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after school weekend edition
Welcome back to After School Weekend Edition, a not-so-brief trends debrief for paid subscribers. Your support keeps this newsletter going! 💫
Today we’re talking about:
Amazon Prime Day’s Gen Z strategy + what young consumers were buying
Why Gen Z loves mystery boxes
Charli XCX’s merch drop
Halley Kate’s Hey Dude collab
The Gracie Abrams bob
Starface’s lip balm launch
The shoe of the summer is a $650 flip flop
Glazed donut is out, pressed powder is in
Instagram’s “freaky” algorithm is going viral on TikTok
Gen Z ruined the Macarena
“Fruity boyfriends”
Plus everything else that happened this week in style, beauty, and culture — this email is so very long I’m sorry 😭 — and what I’m buying/reading/listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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Amazon Prime Day 2024 — a two-day sale with 89,780 deals, by Wirecutter’s count — was “the biggest Prime Day sale in history.”
Every year has been “the biggest Prime Day sale in history” since the event started in 2015, so you can be sure that 2025 will also be “the biggest Prime Day sale in history,” especially with the ten-year milestone.
This year, shoppers spent a record $14.2 billion, up 11% from last year.
Because I find almost $15 billion hard to understand without any point of comparison, I ran some numbers on other shopping events and found that Black Friday shoppers spent a record $9.8 billion in U.S. online sales last year, plus another $12.4 billion online shopping on Cyber Monday.
I’ve been writing this newsletter for three Prime Days but have been covering the sale in a professional capacity for much longer, and I’m always interested to see the strategies Amazon uses to entice young people to shop this event.
Prime Day feels to me like it’s engineered for millennial moms, no offense to the millennial moms reading this, but the truth is, Gen Z is sales-savvy and value-obsessed. Many of them have a love-hate relationship with Amazon (who doesn’t!), but they’re spending more time and money on Amazon than any other online retailer.