“Absolutely LOVE the behind the scenes!! Incredible how you balance everything and I can relate with that crazy life and experiences🙈” - HSR Angel

ICYMI

Hello! Hi! Happy Sunday HSR!

I am writing this to you after my first Turkish hammam experience on the roof of our hotel in the Old Town of Istanbul, listening to the call to prayer echo across the city, and I am so grateful to be able to see so much of the world and share what sticks with me here.

I swear, I integrate into new cultures faster than anyone I know and it comes down to a few very simple things. I always take public transportation at least 2x, I find someone in my network who knows the local spots, and I figure out what the most iconic wellness experience is to that culture. For Turkey, I quickly learned that answer is a Turkish Hammam. So I arranged for a few Turkish friends to spend the afternoon with me at one.

As a self-declared global sauna, cold plunge, massage, and lymphatic drainage enthusiast, I had genuinely never experienced anything quite like it and I am glad I walked in with no expectations.

Stripping down to a pair of cotton underwear they hand you and having a woman exfoliate, bathe, and scrub every inch of your body while your friends are beside you is, to put it mildly, a freeing experience. But when I was done I was completely obsessed with how I felt, both physically in my skin and emotionally in my soul. It was a kind of healing I have not experienced before. My skin genuinely looked and felt better than it has in years.

And when I sat with it, it made complete sense. Communal bathing has been part of the human experience across almost every culture that has ever existed, from Ancient Rome and the Ottoman Empire to Japanese onsen, Finnish saunas, Russian banyas, Korean jjimjilbangs, and Native American sweat lodges. The throughline is identical across all of them: heat, water, community, and presence.

The need is ancient, yet I cannot fully explain if America is ready for it. Ready or not, it is coming regardless, and when I came back to write about my hammam experience I found the internet equally obsessed. A Women's Health article dropped two days ago covering what they are calling America's bathhouse boom, and when I started looking into the investment side of it, the numbers tell you everything you need to know.

Bathhouse, the Brooklyn-born luxury bathhouse operator, raised $35 million in a round led by Imaginary Ventures, the firm known for backing Glossier, Skims, Kosas, and Reformation, bringing their total funding to over $76 million. Othership, the Toronto-based wellness brand backed by Shawn Mendes and the founders of SoulCycle, has raised roughly $20 million to fuel its US expansion.

But it’s more than that - it even connects to something I’ve been quietly tracking in beauty industry. Body care is having its biggest moment ever, starting to outpace both skincare and cosmetics as the category consumers are most excited about. Prestige body care in North America is up 25%, projected to surpass $37 billion by 2029, with 82% of women globally now wanting skincare-level results for their body. The hammam is essentially the original body care ritual and no product on a shelf comes close to replicating what an hour in one of those rooms does to your skin.

I told our Turkish friend on the spot to open something similar in LA or NYC because I can feel it. The quiet, growing hunger for social experiences that do not involve alcohol, nighttime, or the isolation of a screen. This newsletter exists to keep you ahead of the consumer trends and behavioral shifts that will change how we live, and this one is yours to know right now, whether you’re a paid subscriber or not.

PS. I heard you loud and clear from the vlog 2 weeks ago and we are BACK with another one!! I am working on figuring out ramping up to weekly vlogs but for now feel confident that I can hand bi-weekly!! I hope you enjoy ❤

In case you missed it, last week I sat down with Aimee Smale, founder of Odd Muse, for my first ever London studio recording. She shared how she built a $30M fashion brand with no investors, turning £12K into one of the UK's fastest growing bootstrapped businesses through the power of community.

We talked about building a personal brand, doing scary things before you're ready, and why you don't need permission to start. If you're dreaming about launching a business, this is an episode you won't want to miss.💞

all the brands, people, places, things we’re gossiping about this week

Women’s Health & Beauty

Media, Entertainment & Creator

Consumer, E-Commerce & Retail

Tech, Business & Investing

Why the next generation of influencers people will have jobs.

The Wall Street Journal published an article this week titled “This Summer’s Hottest Arm Candy Is a Private Equity Boyfriend.” Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Olivia Rodrigo are apparently all hanging out with finance guys instead of the previous husbands and boyfriends they had who were “in the industry”. Somewhere along the way, apparently having a real job became hot again.

And I don’t think it’s only happening with men.

The women I find most interesting online right now aren’t traditional creators at all, they’re Chief Commercial Officers, CMOs, brand executives, investors and operators who have built real careers and are still in the office M-F, 9-5. And let’s be honest, everyone wants access to what they know, how they think and what they’re doing when the camera is off, because they are the ones building the $100M brands alongside the entrepreneurs that founded them.

But really, maybe that shouldn’t be surprising when you look at the numbers. On average, according to this article from Gettysburg College, people spend roughly 90,000 hours of their life at work, or about 1/3rd of their life. And that’s the average person clocking in at 9, leaving at 5 and presumably not answering emails all evening or working through the weekend, which, let’s face it, probably isn’t the majority of the HSR Angels.

For most, your job is your personality. Who you work for, and your “career” shapes a lot about what you know, who you meet, the rooms you get access to, the problems you learn how to solve and the experiences you have that someone outside of your industry probably never will. And up until 2010 with the rise of the creator economy, what someone did was one of the biggest things that made them interesting or influential. Until everyone wanted to become an influencer…

And I say that as someone who has built a huge part of my career on social media. I’m also not going to sit here and tell you the creator economy is dead and not something worth pursuing. I still think it is, if you do it the right way. But I wouldn’t have Hot Smart Rich without becoming a creator. TikTok completely changed my life for the better and gave me the ability to build an audience around things I was already interested in, like building early-stage consumer brands, angel investing, and VC.

But when everyone starts becoming an “influencer” and making the same types of videos, the content itself became less interesting….and not difficult to create.

This goes back to the thesis of last week and Variety’s article about being Alo’d out of influencers. You can only watch so many GRWMs, luxury un-boxings, and morning routines before they all start to blend together. There will obviously continue to be breakout lifestyle creators, like Alix Earle, who are exceptionally good at what they do and build enormous businesses because of it. But for everyone else, I think having an actual career (aka JOB) you’re passionate about might become one of the easiest ways to differentiate yourself online.

The next evolution feels even more obvious and is a huge opportunity for everyone who has a job (especially if its at a brand that people associate with being “cool”). And that might be you!!!

I’ve been thinking about it alot this week and am going to share:

So let’s get into it.