Sauna Raves and Status Tans
after school monday edition
Welcome back to After School Monday Edition, a not-so-brief trends debrief for paid subscribers. A monthly subscription costs less than an Aperol spritz at Bar Pisellino so please consider upgrading. 🫶
In today’s letter:
How influencers and brands, from Brandon Edelman and Erika Veurink to Nuuly and Nylon, are embracing offline strategies
What the viral “Married in a Year” song says about Gen Z
The Gap ad that made me cry
The “cut them off” theory
Jersey Shore nails
Hood MrBeast
“Holy airball” goes nepo
The Chuck Taylor comeback
Muffins in the freezer
And so much more, plus everything I’m buying, reading, and listening to. But first, my favorite TikTok of the week:
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More and more, I’m noticing that the most interesting things happening in the creator economy are happening offline.
Last week, Brandon Edelman, a Philly-based TikTok creator with 1.3M followers, launched what he called the “Bran Trip,” a riff on the ubiquitous brand trip reimagined for his followers. He flew out select fans — chosen via application videos shared to TikTok — for a curated weekend in Philadelphia, backed by more than 30 brands including Abercrombie, Béis, and Shark.
Edelman told Glossy he hopes this follower-first format becomes a new model for community-driven creator experiences. While influencers like Alex Cooper and Tinx have been hosting fan meet-ups for years, the level of mutual access here feels different. Followers have long viewed creators as their friends, but those parasocial dynamics are becoming…just social. Gen Z’s (extremely well-documented) desire for in-person interaction is fueling this shift. Earlier this year, Eventbrite reported that 95% of them want to turn online interests into offline experiences, and brands are responding.
Last month, the youth research firm dcdx launched Offline, an agency that partners with 1,500 micro-communities to co-create emotionally resonant events. “The next wave of brand connection will be about who can create meaningful moments, not just viral ones,” founder Andrew Roth told Forbes. It’s about building rooms people want to be in.
You can already see that strategy play out at EV Salon, writer
’s invite-only event series that’s become one of the hottest tickets in town for a certain subset of young professionals in New York City. Guests receive personalized name tags, curated introductions, and gift bags featuring Erika’s favorite brands. The experience is super authentic. Strangers talk and laugh and exchange numbers, no easy feat at these kinds of events. I’ve been lucky enough to attend several, and the number of women I want to befriend that Erika manages to squeeze into one room is astounding. It’s no surprise that brands want to get involved. In the last few months alone, Erika has hosted events with Rothy’s, Alex Mill, and Sperry.
Nuuly is taking a similar approach, but at scale. The brand is working with micro-influencers with followings as small as 2,000 to host hyper-local events like book swaps, matcha meetups, and bouquet bars, often in suburban cities where the brand is scaling fastest. Julia Piccone, Nuuly’s senior director of marketing, said the popularity of these events speaks to people’s desire to access “third spaces.” “We’re aiming to create spaces where people feel like they’re friends of the brand rather than consumers,” she added. It’s working: Nuuly’s subscriber base jumped 53% year-over-year, topping 300,000 members and delivering a $5.2 million profit.
Even legacy media is chasing this IRL intimacy. I mentioned a few weeks ago that Nylon was launching a creator membership program designed to funnel influencers into branded real-world events — fashion weeks, Montauk parties, international festivals, etc. — paid for by advertisers. Despite my skepticism that anyone would be interested in joining a Nylon membership program, nearly 8,000 creators applied in the first week. (I can take an L!) CEO Bryan Goldberg told The Information he hopes to sign up about 50,000 creators to the program and host more than a hundred events per year.
(I guess everyone wants to be an influencer deep down, even Mr. Goldberg.)
For years, creators chased virality online, but these days, influence is about access, not scale. Follower count matters less than who actually shows up. But I keep wondering what happens when the novelty of IRL wears off. Gen Z, as we’ve all heard a thousand times, is hungry for in-person connection, but what happens when that craving is satisfied? Does the pendulum swing back to screens?