Memorable Over Measurable: Retail’s Lost Wonders

0:00Phillip: Welcome to Future Commerce, the podcast at the intersection of culture and commerce. I'm Phillip. And something that's taken me by surprise recently is the amount of deep dives and archival work that is going into like telling stories of our retail past. And I think that's intersecting with a really interesting time in our culture where we're wanting more experiences. I've been saying a lot that we're in the experience economy and it feels like history repeats itself. we have lived in times before where retail experience was paramount, was really important. And no one is doing it better than telling the stories of those types of spaces and the world that we used to live in than our next guest.

0:42Phillip: Emma Applechozik is a writer, creative strategist, the founder of Great Collab, and a once and future guest here of Future Commerce. We've collaborated in the past before, and she tells stories on social media, short form virtual video, and does all kinds of things these days. Glad to have you back to the show, Emma. I'm excited to talk about a lot of things today.

1:02Emma Apple Chozick: I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me back.

1:05Phillip: Yeah. Last time you were on, you had just launched Great Collab. I think we were talking about some really interesting work that you were in the middle of at the moment. I'm really just curious what's the work looking like today and what's fascinating you at the moment.

1:19Emma Apple Chozick: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it's been almost three years since I've launched the consultancy, which is crazy. Um, I think, you know, when I started Great Collab, the work was really about, you know, helping brands tell their stories. Strategic partnerships was really core to like the business and it still is. And thinking about how do brands do things that are culturally resonant and, you know, talk to their audience and storytell across different platforms. And I think as, you know, time has gone on, I was, you know, doing content partnerships, like one-off here and there with brands and continuing to do my own content on different channels.

1:59Emma Apple Chozick: But I think, you know, obviously as, as you continue to work with people, you go deeper in partnerships and you go deeper and work with brands. And so it's been just really fun, I think, to, to think about, you know, what are the stories that I want to tell and who are the brands to work with and tell those stories. And also, how can I help brands better connect with their audiences and think about building projects that have longevity to them, too, which I'm sure we'll get into here.

2:30Phillip: What has changed about the content, the stories that you've been most interested in yourself versus what's resonated with your audience? And is there something between those two dynamics that you feel like is driving more interest in the consultancy? Like what are brands interested in? brands are incredibly interested in i think editorial judgment and taste and i think taste is like getting a big i don't know like it feels like a buzzword the same way that when i

3:05Emma Apple Chozick: joined thing testing in 2021 i was the first community hire and i remember community being like the coolest job to have and then i took on the curation and like curation was like the coolest thing. And all of these things are products of taste. And taste is obviously completely subjective. But I think when a brand resonates with a particular person's taste, that's not replicable. A brand can't create that on their own. They can try, but it's never going to feel authentic. And I think that's why we're seeing so many brands want to partner with people who have their own judgment and their own taste and their own audiences who come to them for those specific things.

3:47Emma Apple Chozick: So I think, you know, it's been really just, I guess, fulfilling to, to work with brands where they say, Hey, we want to work with you. We don't actually know. Sometimes they say, we don't even know what we want to do, but like, we want to do something. What do you think? Versus, you know, sometimes a brand will come to you and say, Oh yeah, we need to like redo our website and blah, blah, blah. And then you find out actually, you know, you just need to like reposition who you are or you need to talk. And so like, I think brands are getting more comfortable coming to people that they respect their tastes and opinions and judgment and saying, what do you think?

4:26Emma Apple Chozick: And then building and shaping something together.

4:28Phillip: Holiday starts early on Walmart Marketplace. Apply to sell and get your inventory to Walmart fulfillment services by September 15th to prepare for millions of holiday shoppers. That's right. Build your seasonal assortment with something called customer favorites. That's products that Walmart customers already love and they are actively searching for. Then you add eligible customer favorites to your catalog and you as a merchant, you can receive up to 100 % off referral fees on those items. So I don't know what you're waiting for. You can get holiday ready with Walmart Marketplace. Sign up today.

5:08Phillip: At marketplace.walmart.com slash future commerce. That's getting holiday ready with Walmart marketplace and 100 % off referral fees. When you use customer favorites, visit marketplace.walmart.com slash future commerce. I think that when I think about how we have known each other over, like, I think we're working on four or five years now and the journey you've taken, I have always thought of you as a person. who has cultivated, you know, a very keen sense of taste of many things, not just one thing, right? And so when I look at the content that you've created, it feels demeaning almost to call it content.

5:51Phillip: But it's like when I look at the research that you've done, and you've put it out into the world in various formats, whether it's something on a sub stack, or you've created video about it. It's, it's always, uh, it always feels like uniquely you. Um, but it seems like you're following new passions, uh, these days. And I'm, I'm really interested in how your interests can guide what brands invest in versus being pulled into what brands want you to do, which I think is always the tension in the relationship between like a, not just a content creator or a collaboration partner, but also in the consultancy realm.

6:37Phillip: I just, uh, like a quick glimpse of me, I spent 10 years agency side and we weren't very careful about it. And next thing, you know, like all we ever did was like footwear and wellness and like, you have to be extremely intentional in not just the relationships you form, but also in how you form that image of yourself in the world too. I think you've done that really well, but how much do you think about that?

7:05Emma Apple Chozick: I think there's a piece of it where I think about that and there's a piece of it where you ultimately just have to go with your gut. I appreciate you talking about the length at which you feel that I've been doing this across my career. Because when I joined ThingTesting years ago, I remember talking about in my interview there that I was just excited about brands that were doing more than selling a product. And I think that's what I've always been interested in is the story behind things. As a kid, I loved that show, how it's made. The context of things is really relevant. And so whether I'm doing consulting work or I'm working you know like doing a content partnership all of those things kind of live in the same world and that's also a new thing that I'm realizing about my work as well like totally transparently is like they all kind of feed off of each other if I'm making a video I'm also helping to uncover what is the insight or like tension point or story that we want to tell together it's not just very rarely is it like here's the brief make this video and there's plenty of creators that do content like that.

8:16Emma Apple Chozick: And I, I respect it and it's great, but it's not really how I operate from a content perspective. And it's like the same reason that sometimes I won't post a video for two, three weeks. And I remember having a conversation at one point with a potential manager and they were like, you got to be posting every day if you want to, if you want to, you know, grow. And I was like, well, I don't know if the goal is actually quote to grow. I think the goal is to work on a really like compelling projects that are aligned with what I'm interested in can reach new people but like the goal isn't always reach and I think I've I've always sort of straddled that line of it between yeah it's great when something goes viral but also why did that thing go viral?

9:04Emma Apple Chozick: Did it go viral because it hit a point that people really resonated with? Or did it go viral because the hook was a clickbait? And obviously people watched past the first three seconds.

9:17Phillip: And it's interesting to have virality, our measure of virality has changed dramatically. And, you know, in my lifetime, the last 10 years in particular, I think just anything that breaks out of, uh, you know, what is locked into like the very small amount of reach that a brand's organic reach has today in a brand account, um, is some level of success. I think it's why personal brand is so important, um, these days too. And I think like almost everything comes down to the design of the system, like is, leads to, and the incentives within the system sort of leads to all of the behaviors that you see.

9:58Phillip: And that's why there are so many partnerships, I think. And there's why so many people have to partner with people who've cultivated large followings is because the incentives in the system exist in the system that require that ecosystem to exist. I think we've arrived there. I think it's fairly healthy, but also we're kind of better for it because I don't know that anyone trusts a brand's taste necessarily. By and large, you know, for every Apple or in bygone days of Apple, you know, there's a million others who have, you know, there is no taste. We talk a lot about brand cultural relevance, but like, what do you think is like, who are the most interesting brands today?

10:40Phillip: Like, how are they engaging in the world? What are they doing? And like, And how are you working with them?

10:47Emma Apple Chozick: It's a big question. There's this question around what is a culturally resonant brand, an interesting brand. I think, obviously, you have large fashion houses that do incredible brand work. Looking at what Prada just opened at their Milan store and the Prada Foundation that they have there, which is one of my favorite museums in the world. And honestly, the art is incredible. But also if you go to the bathrooms there, they're like incredibly designed in the coat. The coat room is incredible. Like all these pieces like help feed into the cultural story that a brand is telling. but I think you know the most culturally resonant brands today are the ones that like operate from a place of like yes authenticity but they also know like when when to speak and when not to and like what is for them and what's not for them and there's sort of like that discernment that you have to have and there's a piece of like I always talk about like conviction I think it's so obvious when a brand is like just doing something for the sake of doing it versus doing it because they have a true conviction and need to put it out into the world.

12:06Emma Apple Chozick: And sometimes those things take years and years. And sometimes they throw them away a million times before they put it out. But those are the brands that I am most interested in knowing about and also the brands that I think will have the most longevity.

12:19Phillip: Yeah. And two, I think you can't just turn... It's not like you just turn on whatever new hot channel is and there you go. You're relevant now. Although I think we might talk about Substack in a little bit. But I do think there's, for every Prada that's going up, right, and building, you know, Mecca to its top customers, you also have St. Laurent that's going down and building, you know, the Avenue Montaigne accessory store. But I think you could do both. Like also St. Laurent's doing like, it's just like these cafes too. And I think that there's, we have the, all of these signals in culture where, um, there's, I don't know, it's a little bit of mixed signals that you get across the board as to how we engage in experience and experiences to some degree, like how we engage with brand now, because everything in, in our, at least in the American wallet or Western society's wallet is going much more towards these, uh, in these experiential uh purchases and so the brand has to the brand again it's the incentive in the system the brand is like sort of required it's incumbent on the brand to be part and parcel of that system i don't know where media comes into that and a brand participating as a media outlet comes into that.

13:46But to your point earlier, it's, I'm really curious about how how that you continue to be, maybe I'm off, I'm off on a little tangent, but I do think that

14:00Phillip: there's this challenge when we are looking at sort of this layer of experience versus the the traditional like business of retail and where those two things intersect versus all of these sort of like hot new channels that we always tend to put our they're sexy we put our lenses on them and we're like oh this is what we're doing now and I don't think that that's actually like cultural relevance necessarily I don't know that any of those actually reflect culture I think actually we bend culture to those things because that's where we put capital towards and an industry likes to talk about them because they're new.

14:38Phillip: But I think that the people actually define what the culture is around the brand. That's neither here nor there. But you are doing a lot of content and editing around things like sub stacks right now. I'd love to know how are brands wanting to show up in those channels? And what do they tend to want to gain? How are you doing that work? How are brands showing up?

15:03Emma Apple Chozick: Yeah, I mean, it depends on the brand. I think there's a lot of brands that are like, oh, TikTok, we're done with that. Now we're doing Substack. Everyone's doing Substack. So let's launch a Substack. And I think I've had a, I've actually, we'll talk about ShopMy, but like, and what I've done with their Substack. But I've had a lot of conversations preceding that Substack with other brands that wanted to launch on Substack. And it, a lot of times was a conversation that was like, like, hey, we want to do a sub stack okay cool like who are you trying to reach what you know what what do you want this channel to do that you're not doing on instagram and you know sometimes of course the answer is like hey we want your perspective but a lot of times it's like oh yeah we want to like also drive people to our website and like get people to like buy our clothes okay what how are we gonna how are you thinking we're gonna do that because like is your instagram the dot dot dot in between there is a lot of work right and like that you know like of course i want to you know i i want to move the needle for brands regardless of what the goal is but we also have to be real about like what what we're driving to before we get to what channel does this best live on and so i have a lot of conversation like talking people off the the like ledge of going to like the shiny new platform to because you have to just be clear about what you're looking for and what you're going to get out of it.

16:34Emma Apple Chozick: And so that's always like the first conversation. I think what was really interesting when I started talking to ShopMy about a sub stack is, you know, it was very, very clear from the beginning, from their side, that it was not going to be a marketing channel for, you know, for ShopMy, it was going to be a newsletter that reached brand leadership and talked about something that would be interesting to them. You asked a question about like real editorial. And I think real editorial has to start with like a question or an insight or like maybe a point of tension. And if you don't have that, especially on a channel where you're asking someone to read long-form content, it becomes very difficult to compete in a sea of long-form content at the bridge.

17:26Emma Apple Chozick: Maybe if you're an influencer or you're a person who is known for your taste and judgment, you can write about your favorite shoes, but a platform that sells people's favorite shoes can't talk about your favorite shoes because it becomes an ad and no one wants to read that. So having that data became like a very important piece to the ShopMySubstack and this idea that we could use the data to have an insight about something that's happening in commerce and creator and like brand conversation at large that really no one else has that. I mean, they might have their own version of that data. No one also had the data that said Sol de Janeiro's GMV went up X number last November because of a holiday SKU they had launched, which suggested further to the, this was the first story I wrote about fragrance.

18:26Emma Apple Chozick: and the idea that storytelling on TikTok and Instagram was quite literally driving brands to launch entirely different SKUs of their products to meet the conversation that was happening online. And how is it possible that people are buying something that you have to smell before ever smelling it? Because someone they follow on Instagram who they trust their taste and their judgment and their perspective said they should buy it. And so using that data has allowed this publication specifically, I think, to tell a story that's very ownable. But I think there's other brands that have done a really fantastic job, I think, with partnering with writers on their own channels as well.

19:12Emma Apple Chozick: Um, thinking about, you know, Hinge has done actually, I think a really good job with partnering with creators. Eventbrite has done a great job with this amplifying their own content to their own audiences and saying like the brief is whatever you think it is, um, versus saying, Hey, can you write about us and talk about this thing we're launching?

19:38Phillip: Sure.

19:38Emma Apple Chozick: That doesn't hit. I don't think.

19:41Phillip: Yeah, no, I agree. We, we encounter that. I mean, it's B2B, it's, it's obviously different, but the, the dynamics are the same. And I think that there's people who understand that we, you know, there's an implicit trust between us and an audience and, you know, they tend to be very senior and very forward thinking. And then there's others who want advertorial and they want really tight control. And I think that there's like the dynamics are very, very much, they're very similar. I think what's really fascinating to me is how a lot of these folks, their mindset has been for so long around measurability, return on ad spend, performance marketing, centric growth mentalities.

20:40Phillip: And I think that a lot of the, and even in like enterprises who are typically have been engaged in a lot of brand centric activity and spent a lot on top of funnel and brand awareness. And I think what we now might be seeing, I'd love to your perspective on this, is that creator maybe has been thought of as a lot of bottom of funnel. but I'm wondering if that tide is turning a little bit and now we're starting to see a little bit more of the like we're we're more willing to invest in creators and as a channel for you know top of funnel and awareness as a whole and maybe budgets are are bigger and they're allowing for more of that spin I'm curious what your perspective is there you know I think I think all of those

21:36Emma Apple Chozick: things are still important. I think, you know, I was having a conversation the other day about retail stores and about how every retail store wants to have a cafe now. Like, what's it actually driving? Are people buying things? And I think the answer is yes, it is a longer tale. But I think brands are also realizing that if they want to be part of the conversation, like a larger conversation in the zeitgeist they need to do things beyond meta ads and they need to do it in a way that i think is relevant to their audience and who they're trying to reach like not everyone needs to host a dinner party like if that's not if that doesn't feel aligned to your brand don't do it not everyone has to have a subset unless you can figure out an angle that really you can be a category of one in owning.

22:32Emma Apple Chozick: So I think brands are just realizing that consumers are also tired of being marketed to. Like consumers are increasingly getting smarter too about what is an ad and what's not. And they don't want to be made to feel stupid. And I think people really respect when a brand treats them as a consumer as intelligent and thoughtful and someone worth thinking through how they're going to message to them.

23:03Phillip: If you run operations or fulfillment at a growing brand, you already know this to be true. The customer just does not care where the marketing department ends its journey and the operations team takes over. Because if the order arrives late or maybe tracking is not updating or the unboxing experience does not live up to their expectations, that is a brand level problem. And usually that becomes your problem because that is your job. And Ship Fusion wanted to give operators a better way to understand how their fulfillment experience actually compares to the rest of the market. So they placed and audited hundreds of actual real life DTC orders, and they looked at everything from checkout and shipping to delivery and unboxing.

23:47Phillip: and then they turned all of that research into the DTC fulfillment experience quiz. It's 16 questions. It takes five minutes and it gives you a benchmark for where your operation is strong and where there's a gap for the customer experience that's breaking down for you right now. And let's say that fulfillment is becoming a constraint on your growth. Ship Fusion is giving future commerce listeners three months of free fulfillment when you partner with them. I can't think of a better way of getting started on BFCM than doing that right now. So start your journey by banking your operation at ship fusion.com slash future commerce.

24:23Phillip: That's ship fusion.com slash future commerce. Take the DTC fulfillment experience quiz, 16 questions, five minutes, get a benchmark for where you are and get three months of free fulfillment when you partner with them. But you got to use our link ship fusion.com slash future commerce. I think it's a really good segue. way uh you you did the series recently the piece of research that you released uh over on i think i saw it on instagram although i'm sure you you placed it in a bunch of places um about a uh a retail chain best products uh and site uh and they their like commitment to uh retail experience architecture design um i'd love for you to kind of get into that a little bit i also want to talk about your process in how you go about telling these stories, the research, some of the archival work there.

25:21Phillip: But when you're talking about specifically about how much people care and how much intentionality goes into this and like the measurability of those types of investments, I mean, obviously we'll talk about their fate. I don't know if it was the most successful experiment. But I think there's a lot to learn here too, about doing things that aren't necessarily always measurable, but certainly memorable. Tell us a little bit about Sight.

25:49Emma Apple Chozick: There's in the video I shared, there's a letter from the best owners to James Wines. He was commissioned to design nine best locations through his firm Sight in the 1970s. And I think, you know at that time people were like no they were kind of going out of like downtown department stores and now going to these like big box retailers along the highways and they all kind of looked the same they're all these huge white boxes and best was like in sight together they really decided like let's do something interesting on these locations so like one of them looks like the bricks are just like tumbling out of the front of it and i believe when they opened this one that's in Houston, they put a giant black cloth over it.

26:41Emma Apple Chozick: And to unveil it, they had a helicopter raise the cloth. And one of the things that I don't really talk about in the video, but it wasn't super well received, I believe, by the architecture community. This was a time where humor had absolutely no place and architecture was very serious. And even I think still to this day, There are some people in the industry who would probably not laugh at what site Invest were doing. But it was a compelling thing. And in the comments, there's a lot of people who are like, oh my God, I remember this. Someone commented saying they worked at Best, not at one of the site designed ones, but at a different one.

27:22Emma Apple Chozick: and was always really jealous of the employees that worked at these designed stores because it was quite I mean it was quite novel and by the way this was obviously a time before experiential retail and then to sort of like elevate it by you know their Miami location was like a glass wall with a rainforest behind it and like a cascading waterfall and they kind of just did it for the sake of like let's do something interesting and it worked or maybe it didn't it I mean it certainly didn't you know they're they're not around anymore I believe there's one location that's still standing but it's like quite quite disheveled and um not quite in its prime I think it'd be

28:08Phillip: difficult to tell the way that some of these were designed but yeah yeah you know what's interesting and you can see actually some of these. We'll link to your original video. We'll also link to Site New York, which is the firm. They still have pictures of some of their, the actual buildings that were taken at the time, you know, in say like the 80s, the 70s and the 80s at the time of their openings. There's even one that I found just to be like Cuckoo, which is a uh a concept of a store that looks like it's a parking lot that just wraps over the top of the building like you just you you know if you want to go off-roading you just drive up onto the roof of the building i wonder why they didn't build that one to be honest with me but um you know there's there's something about um this particular time where uh there's something that tickles my brain about this coexisting with like showbiz pizza or chuck e cheese and like Like this was, I think very much a time of like experience being very key to bringing you out of the house.

29:20Phillip: And again, showrooming, I think I brought it up earlier. It was like, you know, pieces going, going back to how companies like service merchandise, they really wanted you to have a showroom type experience. It wasn't about coming in, just getting the product. It wasn't a utilitarian necessarily. You are your own salesperson. You grab it, you take it to the till. It was more about engaging from the outside to the inside with every sight line was considered. You're coming in to have a memorable experience. And I think that that's something that we talk a lot about, Emma, is the inability to measure cultural relevance as opposed to the capital return.

30:11Phillip: Certainly, we see this a lot in streaming media. The drip model is certainly something we talk a lot about more culturally. but I think it tends to not be as performant as when people drop or when, when streaming services drop a, a season. Um, Netflix has said, you know, time and time again, that when they put an entire season of television, uh, all up, up all at once, more people are more, uh, apt or more likely to get all the way through a season when they binge it. Um, they fall off when it's, you know, coming out on a weekly basis, but it's not as memorable culturally. And I think that we have a similar, uh, thing that's happening right now.

30:56Phillip: Maybe we're returning to that with cafe culture. Um, we want something that gives us an excuse to dwell, something that gives us an excuse to be there also to build something that, you know, has some, uh, departure from the norm and artistic merit to it. Um, certainly nothing like best products in sight. Um, let's, when you're doing this, work and you're doing the research, how long do you spend looking into something like this? Actually, what was the impetus for you to go down the rabbit hole on this particular piece of research?

31:31Emma Apple Chozick: So I guess a helpful piece of context here is that I don't have a social calendar. I am someone who like, if you see a video that I've posted, I like, I have just made that video like I do not believe in like oh this will be a good video for like this like I remember on it was like the day before New Year's Eve last year and I was like oh I wonder if there's like anything interesting I could talk about around like New Year's Eve and then I was just sort of like thinking about like the like joy and excitement of New Year's Eve and I was like New Year's Eve glasses. I wonder who designed them. And went down this huge rabbit hole and found this crazy story about the two guys that designed New Year's Eve glasses.

32:16Emma Apple Chozick: And I was like, oh my God, I have to make this right now. So I literally texted my friend that I was supposed to go out to dinner with and was like, hi, I have to push the reservation back a couple hours because I need to do something really quick. And that is like, I think that is kind of also the same spirit of a lot of the things that I cover, which is people following their curiosity. And so So you can tell when I've, when I've like me, I would, I hope that this is, that you can tell at least that in my content that like when I'm talking about something, I'm really excited about it because I'm also learning about it.

32:50Emma Apple Chozick: So I think the research really depends on the video. But, you know, for the best video, it was, it was Labor Day and I was in New York and I am going to out myself. but I am a like closeted Soho house member and I was trying to get a spot at the pool and they were like, there's no spots here on the wait list and it's three hours long. And I was like, whatever, I'll just have lunch downstairs and like do my own thing. And so I'm sitting out there, it's really hot. And I'm like, just on my phone. And I was just sort of like, how did sales, like what, like, how did this happen that like all these brands want to have big sales on holidays?

33:35Emma Apple Chozick: Like, what is that relationship? Because I was getting all these ads targeted, obviously. And then I just sort of started thinking about like retail at large. And then I kind of was like, oh, I wonder like what interesting retail stores looked like. Yeah, I don't know, even like 20, 30 years ago. And I've like done a lot of videos about like the history of Marnie stores. I basically looked up like old stores, store designs, and something about best came up. And I was like, I don't know what that is. So then I looked that up and then I was on sites and you know, it like snowballs from there. But I think again, it's like, I can't talk about something unless I'm interested in it myself.

34:16Emma Apple Chozick: And that is a sometimes difficult thing to do when part of your income comes from working with brands. But like, that is the only way I will talk about something.

34:27Phillip: I, and I think it's the, it's probably the best way. That's one of the traps I think is when you fall into a cadence, you certainly wind up talking about things that don't interest you. And I think that that winds up coming through over time to, um, case in point after 14 years of podcasting, you know, you can, I myself have certainly been on the ups and downs of that. Um, and I, I, That's why when I come across something like the story of site and they're sort of like the art, uh, uh, industry or it's like art as a discipline informing how we create architecture. Um, those things are very closely related.

35:07Phillip: It's something we talked about last year at Vision Summit and how much architecture is related to how we, you know, how we as people engage in the world, like how we use things, how how we how commerce is designed, like how it brings people together, how cities function. Like these are really important human concepts. We just take them for granted. And I think that that's such a. And they go through such large macro cycles too and trends. And I think that there's such a interesting and valuable thing to be talking about in our space often just goes, uh, uh, unremembered. And so when you're doing work, like what you're doing, I think it's worth, uh, taking a moment to highlight it.

35:58Phillip: would love to have more people check it out and we'll share it in the description in the show notes. What are you working on next and what's exciting you right now?

36:10Emma Apple Chozick: So last year, actually around this time, I launched a YouTube show called Surroundings, which is all about exploring the environments that shape people's creative worlds. And there's three episodes that are live on YouTube with all New York City based creatives. But as an extension of that, I launched a sort of access based programming inside of architecturally and culturally significant spaces. Last fall, we've done tours at a Frank Lloyd Wright house upstate private residence like led by the owners themselves, which is really fascinating. The Sheets Goldstein residence in Los Angeles, If you've seen Charlie's Angels, then you would know that house.

36:57Emma Apple Chozick: The Neutra VDL house and the Max Chateau house in Mexico City. And I'm currently in the midst of planning a lot more tour programming. I'm working with this platform called Posh, which is an events ticketing platform to host some of those, which is really exciting. And I think there is, you know, obviously everyone wants to spend time in person together. But what's been really fun about these tours is like I've been going on architecturally significant, you know, home tours since I was a kid. I grew up in a mid-century contemporary home in Connecticut. I just published a story actually for Dwell Magazine about that home, which was also a really fun project.

37:38Emma Apple Chozick: and you know like kind of just like allowing things to unfold I think the same way that I've tried to really like shape my content and a lot of my work at large around like what is interesting to me and what what feels curious and worth spending time with

37:54Phillip: is kind of how I'm hoping to continue to build the business and and projects and also things that like maybe aren't monetizable, but are just fun to do and like feel sincere. Yeah. Uh, that's, I think there's no better way. And it seems like it's coming through. Uh, it's so authentic and I've always appreciated everything that you've ever put out. Um, love following it. And I know others will too. Um, thank you for coming. Love to have you for

38:28Emma Apple Chozick: having me. This is so fun.

38:31Phillip: Emma Chozik is writer and founder of Great Collab, thegreatcollab.com with an eight. We'll link all of this up in the show notes. Thanks for coming on, Emma. Good to see you again.

38:42Emma Apple Chozick: Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

38:44Phillip: Thank you for listening, watching this episode of Future Commerce. You can check out more episodes of our podcast at futurecommerce.com. Bring more Future Commerce into your world. You can join us at our Vision Summit at MoMA. Again, for For our fourth year, we're joining up with some incredible speakers and minds, futurists, and I would say provocateurs this year. We're going to have some Socratic debate on the stage. We say that commerce has been taken over by AI. Culture is next. Vision Summit, November 3rd at the MoMA in New York City. Thank you for listening. And remember, commerce shapes the future because commerce is culture.