After School is a daily newsletter about youth culture read by thousands of execs from companies like TikTok, Nike, and Depop. If you enjoy it, please consider forwarding to your extremely powerful boss and/or smartest friend (and/or becoming a paid subscriber).
A majority of Gen Z investors think crypto will make them millionaires; influencer marketer LTK raises $300 million; how Taylor Swift muse Dylan O'Brien became the internet’s biggest heartthrob; introducing fairy hair, TikTok’s glittery hair trend for the festive season; and Outdoor Voices is collaborating with YMCA for Giving Tuesday.
WHY PIZZA HUT, EOS, JIF, AND VW ARE AMONG THE BRANDS TIKTOK CALLS ITS BIGGEST CULTURE DRIVERS, fastcompany
TikTok just published its first-ever Culture Drivers list, recognizing 14 brands that do “the best, most engaging, and entertaining work on the platform.” You can view the entire list here — and while it’s super interesting, the UX is truly terrible so don’t say I didn’t warn you (TikTok is better at designing apps than websites it seems).
HOW THE NEW WAVE OF FAST FASHION BRANDS REALLY WORK, bof
The founder of Edikted — which, at less than a year old, is already all over TikTok — says catching Gen Z’s attention and money “comes down to a simple formula, whether those teens and early 20-somethings are in Toronto, Tampa or Tel Aviv: move fast, keep manufacturing costs low and flood social media.”
THIS CULT TEEN BRAND IS QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA AMID GROWING SAFETY CONCERNS, cnn
Lush Cosmetics is quitting all of it — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat — the day after Thanksgiving, to “draw attention to how those platforms are damaging people's mental health.” Idk if it will successfully do that, but it sure has successfully earned them a bunch of press.
HOW LUXURY BRANDS CAN WIN OVER GEN Z VIA THE ‘THROWBACK ECONOMY’, jingdaily
Not just a trend among American teens, “Y2K style has become a dominant theme with Chinese cool-kid consumers.” Young shoppers fueled a countrywide thrifting boom — but “instead of only purchasing used indie brands from the Y2K era, these young customers are also interested in buying classic replicas.”
SNAPCHAT TURNS A LOW-KEY HIGH SCHOOL PARTY INTO A RAGER, bloomberg
How does a low-key get-together go viral and turn into a complete blowout? Snap Map: “The 15 invited guests had shared their locations with their school friends and sports teammates, who did the same with theirs, and word of the party had spread faster than a video clip of some wicked side-eye by Taylor Swift at a music awards show.”
HOW DO YOU MAKE TEEN COMEDIES TODAY? BUY A HIGH SCHOOL., nytimes
One director is making a big bet (to the tune of a $1 million purchase of an old high school) that the time is right now for a surge in hormonal high jinks captured on film.
After all, it has been roughly two decades since tales of love, sex and related high school humiliations had created financial and cultural hits like “American Pie” and “Can’t Hardly Wait,” films that themselves were grabbing the baton from 1980s John Hughes classics.
↳ Teen dramas from the early 2000s help Gen Z imagine a life without social media anxiety.
One last thought:
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