The Politics of Soho Spas

An unexpected defense of Sporty & Rich, the false promise of retailer marketplaces, and the overlap between George Saunders and brand strategy.

Amir Hamja/The New York Times

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Are we asking aspirational brands the wrong questions?

This (hit) piece on Emily Oberg’s Sporty & Rich paints a confusing portrait. It rightfully highlights the founder’s occasionally tone-deaf content, including vaccine skepticism and a misunderstanding of the relationship between income and diet, which you would think would put her out of touch with her left-leaning urban market. Yet, the brand will generate $30 million in revenue this year and open a Soho spa.

The article cites two of her defenses: her primary consumer base is composed of consumers who “DO have the option” of an Erewhon diet, and, more bluntly, “We’re making clothes, you know. We’re not finding cures to diseases and viruses.”¹ Positioning, messaging, targeting — the stuff of standard marketing strategy. Yes, her content is valuable only to the wealthy; also yes, they’re the only ones listening. Do we want to live in a world where a brand called Sporty & Rich takes responsibility for food deserts²? Might our healthcare system, rather than Emily Oberg, make ozone therapy as a treatment for Graves’ disease accessible? Do you want the next epidemic to be eradicated by a brand that sells $140 crewnecks? I hope not.

Let me be very clear: I find the brand redundant, a few years out of date. And yet, I can’t help but feel that this type of critique is an easy takedown, not a particularly productive one. Here’s why:

• First, anyone who manages a brand can tell you there’s no measurable return in catering to an audience that isn’t listening. (Again, this doesn’t excuse misinformation when it comes to, say, vaccinations, as we have the power as individuals to receive or not receive them, which, in turn, impacts their efficacy on the whole. Food accessibility is a considerably more complex matter, one with systemic and historical causes, among others.)

• Second, and more importantly, it takes social responsibility away from those that actually have it — politicians, to keep things simple. On any given day, my social feed might cast more blame on brands than the individuals who are not only voted into positions to institute meaningful change but can also suppress wider movements to do so.

• Last, and most importantly, it doesn’t focus on the areas where businesses like Sporty & Rich can have an immediate impact.

For example: Are its materials a sustainable alternative to its competitors? (Apparently.) Is its team diverse? (At least in part — Oberg is a female Filipina-Canadian founder.) Do its social channels demonstrate a commitment to diverse representation? (No, despite its gifting strategy “[consisting] of at least 70% POC at all times.”) Does it take the extra step of allocating resources to meaningful causes? (They say so, though details are sparse.) Will it pay fair wages in its spa? (We’ll see.) It’s all a bit hazy, and anyone who has ever worked at a brand knows the relative investment in these causes may be minor. Unfortunately, in this case, we don’t know, because the questions are never asked.

Don’t get me wrong: I can’t believe I’m writing what is essentially a defense of a brand called Sporty & Rich, and I know full well that the Times balances this type of coverage with the types that really do matter. But it is remarkable how little pressure is put on brands to take the steps they can take because it drums up more attention to focus on the ones they can’t.

Amazon is competing for ad spend by providing it.

First, a quick precursor for those that have dodged traditional retailers over the past several years:

• Brick-and-mortar retailers like Urban Outfitters, Kroger, Anthropologie, and Hudson’s Bay have all launched marketplaces that function essentially like Amazon: brands and their third-party sellers can list their products on these retailers’ websites without going through a traditional in-house buyer.³ Generally, you don’t even have to be sold in-store.

• Again like Amazon, most of these retailers are also launching ad networks of their own. This means, for example, you can buy your way to the top of search results on their websites. As a result, they are all fighting one another and platforms like Google for brands’ advertising budgets.

Not for the first time, Amazon recently played a card that, among third-party marketplaces, only it has played: actually subsidizing brands’ Google and TikTok marketing spend as long as it drove that traffic back to Amazon. It is simultaneously competing for advertising spend and giving up share of that spend because it also derives revenue from the sales that advertising generates. (By allowing on-platform sales of their own, Meta and TikTok are trying to do the same, but they generally don’t make a meaningful dent in a given brand’s marketing strategy, at least not yet.)

Investments like this reinforce my feeling that there’s no genuine long-term competition between Amazon and the retailers launching marketplaces of their own. Not only is Amazon’s ad tech the most robust — more tactics with more efficiency — but retailers’ strategies are still stubbornly influenced by their traditional co-op models, which require blind marketing investments for the honor of a bit of shelf space. Take this example:

• For Prime Day, Amazon would simultaneously pay for your TikTok campaigns and feed you back live data on how well they were converting to actual sales. Not working? Turn them off. Sort of working? Optimize. Working? Increase spend.

• Alternatively, you could allocate that spend to another retailer to run a campaign on, say, Instagram. They will likely demand in-house control, set a high minimum budget, and then commit to only telling you how many people saw or clicked on your ads. You won’t know how many conversions they drove, and worse still, you won’t be able to stop them once they have started. Instead of a dashboard, you’ll get a PDF at the end of it all.

In fairness, some retailers seem to be making genuine investments to mirror Amazon’s transparency. More often than not, though, when discussing growth strategy with these retailers, you’ll feel a strange imbalance — the sense that their confidence is inspired by a history that, honestly, doesn’t matter much anymore. Until that changes, it will be hard for anyone under pressure to drive profitable marketing growth to opt for an alternative to Amazon’s ecosystem, giving the platform greater advertising share and, in exchange, retail revenue.

To plan or not to plan?

I once worked on an omnichannel campaign for a national retailer that involved six months of planning, research, and creative production, only to have it launch to controversy and be immediately pulled off the air. Shortly thereafter, we invested an equal amount of time into the positioning of a major real estate development only to have the entire strategy replaced, mid-presentation, by an off-the-cuff idea from a team member. The campaign still launched on schedule, void of the entire strategic base, to success.

This is a standard agency experience: the strategy wins the contract, but the output carries only a semblance of it. This point is especially important in conversations with brands that are launching in a leaner, digital-first capacity — the line between planning to the point of excess and planning to the point of getting enough out into the world to learn from the data is a thin one. I have seen brands actually plan themselves out of business, burning so hot that they can’t afford to launch.

Importantly, platforms like Meta (via Advantage+) and Google (via PMAX) have grown to support the leaner approach, automating learnings at such a rapid clip that you can understand in just a few weeks what six months of strategy could tell you. Those learnings aren’t free, but they’re based on reality — actual, genuine, real-world consumer reactions, not selective research from fallible humans.

Anyway, this line of thought was sparked, oddly, by this essay from author George Saunders, whose creative approach has netted just about every conceivable award imaginable.⁴ The fact that those awards are born out of an inconsistent, malleable process, summarized by him below, is something I try to keep in the back of my mind.

My approach, as you know, is very different; I try to know as little as possible before starting, feeling that the thrill of discovery will be apparent in the prose.  I’ve also found that knowing too much in advance is dangerous for me, because the kinds of things I tend to know in advance are dull and predictable.  (Other people may be more capable than I am of imagining a complex, open, evolving moral universe.)

But this isn’t always my approach.  With some stories, I’ve worked more like     Wharton and Millhauser; I mull the thing over in my mind until a door appears, and that door often comes in the form of a voice, or sometimes a very simple sequence of events. 

I wish this quote would fly in a planning meeting, but I’d rightfully be kicked out. Instead, I suggest focusing on the beliefs that gave birth to your brand and see if the world shares them.

1. I should be clear about my position: I don’t think anyone should spout anti-vaccine commentary, particularly someone with 300,000 followers.

2. A thorough summary from the Annie E. Casey Foundation makes clear both the enormity of this issue and the complexity of solving it.

3. ModernRetail provides a thorough overview of the ups and downs of what is a substantial market shift.

4. Saunders has won the National Magazine Award four times, an Academy Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Booker Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Award, just to start.