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

Imran Amed (0:04)

Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of The Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF Podcast. It's Friday, September 25th.

Every weekday morning, a certain slice of New York opens the same email. They are lawyers, bankers, editors, restaurateurs, the city's most plugged in people. It's called Feed Me, and it's written by Emily Sundberg.

In a few short years, Emily has turned a newsletter she started at her desk into one of the most talked about new media publications in New York. She built it all herself with a paywall from day one, with no outside investors. Her readers are exactly the people fashion brands are trying hardest to reach. Smart, skeptical, and very aware of how they're being marketed to. And that makes Emily one of the sharpest outside observers of our industry today.

Emily Sundberg (1:00)

I just never underestimate how clued in and informed my audience is. And I never want to speak down to them or underestimate how much they know about the world that they're living in.

Imran Amed (1:14)

This week on the BOF Podcast, Emily joins me to talk about building a media business on instinct and why the customer's fashion most wants to reach may be the ones it understands the least. Here's Emily Sundberg on the BOF Podcast.

Emily Sundberg, welcome to the BOF Podcast.

Emily Sundberg (1:37)

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Imran Amed (1:41)

I want to start with your growing up in a place I know absolutely nothing about. I hadn't even heard of it. I've obviously heard of Long Island, but I've never heard of Huntington.

So for those of us, including me, who don't know what it means to grow up in a place like Huntington, tell us a little bit about it.

Emily Sundberg (2:04)

Yeah, I grew up in a town called Huntington, which is about an hour, 10 minutes away from the city. My family is from Long Island, so like my parents grew up there. They met in high school. My grandparents are from Brooklyn and Long Island as well. So it's really all I know. I spent most of my life identifying as a New Yorker, Long Islander, and I would say my town was a real middle class mix. Like my neighborhood itself, I had neighbors who were fishermen, like lobstermen, and then I had neighbors who worked on Wall Street. There wasn't like a cohesive income level or anything like that. It was really beautiful. I grew up by the beach, which was lovely, but I could also take the train into the city with my family. We came in a lot. But I had this I always had this feeling that I think a lot of, you know, you hear like David Remnick talk about this or a few other other, you know, prolific writers and founders now this like who grew up in the tri-state area, this like bridge and tunnelness of being so close to Manhattan, but not quite there. So you could often see the the skyline from maybe you were at the beach or on the water or in the car and you'd see it out in the distance, but you were never quite there. Like growing up. I remember my mom worked in the city and she'd come home from the train and I'd hug her coat and she'd smell like pretzels and cigarette smoke and these things from like a land far away and then she was back at home in our house and it was like okay there's something that she's going to do that she's leaving to go be a part of and then she comes back to like our little bucolic backyard. Yeah I mean I went to like a very normal public high school.

I partied a lot. My friends played sports. I painted. I you know I did the announcements every day in high school which was like a fun little foreshadowing. Like over the intercom?

Like over the intercom. Good morning. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. Uh birthdays things like that. Any other like announcements that were important. Signing up for you know like field days or something.

And I got a really good experience in middle school and high school. I felt like my creativity was really encouraged and I wasn't you know like in a in a very strict academic household. My dad's a teacher. So I you know like it was sort of like a normal healthy upbringing. But I spent a lot of time on the computer. And whether that was like Facebook talking to people from other schools who maybe seem to be interested in the same kind of like music as I was or spending time on Tumblr talking to complete strangers who maybe liked the same magazines and books that I did. And it was something that I always viewed like playing on the internet always felt more like playing like a playground than like a minefield which I think so many people feel like spending time on the internet is today. Like you're just waiting to hurt yourself. And I didn't have that experience. I really enjoyed finding communities online that I connected with and using new like social media platforms or whatever you want to call those early sorts of things. And then when it came time to apply to colleges, I could go to any state college in New York. That was sort of the deal with my parents. Like we'll help you with college if you go to a state school. And FIT, as you might know, is the only state school in New York City.