Dupe Mindsets and UnemploymentTok

omg jane austen

After a dramatic Sephora exit, Selfless by Hyram lands at Target; Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” tops Billboard charts for the second week (she can thank TikTok); and Chipotle is launching a jewelry collection for Valentine's Day — romantic!

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Super excited to kick off a year-long partnership with my good friends over at Day One Agency, the team behind some amazing campaigns for Chipotle, Nike, and American Express. You’ll see them pop up frequently here throughout 2023 (and beyond). They just launched their 2023 Predictionary, an extremely fun take on the annual trend report that they've been publishing for three years running. Learn more here about the exponential rise in “trends” met with decreased cultural value/impact (a.k.a “Trendflation”) and how second-hand goods are becoming a driver for brand growth (a.k.a. “Re-conomy”).

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CAN YOU BUILD A NEWSROOM ON TIKTOK?, semafor
To answer the question posed by Ben Smith here, just because you can does not mean you should. And given how shaky TikTok’s future is, you really, really shouldn’t. But that’s not stopping The News Movement, “an ambitious and well-funded startup that is hoping to succeed where a generation before it struggled: By building a media brand on other people’s platforms.”

THE BEST AND WORST MEDIA TIKTOK ACCOUNTS, gawker
Follow the previous read up with this one.

TECH LAYOFFS STRIP THE FACADE OFF TIKTOK'S 'DAY IN THE LIFE' VIDEOS, nbcnews
The aspirational “day in the life” TikToks that flaunted “glamorous corporate perks like catered lunches, campus gym facilities and sponsored happy hours” have suddenly been replaced by videos about labor rights and “raw — but still curated — content about unemployment.”

IS FAIRFAX AVENUE DEAD AS THE STREETWEAR HUB OF L.A.?, wwd
A full two blocks of the Los Angeles thoroughfare are crammed with popular streetwear brands — The Hundreds, Diamond Supply Co., Aape, Flight Club, Huf, Ripndip, Grail, Mitchell & Ness, Brain Dead Studios and SoleStage — anchored, of course, by Supreme, whose weekly merch drop brings in huge crowds. But now that Supreme is relocating to a bigger space two blocks away, no one’s sure what will become of the streetwear stretch.

THE DUPE MINDSET HAS TURNED EVERYTHING ON TIKTOK INTO A REPLICA, buzzfeed
The dupe mindset extends beyond the realm of product alternatives; the mentality is that anyone can hack the socioeconomic ladder of haves and have-nots by taking a shortcut with a dupe. In the era of performing carefully curated lifestyles online, there is content to be made and views to be gathered by telling people that they can get a little closer to that aspirational performance by using a similar sort of product.

OMG! IT’S JANE AUSTEN... THE TIKTOK GENERATION EMBRACES NEW HEROINE, theguardian
Interest is, unsurprisingly, being driven by a proliferation of internet memes and TikToks; a recent study led by a Cambridge academic entitled OMG Jane Austen suggested that Austen is the most memed writer after Shakespeare.

One last thought:

Ginny Hogan_ @ginnyhogan_

Wild how many app’s business model is just “hope free trial users forget to cancel”