← Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Clotheshorse with Amanda Lee McCarty
Episode 245: I'm With The Brand (bots in the algorithm), part six
02:28:21
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Amanda Lee McCarty
This week, Mr. Dustin Travis White and I are celebrating nine years of marriage. Although we currently have no plans for what we're going to do to celebrate. But we're hoping that something cool and or romantic will pop up for us in Portland or Seattle. We've just been so busy with life right now and we were both, we kind of turned to one another in the car yesterday and we were like, hey, so our anniversary is this week. Like, what should we do? Anyway, I gotta tell you, Dustin is the best. There's a reason we've been together this long and we are so happy together. And one of those reasons among many, is that we have so many things in common. We love cats and thrifting music of all genres and talking about music of all genres, like all day, every day, making up weird jokes and fake stories. We love art museums, we love breakfast tacos, Sex and the City, weird old books, elaborate desserts. I could go on and on. We have so much in common. But the way we experience social media is quite different. Or at least what the algorithm serves us is quite different. So whenever I see something going wild on social media seeming as if, quote, everyone is talking about it, I always ask him like, hey, is everyone XYZ a big thing on your side of the Internet? And about 75% of the time it's total news to him because he's not seeing it and vice versa. And at this point I'm not surprised by that. As I have said to many people over the last few years, and something that I have to repeat to myself quite often, social media distorts our perception of the world as a whole. And there are several reasons why. Number one is what the algorithm chooses to show you. Specifically you. And I gotta say, I am always, weirdly enough, relieved to learn that Dustin and I are seeing different things. Knowing that, like, I don't know, it helps. It helps me keep things in perspective. Number two is who is creating the bulk of the content on social media and why they are creating it. And three, and this is kind of a subset of number two is what the algorithm is pushing. You really even being posted by humans? Yeah, don't worry, we're going to get into it all. Okay, so let's start with the algorithm. A word that gets thrown around non stop all day, every day and almost always in a negative way. Right? The algorithm in very heavy, all caps with air quotes. The algorithm is a source of frustration for content creators, small businesses and maybe everyone at this point. We're used to talking about it. We're definitely used to complaining about it, but what is an algorithm? Well, while we tend to associate the term algorithm with social media, it's actually just a set of step by step instructions for solving a problem or completing a task. And an algorithm starts with inputs followed by a very specific step by step process and series of rules, and it produces an output. Believe it or not, we're using algorithms outside of computers every day. For example, cooking from a recipe, or to be honest, even making it up on the spot. That is an example of an algorithm. The ingredients are the inputs, the step by step process and general rules around cooking. That's the recipe, right? Even if it's one you have memorized or just made up in your head, it's still part of this algorithm. And the output of all of this is the food you get to eat at the end. You, you would not have that food in the proper version of it if you had not followed the rules and the process of the recipe. Right? Another example is sorting laundry. Yeah, this is also an algorithm in action. The laundry is the input your brain methodically sorting out colors from whites and cold wash from warm wash and dryer versus line dry. That's a set of repeatable steps and rules that have a final output which is clean, undamaged laundry. Now, if we're going to step it up and get a little bit more technological here. Traffic lights, they use a mixture of traffic data, that's the inputs and step by step rules to determine how long to stay green or red and keep traffic flowing efficiently. The maps app on your phone uses an algorithm to give you the most efficient directions to your destination. It's combining the inputs of your location and destination with current traffic conditions and maps as it knows them with the step by step rules created by humans who program this to determine the most efficient path for you. Search engines use algorithms to rank web pages by relevance to your search query. Once again, the input is what you're asking it to find, along with the Internet as the search engine knows it. And the step by step rules that help it figure out what's most relevant to you are programmed in by humans. Your email spam filters use algorithms to detect spam and filter them out of your inbox. Once again, it's taking a lot of information or a lot of items to process. You know, laundry, groceries, using a step by step series of rules that have been created by a human to get you to a final output efficiently and effectively. Now, of course, as we get into the technological examples of algorithms, we start to see that it's never perfect. And really all of us have missed a red sock when sorting laundry too, right? But sometimes Google Maps will have you doing left turns across a six lane highway or your inbox is sending sending important emails to your spam folder. These algorithms are not perfect. In all cases. Algorithms are only as good as the rules that have been fed into them. And often it's on the people engineering these algorithms to anticipate and make a rule for every exception or weird outlier. It's never foolproof. And of course, the other complication to all of this is that the algorithm is following the rules that have been created by the humans themselves, right? So it's not as if algorithms are fully impartial. Using the recipe as an example, if the person who wrote the recipe really, really loves garlicky food, the recipe is going to call for a lot more garlic than you might have wanted, right? Or perhaps the person writing the recipe prefers broccoli to cauliflower. So there's going to be broccoli in this dish, not cauliflower. And maybe cauliflower would have made the recipe better or cauliflower would have been a more nutritious option for the recipe. Or maybe you personally would have preferred cauliflower to broccoli, but that's not happening because the person who created the recipe preferred broccoli and wanted you to use broccoli. And perhaps we could peel back the curtain here and it would turn out that the person who wrote the recipe works for some like broccoli lobbying group or was being paid by big broccoli as like a food influencer to create recipes that would get you to cook more broccoli. Yes, all this vegetable talk is really a metaphor for social media. We're going to get to it because an algorithm is essentially just a series of rules and processes that are created by a human. An algorithm is only as impartial as the human or companies creating those algorithms are. So really, when we're blaming the algorithm, we should be blaming the people who created the algorithm in the first place. When we get to the social media algorithm of it all, if the humans who are creating the rules are saying actually do please push a lot of content to people that upsets them. Right? And how the rules for determining via data that something is upsetting someone are this, follow this, prioritize this. Well then your feed as sorted by the algorithm is going to be full of rage bait. Ultimately, an algorithm is supposed to be a clear, logical process that takes a bunch of input ingredients, laundry, your Location your destination and turns it all into an output. And so really, when we're blaming the algorithm for things going awry, really, it's not the algorithm itself, which is just a bunch of rules, right? But it's the people, the companies, perhaps even, I don't know, the systems that are creating, writing these rules that the algorithm uses. How does a social media platform decide what to show you? What is this mysterious algorithm? Well, first off, if you've been following along with this series, which you really should, then you know from our conversation with Kim that these platforms know more about you than most of the humans in your life. And their goal is to keep you on the platform as long as possible. So what you see is tailor made for you, even though sometimes it's kind of silly. And to keep you on the platform as long as possible, the algorithm will show you what it thinks you'll care about the most. And it learns what you are most into, or at least how to predict what you might be most into by watching how you use the app. And it uses every single action you take to determine what it will show you next. Of course, if you like, save, share or comment on something, it's going to show you more of whatever that is. That it can include specific accounts and it can also include topics. And this is where we kind of choose our own poison on social media, whether we realize it or not. If you're getting into fights with strangers on political posts, well, guess what, expect to get served a lot more posts that upset you and get you wasting time in the comments section fighting with more people. If what you actually want to see is more content about travel or slow fashion or cooking or animals or whatever it is that makes you happy, that inspires you, that teaches you things, well, then you've got to engage with that content when you see it. Like, if you want to see more clothes, horse stuff, and similar accounts talking about the same things, then you need to engage with, like my posts, right? Save, share, like, comment. This will signal the algorithm that you are interested in seeing similar content. Because the algorithm wants to give you what you want to see. For any of these platforms, if they keep you scrolling longer, they can serve you more ads, and that's what generates their revenue. So they're not tailoring your feed as some altruistic endeavor to bring joy into your life. It's so you'll hang out and maybe buy something along the way. But how the algorithm watches your behavior is even more nuanced than that. If you scroll quickly past a certain type of post once again by specific account or about a specific topic, you probably won't see more of it. If you hover on a post to read the caption or get a closer look at the video or photo, you'll see more of that kind of post even if you didn't like it or engage with it in any other way. I actually see this most blatantly on Threads and TikTok, but trust me, it's happening on Instagram too. I don't know what to say about Facebook because that place scares me, but I'll tell you, I'm getting so much Taylor Swift content on threads I cannot make it stop. And I swear it's because one time I read one person's post about Taylor Swift's private jet usage and now it's all I see every time there is some sort of Taylor Swift announcement. Even though I have literally never listened to one Taylor Swift's album or at least knowingly, I've never listened to one Taylor Swift album and I don't even know any of her songs. When I picture Taylor Swift in my brain, she's just kind of like a skinny blonde woman. Like no, no specific characteristics stand out to me because I just don't know much about Taylor Swift. It's no judgment against any of you slow fashion Swifties out there. It's just not my thing. I'm too busy listening to 70s country music right now to, you know, to get into Taylor Swift, but nonetheless, the algorithm keeps showing me Taylor Swift content. All of these platforms, they rank all potential posts using machine learning models that predict 1 how likely you are to like, comment or save, 2 how long you'll spend watching, and 3 whether you'll tap through, scroll past or report and each post gets a score. The higher the predicted engagement score, the higher it appears in your feed. And once again, you get to dictate what the algorithm shows you outside of ads. Of course, by engaging with things you like and skipping things you don't like. If you see an ad that you don't like, just scroll back past it really, really fast and maybe you'll get better, more interesting ads in the future. The algorithm will also take into account the kind of device you're using to access the app, how long you're actually spending on the app, and when you are using the app. And as we discussed with Kim, it's going to use all of this information about you and your habits to lump you in with similar users and then serve all of you similar content and ads. In theory, it will also avoid showing you too much stuff from the same account because it doesn't want you to get bored. And it will also mix in people you follow, new stuff you've never seen before, and of course lots of ads. But it tries to make it feel organic, like not too ad heavy. Now I will say all bets are off with ads and it not feeling ad heavy as we get into the last part of this year. You know, it's very standard in the industry, any industry, any retail industry that sells you stuff to have about, you know, a certain percentage of your monthly sales allocated towards marketing. Right. And when do most businesses, like retail businesses, do the bulk of their sales during the holidays In November and December. And that means they have the biggest marketing budget of the year in November and December. So they're going to be flooding you with ads on every platform. They're going to be sending you tons of emails and SMS messages and on and on and on. You're going to get a lot of marketing over the next two months. So some of this fine tuning, alleged fine tuning. I guess I would say that the algorithm does to not show you too many ads. It might not feel that way as we go through November and December, but remember, the goal of the people and companies who build these algorithms is to keep you scrolling by showing the content it believes you'll enjoy or react to the most reacting. Not always a positive reaction, but it still counts as a plus. When the algorithm is scoring a potential post, it's not necessarily prioritizing or showing you what what's newest or most important when it comes to things like shadow banning, meaning when the algorithm does not show your content to your followers and other accounts who don't follow you. All of the platforms say that they do not shadow ban users or specific topics, but the algorithm does, by design assign a lower score to content that people are more likely to report or just scroll by really fast. And when I think about something like pro Palestine or leftist content seeming to be shadow banned, it could be that the algorithm has rightly or wrongly been told to recognize this kind of content is highly likely to be reported, therefore scoring it lower and showing it to less people. Or it could be that people are just scrolling past that stuff because they are using social media for fun and relaxation. I don't know. But what I do know is that every time back when I was still posting on TikTok that I would post about Shein Temu or Fast Fashion as a whole, the content was suppressed, shown to almost no one, while other Posts about thrifting that I did were shown to lots of people. It could be that TikTok has trained the algorithm to score anything anti sheen a lot lower, so it shows it to less people. The same could be said for pro Palestine content on Instagram. I don't know. What I will say is that my feed on every platform for the past two years has been highly pro Palestine and leftist. So I do know that that content is being shown to someone. I just don't know how many people. And it may be just like honestly, people don't heart things on Instagram anymore like they used to. It doesn't mean that they don't see it and take it in and think about it. They're just not reacting because they just keep on scrolling. So I don't know if shadow banning is real. I suspect it is to a certain extent. I really doubt that these platforms are completely innocent and unbiased in terms of what the algorithm pushes us. But what I will also say as we're going to get into it, is that there are even more factors involved in what we are seeing, and it really starts with the volume of posts and where they're coming from. Now, when it comes to brands or fashion trends that it seems like everyone is talking about, this is 100%, at least partially a function of how the algorithm functions, not necessarily a reflection of how many people IRL out in the real world outside of social media, like that brand or trend. So if it's not a reflection of people generally globally, whatever, actually being super into that brand or trend, why does it feel like it and why are you seeing so much of it? Well, there are a few reasons why that's happening. One is that at some point you or someone the algorithm thinks is similar to you engaged with content from that brand or trend, or on that topic, maybe even you or someone similar to you bought something from an ad for that brand. So the algorithm's going to push it towards you, or perhaps people who you follow, or people the algorithm thinks are similar to people you follow, they are posting about that brand or trend, so the algorithm assumes you want to see it too. And it's interesting when you see these things kind of snowball because it's like someone posts about it, it gets recommended to people, people engage with it, so it gets pushed to more people. And then at some point I people start posting about that thing too, on their own. And so it has this snowball effect and suddenly like everyone is talking about this thing and it's hard to say if that trend really originated organically or if it really picked up momentum because of the algorithm. Right. Same thing with, like brands, Labu boos, you name it. It's hard to say that it would have ever picked up that much traction in the real world outside of social media, because remember, the algorithm wants to show you things you like and, or things that elicit a reaction, AKA engagement from you because you'll spend more time on the app. So it's hoping to predict what brands or trends you want to see, even if you don't know about them yet. And when you think about becomes really obvious why Dustin would see a different side of the Internet than I am seeing. Because he's engaging in music and music gear and film and design stuff and I'm posting about sustainability and cute things and clothes. So yes, we have overlapping interests, but the algorithm doesn't quite seem to get that yet. So that's the algorithm. Here's another reason you might be seeing a skewed version of the world that isn't actually reflective of society as a whole. The people who post most often are the super loudest voices on social media. They are the individuals who have the most time to post often. I don't think I had a clear view of that until I started using Threads because I wasn't much of a Twitter user. That place has always been terrible. But, and I'll tell you, Threads isn't completely dissimilar at this point. And what I noticed when I first started using Threads, well, I noticed a couple of things. One, there are people who I respected or liked who I don't respect and like anymore because of the stuff that they were saying. Uh, but two, something I noticed pretty fast is that there were people I know who were posting and still are posting every hour, multiple times an hour, engaging in back and forths in the comments all day long. And I would ask myself, how are they finding the time to do this? Well, some people are getting paid to post on social media threads. TikTok, Instagram and Facebook pay certain accounts based on engagement. A lot of those weird sort of like meme farm accounts that you might see, whether they're posting leftist memes or animal memes or music memes, or just memes. Memes, memes. They are getting paid for the engagement around that content because it keeps people on the platform. Now, I don't know if Threads is still paying people, but they were for a while there and people were pretty blatant about it. And what was happening is people were posting nonstop, generating tons of content, engaging in it heavily when people commented, because if they drove up that engagement, they were going to get paid more. And that was great for Threads because it was a new app. People were sort of like, I don't know if I need this. Isn't this kind of just Twitter but with a different name? And suddenly new users could come to Threads and see a whole lot of content and a whole lot of engagement from the people on Threads. So there was reason to stick around and keep coming back and checking it over and over again until it became a habit, right? So paying creators right out of the gate to post on threads and be highly engaged, incentivizing them to be highly engaged, was really important to the success of that app. And the same thing goes for every app out there that is paying creators in one way or another. And in most cases outside of TikTok, creators are getting paid pennies, right? Per post. So it's in their best interests to post a lot. It is a volume game. There are people out there who really are making a full time job out of content creation without taking any money from brands at all. Of course, there are also creators out there who are being even more successful by posting a lot and taking money from brands and kind of being able to double dip into that by getting paid on both sides of of that transaction, Right? But ultimately there is a lot of money in one way or another driving what we see, because there is a direct relationship between the volume of what we see and the money that's motivating it for creators who are being paid to post content, posting as often as possible. And posting the most engaging, often inflammatory slash, sort of clickbait kind of stuff will mean a bigger payout. But others are not getting paid and they are just posting nonstop because they have nothing else to do. They might be unemployed, stuck at home, dealing with health issues that isolate them. They might be dealing with a breakup or other relationship pain. They're probably not in the best place in their lives. And to make matters worse, spending so much time on social media is bad for our brains. I'm going to share the abstract from a study about this in the Show Notes. It says the use of social networks is strongly correlated with the development of anxiety and other psychological problems such as depression, insomnia, stress, decreased subjective happiness, and a sense of mental deprivation. The majority of the cited literature predicts that the likelihood of social media induced mental health problems is directly proportional to the amount of time spent on these sites. The frequency of usage and the number of platforms being used. So whether someone is being paid to post or is just posting for free, they are getting progressively more unhappy. The more they post, the unhappier they become. And this means that the unhappiest voices are the loudest and the volume of posts just amplifies their messages. That means that what you are seeing most often on social media is probably not indicative of society as a whole, or even a large swath of society, especially when we couple it with what we have learned about the algorithm so far. 1. Social media is being flooded by specific very loud perspectives because those individuals have more time and or financial motivation to post often. 2. You or someone like you has engaged with these posts, maybe even just slowing down for a minute to read and think. So the algorithm serves it to you and if you engage even slightly, it decides to show you even more. 3. Suddenly that opinion or trend or brand seems to be something that everyone is talking about and you might even think that everyone agrees on it. So here's an example. Last year at this time, AKA October, a friend of mine who loves Halloween, like literally starts working on her costume early in the year, decorates her entire place from top to bottom, tries to only eat Halloween foods in October. I do have a lot of questions about that one and really, really just lives for October, said to me quite sadly last year, I'm afraid to post about Halloween this year because I don't want to get canceled. And I was like, huh? And she said, yeah, there's a lot of pushback against celebrating Halloween this year because the world is essentially falling apart. She cited posts like white women are too busy buying sexy Halloween costumes to care about genocide and imagine caring about your Halloween costume when people are dying. That second one was literally posted by someone I follow who later that day shared in their stories that they were doing a pop up of secondhand costume pieces that weekend. So I don't know what to say there. I think we're just all over the place and really emotional right now. But my friend was concerned. She was like, listen, I post about Gaza nonstop. I'm giving money as often as possible, I'm volunteering my time, I'm phone baking, phone banking for the election and I've done my best to show up for everyone, but I feel like I'm a selfish monster if I wear a costume this year. And it makes me so sad because I just need to feel something comforting and fun right now. And so while the algorithm might be serving you anti Halloween messaging because you reacted to it or slowed down to read One post. Once again, I'm drowning in Taylor Swift posts. Please send help. Plenty of other people are seeing and sharing pumpkin patch photos and cool costumes that they're making. You're just not seeing it because the algorithm thinks you don't want to see it. If you're never seeing good news on your social media feeds, I promise it's not because good things aren't happening in the world. It's just that outrage gleans more engagement. So that's what the algorithm is showing you. There may have been a time when our social media was a mirror of our world, but. But it hasn't been that way for a long time. Basically, the moment our feed stopped being chronological and became algorithm driven, nothing was ever the same. But back to this Halloween issue. So after having this conversation with my friend, it was the weirdest thing. I started seeing posts that backed up what she was saying. And I asked Dustin, I said, hey, is your side of the Internet saying that Halloween is canceled? This is something, like I said, we do a lot because the algorithm serves us completely different content with slight overlaps in terms of politics. And he was like, no, but I do see pictures of people carving pumpkins and making cool, weird costumes. And I was. I was relieved to hear this. Not because I had big Halloween plans, but because since that conversation with my friend, my feed had been filled with content like, white women love genocide, voting for KKK Kamala, and cultural appropriation Halloween costumes. And I gotta tell you, it was like, fucking with me. Because even though these posts were predominantly from white women who should know better than to call a black woman KKK Kamala, because that's really messed up, it was still fucking with me. I was like, man, am I like, a horrible person because I want to put up my Halloween decorations. Like, what the heck? Like, I don't know what to do anymore. But I'll tell you this. If you're wondering my thoughts on celebrating Halloween or whatever else brings you comfort in this hellscape of a time, keep doing it. Life in 2025 is hard, and that's an understatement. I feel like I'm always, like, five seconds away from crying. And as I have moved through this year, working and trying to keep my head above water financially, professionally, and emotionally, I have settled into this chronic state of just, like, nauseating fear and anxiety. It's always there. Whether I'm hard at work on a project, cooking dinner, reading a book, or talking to a friend. It's just there, gnawing on the back of my brain. And yeah, it's taking a toll on me mentally and physically. I'm sure you're feeling very similarly. That's why it's important to let ourselves do things that do make us feel good. You should not feel guilty if you're excited about decorating your house for a holiday or making a costume or even listening to a certain pop star's record. I will not name the pop star because somehow I'll see more content. All of these things, they are things that recharge us and help us keep up the good fight. And you know what's even better though? Doing these things in more responsible, thoughtful ways, meaning minimizing the waste and impact of these endeavors. In fact, I'm going to tell you, I think there is great joy in taking something that makes you happy and then doing it in a more sustainable, ethical way. It's like double fun, double happiness, and we all need it right now. So please do things that make you happy. But like I said, Dustin and I do these. Like, what is your side of the Internet saying? Check ins pretty regularly. Because to be honest, his side of the Internet is full of cool, creative people being funny and doing cool stuff. And mine is often clogged with virtue signaling, infighting and people complaining about and or defending Taylor Swift. And it is like really exhausting and actually unengaging to me. So I have actually been pulling back a lot from social media. I just am like, I can't do it right now. I've even been not allowing myself to use my phone after 8pm which has like opened me up to this wild world of watching movies, reading books, doing craft projects. It's amazing. So this summer, right after my birthday, Dustin went on tour with his band American Motors for a few weeks, which meant I was home alone in the middle of nowhere and I was not doing well mentally. This year has been rough and I've been dealing with harassment from, I hope, a former Clothes Horse fan that has made me very afraid of being home alone. I've been dealing with some really scary family stuff and just being home alone by myself, stuck in my thoughts, my fears, all that stuff. I was spending a lot more time than usual online on social media, with no one to check with on what they were seeing. And that made it harder to get a perspective on it, so made me even more anxious and afraid. And something that I was seeing a ton of posts about was Cracker Barrel. Now, for all of you who don't know what Cracker Barrel is or aren't as chronically online as me, Cracker Barrel is per Wikipedia, an American chain of restaurant and gift stores with a southern country theme. I've only been to Cracker Barrel one time. It was in the early aughts and I was with my grandmother. I ate a salad and some macaroni and cheese. It was pretty forgettable. I mean the meal was forgettable. Seriously, I would much rather eat at a Bob Evans restaurant or Friendly's, two other favorites of my gam Sandy. But one thing that did strike me as unusual and possibly really smart was that to enter the restaurant we had to first walk through a Cracker Barrel store that sold rocking chairs and many types of decorative wreaths, baskets, those hard candy sticks that come in flavors like bubblegum and root beer, and really like any number of like country themed products. Now the McCarty White household is pretty anti Cracker Barrel because there are pretty much no vegetarian gluten free options there. Furthermore, we don't really eat at chain restaurants very often, so it's just not something we even think about. So imagine my surprise when suddenly there was all this commentary about Cracker Barrel's new rebrand being woke. The main controversy seemed to center around two things. One, the logo for the brand was changed from a white grandfatherly man sitting on a chair next to a barrel. A Cracker Barrel, I suppose, to a blended down version of of just the name, no white guy in sight. Literally. A trend called Blanding. Yes, Blanding was a design branding trend from a few years ago that Kim and I covered on the department. You should go check that out if you want to learn more about what Blanding is, if anything, a move to a more bland brand. For Cracker Barrel, it felt a few years too late. The other thing that was getting people riled up was the planned remodel of all of Cracker Barrel stores into a white, more minimal look that was, to be honest, not dissimilar to the modern farmhouse aesthetic championed by Chip and Joanna Gaines and their Magnolia brand. Which by the way is also kind of an old out of date trend at this point. I remember back when I was at my job before the pandemic, my boss, the same person who told me that I would be more successful in my career if I cared less about the people who worked for me. She showed me photos of this incredible mid century house that she and her husband had bought, complete with a kidney shaped swimming pool and a sunken living room. Dustin and I dream of a sunken living room, a conversation pit if you will. I was like, wow, this is so cool. And she laughed because the plan was to spend a year gutting and renovating that house into modern farmhouse aesthetic. That was five years ago. Breaks my heart. Anyway, the fact is that many of the coffee shops and restaurants out here in Lancaster county where I live have had this kind of modern farmhouse decor for a few years now. It's sort of live, laugh, love adjacent and certainly nothing shocking or troubling for anyone who loves Cracker Barrel. In fact, I would suspect that many Cracker Barrel regulars live in homes with this aesthetic or at least have fantasized about adding some white shiplap to their homes. Something I want to add here about the renovations that Cracker Barrel was planning. It was a smart financial decision for its existing 600 locations and for any additional stores it planned on opening. Why? Well, remember when I was explaining what happened to Red Lobster as an example of how private equity works? That was back in the who Killed Joanne episode. If you haven't listened to that, go give, go check it out. You're going to learn a lot about Red Lobster as well. Well, like Red Lobster, for many of these restaurant chains, their biggest asset is the land where their restaurants are located. Basically the company owns the land and the restaurants kind of rent it from the company. It's rich people math, okay? And when they choose a location, if the restaurant has a very specific architecture sort of design, think Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut is the most easy, extreme version of this. It becomes a lot more difficult to rent out that property because it is very clearly an old Pizza Hut or an old Cracker Barrel or what have you. In fact, especially in the case of these Pizza Hut buildings, it can. It might become a tear down situation and then rebuilding just to get anyone to move onto that land. And that's really expensive. So if a restaurant is just a beige or a brown box, it can kind of become anything. I'm going to share this video that Dustin recommended that explains why all fast food and chain restaurants kind of just look like boring gray boxes these days, but it really goes back into increasing the value of the property via these versatile sort of bland spaces. Anyway, so for like three days this August, my entire feed on most platforms was Cracker Barrel. And because these platforms know that I'm a guess I'm a radical leftist, I was seeing content coming from the left perspective. Kind of like these right wing MAGA snowflakes are butthurt about a boring rebrand. However, I have no doubt that people who were on the other side of the political spectrum or were seeing content that, you know, parroted this idea that the rebrand of Cracker Barrel was some, like, woke DEI conspiracy, really. I think it was just bad decision making. Anyway, I was probably seeing so many Cracker Barrel posts because, of course, I did click on a link from a post so I could read an article about what was happening, because I was like, this is so random. And I was and still am in the midst of a series about emotional branding. And certainly this rebrand was evoking a lot of emotions amongst Cracker Barrel fans. And I gotta tell you, I do think that, forget about Wogue dei, whatever people were trying to assign to this rebrand, I do believe that the company was trying to make the stores more appealing and comfortable and sort of like modern and relatable, but also aspirational to their customers by adopting this Magnolia, you know, modern farmhouse aesthetic, which is very appealing to their customer base. Shocking that it got turned into this other thing. Now without Dustin there, I didn't get to ask, hey, are you seeing a lot of Cracker Barrel on your side of the Internet? I mean, I wasn't gonna text him to ask because we try to avoid texting one another. Social media stuff and news articles like, we wanna talk about other things at the same time. Something about this whole situation felt off. Like I said, it seems to me that Cracker Barrel thought they were hitting a home run with this rebrand, that their customer would love it as much as they love Magnolia. I mean, Magnolia has had a wildly successful collab with Target for how many years now? I have no doubt that Cracker Barrel thought that they were just giving them what they want. But also, it just came in really fast and really, really hard, Just flooding every platform with Cracker Barrel talk seemingly within few hours. And sure, I expect that from a big news story, but this was just a restaurant chain that was doing a rebrand and some renovations. Like, not the biggest thing happening in the world by a long shot. I mean, this is 20, 25 people. Okay? There's a lot happening. The Cracker Barrel outrage kind of died down by the time Dustin returned from tour. So we never even discussed it until a few weeks ago when a story emerged about the whole thing that made me turn to Dustin and ask, hey, while you were on tour, did you see a lot of wild Cracker Barrel content? And he was like, yeah, it was overwhelming so much everywhere. And it was kind of boring and weird. And that's when I told him what I had just read. Quote, According to data compiled by Intelligence Platform Peak Metrics, nearly half of the early Posts about Cracker Barrels logo change appeared to be generated by bots. Okay, listen, whether you're chronically online like me or not, you have encountered the term bot and you might know it's like a bad thing, but might not know exactly what bots do or what they are. So let's get into that. Okay? Social media bots are automated accounts that perform actions on social media without a human actually doing them. They're not, there's no human involved at all. They're controlled by software that can like follow comment, post or message automatically. And they might even look like real accounts run by real people with profile photos and little bits of copy in their profiles and real seeming posts. But really they are just code pretending to be actual users. And because they aren't real people, a whole bunch of them can be mobilized really fast to churn out content and sort of flood the algorithm with whatever they're pushing. They exist purely to manipulate visibility, I. E. Make something a bigger conversation or influence perception, like make you think that the Cracker Barrel rebrand is some woke conspiracy rather than just an outdated design trend. And these bots can serve a lot of troublesome purposes. They can be engagement bots. They auto like or comment to make posts look more popular. That shapes public sentiment in two ways. One, of course, the algorithm notices that there's a lot of engagement on a specific post or on a specific theme of posts. And so it pushes them to more people, right? So more people receive the information within that post. But two, it works on us as individuals when we see a ton of likes and comments on a post, and most likely we're not going to go in and read them all, but we'll see the numbers and we'll think, wow, this is something that a lot of people are thinking about or talking about, or even worse, agreeing about. They can be follow unfollow bots which mass follow users to get follow backs then unfollow later. They can be spam bots. They can flood hashtags or comments with links, ads or scams. It's always about crypto or donations or something. They can be political or influence bots, spreading propaganda or misinformation at scale. They can be astroturfing bots, which will make an idea or campaign appear more popular than it actually is. If you think about these different ways that bots can function on social media and take a moment and actually digest that, I guarantee you're thinking of examples of things you've seen trending on social media or behaviors you've seen on social media or even the comments section of accounts you follow that now seem like they're kind of filled with bots, right? Or driven by bots. It starts to make you really think a lot differently about what you see on social media. And I also just want to add here that I receive multiple emails a week from rando services that promise to buy me followers, get me engagement, push me up in the algorithm, and it's all via bots like this. And yes, yes, there are many accounts using these, especially accounts that get paid for engagement. Right. I don't want to go into it too much, but there's this social media account that is supposedly sustainability focused that has been pushing me over the edge this year because they got like 60,000 followers in like a week. And they post a lot of clickbait and untrue things and people seem to be eating it up. And I was talking about it with someone who said you should check and see if they are buying followers, because I think they are. You don't get 60,000 followers on Instagram in two weeks anymore. That could have happened back in 2020, but not now. And I was like, interesting. So I used this website called Social Blade where you can see like, sort of follows unfollows and statistics around an account and it will even tell you, like, what is the likelihood that this account is buying bots. Buying followers, I guess. And those would be bots. And this account is most definitely doing that. And I sell them by 50,000 followers in one day. So anyway, this is all around us, right? And it's. It can be in nefarious ways and it can also be in like, I'm sharing sustainability content ways. But even something that feels as like, silly as buying followers, buying these bot followers for your account on social media is actually, it's pretty sketchy because it does impact public sentiment about that account. Right? So going back to when I was saying like, oh, these engagement bots, when we see them, when we see these posts with a lot of engagement, we start to think, oh, this must be something everyone's talking about. This must be something people are agreeing about. This is something that maybe I should agree with and talk about. And similarly, when we see an account with a lot of followers, we assume that they are more legitimate, that they are presenting true information, that they are someone worth listening to because they have this sort of proof of their legitimacy via all these followers. But it like, doesn't really mean anything at all. An account with 60,000 followers or 250,000 followers or a million followers is in no way for certain gonna have more accurate, more impartial, more useful knowledge than an account with 100 followers. But it works on us to think otherwise. And so, yeah, even just something as silly as buying bot followers can actually misrepresent the reality of the situation to people on social media. All in all, bots distort our perception of what's really happening in the world and can lead us to some dangerous decisions. Yes, we have confirmed proof that bots have been influencing election outcomes around the world for the past decade. These bot accounts definitely help Trump get elected twice. They 100% spread misinformation in the most recent election and got a lot of people to sit this election out via astroturfing and political influence. Okay? Making it seem like everyone was sitting out the election because of xyz and then, you know, basically getting you to share why you are sitting out this election so that your friends see it and then they sit out the election. It was highly effective. I want to say 34% of registered voters in the United States did not vote. That is more people than voted for Kamala. Okay? This was a very effective campaign. And people I know, who are my friends, who are Dustin's friends, who I know professionally, who I know through like the sustainability world, who I went to school with, who I've worked with, etcetera, Posted about how they weren't voting because they were voting with their conscience or they were sitting it out because both parties are the same, or all of these other things that directly led to Donald Trump winning. And they were 100% repeating the same verbatim words and phrases that I was seeing in other posts. So, yes, this stuff is very effective. But outside of political stuff, bots were also a big part of the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial. There is a six part BBC podcast called who Trolled Amber that digs into it. You should listen to it. It will change how you feel about any discourse you see on the Internet, period. From that show, they said, we obtained a cache of almost 1 million tweets posted about Amber Heard in the run up to the trial. One data expert who we commissioned to look at the cache told us that more than 50% of these tweets were inauthentic. According to the expert, that means they either came from bots which are automated accounts or paid for trolls, real people hired to slander someone online. In one case, 100 accounts sent 1,000 identical messages and at once to companies working with Herd saying, this brand supports domestic violence. Against men. We also found bot networks tweeting pro Dep content in Thailand and Spain, as well as fake pro Dep accounts that used AI generated profile pics to appear authentic. Wow. The goal here was to turn public opinion against heard. And yes, 100% the Johnny Depp paid for this, because also, it could possibly protect Depp's flagging career by painting Amber Heard as a liar and as an abuser. And you know what? It worked. Okay? The stuff I saw people saying about them or even being like, well, it's a both people kind of suck thing. And I was like, are you kidding me? It became almost a litmus test for a while for me of, like, people who I should trust or not. And over time, I realized it was like, no, it's people who have seen the algorithm serve them this much stuff or not. That's what it really is. Anyway, a similar strategy was used in the recent Blake Lively Justin Baldoni lawsuit, with bots infiltrating celebrity subreddits, among other places, posting anti Blake content. And you know what? It also worked because the bot, basically the bot would start the thread and then maybe a few bots would comment, and that would push it up in the algorithm and. And then real people joined in. Because if there is one thing the Internet can agree on, it's that it's super fun to shit on women in a comment section, right? But back to Cracker Barrel. I'm going to share this full article from Gizmodo in the show Notes that really outlines it all. But here's what happened. Okay, so peak metrics analyzed 52,000 Twitter posts about Cracker Barrel's new logo within 24 hours of the announcement. I know that some people call Twitter X. I refuse to. Anyway, okay, so 44.5% of all mentions of Cracker Barrel showed signs of bot activity. Posts calling for a boycott had even more. 49% were flagged as likely bots. So half. And these bots just weren't. Weren't just on Twitter. They were on just about every platform linking this rebrand to terms like woke and dei, which of course, real people just ate up. In less than two weeks, there were more than 2 million posts about Cracker Barrel's rebrand on Twitter alone. And Peak Metrics estimated that a quarter of them were posted by bots. Of course, that means that 75% of those posts were from humans. It seems like what happened is this. A few people posted about disliking their rebrand, then someone somewhere decided that it could be A great culture war topic to fuel division. So the bot armies were set loose on it. Bots amplified the conversation in a big way, creating that feeling of everyone is talking about it, which then got more and more people to post about it. So who set the bot army loose? Peak Metrics didn't name names, but it did say this. The initiators are ideological activist accounts with prior culture war posting histories supported by botnets. Isn't that scary? Like here's just like a restaurant that maybe you've never even thought about or maybe you're like, I really love. I'm sorry I can't name anything from their menu, but fill in what you really love from there. And to have just this restaurant turned into sort of this big culture war topic just because they changed their logos and painted their stores white, I mean, that's scary, right? It shows that just about anything can be used to divide us right now. It can be Cracker Barrel. It can be whether or not you're celebrating Halloween. And the thing is, Cracker Barrel worked and it all works right? Back then in August, it felt like everyone was talking about Cracker Barrel and it made the whole thing feel like a big cultural moment, something that everyone needed to think about. Like suddenly it was something where everyone had to pick a side and really it was just a really boring rebrand and renovation. It wasn't deeper than that at all. It wasn't indicative of wokeness. I mean seriously, Cracker Barrel is so unwoke that it doesn't even have. It doesn't even have gluten free and vegan options. So I don't want to hear it. Okay? Cracker Barrel not woke. It was a non story that became a values litmus test when really it just should have been something confined to Cracker Barrel mega fans, advertising industry professionals and design nerds. So knowing everything that we have discussed so far, let's examine how Cracker Barrel's rebrand is woke flooded everyone's psyche for a few days. Well, first people posted about their displeasure with the rebrand. Maybe a few people posted a lot about it because they had more time and or financial motivation to post. In fact, maybe a few people posted a lot about it because they had more time and or financial motivation to post. Often. Maybe they would have never posted a single thing about Cracker Barrel because like I said, it's kind of a boring story if they hadn't had the time or financial pressure to come up with something to post about Next. A few people saw those posts and maybe lingered over them for a while thinking about them, or even clicked onto the link to see what the rebrand looked like. And the algorithm was like, ha. Ah, people like this. Show it to similar people. And along the way, the bot farmers were like, oh, hell yeah, this is going to be a great way to sow some animosity on the Internet. And so then real people engaged with the bot posts, which pushed them to even more people. And then real people posted their opinions on it. And suddenly a bland rebrand was culture war fodder. So all of this is to say, harnessing the algorithm and even using bots, these are just more tools in the marketing toolbox that create an emotional connection with a brand. Maybe that emotional experience begins with extremely negative outraged thoughts, but regardless, it increases brand awareness and maybe even converts us into customers over time. Like now I have Cracker Barrel on the brain, perhaps I'll be on a road trip and be like, oh well, we could eat there, you know, because I've been thinking about it. It's in there now. Think about the things it seemed like everyone was talking about at some point online, right? Leboo Boos, for example. Sorry, but Labubus are popular because of the algorithm, period. Okay? I'm telling you. I mean, they're cute, but like the fever, the fervor, definitely fueled by the algorithm and maybe even some bots, who knows? And not everything that you read about a trend or a brand has to be positive to get it into your brain and make you reconsider it. For example, I never saw anything pro Labubu on my social media feeds, but what I saw was Labubus are just another example of fast fashion and over consumption and wastefulness. And look at these ding dongs who buy plastic stuff for the landfill. Like, I only saw extremely negative, very virtual signally, very judgmental, very not helpful discourse about Labubus that were like that. And that is how I became aware of Labubu as a trend and interacted with it by like seeing what they were and thinking about whether or not they were cute. And of course I didn't buy one, but I could have. It could have pushed me in that direction. And that's another thing that's important to call out here, is that, I don't know, it's sort of like that all PR is good pr, even when it's bad kind of logic is it's true that even when someone is posting over and over again about how people who love Taylor Swift are just billionaire bootlickers or white supremacists, OR whatever. The 9 million bad posts I've seen about Taylor Swift, which, by the way, I've only seen like one positive post about Taylor Swift in the gazillions of posts I have seen about Taylor Swift. But what it did is push Taylor Swift into my consciousness, where I was like, huh, should I listen to that album just to know what people are talking about? I didn't. But I guarantee it did push more people to listen to Taylor Swift and perhaps become fans kind of by accident. How about any type of misinformation? It can be even something as simple as this post earlier this year that went viral that said that France banned Shein hauls. That post was not true and full of misinformation. But because people don't fact check what they see on social media, they just share it, that tells the algorithm to push it to more people who also won't fact check it. How about, like what I mentioned earlier, not celebrating Halloween or other holidays because, well, look at the world around us. Even brands like Shein and Cider and Quince being on people's brains, people posting hauls, people shopping from them. I know that Quince is pushing the algorithm in so many different ways, via ads and probably via bots and influencers, et cetera, et cetera. Because I get so many questions about quints, like every week now. They're just like huge. And yes, they are fast fashion, okay? Different brands, sustainable collections, whether it's Nike, Zara or H and M, those have a certain level of algorithm virality baked into them. And it's intentional. Even viral trends that seem to work their way up from TikTok, like mobster wife or even cottagecore. It was like one person shared it, people liked it, it got pushed to more people. Then people started making their own content about Mobster Wife or cottagecore. And it just grew and grew and grew, Right? In fact, the viral aspect of brands and trends means that we might be kind of flooded into building a connection with them, of wanting to buy into them, then maybe we would not have even given them a second glance outside of social media. It makes me think more about Mark Gove's book, Emotional Branding. Of course, we gotta mention it again, the, you know, flowers in the attic of marketing in this century. And in that book, as we've discussed countless times over the past this whole series of episodes, gobe's big message to companies, to brands, to retailers is sell without seeming like you're selling. And the algorithm and bots and all of this, it sells to us, whether it's stuff or ideas without actually seeming like it's selling to us. Right? It's like so genius. Some of this selling to us might not even be coming from real people, but they feel like real people to us and they convince us that everyone is talking about this thing. It's been sold to them. Now we should buy into it too. It is highly successful, highly sneaky, emotional branding. I'm sure it's not at all what Mark Gob envisioned, but that is what's happening. And I can't help but think that if we had encountered these ideas, these trends, these brands, this misinformation out in the real world outside of social media, just like it crossed our path organically, I don't think we would have bought into it the way that we are now, because we would have encountered it and kind of moved on. But what's happening right now is we're being flooded with it everywhere we turn online, and we spend a lot of time online. The algorithm pushes and pushes and pushes it into us until we have no choice but to be a part of it too. And it creates this connection between us and the brand, the trend, the idea, the misinformation that makes us invested in it.
- [70:34]
Dustin Travis White
Right?
- [70:36]
Amanda Lee McCarty
It's just one more reason for us to take a step back and ask ourselves, why do I feel so connected to this brand that isn't even a person, much less an entity that cares for me? Welcome to Clotheshorse, the podcast who is not ashamed to admit that my favorite chain restaurant is Taco Bell? And I am also not afraid to give you an hour long cold open Congrats. You listen to it. Hi, I'm your host Amanda and this is episode 245, part 6 and an ongoing series about brands and how they influence our identities and drive consumerism. And thank you for being patient. As I worked on this one. I meant to release it last week, but I had to rewrite the whole opening. I really wanted to get into explaining bots and how they work, which meant more research and reading and thinking about how I could explain it to you in a way that was understandable. So thank you for being patient. It was worth it, I hope. I feel like it was worth it. Anyway, like I said, this is part six in an ongoing series. I highly recommend that you listen to all of them because they interconnect and will help you understand this episode more too. In part one we explored the meanings of brand and branding along with the history of branding. I also revealed some brands that are really just licensed zombies at this point. In Part two, we unpacked the concept of emotional branding and how it has influenced our own relationships with brands, building large communities of strangers who are brought together because of where they like to shop and what they like to buy. In Part three, we unpacked Cause Marketing and why It's really not that Charitable. In Part four, we talked about how brands use convenience, nostalgia, and hope to market to us. And we examined part of a recent WGSN trend report about the emotions of consumers and how to market to them. In Part five, we learned about what brands know about us, AKA the customers, and how they sell to us more sneakily than ever. My good friend Kim Christensen dropped by to explain digital marketing and consumer data. In this installment, we're going to check we're going to check out your stories and all of your thoughts surrounding brands. There's still more to share in a future episode, so keep your stories and thoughts coming. I would love to hear from you about how this series has changed your relationship with brands. What it's made you see more clearly or even whoa. I think that the algorithm and bots made me think this thing XYZ was what everyone is talking about. I would love to be able to show more examples to all of you about how this impacts our perception of the world. Let's take a moment to thank some of the incredible small businesses who keep Clotheshorse going via their generous Patreon support. Slow Fashion Academy is a size inclusive sewing and pattern making studio based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Designer and fash professor Ruby Gertz teaches workshops for hobbyists and aspiring designers so that anyone can learn the foundational skills of making, mending and altering their own clothes several times per year. Ruby offers her flagship Sloper Workshop, an in person two day pattern making retreat where you will learn how to drape a set of basic block patterns that capture your unique shape and proportions. You can also use these basic block or sloper patterns as a foundation for infinite styles of garments that are custom made to your body's one of a kind content contours or compare your slipper to commercial patterns to see where you might need to alter the shape. No more guessing at full bust, flat seam or sway back adjustments. Start with a foundation that fits. Ruby also provides professional design and pattern making services to emerging slow fashion brands and occasionally takes commissions for custom garments and costume pieces. She has also released several PDF sewing patterns for original designs under her brands Spokes and Stitches and Starling Petite plus. I just want to also add here on a personal note that right Now Ruby is actually working with me to create a one of a kind unique to me special dress that I will be wearing for all future clothes horse events including live episodes later this year in the Pacific Northwest. I am so excited to work with Ruby because she is so talented and so knowledgeable about all things clothing creation. Check out the schedule for upcoming workshops, download PDF sewing patterns and learn about additional sewing and Design Services at www.slowfashion.academy. and it's important for me to tell you that that's slowfashion.academy Selena Sanders a social impact brand that specializes in upcycle clothing using only reclaimed, vintage or thrifted materials from tea towels, linens, blankets and quilts. Sustainably crafted in Los Angeles, each piece is designed to last in one's closet for generations to come. Maximum Style Minimal carbon footprint. Shift clothing out of beautiful Astoria, Oregon with a focus on natural fibers, simple hard working designs and putting fat people first. Discover more@shiftwheeler.com late to the party Creating one of a kind statement clothing from vintage, salvaged and thrifted textiles. They hope to tap into the dreamy memories we all floral curtains, a childhood dress, the wallpaper in your best friend's rec room. All while creating modern, sustainable garments that you'll love wearing and have for years to come. Late to the Party is passionate about celebrating and preserving textiles, the memories they hold and the stories they have yet to tell. Check them out on Instagram eighttothepartypeople Vino Vintage Based just outside of la, we love the hunt of shopping secondhand because you never know what you might find. Catch us at flea markets around Southern California by following us on Instagram Inno Vintage so you don't miss our next event. Dylan Paige is an online clothing and lifestyle brand based out of St. Louis, Missouri. Our products are chosen with intention for the conscious community. Everything we carry is animal friendly, ethically made, sustainably sourced and cruelty free. Dylan Page is for those who never stop questioning where something comes from. We know that personal experience dictates what's sustainable for you and we are here to help guide and support you to make choices that fit your needs. Check us out@dylanpage.com and find us on Instagram ylanpage lifeandstyle Salt hats purveyors of truly sustainable hats, hand blocked, sewn and embellished in Detroit, Michigan. Find us on Instagram. Althats Thumbprint is Detroit's only fair trade marketplace located in the historic Eastern market. Our small business specializes in products handmade by empowered women in South Africa, making a living wage creating things they love like hand painted candles and ceramics. We also carry a curated assortment of sustainable and natural locally made goods. Thumbprint is a great gift destination for both the special people in your life and for yourself. Browse our online store@thumbprintdetroit.com and find us on InstagramPrintDetroit. Vagavan Vintage DTLV is a vintage clothing, accessories and decor reselling business based in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada. Not only do we sell in Las Vegas, but we're also located throughout resale markets in San Francisco as well as at a curated boutique called Luxe and Ivy located in Indianapolis, Indiana. Jessica, the founder and owner of Vagabond Vintage DTLV recently opened the first IRL location located in the Arts District of downtown Las Vegas on August 5th. The shop has a strong emphasis on 60s and 70s garments, single stitch tees and dreamy loungewear. Follow them on Instagram vagabondvintagedtlv and keep an eye out for their website coming fall of 2020 okay, before we jump into everything, even though I know we're like an hour into this episode already, congrats to me for writing such a long intro. Here's a few announcements. 1. Closed Horse is coming to the west coast in like a week. Seriously. I'm flying to Portland this Saturday. I'm going to be doing a show in Seattle on the 23rd and Portland on the 22nd. Links to get tickets are in the show notes. Some of you have asked me about merch for the show, so here's here's what I'll tell you. My friends at Care Instruction who you should follow on Instagram. They are sponsoring the show so they're going to be running the merch booth at both shows. We have more than 200 secondhand tees, tanks and sweatshirts in sizes extra small through 4x available for purchase. Christine and Casey will be running the Heat press, applying your choice of transfers to the shirts. There is one show exclusive design with only 50 pieces available. You can also bring your own favorite shirt or tote bag or anything textile ish and have an iron on apply to the show. Or you can buy transfers to take home and iron on to make gifts for your friends, your family, yourself. There will also be stickers including some new designs, bumper stickers, buttons, mending kits and I'm really excited about this. This took so much work. The new Synthetic Fabric Magazine the Clothes Horse Guide to synthetic fabrics by me. This zine is 100 pages of full color information for anyone who wants to learn more about the fabrics we wear on our bodies. Also, unrelated to any of that, did you know that you can find the full script and links for everything discussed on this episode and every episode@CloseHorsePodcast.com I bet you didn't because I linked to it in the show notes every single episode. But I have Learned that only 1% of people read show notes and sometimes y' all email me asking me questions about the episode that could be found in the show notes or@closehorsepodcast.com so I just want you to file that away for future use. If you want to review something that we talked about here or learn some other stuff. It's all there, along with a lot of other educational resources. Okay, next listener Elizabeth sent me an email with an important message. She said I'm trying to do everything I can to tell people to vote yes on California's Prop 50. You've likely heard of it. It's the response to Texas's attempt to redistrict to favor Republicans in the upcoming congressional elections. California's Prop 50 is looking like one of the very few ways we can stop two more years of unbridled MAGA control. And since it's part of a special election, we can't assume people know about it. Gerrymandering sucks. But it's only a temporary redistricting attempt until 2030, I believe, to stave off really shady attempts to secure power. I find your show a major source of hope and inspiration in these often unbearable times. I was thinking you might be able to use your platform to even Briefly plug Prop 50 by telling all of your California listeners to vote YES and telling others to reach out to their California friends and family. So yes, here I am telling all of you Californians to vote yes on Prop 50. California Proposition 50 would temporarily let the Legislature redraw congressional district maps for the 2026, 2028 and 2030 elections instead of the Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission. This would help Democrats flip up to five districts that are currently held by Republicans. And we need that because Texas is trying to do the inverse by redistricting to create more Republican districts. To be clear, Democrats must win the midterms to slow down whatever the fuck nightmare Trump and his Cabinet of horrible people are doing right now. And yes, I do have hope that we can do this. And no matter what bots have told you on the Internet, both parties are not the same. And I hope that is becoming very clear to anyone who thought otherwise. As Elizabeth mentioned, this is a special election which many of you might not know about. And that's why it's important to vote in every election, no matter how small it might be. Remember, part of a slow fashioned way of life means being a concerned citizen. That includes voting and making our voices heard. So while I'm on the topic, Pennsylvanians, please vote YES to retain Judges Wecht, Donahue, Doherty, Vojic, and Dubow. Everyone else in the US vote on November 4th because local and state elections have a major impact on your quality of life. And everyone here in the US Call your senators and reps to tell them that you want them to keep subsidies for the Affordable Care act slash Obamacare. Many people, including myself, will be unable to have health insurance next year without them. And for all of you who are not Americans, be a concerned citizen. Get active. Control your destiny. Vote. Be loud and show up. All right, that's all for the announcements. Let's get into your messages and stories. Our first message is from Kat and she is going to tell us about a brand that she once loved that has really fallen off. And that's Hot Topic.
- [85:59]
Kat
Hey Amanda, this is Kat. I'm living in Osaka, Japan and I just wanted to tell you a little bit about a brand that I'm very disappointed in. By the way, thank you so much for what you do. Love the podcast. I listen to it all the time while I'm sewing a little background about me. I am an emo kid. I grew up going to Hot Topic. Loved Hot Topic. I still do emo night. I do emo night here in Osaka. We put on an event once a month and so I, I also have started like a small slow fashion alternative brand myself. So we went back to America for our trip in March and just overall I was very shocked by how cheap clothes were, especially if you consider how much food is in America right now. The clothing prices were so cheap and just the quality was so bad. I've just gotten very used to Japanese quality clothing. Anyway, I went to Hot Topic and I've always loved Hot Topic. I grew up going to Hot Topic. They always carried Tripp, which is an American brand and they've always carried other like very popular alternative brands and they also always seem to be pretty decent quality. I still own a trip skirt from when I was in high school, which has been quite a bit of time ago. And so anyways we went to Hot Topic in Alaska when we went to visit and just the quality of everything was so bad. The prices were so cheap and everything was almost 100 polyester if and it looked like it would fall apart after one wear. I think when you were talking about brand loyalty and how brands kind of built like a. Like a culture, I think Hot Topic definitely did that, especially in the early 2000s. They were sponsoring different shows, and they were sponsoring, like, all of these things, and. And they had a chat forum where you could talk and meet new people, and it was really cool. So I think if we also didn't have the Internet much then either. So, like, you didn't. At least you didn't buy online, right? So the. The one place you would go was Hot Topic, and for an alternative kid, you know, that's where you went. And now I think their quality has just gone so bad.
- [88:44]
Bonnie
And the.
- [88:46]
Kat
It's all fast fashion, I guess, you know, and. Yeah, so I just wanted to share my disappointment with you on that, especially from, like, you know, the alternative fashion sense of things. I think it's also worth mentioning that Hot Topic also started selling pop culture things in the early 2010s, and that felt like a slap in the face to a lot of people in the alternative space. And that's still very prominent in their stores now. It seems like they're trying to get back to their roots, but again, the quality is just really bad. Also, I. I heard in your last episode you were coming to visit Japan. So if you are in Osaka, please feel free to reach out. I'll be happy to show you around or anything, or if you need help with anything, please let me know. Thank you again.
- [89:38]
Karina
Bye.
- [89:39]
Amanda Lee McCarty
Bye. Wow, Kat, I gotta tell you that I have always had a soft spot for Hot Topic. Now, where I grew up did not have a Hot Topic when I was a kid, but as an adult, I actually think maybe my first Hot Topic experience was in Portland, Oregon, at the Lloyd center, of course. And what struck me about Hot Topic then was it wasn't like any other place at the mall. It was for the weirdos, which are, you know, people like me. And also that there were just always, like, people hanging out there, just having a good time, like, being friends with the staff and, I don't know, seeing Hot Topic as a safe space in. In the mall, you know, like, that's. That's pretty magical. And it's something that Dustin and I bonded over pretty early in our relationship. And as we would go on road trips around the country, we would always find ourselves stopping at malls because we love a mall. Especially like a mall that's maybe just slowly dying a little bit. Although I also love a thriving mall, but we would always go to These malls in random small cities or big towns. And we would always go to Hot Topic and we would always talk about it later, like, isn't it so cool how you can go into a Hot Topic anywhere in the US and there's just kids hanging out there and like having a good time and feeling, feeling like they're with their people. Like, it's always been really, really heartwarming to me. And it's changed, right? A few years ago, my kid Dylan actually had a part time job at Hot Topic. Dustin and I were psyched until Dylan started working there. And it pretty early on it was like, oh, this sucks. Hot Topic is not what it once was. There was so much pressure to like sell and get people to sign up for things. And there was just this like lack of authenticity in how the staff was expected to interact with the customers. And also like, like, to be honest, the staff wasn't the same kind of people that had once been at Hot Topic. And the whole thing was a really negative experience for Dylan and pretty short lived. But that made me start thinking like, hey, maybe Hot Topic has changed. And my last corporate job before I started working for myself full on the job that moved me to Austin. One of our big competitors in the mall landscape was Hot Topic. Because Hot Topic has changed so much. It is less about music and subculture and more about pop culture. As, as Kat talked about, it's really about getting generations of people to come into the store and shop. And so everything is really licensed. It's all of these like cartoons and movies and characters and it's just, it's just a really different place. Well, the company that I was working for also sold a lot of gifts and pop culture stuff, nostalgia things. And so Hot Topic was one of our competitors. And so I would spend a lot of time going to Hot Topic in different malls and kind of seeing what they had and what was on sale and what the prices were. And that was when I was really confronted, like, whoa. The quality at Hot Topic is really bad. Like really, really bad. And everything is always on sale. There's like multiple sales going on and like weird points and like hot cash and all these other things happening. So you don't even know exactly how much you're really going to pay for anything that's in the store on the website. And you know what that is. That's like a fast fashion trick, right? That's what Shein does. And here's Hot Topic basically selling Shein quality stuff maybe for slightly more, maybe not. Once you figure out what's going on with the deals and this whole like sort of shift into having something for everyone which was never what Hot Topic was in its peak best era. But this shift into selling something to everyone really did drive the business in a huge way for several years there. I also find the article, but I've talked about it here before, about a New York Times piece I read, I don't know, probably like five years ago, about how Hot Topic was killing it because they were selling to generations of people via all this pop culture product. Never mind that they just weren't the same place that they'd ever been before. And I think the like pop culture licensed merch field has gotten super saturated. And so now Hot Topic needs to be the the cheapest place that you can get all that stuff. And that's why the quality is so horrible. And when I think about a brand like Hot Topic, that for many of us has a lot of nostalgia connected to it, that we remember how we felt going in there, seeing other people like us, or finding cool stuff there that we couldn't get anywhere else. It's that nostalgia, that emotional relationship that was built decades ago that keeps us coming back. And it's not just Hot Topic. This isn't the only brand that many of us have some sort of like nostalgia based relationship with. I think for any of those brands it's. We have to take a step back. We sort of have to cut that cord of nostalgia that connects us to a different time in that brand's trajectory. Right when it was just a different place that sold us different things and sold us better things and was a better place to go in general. We have to cut that off and we have to confront what that brand is now. We have to truly let ourselves see the brand as it is now. Because if we were introduced to Hot Topic or some other brand that we've been loyal to all this time, that has been, you know, inshitified. If we met that brand for the first time right now, as it is right now, we wouldn't be interested. Right? And so we need to see things in sharp focus as they really are right now. Remove the rose colored glasses of nostalgia. But as I talked about in the last episode, nostalgia is a hell of a drug. It really gets us to open our wallets. And Kevin sent a message about heritage brands that taps into that as well. He said this series has been a weeks long string of Christmas light bulb moments. I've had some big feels as I look back at the ways I've been yanked around by marketing. Golly, they're insidious. It does help me flesh out a big shift in the outdoor industry that I never quite understood. Heritage brands. Yes. I make my money on wool and cotton. I grew up on glossy photos of climbing € trash, one piece ski mountaineering shells and textbook adventure sports. I remember pining for TNF and Marmot. I dug through the fabric bins at Woolrich to make and sell gear. I did everything to shed that steeltown vibe of my youth. Those were heady times. I moved to Boulder, Colorado in 1992 and spent that critical part of my adolescence easing into a better understanding of climate and ecology. I was radically okay with the cause marketing of major brands. I couldn't afford them, but I didn't need it. I was inside their tent making my own jump forward 15 years and I'm a Minnesota homeowner married to a Wisconsin tomboy and we have a kid. I'm still neck deep in the sports, but I'm walking away from synthetics. Then the weird thing happens. Wax, cotton, wool and leather get super hot. It's a seven day weekend in post war America again. Cabins, trains, fishing boats, stake bed, trucks. Big sigh. I shook off the confusion. Now I'm suspicious. I feel like that big pivot came at a moment when consumers were tired of hearing about how we were killing the planet. They slithered back to being ignorant optimists. They found their comfort in a 1960s Popular Mechanics fantasy. Wow, I think Kevin is so right. I remember this wave of heritage brands especially, you know, making its way through the men's market here in the United States and really globally. It kind of started in Japan, like a lot of these trends of this century in men's apparel. And it made its way here into the US and even at Urban Outfitters. Okay, mega fast fashion brand. We were trying to sell Pendleton, right? We were trying to sell Marmot. We were trying to get like these really nice heritage brands into our stores because people wanted it. And I think for a lot of these heritage brands, it was actually a good time for them, right? Like they were being introduced to a whole new generation of consumers. But what has happened since then, I mean, it's been at least 10 years since that happened, is that we've seen a lot of these brands be acquired by private equity or other investors. And what we've seen is, well, ding, ding, ding. What we have seen with everything else here, including Hot Topic, which is that the product has gotten shittier, right? The quality has gotten bad. The fabrics have become more and more Synthetics. And so a lot of these brands are losing the magic of their heritage, I guess. And I do think that like I still see people stanning for heritage brands on social media and I think they are also pining for this time that they're nostalgic for, which might be the 1960s through a 2015 lens when they remember these things being new and exciting and different and really good. And once again, this is where we gotta rip off those rose colored glasses of nostalgia, of emotional branding and see these brands for what they are right now. It's hard. It's really hard. And also means you've gotta be that bummer friend and tell your other friends, eh? They kind of suck now. Have you noticed how everything is polyester? I'm just saying we all need to help others see past all of the emotional branding. Oh, and one last thing. This is for Kat. Kat, I am not gonna be able to make it to your emo night in Osaka. I tried to make it work with my travel plans with Dustin because he'll be in Japan with me by then and we just couldn't make it work. But a few days before your emo night, I actually am gonna be coming to Osaka to go to the contemporary art museum there and I would love to meet up for lunch or maybe if you want to come with me to the museum or whatever. So send me a message and we can figure it out. And the same goes for any of you who happen to be in Japan. Holler at me if you want to meet up. I can't promise anything, but it would be great to meet some international listeners and talk about what slow fashion is like in Japan. Okay, our next message is from Miriam and let me tell you, we're having like a real international episode today. Miriam is going to tell us about a a brand of boots that she also really, really loved and came to find that they'd been sort of insidified.
- [102:24]
Dustin Travis White
I know. Amanda. My name is Miriam and I live in York in England. I wanted to send you a message in response to the shoes episode, but it fits the brand's voice Notes brief. I recently broke up with my favourite shoe brand. I found a beautiful pair of second hand slouchy leather boots in a charity shop which I ended up wearing all day every day for years until they wore out. I have unusually wide feet with a high instep. And so having found shoes that fit comfortably without the need for an uncomfortable wearing in piece period, which looked good, I could afford and were decent enough quality to last years of Daily wear meant that when I reluctantly let them go I really just wanted to have those exact shoes again. I tend to get clothes second hand for many of the reasons you talk about on clothes horse, so I found some on ebay. But the first time I wore them out in the rain the soles disintegrated. Some research revealed the company had gone through a phase of using a certain material in the soles which dries out over long periods of disuse and then breaks down when water is reintroduced, making them bad candidates for reselling after any time in storage. I found another newer pair that lasted me a bit, but after just a year or two the soles started degrading again. I decided to try and get them resoled, but that ended up costing £50 for another five months of wear. I don't think they were designed with resoling in mind. I went through a few others from a mix of ebay and charity shops with mixed sole longevity. They were all very comfortable and I like the style visually and the repolishable second hand leather. But after my sixth pair in 12 years, all but the first only lasting up to a year or two before the soles start crumbling, I have finally decided I want to find shoes designed with more mending options. I did go down some DIY shoemaking rabbit holes including felted shoes and barefoot and ground shoes, but decided I need shoes faster than I can learn to make them. I ended up with a pair from Vinted, made by a wide feet specific brand. They were horrendously biting around the ankles, but the DIY shoemaking deep dive had emboldened me to troubleshoot. Plus the fact that this is clearly why they ended up nearly new on Vinted. These were never going to find a happy home in their current state, so I made a cut down the back which actually magically fixed everything and now they're great. Obviously I'm not in love with this brand, but the whole saga has demystified shoes for me a bit like as a product they feel less structurally absolute and final and more like a starting point that can be tampered with. This is less so when they're made of specially moulded plastic and short lived fabrics. It's sad because because the boots were so beautiful and comfortable and they work with my weirdly proportioned feet. But this kind of product, made with earth caustic materials and made unnecessarily unrepairable, the leather was still fine, has become a big bugbear of mine. The inshittification of many brands makes me less and less inclined to invest in expensive things firsthand, as I don't know upfront which ones are going to be the one I end up wearing every day forever. Which is what I want, but it's not what the brands or the investors want because they want me to just keep buying stuff. And if I'm happy with a product and I had it forever, I don't need to buy any more stuff. So I'll leave it on that depressing note at P.S. i've been listening to your podcast a lot over the past year and I don't know if you have time for these, but I have some questions when you say breakfast for dinner, are we talking breakfast cereal, waffles, continental or full English? We've recently been making full English breakfast for dinner and it's been a good time. Also, I didn't know brunch had icky connotations. To me it is taking a toaster and bagels and cream cheese to a friend's house on a Sunday and making a lot of toast and doing crafts. As we got older we started including things like grapes and scrambled eggs. Also. Also, early on I heard you mention non thriftable basics like socks and pants, and I would be super interested to hear what you have to say about sustainably mass producing those since I can't get them second hand.
- [107:22]
Amanda Lee McCarty
Thank you so much Miriam for sharing your story of the boots. This is something I have also experienced with shoes and actually when we were doing the whole episode about shoes, I was like, like oh yeah, everything's really coming together for me. I would say one brand of shoes that has really, really gone downhill is Doc Martens. Like I can't believe how low quality they are right now. And I think I may have mentioned this in a past episode, but I was literally wearing a pair of Doc Martens that were fairly new and the entire sole just fell off. While we were in the grocery store we ran across the parking lot and got some shoe goo and glued it back together. Maybe stayed on for like 20 minutes and I almost twisted my ankle in a really bad way when the sole of the shoe fell off. So fuck you Doc Martens. You've really gone downhill. Anyway, to answer some of Miriam's questions there. First off, when I'm talking about breakfast for dinner, it's usually like waffles or pancakes for dinner, which always feels super fun to me. The whole brunch thing is actually wow, that is. That is such a deep cut. Miriam, I know you're going through the archive for sure, but it's something that my friend Gemini came up with way back in the early days of Clothes Horse when we would talk about how in the Obama era, life felt easy, comparatively, of course, and for a specific group of people, of course. But it was easy to be sort of politically ambivalent, inactive, not really a part of your community, and to spend your Saturday at brunch for like four hours. And that's where the anti brunch society idea came from, which was like, rather than wasting our time on like endless mimosa brunch, which is usually overpriced and apparently like the worst shift for servers, rather than doing that, like, why aren't we out, like, being active in our communities? And I still stand by that. Actually, I haven't had brunch in so long. Although last weekend I did make Dustin and I breakfast at 11am and we did question whether or not that was brunch. Oh, and Miriam, I also just wanted to tell you that I do usually cook a full English breakfast on the weekends for Dustin and me, but like a vegetarian version. And we're big fans of having some beans with our breakfast. And then in terms of places to buy things like underwear and socks that are hopefully more ethical, sustainable and high quality, my recommendation is go check out Good on youn. They have a whole, whole category of that kind of stuff for you to see. And I think that when it comes to these types of items, which can be difficult to find secondhand, sometimes we just have to cut ourselves some slack because sometimes the ethical versions are too expensive or maybe not what we want. And that means that we're gonna have to buy them from someone else that might not be perfect, but might be better. And we just want to take care of those things and make them last for as long as possible by, you know, washing them in mesh bags, maybe air drying them rather than using the dryer and making sure we don't lose our socks and all kinds of things like that. Like, it's like I always say, it's progress, not perfection. And nowhere is that more, more prevalent than when it's trying to find some underwear. If you're enjoying this episode, then this is a great time to remind you that my work here at Clothes Horse is made possible by the support of listeners like you. Just like NPR and these great small businesses. Please go give them your support. Blank CAS or Blanket Coats by CAS is focused on restoring, renewing, and reviving the history held within vintage and heirloom textiles by Embodying the love, craft and energy that is original to each vintage textile. As I transfer it into a new garment, I hope we can reteach ourselves to care for and mend what we have and make it last. Blank CAS lives on Instagram @blankcas and a website will be launched soon@blankcas.com Located in Whistler, Canada, Velvet Underground is a velvet jungle full of vintage and secondhand clothing plants, a vegan cafe and lots of rad products from other small sustainable businesses. Our mission is to create a brand and community dedicated to promoting self expression as well as educating and inspiring a more sustainable and conscious lifestyle both for the people and the planet. Find us on Instagram opvelvetunderground or online at www.shopvelvetunderground.com Republica Unicornia yarns Handmade yarn and notions for the color and obsessed. Made with love and some swearing in fabulous Atlanta, Georgia by head yarn wench Kathleen. Get ready for rainbows with a side of giving a damn. Republica Unicornia is all about making your own magic using small batch, responsibly sourced, hand dyed yarns and thoughtfully made notions. Slow Fashion all the way down and discover the joy of creating your very own beautiful hand knit, knit, crocheted or woven pieces. Find us on Instagram @republicaunicorniarns and at www.republicaunicornia.com. picnic Wear a slow fashion brand ethically made by hand from vintage and dead stock materials, most notably vintage towels. Founder Dani has worked in the industry as a fashion Designer for over 10 years, but started Picnic Wear in response to her dissatisfaction with the industry's shortcomings. Picnic Wear recently moved to rural North Carolina where all their sewing and accessories are now designed and cut, but the majority of their sewing is done by skilled garment workers in New York City. Their customers take comfort in knowing that all their sewists are paid well above New York City minimum wage. Picnic Wear offers minimal waste and maximum authentication future vintage over future garbage. Cute Little Ruin is an online shop dedicated to providing quality vintage and secondhand clothing, vinyl and home items in a wide range of styles and price points. If it's ethical and legal, we try to find a home for it. Vintage style with progressive values. Find us on Instagram utelittleruin Is there a little bit of Italy in your soul? Are you an enthusiast of pre loved decor and accessories? Bring vintage Italian style and history into your space with the pewter thimble. We source useful and beautiful things and mend them where needed. We also find gorgeous illustrations and make them print worthy tarot cards, tea towels and hand picked treasures available to you from the comfort of your own home, responsibly sourced from across Rome, lovingly renewed by fairly paid artists and artisans with something for every budget. Discover more at theputerthimble.com Deco Denim is a startup based out of San Francisco and it sells clothing and accessories that are sustainable, gender fluid, size inclusive and high quality. Made to last for years to come. Deco Denim is trying to change the way you think about buying clothes. Founder Sarah Mattis wants to empower people to ask important questions like where was this made? Was this garment made ethically? Is this fabric made of plastic? Can this garment be upcycled and if not, can it be recycled? Sign up@decodenim.com to receive $20 off your first purchase. They promise not to spam you and send out no more than three emails a month with two of them surrounding education or a personal note from the founder. Again, that's decodenim.com okay, next we're gonna listen to two messages back to back from Bonnie and Karina and they're gonna talk about these sort of, for lack of a better term, cult brands and how they build sort of these like, I mean they build communities around them. I was going to say quasi community, but they really are real communities. Just their origin is kind of weird. And there is this part of me that feels pretty strongly that when you leave the cult brand community or when you question the cult brand within the cult brand community that maybe you aren't as welcome as you once were. Let's listen to these messages.
- [116:58]
Bonnie
Hello, my name is Bonnie and I am from Michigan in the United States. I wanted to share my experience with a really small brand because I had not really thought about it in this context until I listened to your most recent episodes and it kind of blew my mind. In 2020 I had just had my third child. I had been living in nursing wear for the last like five years. I had a very small and curated closet, very, very small. At the time I own less than 50 items of clothing because we were building a house house and in the meantime living in my in laws guest rooms which was very limited on space because we didn't want to get a huge storage unit and all of those things. My husband was very much a minimalist but as I said we have three children and as with everything else it gets more complicated than it looks on Pinterest. But I discovered this brand and it was and is called Wool and like W o o L Ampersand and that was the brand. They were this really small brand, and I was so excited because it looked like they really matched my values. They had this challenge where if you wore one of their dresses for 100 days in a row, and yes, everybody always asks this, you could wash it. You got a hundred dollar gift card so you could buy a second one. And the whole premise of this challenge was supposedly that they were trying to show that you didn't need that many clothes. They were also talking about some of the odor fighting qualities of wool. I was so excited, I started looking through the dresses on the website, and at the time, there were only a handful of styles, and they were consistently sold out because they really were doing this very small batch thing and they weren't keeping up with the demand because so many people were excited by this. And as you've pointed out many, many times, we love a deal or the perception of a deal. And so I was just ecstatic. I combed through the available styles, but I had to be able to nurse my baby in it. So I was a little bit limited on that. And I noticed that most of the wool was blended with nylon. That was five years ago. Since then, I've learned to sew a lot of my own clothes. And I understand all of the reasons for incorporating nylon into wool. It makes merino wool far less delicate, makes it more washable, etc. Etc. But at the time, I was like, if I'm gonna do this, I want to do 100% wool. So I chose the one garment that fit those parameters, and I did. I Wore it for 100 days. And I. My mind was blown. I was. Because I took a picture of myself every day to document, and then I chose to post this online. You don't have to do that as part of the challenge, but it was incredibly beneficial for me to post those on Instagram. And I loved the Facebook group. I was just like, oh, my gosh, I have finally found my people. They care about sustainability. They care about all these things. Well, that was five years ago. Since then, the brand has only gotten bigger. I think they've had, at this point, more than 2,000 people complete the challenge, which is awesome. But as brands grow, they have to figure, like, the purpose of a brand is to make money. Even if you have a brand that starts off super small, you are going to have to make a choice to either stay small and deal with customers saying, why is your stuff always sold out? Or to make more things to make making money the goal. And that is what this brand chose to do. And I remember when I started to realize it, it was because they were running a promotion where they said if we bought enough, they were going to donate a certain percentage of the profits from our purchases, like that week or that month to build a break room for the employees in the factories in South Korea. And I just went, wait a minute. I bought at this time, I had like three of these dresses. I'd completed the challenge. I didn't have as many as a lot of the other people. But I also didn't feel like it was cool for other people to shame the people in the group who had more of these dresses. They were just excited. But that was the first time I went, wait a minute, why don't the employees have a break room already? Isn't that what we're paying for? Isn't that why we are paying, you know, more than a hundred dollars per dress to support a company that shares our values? And what happened was people who started questioning those things within the Facebook groups, those comments started disappearing, and then people would pile on because this is a Facebook group that had thousands and thousands of members. And so I got very discouraged by that and I left the big group and then I left all the resell groups because it was always tempting me to buy things that I still couldn't afford, even if they were secondhand. And there was this idea that if you're buying it secondhand, it's totally guilt free shopping, which we know is not exactly true. There's still shipping, there's still consumption. Like, I didn't need the temptation always. At this point, I had several of these dresses, and I also had a separate Facebook group with just my, so to speak, graduating class. The people in my group who'd done the challenge together, I thought these were the women who basically I was going to grow old with. Even though I'd never met them in person. I did end up meeting a couple of them. And they are wonderful people, people. But even in the context of that group, things happened where now being out of it, I've looked back and go, oh, we kind of formed our own cult based on clothes, which is really, really weird. So I wanted to offer that perspective. Just that I got so into a brand, it was like part of my identity. Like people at my family Thanksgiving would know how much I love this brand because I was constantly posting about it, constantly wearing their dresses, constantly talking about how life changing this challenge was. And at its heart, I do think that the the 100 day challenge and the dresses were really good ideas. But now that company does a drop at least every couple months. They psych up their entire Facebook group things so that they can sell and sell and sell. And when things things, they then claim that they will never do sales because that's not their business model. But then when they have to clear warehouses of which they have multiples, suddenly there will be a warehouse sale. And it's just, I think it's really easy to fall into this trap of thinking, well this brand is different and it shares my values, but a brand is a brand. And I just wanted to thank you for your amazing podcast and particularly these episodes which have made me think about things in a way that I had not before.
- [124:55]
Karina
Karina from Arinaskinatall on Instagram and I wanted to talk just about a phenomenon that I I see happening so much with particularly white middle aged women, which is what I am for reference and I find it really interesting. So I live in Canada, so some of the brands and things that I talk about might be more specific to here. But one of the prime brands that I think really exemplifies what I'm seeing.
- [125:25]
Amanda Lee McCarty
For.
- [125:27]
Karina
I don't want to call it cult like, but really there's a lot of overlap but a lot of obsession and just the over consumption that comes with middle aged white women getting really into one brand. And the one that I want to focus on is called Smash and Tess. You may or may not be familiar with them. They are a Canadian based brand out of Vancouver. They were founded in the late 2010s, a little under 10 years ago and their big thing was having comfy one piece rompers that were made of bamboo and were sustainable and made in Canada. So as you can imagine they did get pretty popular in 20202021 and they had a really big bust. I would say just given off of my observations on social media and in resale groups and such that they were likely they hit their peak popularity in 2022. There were a lot of pieces out there for resale, but what I found really interesting was on the buy sell trade group groups on Facebook, what was really interesting was just the sheer over consumption of how much people owned they really were brand that did a lot of greenwashing and talked about how they were bamboo and made in Canada and how that was better for the environment. But then they promoted a lot of small drops limited product and people started getting annoyed when they started repeating this product just in different colors or even the same colors for seasonal collections. Looking at you velvet Christmas collection that was supposed to be limited and then came out three years in a row. But what was really interesting was seeing how many people owned. There were people who would talk about saying, I have to get this, I must get this. And they would have 30 rompers in their closet. Like more rompers than days of the month. Like I get having three, four, maybe even five if you're at home all the time. This is something that's comfortable. You can wear it as pajamas. Pajamas, it's a really easy piece if you have young children that you're chasing after. Which was one of the reasons I ended up getting a few secondhand and a couple new. But nobody needs to own more than seven rompers. Like you don't need to do laundry that much. So it just, I thought it was really interesting that this is just a pattern that I've seen repeated. I saw the same thing with Stanley cups, even in Starbucks cups. Now apparently, according to all the over consumption videos I consume on YouTube, everyone is all into beaded bags from TJ Maxx this summer. It's just, I, I don't get why. I mean, I do get it, I do get it. I don't. I just think it's so sad that we as white middle aged women don't actually have hobbies and things that interest us that we need to go and latch on to over consuming something that I hope to goodness people can afford. Because in this economy it makes me wonder, but it just seems like a lot and it's something I keep seeing and you know, the basic stuff, like, you know, I remember going out one night with one of my friends and three out of the five women who I don't have a Costco membership. I don't actually like Costco because I just find it's a lot of over consumption, a lot of weight, least. But three out of the five women that had attended were all wearing the exact same shacket from Costco and laughing about it like fine, whatever, like you needed a jacket. It's a practical item. I hope you didn't buy three of them because goodness knows I've seen them in Plato's Closet with the tags on. But you know, I think that's just a little slightly bit different than going in this compulsive need to buy 30 $125 rompers. So smash and test, very interesting company. I would recommend you look in because the backlash when they started moving their production outside of Canada was intense. And I'm not sure where that's at right now because we have a big buy Canadian movement here. Right now I'm not sure because I stopped purchasing Smash and Test because I had what I need and haven't changed size. And I'm not sure if they're pushing that right now, but I'm willing to bet they are.
- [129:45]
Amanda Lee McCarty
Thank you to Bonnie and Karina. These are both really great examples of actually what I talked about, I think in the second episode in the series where we talked about these communities that develop around a brand, right? They might be via like a Facebook group, a subreddit, a discord, maybe all three. I mean, I can think of so many brands of all types that have that kind of loyal community fan base. You know, we talked about Aldi, we talked about TJ Maxx, Big Bud Press, New Works. Perhaps you heard Karina's message and you are, you haven't even listened to what I just said because you are getting ready to fire up a spicy message to her, to me, to both of us, about what she said about white middle aged women and kind of getting sucked into these brands and over consuming. Well, I will say touche. Karina is right. But what I will also say, as a person who has to go far outside my demographic on social media only, honestly, because of the work I do for Close Horse, I observe a lot of different kinds of people of different ages and backgrounds and locations and economic situations, et cetera. And what I will tell you is this desire to be a part of something and then finding yourself a part of a brand's fan base. It knows no boundaries of race or age or financial situation. Honestly, I see it all over the place. It can be Shein, you know, it can be Aldi, as we talked about. It can be the two brands that Bonnie and Karina talked about. It can be sustainable brands. It can be fast fashion, it can be grocery stores, it can be glossier and other makeup brands. It's all over the place. And sometimes it's really hard for me to observe these communities because consumerism, collectibility, shopping from every single drop is the cornerstone of the culture in these groups. Now some of them, of course, are also reselling in there, and that's great. Or showing people how to style things differently, how to order things in the right size, et cetera. That's great. But the group that always really gives me the most anxiety while it's tied one is the Aldi Isle of Shame group because people are getting up at the crack of dawn to go there on Wednesday and get the Isle of Shame stuff before anyone else does. And it's pretty low quality. It's made under dubious ethical conditions. And it. It is over consumption. Right. It's distressing. Silky is another group that really stresses me out. And Silky's on the other end of the spectrum. Right. It's a lot more expensive. A dress is 3, 4, $500 and up. And while a lot of the things in the Aldi aisle of shame, like, say, leggings or a dog bed, are inherently useful, silky dresses are not something that you can wear every day, Although I appreciate people who do. And there are so many posts I see on there where people show pictures of their collections and they have like a hundred dresses, and I'm like, wow, you're like 20, 30, 40, 50,000 deep dollar wise into selkie collecting, into these dresses that you can't wear very often. Some of them have closets and rooms of their home that are solely devoted to selkie. People post screenshots of their order from the recent drop, and it's like a couple grand, and they'll be like, oh, I guess I won't pay my bills this month. I mean, it's scary stuff like that where I have to take a step back and not let myself get into my head too much about it, because I will just spiral with a sense of doom. And the commonality of all of these groups, whether they are a sustainable brand or Aldi or the group on Facebook where people just find dupes of other brands on Shein. I mean, there's a group for everything, right? The common thread in all of them is that people find one another and have something to talk to people about, and people share their lives and photos of their lives and their engagements and their kids and their birthday parties and their weddings and on and on and on. And I think it's because they don't have the opportunity to connect with people in other ways. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way at all. I'm not no judgment here, because I feel that too, actually. I work all the time. I have very little time for relaxation, much less socialization. And that is a pretty standard state for many people in 2025. We are working, we are taking care of families. We are doing all the things that you have to do as an adult. I believe the millennials like to call it adulting. And just saying adulting is so funny. Wow, what a relic. But. But, you know, we're busy. We're trying to keep our head above water, which means we don't get to go out and hang out with people in person very often. But we are humans and we need connection. And one easier way to find community is to join these groups where people are brought together by what they like to buy and where they like to buy it. The problem is that one, this is a community based on shopping, and two, it often leads to over shopping, right? As I said in their earlier episodes about this, like, yeah, sometimes these groups get together and do awesome things and sometimes it's just a gateway to something even better for the people in those groups for becoming more activated socially and within their communities. But. But it still is essentially like a friend group based on shopping. And it makes me really sad. And I see how it leads to people buying more stuff and how it can sometimes be sort of a hollow transactional relationship. I think we need more opportunities to build community outside of shopping. And it's happening, right? I think people are starting to realize more and more that we need that. I think a lot of us don't know how to do it. I think a lot of us don't have time to do it or don't know how to make time to do it. And frankly, community is inconvenient, okay? And we, because we work so much, because we have so much on our plates, because we are so tired and overwhelmed, we need convenience, right? As I talked about in the previous episode in this series, convenience is a brand building tool, right? It is. Entire brands are built upon just making things more convenient for us. But what many of us are finding kind of all at once these days is that by opting for convenience, we've compromised our expectations, we've compromised our standards, and to be honest, we've compromised our values, which means we've compromised our humanity, right? And one part of sort of digging ourselves out of convenience culture is getting comfortable with things being inconvenient. For example, hanging out with people being inconvenient, sometimes annoying. And sometimes you won't like everyone. Sometimes you'll get stuck in traffic going there or it'll be boring when you get there, or awkward or all these things that I myself go through. Every time I try to go out and be social, I'm like, where will I park the car? What if people don't like me? What if people judge the fact that I have horrible fingernails? These are the things that I don't have to think about if I just join a Facebook group for other people who like to buy this brand of clothing, right? And so what do we do next? A few weeks ago, Dustin and I got to go to this thrift store that we like never get to go to because it has the worst hours. Like, it's only opened until 1, maybe 2pm on Saturdays, which is very inconvenient because we have to run all of our errands on Saturday because Monday through Friday I usually work from the moment I get up until it's time to go to bed. And then on Sundays, I work all day on Clothes horse and do all the laundry also at the same time. So Saturday's our big day. And we finally got to go to that thrift store a couple weeks ago and it was awesome. They have so many amazing vintage books and you can fill a paper bag for $5. Wow. And I found this awesome Holly Hobby limited edition Coca Cola glass that I'm pretty sure was probably from the 80s when fast food places and soda brands were always giving away glassware. And so this is Holly Hobby and it's really cute. It's one girl showing another girl how to do embroidery, which warms my heart. And it says on it, and this is the real reason I bought this glass, it says, says a good example is the best teacher. And this is something I think about a lot. You know, I have a platform here. You're literally listening to me talk right now. And it's not something that I take lightly. Right. Like, I am very careful about everything I talk about on here. I want to make sure I'm giving you the best information, framing it in the best way, and I don't know, hopefully inspiring and motivating you along the way. Right. And that means I am also very strategic about how I talk about things. Sometimes I have to rewrite it five times before I'm like, this, this is what I wanted to say. This is going to be the most impactful and motivating way to say this. And also it will hopefully help you feel optimistic. Right. Because we need that. And so I think a lot about my role as an example. You know, like, how can I lead by example, which is such a performance review kind of term. But leading by example is super duper important to me. If I'm going to teach you anything that is going to impact your life positively, I have to be a living example of that. And guess what? It's the same for you. If we're going to reach more people, if we're going to get more people to think about the people around them and less about shopping and hoarding dresses or sweaters or whatever else is being. We're being told we should buy a lot of to find happiness if we're going to build this better future and get more people to be a part of it, it's gonna mean they have to change a lot of things about their lives. And how they feel empowered and motivated to do that is by seeing us do that ourselves and be happy about it. Which is all to say that all of us need to be the good example so that we can be the best teacher. And one way that we do that is inconveniencing ourselves. You know, getting out there in real life, talking to people, dealing with the parking, taking the bus, even though it takes longer. You know, having weird conversations with people sometimes. And it will be inconvenient, it will be uncomfortable, but it'll also be awesome, and it will become more comfortable. I mean, the first 50 episodes of this podcast, having to speak into a microphone all the time and hear my own voice back, I thought that I might die. It was excruciating. But over time, I just got used to it and it doesn't bother me anymore and enabled me to, like, be more creative and do more digging into the stories I want to talk about. Because I was no longer like, ew, is my voice gross? Do I have to listen to my voice? Like, what? I mean, I think I may have mentioned this, but years ago, I was part of an incubator for women podcasters. And, I mean, I'm a non binary person, but, you know, I get to go to the women podcasting cohort. And one thing that shocked me is that no one except for me edited our episodes. Like, everybody was like, I just don't want to hear my own voice. I just record it and then I just release it to the world. And I was like, wow. Like, I love editing because it allows me to tighten up the story and do a better job and figure out what I missed. And I think that, you know, yes, I had to get over the discomfort of hearing my own voice, but it made clotheshorse so much better. And, I mean, if any of you are out there thinking about starting a podcast, please, please edit it. Seriously. It's good for you and it's good for your listeners. But that's just one example of how to be the best example, the best teacher. I had to get uncomfortable and I had to get inconvenient, right? And so I guess I just want to wrap this episode up, this part of the series about emotional branding, and tell you, like, listen. Unpacking our relationships with brands, sort of dismantling our own consumption habits, taking a second look at what we're seeing and absorbing on social media. These are all uncomfortable, they're inconvenient, but they're really important work that allows us to be the good example that becomes the best teacher. And my goal with this branding series has been for all of us to do that uncomfortable work together so that we can help others do it in the future. And so I want to thank all of you who have been listening to this series. I know it's been long, it's been meandering, it's been very detailed. I really thought there'd only be one more episode left in this series, but I think we got two because I didn't get to get into the other WGSN emotional branding trends. We'll do that in the next episode. So keep your messages coming. I want to keep telling your stories. I would love to hear what you think about this installment. And I also have an episode I want to do about Glossier, which is another cult brand with a following that has its own subreddit, where people really are like, encouraging one another to buy things, among other stuff. And I want to talk about how that brand kind of of harnessed emotional branding, but then perhaps has lost it recently. So we're gonna have at least two more episodes in this branding series. And honestly, like, I could do a hundred more because every time I think I'm getting to the end of it, something else emerges that is an important part of this story. And I've just really loved telling it all to you. So thank you. And yeah, let's get out there. Let's be the good examples that become the best teachers. Thanks for listening to another episode of Clotheshorse. Written, researched, edited, hosted all the things by me, Amanda Lee McCarty, a person who apparently gets good advice from a drinking glass. Seriously though, this class is great. If you liked what you're hearing, please leave a Rating A Review subscribe, tell your friends, tell your family, and of course interact with my content on the social medias. Like I said, in about a week and a half I will be doing a show in Seattle, followed by a show in Portland a few days later. Please get your tickets. I would love to see you there. And of course, thank you as always to my other half, Mr. Dustin Travis White, for our music and audio support. Oh, and one last thing, and thank you to everyone who sent in awesome, super thoughtful messages. I know, as I mentioned, how uncomfortable it is to listen to your own voice, so thank you for getting uncomfortable and inconvenient by recording yourself and sharing your stories with us. Bye Sam.