Just How Big Can Fashion Substack Get?

Emily Schuman thought she was done writing anything longer than an Instagram caption.

With Cupcakes and Cashmere, where she started posting daily updates since 2008, she became one of the first fashion bloggers to turn her side hustle into a multi-faceted business, eventually hiring a team of writers and editors and selling jewellery, homewares and more online. But by 2021, she stepped back from posting to focus on her e-commerce shop.

Then came Substack, the newsletter publishing platform that has convinced fashion to fall back in love with longform for the first time since Instagram took off in the early 2010s. While blogging had moved “further and further away from how I had started back in 2008,” Substack, Schuman felt, provided an opportunity to go even “deeper, not as Pinterest perfect … as in the 2010s.” She launched her newsletter, Fwd: From a Friend, in February; already, she has over 110,000 subscribers and is #16 on Substack’s fashion and beauty ranking.

Schuman is one of several high-profile recent additions to Substack, which has increasingly gone from a launch pad for writers and former editors striking out on their own and a way for influencers to diversify their income to attracting big names. In the past six months, that’s included brands like Nike and American Eagle, founders like Crown Affair’s Dianna Cohen and Hill House’s Nell Diamond, stylists such as Allison Bornstein and Abby Arad and fashion podcasters Nymphet Alumni and Style Zeitgeist’s Eugene Rabkin.

“The floodgates have really opened within the last year,” said Christina Loff, the head of lifestyle partnerships at Substack, of fashion’s adoption of the platform.

For the early adopters, however, the stakes are changing. Many of the brands, celebrities and founders who recently joined Substack aren’t charging for their content, viewing the platform as a way to connect with potential customers rather than as a subscription business. Some writers who are counting on readers’ monthly payments say the competition is altering the economics of the newsletter business, and not necessarily for the better.

“It was a lot easier to convert somebody when there were less people on the platform, and asking someone to pay $5 or $10 a month wasn’t as big of a deal,” said Jess Graves, the writer of the Substack newsletter “The Love List,” who has been publishing on the platform for over four years. “Few people will subscribe to 30 different Substacks and pay for all of them.”

Fashion publishers of all stripes are also running up against Substack’s limitations: the platform doesn’t offer support for selling ads or sponsored newsletters, two common ways they make money elsewhere. Substack has no plans to add these features, believing subscriptions are “the best model for monetising,” Loff said, adding that they’ve not seen evidence of subscriprion fatigue. (One possible reason: Substack’s top echelon is dominated by political and business newsletters, where ads and sponsored posts are less common).

For now, the benefits — having a place to connect directly with followers and earn subscription income — outweigh the negatives. Still, keeping that community happy and publishing regularly is a priority for Substack, which announced on Thursday it raised $100 million in a Series C funding round, with participation from Skims co-founder and CEO Jens Grede. The company’s primary source of revenue is the cut it takes from subscriptions — reportedly bringing in about $45 million, or a little under 10 percent of what creators receive annually. Fashion newsletters represent $10 million of that, and are growing fast, according to Substack, with both the number of publications and subscriptions doubling over the past year. It sees beauty in particular as a space with room to grow, too.

“When we have these new platforms, people are more open to exploring before it becomes too formulaic,” said Nya-Gabriella Parchment, the vice president of brand partnerships, UGC and marketing at influencer management firm DBA, which represents Schuman. “Everyone’s just trying to figure it out.”

Substack as Community-Building Tool

For founders like Diamond and Cohen, Substack allows them to experiment with a platform their influencer partners are using, but also bring a more personal touch to their own brands. A recent post from Diamond, for example, detailed the behind-the-scenes chaos of a 2021 launch that at the time was its highest sales volume day to date. Cohen, meanwhile, offers a hair tip at the end of every post, even if the larger content is unrelated — a subtle nod to Crown Affair.

“Substack allows me to give context to Crown Affair and have it live in a more evergreen way than an Instagram Story or a Tiktok,” said Cohen.

Substack’s community elements — where newsletters can host chats for subscribers and readers are fed a consistent stream of recommended content — also help boost awareness.

Rose Colcord, founder of London-based Cou Cou Intimates, moved the brand’s “Cou Cou Talks” content series over to Substack in May from its own website, where she said it hadn’t gotten much traction.

“When people go on a brand’s website, they’re there to shop, not to read,” said Colcord. On Substack, meanwhile, readers are fed a consistent stream of recommended content, which brings in more eyeballs.

Larger brands, like Nike or American Eagle, also use Substack to foster community and further build out their brand worlds. Both have enlisted writers on the platform: American Eagle hired Casey Lewis, the author of the Gen-Z culture-focused Substack After School, to write the first three editions of its newsletter, Off the Cuff.

Even without a high-profile author, the key is making it feel personal. The RealReal’s Substack, which launched in March, for instance, is authored by an anonymous author called The “RealGirl;” in her opening post, she lists the ways she’s similar to the site’s most devoted customers, suggesting they “might even own each other’s clothes.”

“You have to find a way to talk to people about things they are already thinking about and interested in,” said Kristen Naiman, chief brand officer of The RealReal.

The Challenges Ahead

Big brands like Nike, and successful influencers like Schuman have a built-in audience ready to subscribe. It’s harder for less well-known writers to get noticed as Substack becomes more crowded. They need other ways to make money, said Graves.

“[Subscriptions] are not enough of an income for just about anybody on the platform, unless you have tens of thousands of paid subscribers, which very few people do,” she said. She added that she’d like to see Substack create its own built-in advertising tools, or offer integration with platforms like LTK and ShopMy, which help creators line up sponsorships and use affiliate links.

Not everyone is waiting around for Substack’s next move. Some newsletter writers are jumping ship for rival platforms like Beehiiv, Ghost and Patreon (though there’s plenty migrating in the other direction as well). Graves said she regularly considers leaving. Stylist Subhrina Heyink, for example, decided to shut down her Substack newsletter last month, explaining that it felt that fashion Substack was dominated by sameness, alleging that the platform gives preference to those that fit that mold.

“[Wearing] The Row is the standard, and it’s like, ‘Okay, so if I don’t wear The Row, does that mean that you don’t take me seriously?’” she said.

Graves said the cookie-cutter newsletter problem could be rectified in part with more personalisation options, which Substack has offered to some of the platform’s biggest users, including former New York Times’ columnist Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, which allows for custom typefaces, homepage layouts and more, making it feel more like a true publication and less a newsletter. A spokesperson for Substack said that is part of a limited test, and they are “working on making more of these features available” to a wider audience; just this week, they announced they’d be allowing users to select a cover photo for their pages, while bestsellers can change the colours.

But while some want their Substacks to more resemble a freestanding website, others appreciate its simple nature. For Heyink, for example, the added pressure to use features like Notes — Substack’s Instagram-esque feed, where users can share photos for likes and comments — contributed her feelings of exhaustion.

The expanded features, though, are bringing in new talent. Substack’s increased focus on audio, for instance, was part of what encouraged the Nymphet Alumni podcasters to make the move, with host Biz Sherbert saying “the ease of the UI has been really nice for creating more types of content.” Now, they’re publishing more written content in addition to their weekly episodes.

It’s an important reminder that, despite the fact that algorithm exhaustion is often cited as an impetus for joining, Substack itself is a platform, just as Instagram and TikTok are.

“Substack could be bought by Meta tomorrow, and that could change the whole algorithm,” said Parchment. “You just never know, so you want to have a space that you can totally own.”

Joan Kennedy contributed reporting to this story.