Feed Me's Emily Sundberg on How Fashion Underestimates Its Customers

The Business of Fashion Podcast

In this episode of the Business of Fashion podcast, Emily Sundberg discusses her journey from a student at FIT to the founder of the highly

Key takeaways

• Emily Sundberg built Feed Me as a paywalled Substack from day one with no outside venture capital.
• She utilizes 'pattern matching' and monitors job boards to find industry scoops, such as tracking Glossier's expansion through hiring data.
• The business model is diversified through paid subscriptions ($80/year), advertising partnerships, and physical merchandise.
• Modern fashion consumers are highly skeptical of repetitive influencer marketing and 'group think' tactics.
• Sundberg emphasizes the importance of being an editor who provides expertise rather than just delivering gossip or information.

Main topics

• Entrepreneurship on Substack
• Fashion marketing strategies
• Media business models

Notable quotes

I just never underestimate how clued in and informed my audience is.

Conclusion

The episode serves as an inspiring case study for independent creators

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:04) Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF podcast. It's Friday, September 25th. Every weekday morning, a certain slice of New York opens the same email. They are lawyers, bankers, editors, restaurateurs, the city's most plugged-in people. It's called Feed Me, and it's written by Emily Sundberg. In a few short years, Emily has turned a newsletter she started at her desk into one of the most talked-about new media publications in New York. She built it all herself with a paywall from day one. with no outside investors. Her readers are exactly the people fashion brands are trying hardest to reach. Smart, skeptical, and very aware of how they're being marketed to. And that makes Emily one of the sharpest outside observers of our industry today. Speaker 2 (1:00) I just never underestimate how clued in and informed my audience is. And I never want to like speak down to them or underestimate how much they know about the world that they're living in. Speaker 1 (1:14) This week on the BOF podcast, Emily joins me to talk about building a media business on instinct and why the customer's fashion most wants to reach maybe the ones it understands the least. Here's Emily Sundberg on the BOF podcast. Speaker 1 (1:33) Emily Sundberg, welcome to the BOF podcast. Speaker 2 (1:36) Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. Speaker 1 (1:40) I want to start with your growing up in a place I know absolutely nothing about. I hadn't even heard of it. I've obviously heard of Long Island, but I've never heard of Huntington. So for those of us, including me. who don't know what it means to grow up in a place like Huntington. Tell us a little bit about it. Speaker 2 (2:04) Yeah, I grew up in a town called Huntington, which is about an hour, 10 minutes away from the city. My family is from Long Island. So like my parents grew up there. They met in high school. My grandparents are from Brooklyn and Long Island as well. So it's really all I know. Like I spent most of my life sort of like identifying as a New Yorker, Long Islander. And I would say my town was a real sort of middle class mix. Like my neighborhood itself, I had neighbors who were fishermen, like lobstermen. And then I had neighbors who worked on Wall Street. There wasn't like a cohesive income level or anything like that. It was really beautiful. I grew up by the beach, which was lovely. But I could also take the train into the city with my family. We came in a lot. But I had this, I always had this feeling that I think a lot of, you know, you hear like David Remnick talk about this or a few other, you know, prolific writers and founders now this like, who grew up in the tri-state area, this like bridge and tunnel-ness of being so close to Manhattan, but not quite there. So you could often see the... the skyline from maybe you were at the beach or on the water or in the car and you'd see it out in the distance but you were never quite there. Like growing up I remember my mom worked in the city and she'd come home from the train and I'd hug her coat and she'd smell like pretzels and cigarette smoke and these things from like a land far away and then she was back at home in our house and it was like okay there's something that she's going to do that she's leaving to go be a part of and then she comes back to like our little bucolic backyard. Yeah, I mean, I went to like a very normal public high school. I partied a lot. My friends played sports. I painted. I, you know, I did the announcements every day in high school, which was like a fun little foreshadowing. Like over the intercom? Like over the intercom, good morning, please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance, birthdays, things like that. Any other like announcements that were important, signing up for, you know, like field days or something. And I got a really... good experience in middle school and high school. I felt like my creativity was really encouraged and I wasn't, you know, like in a very strict academic household. My dad's a teacher, so I, you know, like it was sort of like a normal, healthy upbringing. But I spent a lot of time on the computer. And whether that was like Facebook, talking to people from other schools who maybe seemed to be interested in the same kind of like music as I was or spending time on Tumblr, talking to complete strangers who maybe liked the same magazines and books that I did. And it was something that I always viewed like playing on the Internet always felt more like. playing like a playground than like a minefield which I think so many people feel like spending time on the internet is today like you're just waiting to hurt yourself and I didn't have that experience I really enjoyed Speaker 2 (5:25) Finding communities online that I connected with and using new social media platforms or whatever you want to call those early sorts of things. And then when it came time to apply to colleges, I could go to any state college in New York. That was sort of the deal with my parents. Like, we'll help you with college if you go to a state school. And FIT, as you might know, is the only state school in New York City. So I didn't necessarily want to work in fashion, but I knew that they had a really strong business program, which would allow me a lot of flexibility because it wasn't strictly like art, design, or fashion. And I would say that was like probably the most important decision that I made in my career because they offered a lot of night classes. So I could work during the day, go to school at night, and then that's kind of how my whole career and life in New York began. Speaker 1 (6:22) So you weren't really drawn to fashion or design or those things. It was literally just the pathway to work in New York City. Speaker 2 (6:30) Yeah, I think I was into creative fields. Like I was, you know, the president of Art Honor Society and I like enjoyed being in like different art classrooms and like I was in AP Art and like I liked being parts of, actually, was I the president of Art Honor Society? I think I might have been senior year. But like I liked being with my art teachers and with other people who were like in the dark room and illustrating, but I wasn't. really into fashion. It was more like digital creativity. Like they had a lot of digital marketing classes there. They had PR classes. They also had digital journalism classes. And I knew that a lot of the professors at FIT also were working, like had jobs outside of the classroom, which I was really attracted to. And then on top of that, I left with very little student debt, which I paid off in a few years. And that I could see far enough to know that that was important to me as well. Speaker 1 (7:32) So during the day, where were you working since you could do those night classes? Speaker 2 (7:37) So I had an internship at Yahoo for about a year. It's funny, I work with them a lot now. It's kind of come full circle in an unusual way. But they had an office in Times Square. And at the time, Yahoo was going through this digital... pivot where like Bobby Brown was an editor, Michelle Promoleko, who used to work at Cosmo, was an editor. And they were bringing in like, they were sort of experimenting with this big editorial push. So I worked there for about a year. I worked at NBC for about a year. I worked at Food Network, which was really fun. And all of these were paid and they were pretty well. They were paid pretty well. They weren't like the sexy Stella McCartney internships or like I had friends who were interning at The Row in the really early days. Like they weren't as sexy as that, but I was making like $20 an hour as a 20-year-old. And then when I graduated school, I had sort of built up like a bit of a resume for myself and a bit of a reputation for myself, especially in the world of social media. And Stella Bugbee, who was the editor at The Cut, was speaking to somebody who worked at Instagram. And she said, that she was looking for somebody to focus on the Cuts Instagram presence. And somebody who worked at Instagram at the time suggested me. They said, you should take a look at this young girl, Emily Sundberg. She has an interesting resume. And we spoke, and Stella was the first person who hired me, like, days after I graduated college. So my first job was working at New York Magazine and social media, which was a really exciting time. to get into social media in the world of news and publications. Because if you think about it, like Apple, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram were all bolstering their media relations teams and sort of developing strategies for newsrooms to work closer with these tech and social media companies because they knew that that's where a lot of the conversations and traffic were taking place. Speaker 2 (9:48) Yeah, a lot of those connections that I made back in 2016 at those companies, like I still talk to now. A lot of the people still work at those companies, which is crazy. But it felt like I was in the right place at the right time. And the social media manager definitely was somebody who was like off to the side. They had like that intern reputation. But it had like tenfold returns for me being in that position at that specific time at that magazine. Speaker 1 (10:16) And you went on to do a number of different roles. I think you worked at Meta and you kind of became a digital content expert, right? Which is obviously a through line to what you do today, except you have your own company now, your own voice, your own platform. And, you know, every founder has an origin story. So just maybe in a nutshell, because I have so many more things I want to talk to you about then. origin story but you know this podcast is listened to in like 140 countries around the world so there's lots gonna be lots of people here who don't know feed me what's what's your origin story how did it all happen Speaker 2 (10:58) Yeah, I can speed run through the next few years because it was interesting. So after New York Magazine, I worked at a direct-to-consumer cookware company called Great Jones. And it was started by one of my colleagues from... uh, New York Magazine, Sierra Tischgart and Maddie Mullis started a company called Great Jones, which was like colorful cookware. It was sort of being whispered about in the New York Magazine as the glossier of cookware. And I thought, I want to work there. I want to be the first hire there. I think that I, like, I know, I see all these companies around me, whether it's Away or Glossier or Outdoor Voices. Like, I see. how the women who work at these companies, like what happens to their careers? And it's a really great jumping off point. So I was the first hire at Great Jones. I was also the first to leave, first in, first out. But I saw a lot really quickly in that first year, like two years, specifically in the way that these young women in 2018, 2019 were being invested in by venture firms. Speaker 2 (12:08) I kind of stuck a pin in that, like seeing the investors come in and out of the office, seeing the way that these people were being written about, seeing the way that like Instagram marketing was booming, like working on the front lines of that sort of team, which wasn't really a team because we were so small. But I kind of like stuck a pin in that whole experience. And I was like, I think I'm going to revisit this. But I saw a lot, you know, like we were in and out of the wing. We were getting packages from Glossier. We were looking at what other companies were doing to market to women. We were sending out influencer packages. Like you can kind of imagine, like it's all very millennial pink and you're seeing big headlines about sales and investor checks and you're seeing like really splashy names come in. And I didn't have a finance background, but I was like, this is a lot of information and I'm seeing a lot firsthand and I'm just going to put this away for a second. Speaker 1 (13:04) And did you find that whole world of like venture and startups, did you find it personally appealing? Speaker 2 (13:14) I thought the personalities and the characters were really interesting. I thought that like the, you know, whether it's like the egos or the editorializing of the small little happenings between the companies and the investors or... the sparkly headshots of the women that went alongside investment announcements and the competition, like turning it into like Sims investors. Like that was very interesting to me. And it all felt possible. Like it felt like anybody could come up with an idea and meet the right person and get a nice little check from. General Catalyst or El Catterton or whoever. Like it all felt very possible. I was like. Speaker 2 (14:09) a lot of people could do this and we'll try this and it won't go well for everyone. But like a lot of people are going to kind of like play with this moment, which we then saw like the following few years up until 2021, how many DTC pantry brands or clothing brands or cosmetic brands quickly launched? How many of them do we still speak about? How many of them are we still excited about? So after that. I had a very short stint at Condé and then COVID happened and Condé Nast had a really big round of layoffs. And I wrote like a really sort of like I was I wrote like a long post on LinkedIn about getting laid off. I was like, I need a job. So I'm just going to like tell everybody that this happened instead of being embarrassed by it. I got a flood of inbound interest and one person who reached out to me worked at Meta. And I started by being like a freelancer at Meta and that turned into a full-time job. And then when everybody started going back to the office in 2021, I worked at the Meta office in Hudson Yards. And I really liked that job. People ask me all the time, like, was it horrible? But the people who worked on my specific team after years of working at women's magazines or like a women's magazine and an all-female, like, startup. It was really nice to be in an office with these like super smart, interesting, dynamic, creative people who happened to be working at sort of a, in a bland tech office. And it was quickly opening my