🗽NYC networking event, pastel aesthetics are dead, TikTok x GIPHY

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Female Founder World
April 03, 2022

Hey, this is Female Founder World. If TechCrunch was a newsletter for consumer brand builders and their teams, it would look like this.

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In this week's email:

  • 🗽 You're invited: Female Founder World NYC Panel and Networking Event on 7 April

  • 📓 Resource roundup

  • 🗞️ Headlines of the week

  • 🎨 Pastel #aesthetics are dead. The brandvere is king. Is your biz ready?

  • ☕️ Founders react to Instagram's chronological feed update

  • 🎧 Latest podcast episodes: Parachute, Diem, TALEA, Kimai, Poppi

  • 🗓 Coming up on the podcast

🗽 You're invited: Female Founder World NYC Panel and Networking Event

Speakers: 

We are so excited to bring our New York community the perfect evening for consumer brand builders. There will be food and drinks by your favorite woman-owned brands (on us!), networking opportunities, and a panel event covering the tactics and tools driving traction for consumer brands in 2022. Our guest list already includes the investors, founders, and leadership teams at the biggest consumer brands in New York—you won't want to miss this.

Agenda: 

  • 6:00 pm: structured peer mentorship mixer. Come and meet your people (yes, they’re here!).

  • 7:00 pm: panel discussion begins

  • Food and drinks from your favorite female founded brands will be served (complimentary) from 6-9pm

🎫 Admission is free, but spots are limited and registration is essential.

See you there, New York 🗽

📓 Resource roundup

  • Commerce Club is a Facebook group for women ecommerce founders, recommended by Monica Grohne, founder of Marea. 🔗 Tell me more

  • Atomic Habits is the book fashion designer Tanya Taylor recommends if you want to eliminate self-sabotaging habits and clear the noise in your mind. Her other favorite, Obsessed, teaches how to create a brand that people love and your team believes in.

  • Ecommerce growth agency Common Thread published a free TikTok Ecommerce Guide. 🔗 Tell me more

🗞️ Headlines to know this week

SOCIAL MEDIA: TikTok partnered with GIPHY to create the TikTok Library, an in-app creator tool that lets you use content from GIPHY, including GIFs and “GIFs with sound” (short videos). TikTok thinks this will make it easier for people to start their own trends, using clips from their favorite shows, GIFs, and memes. 

DE&I: Fifteen Percent Pledge, the nonprofit launched in June 2020 by Aurora James to help address the racial wealth gap in the United States held a gala at the New York Public Library. The dress code: #BlackTieBlackDesigner. So far, 28 companies, including Sephora have come aboard the Fifteen Percent Pledge as partners, and the organization has generated almost $10 billion in revenue for Black business owners. 

BEAUTY: This week, Pharrell's brand Humanrace added a Humidifying Body Cream to its product lineup, signaling that a shift towards body care with skincare-like performance and ingredients is continuing to trend.

🎨 Pastel #aesthetics are dead. The brandvere is king. Is your biz ready?

If the 2010s were defined by pastels, San Serif fonts, and a conveyor belt of beauty and wellness brands that looked and sounded the same, the 2020s will be defined by gross aesthetics, insider jokes, and the death of blanding (bland, boring, copy-paste branding).

As Gen Z claims their stake on the economy, they’re declaring #aesthetics are dead and demanding brands deliver an offbeat, narrative-driven, character-rich brand universe—served up with a sharp sense of humor. The vibes are weird, chaotic, and a big middle finger to pretty pastel everything that dominated for the past decade.

“I’ve spoken to a lot of Gen Z founders about this,” Andrea Hernández, creator of food and beverage industry newsletter Snaxshot, told Female Founder World. “You need to remember that in 2010 while most millennials were turning 20, Gen Z grew up looking at this older generation’s bland pastel aesthetic. Now they’re adults and they hate it.”

Hernández, who calls DTC “direct to copycatting,” says we are seeing counter culture happening in real time. “Everything is cyclical. We saw yuppy aesthetics give way to counter culture ‘90s Nirvana vibes, and now in the 2020s we’re seeing this shift happening again in real time.” 

Licked Media is one example of a biz embodying this evolution. They created a spoof cereal delivering a not-so-subtle eye roll at millennials' obsession with iced lattes and cereal. Hernandez also points to Sea Moss Girlies, a wellness meme page and podcast for Gen Z that she predicts will become more relevant than GOOP in the next few years, as they “speak their generation’s language, better than millennials could ever translate it, their wit is undefeated, and their posts garner thousands of likes organically.”

“Gen Z brand builders aren’t faking it until they make it. They’re just making shit,” she explained.

We're at an inflection point. Brands who lean into the shift now will be rewarded for their creativity and storytelling, as it's almost impossible for competitors to copy and paste an authentic brandverse. And millennial founders are adopting the movement by creating detailed brand universes with outer space aesthetics and detailed storylines. Hibiscus water brand Ruby is one example. The beverage company held a party in a NYC Halloween costume store last week, treating guests to a magic show and a ‘Intergalactic Rubyverse Library’ experience that included a wacky 3D world created purely from the brand team’s imagination. 

“Ruby is the best example of brands building their own brand aesthetic. They don’t want to be blanded, and they’re finding obscure artists and creators to build a universe and story that is not easily replicable. They even have their own lore and origin story,” Hernández commented.

Did you enjoy this story? Look out for Andrea Hernández's interview on the Female Founder World podcast soon.

☕️ How founders are feeling about Instagram's new chronological feed

OK, everyone asked for it and now it's back: A chronological Instagram feed.

Let's recap: IG brought back a chronological feed option ('Following') and also introduced a new feature allowing users to view updates from their top 50 favorite accounts ('Favorites'). Testing started back in January and rolled out globally on Wednesday, 23 March. The default 'Home' feed still shows posts based on IG's algorithm, but by toggling to the 'Following' feed users will see chronological updates from accounts they follow.

Stories do not appear on the new 'Following' chronological feed. If users want to watch Stories, they’ll need to navigate back to the algorithmic ‘Home’ feed. 

Scrolling through the chronological feed certainly feels slower. It doesn't feel quite as addictive as the algorithm-based feeds, and it will be interesting to see over the coming months whether users actually choose to utilize the new chronological display option over IG’s algorithm-informed feed that most of us are now used to. If users do shift to chronological feeds, it may incentivize brands and creators to post more regularly to appear frequently in the chronological feeds of folks who follow them.

We've had the chronological feed for a week now, and brand founders are cautiously optimistic. "We are noticing more engagement and activity on the account overall," Jacquelyn De Jesu, founder and CEO of Shhhowercap told Female Founder World. Other brands are reporting a sharp drop in Instagram Story views following the update. 

At the very least, founders are feeling heard by the powers that be at IG, after a disheartening drop in engagement was experienced by many when the platform began prioritizing Reels in 2021.

"Psychologically it feels more valuable to continue to invest our time here—versus previously, without chronological, we'd focus on brand polish in the feed knowing that it was almost futile to pop without sacrificing who we are," Jacquelyn De Jesu explained. 

"As the social media landscape has evolved to cater to the lowest common denominator of what the algorithm incentivizes to pop to the top... it never felt like us creatively. So, it's nice to see Instagram recognize that what makes their algo sing is not necessarily what, in fact, makes great brands," she added. "All founders and brand builders need to keep their eyes open [about this] as the world continues to evolve and recalibrate to the role of social media in our lives and businesses."

If there's one thing we can rely on Instagram to do, it's to change. Stay nimble, founder fam.

What do you think about IG's chronological feed? Are you exhausted by the constant updates, or excited to see a shift to chronological? Are your followers using the new feed option? Our DMs are open.

👀 Freelancer recommendation: Good Side's copywriter and logo designer

Small and new businesses are built on an ecosystem of freelancers and consultants, and we want to let you know who's out there doing a great job for other consumer brands right now. 

Good Side is a six month old Aussie brand creating simple silk staples designed to be soft on you both night and day. Cofounders Danielle Selig and Anna Niedermeyer come to entrepreneurship from creative backgrounds and were hands on during the process of designing Good Side's look and feel, but they also worked with two superstars to bring the biz to life: Ted Guerrero on the logo design and Anna Lei on brand copy. 

🎧 Latest podcast episodes: Diem, TALEA, Kimai, Poppi

Catch up on the conversations you missed.

  • Ep 52. Parachute Founder, Ariel Kaye, On Building a Home Decor Empire

  • Ep 50. Reimagining a Women-Centered Internet With Diem Cofounder, Emma Bates

  • Ep 49. TALEA's Building the First Female-Led Brewery in New York City

  • Ep 48. She Invented a Viral Beauty Tool With a 3D Printer and TikTok: Contour Cube

  • Ep 47. What Happen's When Meghan Markle Wears Your Jewelry Brand?

  • Ep 46. Her Beverage Biz Hit 1 Billion Impressions and Landed on Shark Tank: Poppi

👀 Coming up on the podcast 

🎧 Monday: Kerrigan Behrens, Sagely Naturals 

🎧 Wednesday: Michelle and Mo Mokone, Mo's Crib

🎧 Friday: Nisha Dua, BBG Ventures

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