Yes, the subject line of today’s email includes the word “slutty.”
If that didn’t outrage or shock you so much that you marked this email as spam already, then read on, because I will tell you how to turn any shock and outrage you did feel into profits, regardless of what you sell.
I’m making my way through a backlog of old New Yorker magazines that have gathered under my living-room coffee table.
The one I’m currently on is from April 2023. The main article is about Pinky Cole, the founder of a fast-food chain called Slutty Vegan.
The Slutty Vegan menu features no-meat burgers such as Fussy Hussy ($13) and Super Slut ($15).
When customers step forward to order, a Slutty employee announces through a microphone, “It’s Slutty Saturday!”
If it’s the customer’s first time at the restaurant, and they admit it, then the employee adds over the microphone, “We have a virgin slut!”
There’s a bouncer at the Slutty Vegan entrance, and a DJ plays Drake and Aaliyah inside. On the wall, there’s a bright sign that reads, “EAT PLANTS YA SLUT.”
As one investor in the company said, “It’s this very unusual juxtaposition of veganism, which is often connected to what I’m not allowed to eat, with sluttiness, which is all the things that I’m gonna do even though I’m not allowed to.”
And it’s resonating.
Most people who go to Slutty Vegan are not going because they are militant vegans. In fact, most are not vegans at all, or really going for the food.
Slutty hamburgers seem to be middling — “better than American McDonalds,” as one interviewed customer put it. Or in the words of the author of the New Yorker article, who was trying to quit eating factory-farmed meat when he first went to Slutty Vegan, “Like most people, though, I went back in equal parts for the vegan food and for the vibes.”
You might wonder whether it’s viable long-term business strategy to sell people middling food while calling them sluts.
As of that April 2023 article, Slutty Vegan had 10 locations around Georgia, Alabama, and New York. It’s had investment that valued the company at $100 million (the first location opened in 2018).
Slutty Vegan has since opened a new location in Texas and is opening a new one in Baltimore, one of my adopted home towns.
Pinky Cole, the founder, is also launching an entrepreneurial reality show, and Slutty Vegan has had partnerships with designer Steve Madden and was planning one with Lululemon.
The point I’m trying to illustrate is the power of creating a sense of place around whatever and wherever you sell, whether that’s a slutty drive-through or your own slutty website.
Of course, you don’t have to get all crass and sexual with your sense of place, like Slutty Vegan does.
This idea of sense of place has long been practiced to perfection by another restaurant franchise, Unslutty Starbucks.
As the Starbucks website says (under the “Stories” subdomain), Starbucks is the Third Place, a place of warmth and connection and belonging, a place apart from work (presumably, where coldness and alienation reign) and home (filled with mess and stress).
And if you need reminding how valuable that Third Place concept has been, Starbucks now has 35,000 locations worldwide and is valued at $104 billion.
So if you felt any shock or outrage at today’s “slutty email” subject line, then good.
It will help you remember today’s email, and apply, in your own business, the lesson of creating a sense of place — a gift-box-and-bow around whatever you sell, which elevates your product from a commodity to a price-elastic emotional experience.
You might wonder what kind of sense of place I aim for with my emails, and with the products that I sell.
Or maybe you don’t wonder. Maybe it’s obvious. Because I’ve written emails about it before, and I’ve even created paid courses about my chosen “sense of place” in the past.
But if would like to hear me spell it out, you can do do so on the free training putting on later this month.
The training will cover how I write and profit from this newsletter that you are reading now.
It will happen on Monday January 22, 2024 at 8pm CET/2pm EST/11am PST. But you will have to be signed up to my list first. Click here to do so.
