How Seed Brought Back Molly Baz to Times Square 👀
How the probiotic company helped bring back Molly Baz's banned ad back to Times Square, Gen Z's love of luxury fragrances, the booming wellness industry, Zyn shortage, and more!
GM everyone, hope you all had a wonderful weekend.
I celebrated my birthday with friends, catching up at Casetta, eating rock shrimp at Buddakan, toasting at Ray’s in Greenpoint, and taking photos in front of the Charli XCX wall.
Major shout out to Joey Scalabrino, owner of Leo and Apollo Bagels, for literally saving the day and getting me a reservation an hour before I needed it on Satuday. The meal was delicious!!!
Today we are covering:
The booming wellness industry
Gen Z’s luxury fragrance addiction
Molly Baz’s billboard drama
and more!
Seed helped bring back Molly Baz’s banned ad to Times Square. Last week, Swehl, the breastfeeding startup, revealed a new campaign with cookbook author Molly Baz. The original Times Square billboard featured Baz’s exposed pregnant stomach while she wore a sweater and bikini top, and held up two cookies over her breasts.
But after a brief run, the billboard distributor Clear Channel, told Swehl it flagging the ad for review, which is incredibly odd considering they constantly feature substantially more revealing imagery for other brands (think lingerie ads) The take down sparked a social media backlash and a wider discussion around society’s double standards for women’s bodies. Caroline Albro pointed out in her Brand Baby newsletter that ads for Jeremy Allen White in his underwear or Serena Kerrigan’s Joe & the Juice ad can run all over town without issue, but Baz’s image (she’s literally wearing a bra) was deemed as inappropriate.
But Seed, the probiotic startup, realized a major opportunity to bring back Baz’s ad, and add themselves into the conversation. They donated their ad space, and created two new corresponding billboards with the clever copy, “Dear Molly, thankfully we’re not lactose intolerant”
This move was really smart on Seed’s part. Not only did they bring back Baz’s ad, they made a powerful stance standing in solidarity and increased their brand equity by joining the conversation and creating real results. The campaign, despite being banned, brought an additional 200,000 users to Swehl’s site! We love a marketing happy ending.
Gen Z can’t get enough of luxury fragrances. Young teenage boys are increasingly spending (their parents) money on expensive, designer colognes from Yves Saint Laurent, Paco Rabanne, and Dior.
The growing trend, dubbed as Smellmaxxing, represents a shift in adolescent mens preferences, going from Axe Body spray to Maison Margiela. And there is a growing community of young content creators sharing their reviews of luxury scents. Jatin Arora is still in high school, but as amassed over a million followers on his TikTok account The Cologne Boy.
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Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browserThis is actually something I relate to a bit. When I was 13 or 14, I can remember wanting to ditch the Old Spice, and show my maturity by investing in a muskier, elevated scent. Young men in this age bracket have a tendency to want to develop collections (think sneakers) and now they’re turning their eyes to scents. This is a good thing (less BO) and I find this to be pretty harmless. The fragrance industry is way bigger than you’d imagine, representing $70B in sales in 2023. Its estimated to grow at a 7% YoY growth rate, so expect to see more brands and influencers lean into creating scents, like Bella Hadid with Orebella.
The ‘live-forever’ economy is booming. Spending on wellness is up to $5,000 a year per capita in North America (compared to $1,500 in Europe) and 82% of Americans view wellness as a top priority. This increased desire to optimize our heath and live forever is a boon for brands and startups offering increasingly expensive products/services to fuel growing demand. From pilates classes, luxury gyms, supplements, and more experimental treatments, the wellness industry is worth about $2T globally. My prediction is we are going to see more personalized, hardcore, and rigorous wellness offerings from existing players like Equinox (who just rolled out a $40,000 membership tier) and new brands in the space. The appetite to spend a ton of money on health is there.
Sporty & Rich is dropping 3 Adidas Spezial colors. The continued partnership between Adidas and Emily Loves’ aspirational, wellness focused brand has produced some really nice Samba colorways. But as Adidas tries to shift hype to their Spezial model, they are working with S&R on some fun colors. I think we are going to see a lot of these on the NYC streets this Summer, and a lot more Spezial’s in general as people want a Samba replacement.
There is a Zyn shortage in several states. The intensely popular nicotine pouch has found an entirely new customer base (yeah, I’ve got one in rn) over the past year, increasingly being used by young professionals to enhance their focus at work, and by some as an Ozempic alternative as Casey Lewis pointed out in After School. This increased popularity has caused some massive shortages. GET THE FACTORIES BOOMING!!!
EDITOR’S NOTE: an earlier version of this newsletter failed to properly credit Snaxshot with first reporting on Zyn being used as an Ozempic alternative. All credit to them, please go subscribe to Snaxshot 🖤
emily north is launching an advice column on her Angel Cake substack. This is a really smart way to foster more community engagement with readers. I’m hype to read some scandalous questions.
Okay gotta go! This week I have some incredible interviews and deep-dives in the works. See you tomorrow 🫶
Jake Bell is a content marketing and creative strategist based in NYC. He specializes in content creation, branding, art direction, creative strategy, and making things cool.
To learn more about Jake visit www.jb.studio
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this is also the first i’m hearing about a zyn shortage this is so important
HELL YEAAAAAAAA