Welcome back to After School Weekend Edition, a weekly trend debrief for paid subscribers.💫
As you may know, today is St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday I’ve not thought much about since my 20s. But it’s been on my mind this week because it’s been all over my feed.
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Some things never change, I guess, including the fact that young people love an excuse to dress up, go out, and get drunk. (Yes, even Gen Z.)
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Between St. Patrick’s Day and Spring Break, both of which have overtaken my FYP, I’ve become increasingly convinced that TikTok is not for millennials, but rather that millennials are being fed millennial content, confirming their beliefs that millennials now dominate the app.
Of course, it’s also possible that I’m being fed Gen Z content, because that’s what I want to see. I’ve spent a lot of time training my algorithm to give me what I want to see, a tactic I had the opportunity to ramble about this week in
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EMBEDDED:
What shows up on your TikTok For You page?
CASEY LEWIS:
This is the first time I’ve admitted this to anyone, but I think about scrolling on TikTok in the same way I used to think about feeding my Tamagotchi when I was a kid. If I give it the attention, it will continue to provide for me.Another way I think about it—and another analogy, sorry—is that it’s kind of like weeding a garden (I don’t have a garden). I’m pretty obsessive about liking and bookmarking the TikToks that I want to see more of and manually punching the “not interested” button on things that I don’t want to see. As a result, my feed is very tailored to my professional interests. For example, I love dogs, but I do not want to see dogs on my TikTok feed. I want to see shopping hauls and GRWMs and young people talking about what they’re into right now.
Lately, I’ve been fed lots of Spring Break (Punta Cana seems popular?) and St. Patrick’s Day (whoever said Gen Z doesn’t party hasn’t seen my FYP!), and I’ve also started to spot prom popping up here and there, which is a thrill.
If I’ve spent all of this time carefully training my algorithm only for TikTok to disappear — which I do not think is going to happen but I do think could happen — I genuinely do not know what I will do.
I simply don’t have the fortitude to train my Reels algorithm!
To better illustrate the difference in algorithms for those of you who haven’t lost half of your brain to short-form videos, I’ve just opened TikTok and my feed is showing me: A Gen Zer sharing her OOTD for St. Pats, two Gen Zers ordering spicy margs at happy hour, two other Gen Zers sharing their OOTDs for St. Pats, a Gen Zer making a Lucky Charms cake for St. Pats, a Gen Zer sharing some of the funny things her Gen Alpha nephew has said. (I should note that I have not verified anyone's ages here, but they are all Gen Z presenting.)
And now I’m closing TikTok and opening Reels, and my feed is showing me: A video of seals flopping around, women working out in a pool in Egypt, a man eating an entire lobster on the subway, a clip of Jodie Sweeten dancing as a child, and a dog getting his fur Dyson Wrapped. (No links because I couldn’t close the app fast enough, sorry — but if you search “dog getting his fur Dyson Wrapped,” I’m sure you’ll find what you’re looking for.)
Short-form video isn’t going anywhere, and algorithms are only going to get more sophisticated, but it really is mind-boggling to consider how much TikTok has changed the world in a few short years.
This week, Fortune interviewed Liquid Death CEO Mike Cessario about the brand’s unicorn rise. The canned water maker is valued at $1.4 billion in a new financing round, and that’s not because they have a notably superior product. It’s because of social media. It’s because of TikTok!
Cessario told Fortune that he believed that a successful brand would need to have a high likelihood of a user taking a photo of it, “then post it on social for free to all of their followers to spread the awareness of Liquid Death without us having to pay for the awareness.” In hopes of producing a drink that “would catch the eye of Gen Z consumers eager to spread anything cool around online,” he covered his sleek tallboy cans in screaming skulls and declarations to “murder your thirst.”
The same concept — producing something that “would catch the eye of Gen Z consumers eager to spread anything cool around online” — was repeated in WWD’s piece this week about how “merch madness is taking over beauty.” In the week that Rhode teased its now-viral lip treatment-holding phone case, “engagement across the brand's social media channels grew by 1,068 percent from the brand's six-month average, outpacing the average engagement increases driven by Rhode's other launch campaigns.”
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"There’s a utility to the case, there’s a unique design; it allows you to show off product — which, Rhode makes beautiful products — and it also fits in perfectly with selfie culture as a whole,” said Lauren Bitar, chief innovation and strategy officer at Trendalytics.
It’s not about a superior product, it’s about making something highly photogenic (or videogenic) that’s functional enough, and if you can ratchet up demand by giving consumers the feeling that it’s limited-edition or hard to find, even better.
We’re seeing this play out with Trader Joe's canvas mini tote bags that are now being resold online for nearly 200 times their retail price. We’re talking about a $3 tote that’s too small to carry a MacBook Pro. (It can probably carry an iPad, though — functional enough.)
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Today we’re talking about:
I’m mad about that Kylie Jenner x Sam Edelman partnership
Utah Boy Fit Checks
Macro bangs
Depopped True Religion
The rise of the nonicure
Gen Z is revolting against mascara
Starface’s Devon Lee Carlson campaign
The new “Hot Girl Walk” is the 14-mile trek
“Rose is the Shein version of Kate”
TikTok roses are the new GoFundMe
Why Strafford, Vermont — population 1,075 — is a tourist destination among young people
Plus everything else that happened this week in youth culture and what I’m buying/reading/listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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