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Fandom has become the engine of contemporary culture and commerce. It’s everywhere. From the hype culture of music and entertainment to the business valuations of Tesla. And it’s redefining the relationship between brands and consumers. “Fans” behave in fundamentally different ways than “consumers.” Fandom activates our need to be a part of something larger than ourselves, while simultaneously deepening our sense of individuality. In this series, we dig into all things fandom. We talk with cultural experts about how brands can use the power of fandom to create lifetime value. When done right, fandom is a shortcut to lasting love. Hosted by Jonathan Hanson, CCO of Unconquered, a creative agency using the emotional power of fandom to transform brands.
This podcast is a follow up to a report, Decoding Fandom, Unconquered's official primer on contemporary fandom, outlining insights for understanding and building connections between fans and brands.
https://www.fandom.weareunconquered.co/decoding-fandom-insights-strategies
Elizabeth Affuso
00:00 Jonathan Hanson Well, thank you so much for joining us today. So I had a chance to speak with Avi. He really recommended you as far as being a great resource to speak with. I know you've done some research in the past together, both work in academia. I would love to get a little background on how you two met and how this sort of has helped. I think you're focused within the role of fandom.
01:58 Elizabeth Affuso Sure. I don't know quite when I met, but we met certainly at a conference, probably about 10 years ago now. And, you know, at that time, I would say my work was pivoting into the fandom kind of sector. I had always been interested in fashion and beauty cultures, in branding. I'd done some work on reality TV, particularly on the hills, which I think we'll probably talk about later in this episode. And I'd been interested in the way that the new celebrity economies were the influencer economy of the reality TV economy were shifting celebrity and shifting its relationship to products, to merchandise. And I was specifically interested in the fashion and beauty sectors. And Avi and I were both interested, I think, in the way that fandom was being embraced by industry, both by the media industry, but also by the fashion and beauty industries, various other sectors of commerce and the ways that branding and fandom were kind of intersecting into these sort of brand, which I think glosses an example of a brand. And then we can talk about that later. And we were also interested in the ways that fan studies, which is this like subfields of media studies, had historically been kind of uninterested in or maybe not uninterested, maybe not the right word, but less interested in branded products than in things that were fan made. Right. There was this conception in the field that there was maybe more authenticity attached to products that were fan made, like fan videos or fanart or fan fiction. And there was interest in collecting branded items like comic books or action figures or things like that. But there was sort of less interest in the commodity product that was being made by corporations to sell to fans. And we were really interested in kind of diving into that sector and thinking about what the implications there were both for fans, but also for for merchandising writ large and what it might say about our kind of contemporary moment in like late capitalism, for example, in this sort of very consumer centric and consumer driven moment that we live in that is very global. And that's really how we came together. And we started working together on this special issue, journal issue on films and merchandise, which came out in 2018. And now we're working on a new project that's on kind of fan lifestyles and how this idea of lifestyle is being kind of leveraged into the fan space and lifestyles is a sort of fuzzy term, I think, in the contemporary economy. So we're really thinking about trying to define what that might look like within the fans, the
05:16 Jonathan Hanson fan base. And in 2018, referencing that piece you wrote on Glossier into the glow Glossier's Emily Weiss and Millennial Entrepreneurism, I think you sent that over and I read it before we started chatting today. And I thought it was a great piece. And I think it does a great job of really bundling up everything we've already been you've already been talking about as far as entertainment properties, celebrityism, and then the whole beauty and fashion influencers. And what I always find is that the beauty and fashion influencer space is really interesting when you compare it to sports and athletics or entertainment properties as a whole. There is something distinctly different, but I'm still at this point in my understanding and depth of it and study. It's still hard to pinpoint and clearly define, which I think is for me anyway. And I'm really curious, you know, as you were thinking about this brand and all these things at the same time, like what it was specifically that pulled you and inspired you to write about this in depth as you did and really start breaking it down and looking at maybe either cause and effect or this is how it worked in a brand strategy perspective.
06:34 Elizabeth Affuso Sure. Yeah, I mean, I came to the brand Glossier via into the gloss, which was this blog that Emily Weiss started in 2010 that was a massively influential beauty blog. And I think a lot of people who came to Glossier at the point of its launch in 2014 came to it via that trajectory. Right. It was this natural extension. The brand, in fact, was initially launched and announced on the web on the blog and then linked over to the sort of new Glossier page. And so it was this, you know, it was certainly the indication that the initial fan base would be people who were already embroiled in the brand and who were familiar with its content. I think that's not true anymore. I mean, certainly like when I go to the Sephora gondola, as they call them in Sephora for Glossier, there's a lot of preteens buying Glossier products who were not reading the blog in 2010, I think because they were like small children. So it's definitely expanded its landscape quite considerably. And I mean, I think my initial interest in the gloss specifically came from a larger interest in what was happening in beauty culture on the Internet across a bunch of different spaces, notably YouTube and the blogosphere. And I was quite interested in how, you know, the beauty kind of makeover culture was exploding in these spaces. And I was interested in it for a couple of reasons. One, I was interested in the ways that it seemed to be more inclusive than beauty magazines had been in the past. So there were a lot of influencers coming up in the space who were more diverse than we'd seen previously. And I was interested in the fact that that was happening, but also that makeup was still being shilled, right? It wasn't like we were rejecting the makeup and beauty industry. We were embracing them, but thinking about them more expansively, which is a kind of key argument of a lot of your post-feminist discourse. And literature, I think I quote Marcellus Kearney in that piece referencing on that. And I was also interested in the intimacy of these, initially the videos and then also the top shelf routines that became the sort of centerpiece of the gloss. So the top shelf was this column where they would interview somebody about their beauty routine. And it was really a sort of candid narrative. So instead of, you know, these weren't unusual in beauty magazines like Allure or Vogue or Elle or things like that, but they were much more sort of edited in those contexts. These were sort of like blogosphere style, like long form pieces where people would describe in great detail the sort of bizarre ways that they, you know, put on their products or their nighttime routine. Like, I remember there was one with Liv Tyler where she said she put perfume in her belly button, and that tip sort of went viral. And it didn't really seem like the kind of thing that would, you know, exist in a different space and had this sort of intimacy about it. And it had this sort of like quotidian quality that made these very compelling. And then there was, of course, because it was a blog, there were these massive comments that would exist, hundreds of comments on these pieces where people would endorse a product that somebody was using or they would, you know, talk about something that they'd said about their routine. And it had this sort of community space aspect to it, which was also true for a lot of the YouTube bloggers as well. And so I became interested in how the internet was sort of embracing beauty culture. And this was simultaneous with something else that was happening that was really important, which was that, you know, the iPhone comes out in 2007, social media really starts to explode, you know, visual social media like Instagram starts to explode, you know, after, just after into the blog that's founded in 2010. And suddenly we have all these more, you know, additional opportunities to be photographed than we've had previously, which puts a lot more pressure on the sort of beautification of self. And one of the things that Into the Gloss was showing and that ultimately Glossier was showing in their first four products was this idea that you wanted your skin to be beautiful, that you wanted to have the sort of natural glowy glow, of course, was like the big idea of Glossier. And it was one that was also very prevalent on the internet and YouTube spaces as well. And that you wanted to look sort of natural and you wanted to be you. This is Glossier's like big, big buzz sort of term is like you. And this, you know, this felt like a kind of shift point in what the makeup industry had been selling. So it's sort of simultaneously the rise of skincare products, which comes as part of the Korean wave with Korean skin care routines. And then, you know, comes in with this sort of focus on serums and skin perfecting products. And when Glossier launched in 2014, they did it with four products. One is like a lip balm, balm.com. It's like so many flavors, some's a little tinted, depending which one you buy. A perfecting skin tint, which was kind of like a tinted skin product. It's actually quite gender neutral. So that was the sort of interesting element of it. A priming moisturizer and then a facial mist of sort of toning facial mist products. It's actually that's the only product of the original four that's now discontinued. But it was a very streamlined launch and it was a kind of capsule of four products that you could use and your skin would look great and you would look a little bit glowy and you would look fabulous. And, you know, these like new Instagram pictures that could be taken at all times. And it felt quite innovative. And that was really what I was interested in initially. And then sort of diving back to the fandom elements, I was interested in the way that the brand leveraged fandom, not just fandom of the influencers or the celebrities being featured on the blog or of Emily Weiss herself, but of the brand.
13:30 Jonathan Hanson So, you know, it had this sort of very chic millennial pink branding. Very minimal. Yeah, exactly. It's like that. Yeah, it's like the cut out for DTC branding, I would say, at least in the beginning. I know they were kind of earlier in the whole DTC, you know, market boom. So they definitely, I think, helped probably influence that trend. But they were definitely one of the first to really latch on to like that minimalist
14:02 Elizabeth Affuso label and look. Super minimalist label. And, you know, when they would send you, I think there's a picture of the box and the article that I sent you, but when you would when you get an item from them, it would come in this beautiful box. You'd open it up and it had this messaging inside the lid. And then you got this pink bubble wrap pouch, zippable pouch that was reusable and the products were inside of it. So rather than being and, you know, like just thrown in the box, it had this presentation and initially they gave out phone stickers in like a slip of stickers. And now they give out a bigger sticker and it's seasonal that would go on like a water bottle or a laptop, thinking about the evolution of the sticker economy as well. But, you know, again, this opportunity for the audience to actually do advertising and do branding for you by branding their devices or their objects. And at that same time, when they launched the brand, they did this pop up in New York. And I went to the pop up on Lafayette Street, like down the street from the Supreme Store, right, right, and kind of street where central and there was like a queue of people around the block trying to get in. And it felt like it had the similarity to what the streetwear brands were sort of doing, right, where it was like you're dropping product and everyone's going to queue up for it and it's going to be this social kind of social moment. And then the stores were highly, highly insurmountable in a way that stores were kind of not yet. I mean, I think they are now, but at that time they weren't famous for these mirrors. They're also in the Sephora and caps that are. Round and say, you look good on them. So when you photograph yourself in the mirror, it says you look good, right. And then that was, you know, you see all of our social media pictures of people in the store, you know, showing images of themselves in the mirror. It had this real sense. It was clear from the beginning that they had a real sense of the sort of like the circuitry of, you know, the brand as a digital first, you know, direct e-commerce brand and the ways in which they could leverage that toward content creation, both from people they were in a relationship with, like more professional influencers, but also just from regular consumers or in this case, I might call them fans.
16:39 Jonathan Hanson Mm hmm. Totally. And I'm curious to like, if you think when you think back on it, you know, what were some of those pivotal, big fan centric moments? You know, you talk about, you know, their early feature on the hills. And, you know, I'm curious to. I'm always curious about what you think about like a business or a brand's story and trajectory, like where those pivotal moments that help like really throw them into the stratosphere. And I wonder if that's one of those moments when you get an endorsement like that from people who have a really hot TV show on TV and are speaking exactly to your specific audience. I mean, that's like a prime time opportunity.
17:28 Elizabeth Affuso What are your thoughts there? That's an interesting kind of thing. So she so what Emily Weiss appeared on a three up like three episodes of The Hills in 2007 as sort of the so she's the founder of into the glass and was a and she at that time was a college student at NYU and she was at the New York's New York intern.
17:49 Jonathan Hanson And she comes out to L.A. and she's like the intern extraordinaire. Right. This is like the beginning of a movie. I feel like this is like she's so good at her job.
18:00 Elizabeth Affuso Yeah. Yeah. She's so good at her job. This is like the first act of the story. Right. So she's so good at her job. She looks so pulled together. Nobody can even believe she's like a college student. And she's there as a kind of rival for Lauren Conrad's, you know, and Winnie Ports, L.A. interns who are like less pulled together, less good at their job, less effortlessly chic. So she they sort of rivalry exists. At this point, she doesn't have any other, you know, existing brand presence. Right. This is three years before the gloss. This is seven years before Glossier. But she makes an impression and the show is hugely successful. Right. Like the Hill is a really, really big show, particularly with the people who would ultimately become kind of the Glossier core audience, if you will. And I think actually what's interesting when you go back and watch those episodes that I have subsequent to this, to the launch of Glossier, for example, is she really has the brand identity down already. I mean, she looks like she has a much cleaner, like less makeup look than the L.A. girls. She has that sort of effortless new quality that Glossier really kind of goes for. And I mean, there's always been this rumor that she was offered a bigger part in this city, the spin off of the hills that was set in New York and turned it down because she thought reality TV was like not where she wanted her brand to go. I mean, I've never been able to confirm that one day or the other, but that's always been sort of this background story. MTV will never confirm anything, so you'll never get an answer out of them. And then. She goes to work at Vogue, so she is like if you think about this, she is a successful intern, right? She's the one who gets the job. And as you might have expected from this reality TV trajectory. And then, you know, I think into the glosses, the sort of the launch of that is a big obviously a big moment. And the gloss also kind of importantly starts moving off of the bloggers who are specifically and into the YouTube space. So they start doing Get Ready With Me videos, which are really popular on YouTube, and they do them with a host of different kinds of influencers and also just the regular people like college students or just sort of really kind of thinking broadly about the brands. I think this is actually pretty significant because, you know, most of the big brands like Vogue do tons of these Get Ready With Me videos now, they're kind of early to this trend of brands doing them. So thinking about, you know, what are people doing on the Internet that we can kind of leverage into something that could be branded content, but also be searchable as I get ready with me, for example, and YouTube for somebody would be looking for that kind of content or following that content. You know, of course, in 2014, you have the launch, I think, in terms of moments where I see some pretty significant impact in terms of influencer partnerships, I think they do a partnership with Paloma, the model around 2017. She doesn't get ready for my video. That's really good. And then she does the campaign for Body Hero, which is the sort of body oil moisturizing product that they do, which is one of the sort of bigger, more attention grabbing media campaigns that they do. It has some relationship to Dove's Real Beauty campaign in the sense that it's sort of like naked women of lots of different body types. They do billboards where the body hero is done in the supreme logo, kind of over, you know, breasts, basically. And it's you know, they put it up on billboards all around New York City and Los Angeles. I mean, that feels like a big moment where they're kind of Paloma is now more famous than she was at that time. She was kind of, you know, rising in her status. And that felt like a moment where they were kind of thinking very broadly about, you know, what to do with an influence, you know, someone who was kind of on the cusp of like an influencer and more conventional kind of fame. And I think she felt like an important partnership for them in the sense that they were trying to go for it, really trying to push themselves in that kind of inclusive body positive space. And that was a good partnership for them in terms of trying to capture brand ethos. The body hero campaign has remained kind of an interesting one for them. So in twenty twenty two, they partnered with the WNBA. So the WNBA is now the partner on the body hero brand. And they do get ready with me videos with WNBA players. So, you know, there's again this sort of sense of thinking very broadly within that particular product. You know, they have started doing, I think, more really more conventional brand partnerships in recent years. So in twenty twenty two, they did a capsule collection with Olivia Rodrigo, who's like their first true sort of brand ambassador. It was like this lavender makeup bag with a lavender compact. So actually a move away from the pink, right, to the sort of lavender still in the pastel register. We're not going too far. Slightly different kind of brand aesthetic. I think Rodrigo is also an interesting partner for them, you know, in terms of thinking about a brand built on the Internet, because obviously, like driver's license is one of the more important sort of viral songs of the tick tock boom. Right. This way she also has been able to leverage the brand and the brand itself. And I think that's a really good thing. But, you know, she also has been able to leverage social media as part of building her personal brand, which I think is a big part of what Flaucia does. Well, one thing also. Yeah, sorry.
24:05 Jonathan Hanson Go ahead. I don't mean to interrupt you, but you mentioned tick tock. And I think it's an interesting opportunity to talk about platforms and using platforms that help cultivate fans and tap into maybe existing fandoms even. But when we're talking about the beginnings and origins of what Flaucia was, it was sent to me from a blog format, a blog audience. I mean, that is very much of that era. I think, you know, I have evolved. We're big readers of blogs. Now they're just so full of advertising. It's impossible to get through them. And they seem like such a great place because you can have long threads of information that gets very detailed versus like a tick tock or Instagram reel where it's, you know, a few, you know, 30 seconds or whatever it is. So it's quite a difference in what you can do and what you can use. But, you know, there's another brand out there called Monday Swimwear that I've been following. They started out as a swimwear blog that has now leveraged stuff into a pretty big swimwear brand. And they have a similar, I think, pathway in some ways to glossier. There's some overlap there. But I'm curious when we think about platforms, you know, where do you see that going? And, you know, I know it's hard to predict the future. And I'm almost asking you to predict the future here. But, you know, as blogs are becoming less of like a mainstay and we're going for like shorter bits of content, I'm curious to, you know, where you think those opportunities are to like really tap into something and build a brand off of because you hear about you hear about brands building or at least getting a big lift from tick tock. But I wouldn't. I don't know how, you know, much of a relationship you can build with your customers and something like that. And as you were pointing out, the comments section is such a huge part of the community inside of a blog, which doesn't necessarily always translate over to social. Some platforms it does, others it does not. Right. Yeah. So what are your thoughts there?
26:10 Elizabeth Affuso I mean, I think we are in a really interesting kind of transitional moment. You know, I think if you look at something like Glossier or, you know, Monday Swimwear, right there, they came up in a moment where you could where the market was less oversaturated than it is now. Right. Yeah. You know, Glossier was doing something like 100 million. Into the Glass was doing something like 100 million unique page views a month at one point. Incredible. You know, that's just impossible now, I just don't think there's any way for somebody. You know, we're in a different Internet moment. It's just not, you know, it's not possible to leverage the audience in that manner. And I've seen a lot of bloggers in this sort of OJ bloggers in the fashion space and sort of quit blogging in the last couple of years, right, because it's just become kind of impossible to monetize and to kind of hold an audience in the way that they used to. And I do think that the issues that you just described with Tiktok are very real. I mean, you have to contend with the algorithm, which means at some level it's easier to go viral, but it's much harder to maintain an audience because you're sort of fighting the algorithm. You have you're talking about very short form, which is, you know, again, it's more difficult for people to emotionally resonate with short form media. I think it's harder to build that relationship. And I also think that, you know, part of the pleasure, I think, for people of Tiktok is that it's sort of so quick and so there's so much. And you have to make the decision.
27:52 Jonathan Hanson It's just kind of like autopilot.
27:54 Elizabeth Affuso Yeah. Yeah. You're not you're not like, you know, deciding to go to this place and spend a lot of time there. That's not the pleasure of that. And certainly, I do think you're correct. I mean, brands certainly have viral moments with Tiktok. Are they able to build an audience or, you know, but how can you maintain an audience? I think it is a real question. Real question there. And I guess, you know, I'm not sure what the next thing is, I have to tell you. Like my students, you know, what I feel like always on the ready for the next thing, know what the next thing is, you know, their favorite new thing is be real, which I don't really see how you're going to leverage into. I don't I don't really see how brands are going to be able to leverage being real into something at this moment. But I'm not, you know, I may be very wrong on that. And, you know, we'll be laughing at me in two years.
28:51 Jonathan Hanson What's the age group of your students?
28:53 Elizabeth Affuso Like 18 to 22. And they seem to really, I mean, just in terms of thinking about what they seem to be like right now in terms of what social media can do. They're very ad skeptical. They like TikTok because once they spend the time kind of cooking their algorithm, they're able to get exactly what they want or a lot of what they want. Right. So they're being fed content that is, you know, they feel is really designed for them. But of course, it's quite narrow casted. Right. Like, you know, it's not like they're all they're not watching the same things. Right. They're watching these very specific things, which I think is also hard for brands. And then, you know, they do seem to like these platforms that have like the real has this very specific temporality about it. Right. You get your daily notification. You take your picture. You're done. Right. It has a very economical labor force. In some ways, it feels a little bit sort of, you know, like a slow internet kind of object. Right. Where you're just, you know, instead of sort of overthinking the aesthetic, you're just doing, you know, whatever, whatever you're doing.
30:17 Jonathan Hanson I kind of love that simplicity though. I appreciate that.
30:20 Elizabeth Affuso I know I absolutely can. But I guess I wonder, like that pushback seems like it's a challenge for brands. Right. Because what people are looking for then is something that's a little bit slower, a little bit more just your friends or something. That's going to be a hard place to leverage. I think that. They, you know, there does seem to be a great deal of pushback about how much advertising there is on Instagram specifically. And I think that, you know, obviously understand why Instagram, the company, has done that, but I do think it's probably not helping the influencer space in the sense that I think people are frustrated. They can't find they can't even see the things that they want to be following. Right. And I think, you know, I hear a lot of people talking about that. You know, they don't see what they want to see on that platform. I guess in some ways, a push towards a more slow internet might be, you know,
31:25 Jonathan Hanson - maybe a revert back to like a blogger style. I'm for it, I enjoy it. I mean, that's just what I was like when I got really focused and into the internet. So maybe it's more nostalgic for me. But what I think is what I think is. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. What I think is interesting is. How this the into the gloss really help, I think, hone in product development for the brand by by by focusing in on like and learning where those key like fan driven products were, like, you know, whether it's because they're just aspirational and they're just at a high cost point or because they really do work. You know, she was able to get a lot of information out to to to fuel her own product development. And you talk a little bit about that and in this piece. And what I find interesting is that she did it in a way that she wasn't making like knockoffs. She maintained the brand integrity while providing an alternative. I would love you to talk a little bit about that, but I feel like I'm not doing a very good job of digging into it there.
32:39 Elizabeth Affuso Sure, I'm happy to talk about that. I think it's one of the things that she did really, really well, that Emily Weiss did really well on her team. I mean, they had, of course, like four years of into the gloss, so, you know, comments and, you know, data about, you know, which which which articles were being clicked on the most, which products were being clicked on right to to go through and to really imagine, you know, what what you basically do market research of your audience and imagine what the audience wanted. And the piece that you're referencing, I talk a bit about a product that had a real cult appeal that was being pushed in part by the gloss on the top shelf. So over and over again in these top shelf pieces, which were I will say a lot of the top shelves as compared to maybe something you might see on YouTube. The top shelves were often being done by people who were fairly affluent. Right. So they were people who worked in the beauty and fashion spaces or celebrities in a lot of cases or it girls, if you will, who had access to products that maybe regular folks like didn't and couldn't afford, which was part of the pleasure, of course, of the site. Was that sort of aspirational element? But this one product kept coming up over and over again. This Bealogy Grichard P50, which is like an acid serum. And at the time, it was only available at like one retailer in America. But it just kept coming up as like the thing that you needed to, you know, fix your face problem. It was going to solve it. And it was expensive. It was like it was out of the price point for the average person, I would say. I think at that time, at that point, it retailed for about seventy dollars a bottle. And, you know, but one of the things that started to happen under the gloss was that cults started to occur around particular types of products. So these exfoliating toner products like P50 serums that were hyaluronic acid or glycolic acid or lactic acid, all of which are now very popular within the beauty marketplace. But at that time, we were fairly kind of new to the average consumer. And serums that had these products in them were also fairly pricey. There has been some innovation in that marketplace. A company like The Ordinary, I think, is a really important company in terms of thinking about making serums accessible to large numbers of people. Their price point is very low. It's like six dollars a zero. I mean, yeah, but they're like target. But you so she used there were these sort of cults around these products. So one of the things that she did with the brand was to develop versions of these products that had this sort of cult appeal. So they did a kind of exfoliating toner called the solution. The hyaluronic acid serum is called bounce, you know, so they branded them in these sort of fun ways. And I think prices are low. Like, I think I just bought a bounce serum a few weeks ago. I think it was like twenty seven dollars or something. I mean, not cheap, but not insanely expensive either. Right. And but when she did so, we might call these like dupe serums. When she is, we might call these like dupe style products to some extent, right, like products that are versions of something, something else that is more and more higher end. But what Glossier did was they made these products seem like luxury items. So the price point might be accessible, particularly to this young audience they were chasing, you know, people in their teens or their 20s who probably didn't have tons of disposable income to spend on expensive skin care products, but wanted them. But they made them seem covetable. So if you know the products, as I said, you know, when you got the package in the mail, it felt really fun and fancy when you go into a Glossier store and they now have a lot of brick and mortar retail locations and major cities in the U.S. You know, they're these sort of incredibly sort of minimalist pink and red and aqua stores with beautiful mirrors and these like minimalist counters. And I think minimalism is important because minimalism is kind of like a retail aesthetic associated with more high end brands. You know, definitely as you move down in the cost sector, you typically get more clutter in the shelves. So, you know, the kind of minimalist presentation, a lot of staff in the store. So, again, that feeling that you're being, you know, kind of talk to and, you know. And I think that really was the branding of the product, the aesthetic of it was really important to me, meaning that sense of like, this is a luxurious item. This is special. This is chic, it's hip, you know, and hip, I think was a big part of it, right, that it was hip. And this is unusual in the beauty space. You know, most luxury brands Gucci, Chanel, Dior make a lot of their money in the perfume and beauty sectors by selling the sort of idea of luxury in a cheaper package through these products. They're moving a lot more perfume than they are, you know, handbags, which are at a much higher price point. But they're able to do that by maintaining the sheen of luxury, which is, I think, what Glossier was able to do. You know, you were going to Glossier because you wanted to go to Glossier, not because you had to go to Glossier. I think that's kind of an important distinction.
38:49 Jonathan Hanson Yes, I was going to ask, too, if you have actually purchased and used Glossier, you already answered it. It sounds like it sounds like you have.
38:58 Elizabeth Affuso Yeah. And I bought it. Yeah. I like to bounce. I feel like an ad. I like that. It works really well for the price point. I like perfecting skin tints. I will confess that I've actually like bought more products recently from Violette, who is somebody that was kind of an early like feature on into the gloss who now
39:23 Jonathan Hanson has a line. Oh, interesting. This kind of like, you know, Glossier for Diaspora. And what drew you to what drew you to that? Was it the influencer? Their endorsements to help your decision making.
39:39 Elizabeth Affuso So she has a line of products and she made YouTube's for years that are very popular and has a popular Instagram. I always liked her YouTube. I thought they were kind of very fun. I mean, she's kind of trying to distill French girl beauty into a brand. I would say like Glossier products, there are some products that are hyper pigmented in the Glossier line, but not that many because it has that sort of. Natural beauty aesthetic. Violette has a lot of products that are hyper pigmented, which is like great red lipstick that has been very popular, you know, across the beauty space in the last couple of years. And I think, you know, it depends on, I think, your kind of interest and what kind of makeup you want. I mean, that you know, has some skin care products a little bit smaller than glossier’s is at this point. But I think in general, both of them, I think both of those lines actually speak to something that is interesting, which is, I think, like. I think there's a lot of potential still in the beauty sector. You know, direct to consumer brands that come from kind of influencer models, because I think beauty is quite intimate. I think younger consumers are not going to walk into a Macy's and walk around the cosmetics counter and, you know, talk to the salespeople. It's just not how they want to shop. It's not how they're accustomed to living their life even. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, Sephora is always packed and people seem to enjoy the play, sort of possibilities of walking around Sephora and trying things on. But Sephora has a floor space problem. And, you know, most of their brands aren't even on the floor. It's actually very hard to get a brand on the floor at Sephora, which, I mean, speaks to glossiers. And I think that's a great thing about Sephora is that they're very open to positionality. They were able to get one in twenty twenty two. Yeah, or twenty three. They just launched this year. And they, you know, I think the endorsement of somebody that people trust in this space is kind of important.
41:56 Jonathan Hanson Right. I mean, people must. Where else would go with the trust? Right. Because you walk around on Macy's. I mean, I don't know if you would necessarily just immediately you to build that relationship with your salesperson to before you can, you know, take a recommendation from them or in a very superficial way. How do they look? Does their skin look good? Does their makeup look good? You're going to be judging. I think trying to like find a proof point to like, OK, they know what they're talking about, where, you know, if you're seeing these people on your screen every day, every time you open it, a lot of the groundwork already been done for you. And what I find about interest, I've been in this before. I've been in the ultra or ultra. I've been. Yeah. Thank you. I've been in these stores and. I think when the challenge is also these of having like a retail operations, to having the just the EQ levels of a sales associate associate, being able to like walk you through, put things on your face, as you said, it's a very intimate experience and something that might be a little awkward and uncomfortable for most people. If you don't have like that salesperson who really can read by language, she knows how to like loosen people up, get them to feel comfortable. There's a big there's a big brand challenge there for getting around that. So I can see where the influencer side of it makes sense, especially from leading it into their own brand. I mean, we're seeing it now. It's it's it's something I think we haven't necessarily seen in the four like celebrity yoga brands or whatever. But now I think it's coming. They had celebrityism or they were on TV or they were music stars or whatever. Before now, we have people who are just known for being who they are on the Internet, owning brands and turning that into a brand, which I think is really fascinating in an interesting space. And I'm curious about where, you know, who you're following, what you think is doing a great job of that.
43:53 Elizabeth Affuso Oh, wow. That's interesting. That's an interesting question. I mean, I think I think you're absolutely right. I think the influencer space has this emotional register that's very different from conventional celebrity or even, you know, from the salespeople in a store. And, you know, people do follow influencers who they feel like. Are you registering for them, right? They look like how they want to look, or they have an aesthetic that they want to emulate. And they're sort of curating via that. And that is helpful for selling products. In terms of people I'm following, like I said, I like the Alette a lot. I love Katie Sturino. I don't know if you know who she is. She has a mega babe. OK. Katie Sturino is a little kind of a body positive influencer. And she has a line. It's in Target. It's an ultra. It's called mega babe. It's like deodorant. And she's like bust stuff like under boot powder. It's all very well branded. She's like this anti-chafe stick that has a I feel like. I can't remember what it's called. Thigh rescue. And she is she's like very funny and does really good.
45:13 Jonathan Hanson Those topics, you would have to have a sense of humor, right? I mean, if you're going to. Yeah. They're also kind of niche. They're not necessarily like something you're going to see back when magazines were it. But, you know, flipping through a magazine, you're not really going to see an ad for that typically, right?
45:26 Elizabeth Affuso No, she does these like underwear fit tests like for brands where she does these like she does this. She calls it a role test where she kind of like launches over. And if the underwear rolls down, that's a bad thing. But you would never see that, you know, in any other context. And it's very funny, but also very, very charming and helpful. Right. Like, you know, like, oh, if I was going to order this, this, this actually.
45:51 Jonathan Hanson Well, it definitely hits that authenticity mark that you noted earlier. And I think that's a lot of what we're talking about here as far as trustworthiness and taking it back to like, what is it? Why? Why are they trustworthy? I mean, it's that authenticity of that acting, right? I mean, if you're always going to be acting and there's always to be that sort of a mask, more or less, when you're on social media. But those who can do it in a way that's, I think, still true to who they are and what they're about and that brand ethos seem to be doing really well.
46:25 Elizabeth Affuso Yeah, I think I think that's true. I think, you know, I think a lot of people think that being an influencer is maybe sort of easy, but it isn't because I think in order to really develop your relationship with your audience, you have to be. Like, to some extent, you have to cultivate some sort of intimacy with them. And that often is the kind of rawness or it's something that you wouldn't normally show. Now, a lot of influencers kind of burn out because what happens then is that, you know, people start sort of emotionally registering back to them in ways that are often really challenging that they're equipped for. But I think. You know, this is a really different type of celebrity that we've seen in the past. It, you know, it's people who are famous for, you know, who they are themselves, which, you know, reality TV kind of breaks the barrier on that. But influencer culture really expands it. And it also has this sort of a relational sense that's quite different from conventional celebrities. Like, you know, you know, I mean, I felt like Beyonce on social media. Thousands of people respond to every one of her posts. But, you know, Beyonce doesn't follow anybody, not even Jay-Z. You know, she doesn't respond to things people say in the comments. Like, that's not part of her engagement. When you start coming down into the sort of influencer or micro celebrity sector, you know, you do start to see follower, you know, follower following ratios that take up a little bit. I mean, not like the way regular people's ratios are. But, you know, you see that they're also following people. And often they're interacting, you know, in the comments or in the DMs with their audience, which, you know, you know, I follow some fashion influencers like I really like Maxine Green and, you know, she if somebody asks what she's wearing, she's going to respond to it in the comments, which, you know, makes people feel like they are in a relationship, with her in some capacity. Or if she was having kind of a rough week, she's going to do a story about, you know, what's going on in her life in a way that we wouldn't necessarily expect from someone in a more traditional celebrity position.
49:05 Jonathan Hanson Well, Elizabeth, I hate to say this, but we're getting close on time. But I enjoyed the conversation. I loved it. I thought I'd love this piece for people who want to search it out. Where can they find that?
49:16 Elizabeth Affuso - So this piece on it's called Into the Glow, and it's on FloTV dot org, which is hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. You can also just Google my name, I think, with glossy and it'll come up pretty easily if you need to.
49:37 Jonathan Hanson I will also link to it in the comments, just in the show notes for folks. But thank you so much for joining us. And I would love to keep the conversation going and keep reading all the great work you're doing. Thank you so much.
Elizabeth Affuso Thank you for having me.