Welcome to The Cool Kids Newsletter

Hello! This is the edition #2 of The Cool Kids Newsletter, the monthly email I send family, friends, and future Swifties (hi!). Glad you’re here.  Make sure you hit "Display Images" above if you want cute pupper pics.Article of the Month (AotM): Taylor Swift’s Marketing Machine: Brand and Marketing Lessons from ReputationHowever you feel about Ms. Swift, when it comes to marketing she puts on a masterclass. Case in point: With minimal appearances, interviews, and (relatively) little social media fanfare, her new album Reputation still managed to sell 400,000 pre-orders.Then in the first week, the album sold 1.22 million copies, cementing it as the best-selling album of 2017. How’d she do it? By building a loyalty program that circumvented traditional and digital media and going directly to the fans. In this article, I take a deep dive into the Reputation marketing campaign and the evolution of Taylor Swift.Cool things I found in the last 30 days:

• Lorde’s Melodrama. Been listening to this non-stop. Lorde was the only woman nominated for Album of the Year.

• This tweet from Jason Fried. “You can only iterate on something after it’s been released. Prior to release, you’re just making the thing. Even if you change it, you’re just making it. Iterating is when you change/improve after it’s out. So if you want to iterate, SHIP.”

• A successful fast-casual spin-off restaurant. Crushing it while everyone complains about dem avocado eating millennials.

• This wallet. Smathers & Branson designs crush it.

• This parenting lesson from Conor McGregor. The interviewer mentioned Serena Williams, who said she didn’t want her children to play tennis professionally, because of the pressure. Would he allow his son to fight? His response: “Life is pressure. Why shy away? What, there’s too much pressure in tennis? In [swinging] a racket? Anything you do at the high pinnacle is pressure.”

Thanks for reading! Hope you have an amazing 2018 :)Any questions, comments, or recommendations, feel free to reply directly to this email.P.S. We're hiring for a Growth Marketer role at Reforge. Let me know if you're interested!