nike just didn’t have anything fresh to compete with the Samba that was just absolutely exploding at the time. I thought that this was an interesting point, agreed, and then didn’t think about it again. In July, the Prof G Pod did a segment analyzing Nike’s stock performance and what they thought was going on at the company. Professor Scott Galloway is a marketing professor at NYU Stern, so he had some really interesting takes.
In the episode, he dives into the fact that the former CEO, John Donahoe, had been running Nike like a tech company, building out their fitness apps and interconnectivity as a brand. Since Donahoe started in 2020, this really made sense at the time with the rise of tech companies like Mirror and Peloton. I personally love the Nike Run Club app and all of their guided runs. Using it makes me want to run in a pair of Nikes. In my last quest for new running shoes, I found that all of the Nike styles were priced pretty well above a number of competing brands like Hoka or On, and I couldn’t justify the price hike just for my level of casual running. So with their performance shoes being outpriced by specialty competitors that have shot to popularity in the last few years, and the rise of the Samba from Adidas, they’ve been in a tough spot.
After this was brought to my attention a second time, I thought about how much of an opportunity there was at Nike for fresh ideas and wondered what the response should be.
A change in personnel doesn’t hurt at all.
Elliot Hill, the new CEO, has been at Nike since he was an intern. He knows the company and the brand from a multitude of angles. He’s almost the opposite of the former CEO, who came from a background of consulting. It’ll be exciting to see how a true brand veteran will attempt to pump some new energy back into the company. I’m ready for a new pair of runners already…
Mary Beth Barone and Benny Drama sat court-side at the Knicks & it just meant a lot to me!
Some people binge reruns of Friends when they don’t feel like choosing something to put on, I put on the Ride pod.
“If you don’t follow on Instagram you’re only getting half the story.” - Ride the Pod
Omg loveee Hallieeee