Chaos Ensues
What’s up guys, this newsletter appeared on Cool Material’s homepage again and I got a nice lil bump in new subscribers so welcome, everyone! I’ve been toying with doing a sort of unconventional gift guide —I plan to send that out to all the paid subscribers next week so pay up!!
If you haven’t heard already, Goat Group has bought out Grailed which has meant a lot of speculation in the group chats and uncertainty about the future for myself and my friends who still work there. It’s been a too-close-for-comfort reminder that job security in tech is increasingly fraught and fragile, especially with all of the other recent and pending layoffs. I’ll be transitioning to a new team at Goat Group apparently, which I’m grateful for, but it’s also hard not to feel like the golden handcuffs are a little too tight at times. I love clothing, especially resale, but the reality of my role at Grailed over the years has become so removed from the people and the aspects of the community that I love and that got me involved in the first place. I mean, it got to the point that I revived my old blog in the form of this newsletter to rekindle that connection. The devil on my shoulder has me itching to throw a wrench in everything and shrug off my financial responsibilities to pursue something I might be more passionate about. But for now, I’m better off channeling that spirit into side hustles until I have some real financial stability.
This week, I was so happy to grab a coffee with a fellow enthusiast and aesthete, Doug (Ethan Wong wrote about him a couple of weeks ago on his blog), and sort of vented to him about work-related stuff over coffee while gushing about our mutual friends and influences (Aaron Levine, Ralph [always Ralph ❤, The Row, Lemaire, Gauthier Borsarello). If you know me in person, I have pretty bad social anxiety (much like my early influence Mark McNairy) which has led me to be more reclusive than I’d like to be and I’ve probably missed out on some meaningful connections over the years. Hanging with Doug reminded me of everything I love about clothing and style. Mostly, sharing and participating in the culture. For now, the most I do is write this newsletter, but I’d love to get involved in other ways. (Maybe I should get on TikTok…)
Anyway, I’ve rethought my formatting lately and am probably going to combine updates/musing and product recommendations into a weekly sort of thing with some sort of paywall for access to the juicy bits. If you wanna read the rest of this newsletter and peep what I’ve been into lately, this is your cue to subscribe.
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