"we have eight weddings this year and four of them are destination"
i spoke to some 2025 gen z brides
Good morning and welcome back to as seen on
Thank you to everyone who upgraded to paid on Monday. Made my day 😌
In today’s (also very long) newsletter, I wrote about how Substack and Beehiv are working with traditional media, changes to Estée Lauder’s portfolio, an update on D.C.’s luxury housing market, some conflicting thoughts on how beauty brands are working with women’s sports teams, I asked some 2025 Gen Z brides what trends they’re embracing, and a bunch of other stuff…
Tomorrow, I’ll be having a guest writer share her predictions for Search in 2025, featuring thoughts on TikTok, Reddit, OpenAI, and Google. Sunday, I’ll be back with my January reading recap. I read 13 books. They were mostly great.
ENJOY!
Few things were more apparent to me this morning than the fact that M.A.C. Cosmetics wants that Gen Z consumer. Bad. I won’t be told otherwise. Q3 2024, someone somewhere slapped them with an almighty brief on “how to revive a legacy brand for Gen Z.” I wasn’t a part of the focus group, but somebody like me was. The result? They’re relaunching twenty of their archival shades from the 90s, Martha Stewart is doing something with honey, strawberries, and pomegranates, and Julia Fox is (maybe) posing nude on the subway because she Only Wears M.A.C. Fun days ahead, people.
Lots of think pieces in the last month predicting how the LA wildfires will affect Hollywood. Awards season aside, if you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know the industry is struggling—and has been since the 2023 strikes. Squeezed by studio cutbacks and competition from other states and countries, film and television production in LA had already fallen to a near-record low last year. Before the strikes, LA had 35% of the nation’s film and television jobs. That number dropped to just 27% afterward. Barring some aggressive state tax incentives and significant studios commitments, I expect it to fall even further next year.
Disney bumped Iger’s pay by 30% to $41.1 million as a thank-you for making Disney+ profitable. Funny, since that turnaround was largely due to layoffs, but c’est la vie!
Netflix has another Baby Reindeer-esque show in the works—this time about two influencers who set out to cure their life-threatening illnesses through ~health and wellness~. At least one of them is lying about their condition. The trailer calls it a “True-ish” story, based on the book The Woman Who Fooled the World. It looks great.
In a podcast I listened to yesterday, one guy said to the other, “You’d be a fool to bet against Netflix.” Wall Street must be feeling the same. Netflix recently reported its biggest subscriber growth to date—19 million subscribers added in Q4 2024, twice as big as any fourth-quarter growth in its history. This, despite facing more competition than ever. Revenue also grew 16% to $39 billion last year, shooting the company’s stock to an all-time high this month. What’s interesting about Netflix’s business is its sustained growth, and the potential for further sustained growth. The company, and brand, are by now totally ubiquitous. Where’s the growth going to come from? On the back of their latest subscriber report, Netflix said it was raising subscription prices across its tiers. The Verge followed up with a piece titled Netflix Won the Streaming Wars, and We’re All About to Pay for It. They’re not wrong. Netflix’s growth strategy might include more live sports events, experiential, and blockbuster franchises like Squid Game and Bridgerton, but it also involves getting more from their existing subscribers—through price hikes and growing their ad tier. (I won’t be surprised if the price hikes are in part designed to drive people to the ad tier). There’s Netflix, and then there’s everyone else.
