Is Anyone Going to Get Rich off of Email Newsletters?
It’s unclear to me whether anyone has ever fallen in love over email, but it’s true that the only friendship I’ve ever succeeded in initiating via the internet started in my inbox.
Peppermint oil, face spackle, Glossier girls, the physical indignities of “William DeBlasio’s New York”—these were the subjects of Claire Carusillo’s email newsletter, My Second or Third Skin, later renamed That Wet Look. It was half “off-label” product advice, half an absurdist performance of the type of consumerism practiced by upwardly mobile Manhattan white ladies.
The TinyLetter had a recurring yogurt-review segment done solely in GIFs and called, for reasons I don’t think were ever explained, “Bear Bear’s Big Skyr Country.” Carusillo would share sincere-ish thoughts on whether to shell out $20 for some buzzy new lip gloss and then give herself a facial with pimento cheese; the emails had subject lines like “Vaseline my teeth up,” “Water made exciting,” and “an amazing story please click i’m laughing to myself so much.” It was deeply weird, and obviously meant for a niche audience.
“I’ve never really been hoping for mass appeal, and whether that’s disingenuous for me to say … I’d probably have to examine that further,” she told me. “I joke that my dream job is to be an E! News correspondent.”
Carusillo is, like Taylor Swift, a keen observer of the human condition and a shrewd businesswoman. I read her newsletter, I sent her a message on Twitter, and soon enough we were friends—I wrote about her in my newsletter and she wrote about me in hers, which is called synergy. I did not hesitate to fork over $5 a month when she migrated “That Wet Look” over from TinyLetter’s free service to the short-lived platform Double Bounce (founded by her brother Alex Carusillo) in 2017, beholden as I was by extreme loyalty. I would have paid $50!
I’m making it sound like I have portraits of her tattooed on my thighs and talk to them every night before I go to bed, but only
