Good afternoon, everyone.
Today’s newsletter includes: The New York Times is launching a new podcast about New York City (it’s about time), tits are MAGA-coded, depressing news for fig lovers, depressing news for champagne lovers, a $6,000 matcha, is Biologique Recherche still the most coveted facial in New York, the fall campaign that stars Olivia Nuzzi, Nikki Ogunnaike-Fonzin, and Huma Abedin, and Kendall Jenner invests in magnesium.
THIS WEEK ON THE FEED ME JOB BOARD
📱 Creative Strategist at AppLovin. “In this role, you’ll own the creative strategy behind our paid social advertising. You’ll concept, brief, and iterate on ads that are genuinely enriching, while staying deeply connected to the metrics that determine what scales.” ($71,000 - $107,000)
🐝 Associate Manager, Social Media at Bumble. “You’ll help keep our channels active and culturally relevant by engaging with our community, attending events, spotting emerging trends, supporting social listening and reporting, publishing content, and jumping in to capture and create content yourself.” ($70,000 - $80,000)
💄 Fashion & Lifestyle Senior Account Manager at The Lede Company. “The Senior Account Manager will play an integral role in developing and executing strategic communications programs across a diverse portfolio of Brand clients.” ($95,000 - $115,000)
What role does a homepage play in 2026?
Earlier this summer, I was hanging out with my friend Emmett Shine (whose design work you’ve seen at Harry’s, Air, Sweetgreen, Warby Parker…), when he pulled up a trailer for his agency Little Plains’s new site. It was the first time I can recall an agency dropping a trailer for a website. It got me thinking later that night about the changing role of the homepage (there was a parallel conversation about personal websites happening on Twitter this weekend), and even how startups work with design agencies post-2020 DTC boom.
Below is a conversation that Emmett and I had a few days ago that I though you guys would enjoy as we all enter back-to-school mindset. In typical Emmett fashion, it comes with some of his hand-drawn doodles. I like this inspiration guide on the Little Plains site.
Emily Sundberg: Talk to me about the importance of an agency website. How many new clients have you gotten from people discovering your work through the site?
Emmett Shine: “While most client service work comes from warm leads and referrals, you still often need to introduce yourself to the world. With your own website, you can control how you present yourself, your work, and what you want to be known for. You can’t always control how you are presented on platforms like Instagram or LinkedIn. With a website, you can. However, a big not-normal goal of our new site was to build what a website in 2026-2027 could be.
We wanted to push the envelope by showing how agentic technologies are allowing us to build more intelligent, conversational, personal, and fun websites. Most websites are like clickable PDF menus from a restaurant. Websites should feel alive, be dynamic, and respond to you. So we wanted to build the website we wanted to see. I love watching old sci-fi films of what digital interfaces will look like in the future. Remember the floating screens from Minority Report? Let’s build towards that.
Lastly, I hope we can self-select people who get how exciting our interfaces are about to become. Not just websites but all things digital. These curious users can look at the site and immediately know we speak this language, see where things are going, can build it, brand it, and communicate it. It’s a showcase, or like a bat signal over Gotham.”
ES: What role does an agency like Little Plains play in a brand launch in 2026?
ES: “Rollouts and launches are increasingly a big deal. In technology, it’s a double-edged sword. I love working with startups; they’re brilliant, ambitious, and not precious. The hard part is that they move extremely fast, and often challenge everything.
I’ve always positioned our work as a sushi knife, not a Swiss army knife - meaning we go deep in a specific area instead of trying to do everything. As launches become more important, we’ve had to evolve a bit.
That means not only sticking to what we’re great at—branding, websites, etc.—but increasingly having to help with positioning, go-to-market, and launch content.
We now try to be a strategic launch partner. For example, we have built a full-time in-house motion, asset, and animation team because launches today need so much content: a launch video, enough material for PR, comms, social, merch, and often out-of-home advertising.
Founders need something closer to a full rollout package than a single deliverable. Whether you’re in CPG or at a frontier tech company, showing you have a point of view—and can execute it confidently and cohesively—helps make you attractive to users, talent, and potential investors at once.”
ES: What’s the right fit and the wrong fit for a brand or founder looking to work with Little Plains?
ES: “We talk to everyone. I remember being an intern reaching out to studios myself, so I try to respond to every inquiry, every email. Some of the most successful projects I’ve worked on in my career were ones I wasn’t sure about at first. It’s a good habit to explore each opportunity that comes across your desk deeply.
If I’m honest about who ends up being the best fit, it’s people who value storytelling and design, are curious about interactivity, aren’t afraid of technology, and know this work is worth investing in.
At the end of the day, we’re telling human stories, whether that’s for skin care or machine learning.”
ES: What are some recent sources of inspiration (books, movies, runs) that have influenced your brand work? Can you point out specific examples?
ES: Sometimes I check in on meme accounts to see what’s trending. When people zig, it’s helpful to zag. Your inspiration has to come from weirder places. Almost nothing today is ‘offline,’ but you can find stuff that is less ‘online’; deeper cuts, b-sides, lost references, or combined unrelated ideas.
I always think of the Nas line, No idea’s original, there’s nothing new under the sun. It’s never what you do, but how it’s done.
Great artists steal; history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. Etc. etc. We are social creatures; part of what makes being a human amazing is shared cultural experiences, some en masse, and some with a tiny niche audience you are a part of.
It’s a skill to find references, and it’s a skill to know how to apply them.
Some recent touchpoints for me:
Saul Bass’s archive and Jan Tschichold’s typography work for how disciplined and timeless good design can be.
Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows for how to deal with a changing technological landscape, and Stewart Brand’s book, The Maintenance of Everything for how I think about business and longevity.
I love vintage rave flyer archives, books like Antenne Publishing’s New York Rave Flyers. Xeroxed, hand assembled, zero rules, made by people often without formal training but who were having fun and speaking to a very insider-based community.
Cari Institute (Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute) is the greatest site on the web. Our team regularly goes diving into it during moodboarding sessions. Please go visit it and get wonderfully lost.
I spend a lot of sleepless nights buying weird things on ebay. I fall asleep and days or weeks later all these random dead-stock books or used hats arrive. Working so much in digital, I think I love surrounding myself with the patina of secondhand items.
Movies inspire me a lot. I watch a lot of old film trailers and film intros. I love the editing and the graphics of trailers and intros. I have hundreds of photos of film titles in my iPhone library. Every decade is an insight into the culture for that era.
I love film posters, especially illustrated ones, alternative posters, and ones made for different regions. I buy lots of vintage film merchandise. A logo for a film can be super 3D and full of motion on screen, then it has to be reduced down to one color embroidered on a hat. I love that.
Film soundtracks are incredible. I just read that Frozen was the biggest-selling album the year it came out, beating Taylor Swift’s 1989. I also listen to a lot of film scoring. I really like Daniel Lopatin.
I like campy films. I just rewatched Hackers, from 1995 starring a young Angelina Jolie. Parts of it are cheesy but a lot of the fashion, design, and soundtrack have stayed really relevant. My wife and I just watched the 2003 film View from the Top starring Gwenyth Paltrow, with Mark Ruffalo, Christina Applegate, Mike Meyers, and many more. It has a 13% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. No one knows about it. It is inadvertently very camp, with pretty great fashion, outfits, interiors, and design.
Films build immersive worlds that pull you in. The long tail of a great film extends into so many facets of modern life. Think of Disney. I like to draw inspiration from all this when building and launching brands. I like to make little worlds.
From the Feed Me Tip Line: A reader sent me a tip that The New York Times Metro desk is launching a new bi-weekly narrative podcast focused on New York City. To which I say, it’s about time. The show is in collaboration with Serial Productions, the production company behind the podcast Serial, which the Times acquired in 2020. The paper is hiring a Senior Multimedia Producer for the show who will also focus on all the extensions of the show – TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts (big investment in vertical video for social), and a newsletter. I wonder who’s hosting. Good opportunity to remind everyone that Subway Takes host Kareem Rahma used to be on staff at the Times.
“While we were pretending not to be looking, breasts had somehow become Republican-coded.” Did you know there were Make America Hot Again mixers occurring in New York City?
Argent’s latest campaign is studded with media stars like Olivia Nuzzi, Huma Abedin, Lindsay Peoples, Katie Couric, and Jennifer Siebel Newsom. If they got all these women in the same room for this shoot, it’s wildly impressive.
Kendall Jenner is now an investor in a calming magnesium drink called TRIP. I need one of those right now.
London- and Berlin-based architecture studio Casper Mueller (whose clients include Jil Sander and Celine) designed the new Biologique Recherche spa in Soho. Biologique Recherche used to be it — I remember feeling like a zillionaire when I went to Rescue Spa for the first time for a press day (for Glossier’s Solution in 2018), and seeing all of the Biologique products in the treatment room. I wonder what role the brand (and standalone spa) play in New York’s current esthetician landscape of Raquel’s and Sofie’s and Cynthia’s.
The City is pushing to re-open Columbia’s College Walk, which has been closed to the public since October 2023, in response to protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. Residents of Morningside Heights previously sued the university to open its gates and its cut-through on West 116th Street from one side of the campus to the other, which has been closed to the public for nearly three years, the closure of which, they claimed, was a violation of a 1953 agreement between the school and the city. In a recent court filing to the New York Supreme Court, the Mamdani administration joined them in supporting reopening the pathway to the public.
Another new video podcast: The Atlantic announced a new show with David Brooks, the longtime former New York Times columnist who joined The Atlantic in February, called The Permanent Questions. It premieres this Sunday.
A sign that matcha has finally peaked: a $6,000 Judith Leiber embellished matcha clutch, that appears to be nodding to the Erewhon font.
💥💥💥 The world is ending:
France’s 2026 champagne output is set to fall by almost half from last year as extreme weather (heat) batters yields. My recommendation for 2026 brides and holiday party hosts is to start getting curious about British sparkling wine. I had a few glasses at Andrew Edmunds with Louis Cheslaw last year and have been searching for it on menus since.
Moms are bullying other moms for putting Oreos in their kids’ lunchboxes.
Polymarket worked with podcaster Amanda Hirsch to encourage people to bet on the Lindsay Clancy murder trial. Hirsch quickly deleted the post, and posted a Notes App apology. Instances like this really make me wonder what people’s teams look like.
It’s a dreadful year for figs. Sam Rogers wrote an essay over the weekend about the horrors happening to this year’s fig crop – fermenting from the inside out, becoming homes for fly larvae, and overheating and dropping to the ground before ripening. Sorry to leave you with this news on your first day back from Labor Day Weekend.
I can guess what the Oreos bullying is about but in a better world it would be about not enough Oreos to share with friends.
the oreogate thing is bizarre - if it really was a marketing ploy by Suno ... even more reason why the world is ending