Claire and Erica Have a Few Things to Tell You

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Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo — friends, former retail proprietors, podcast hosts, co-authors, work wives — are most assuredly not messing around. Under the umbrella of their lifestyle company A Thing or Two, they consult, produce a weekly podcast, and send two weekly newsletters (the free A Thing or Two, and the Secret Menu for paid subscribers). Oh, and they recently published a book.

It’s a template for a certain type of media empire: A savvy play in the lifestyle space, focused on women who like to be in the know and have disposable income to match. Their voice is that of an extremely online geriatric millennial who no longer needs to prove they’re cool. (Though they are.) But embedded in Cerulo and Mazur’s blueprint for success is a warning of the difficulty of trying to replicate it. ATOT didn’t happen by accident, and what may seem like “just a newsletter” is an intricate, multi-pronged, efficient business built on product discovery.

How it all began

The friends were known first to a segment of women as the owners of the clothing and homewares boutique Of A Kind, which closed in 2019, four years after it was purchased by Bed Bath & Beyond.

Of A Kind was a “discovery focused business,” says Mazur. “It was an e-commerce and content business where we sold the pieces and told the stories of designers and makers, and home, beauty, and fashion.”

Their original email newsletter — then called “10 Things…” — started as a content marketing email after the holidays that the pair just kept sending. If that seems like an obvious play now, it wasn’t in 2012. The free newsletter, reborn and now christened A Thing or Two, “continues to also serve as marketing for our consulting business and our brands in general,” says Mazur.

The experience of running a retail business definitely gave the pair an advantage as they transitioned into their current roles. 

“Selling people a piece of jewelry is very hard,” says Cerulo “and it is also very hard to get people to sign up for a paid newsletter or to pay for content.” 

The intentionality doesn’t manifest as a hard sell. In a sea of holiday gift guides, A Thing or Two and Secret Menu stand out, both for the quality of the recommendations and the authenticity with which they’re delivered. You know what you’re going to get with them, even as you well, don’t know quite what you’ll get. The sense of early discovery is akin to the smug satisfaction of liking “All Too Well” before it was everyone’s favorite Taylor Swift song.

“It’s very important to us to not be just a company sending you marketing newsletters,” says Cerulo, “but to be bringing actual value.”

Behind the Scenes

A Thing or Two hits subscribers’ inboxes on Mondays, the same day new podcast episodes drop. The Secret Menu arrives on Thursdays. All the pieces tend to share a vibe.

Each email comes from “Claire and Erica” and the subject line riffs on the email’s name and theme:

• A Thing or Two We’re Doing Besides Rocking and Rolling
• A Thing or Two We’re Doing Besides Pulling Up a Chair
• A Thing or Two We’re Doing Besides Cleaning Up

A Thing or Two highlights a sponsor up top, followed by a header, then a main photo, which relates to one of the recommendations that come lower down. Before that though, there’s a tease for the latest podcast episode. 

Next come Erica’s recommendations for the week, a bulleted list of stuff she’s into, reading, or ogling over, sometimes with a sponsor item included (clearly labeled). Claire’s recs follow in a similar format.

Each edition of the Secret Menu is wholly devoted to a particular product type — say “Vacation Rentals We’ve Known or Loved” or the best shops for wardrobe basics. There’s a short intro text followed by a list or grid of items, each of which has a photo. “Creature comfort” ends the edition with a thematically-linked photo of a cute animal. The footer contains links to the podcast, Instagram, and Bookshop, an online bookselling platform. They’ve also designed the emails with a mobile-first audience in mind — something many still neglect when creating a newsletter.

The pair draft, edit, and collaborate in Google Docs. They send the newsletter with Mailchimp and manage memberships with MemberSpace, which lets them control personal and financial info if they move platforms in the future. Controlling branding and intellectual property was top of mind when deciding on tools. That commitment to aesthetics shows: Reading ATOT and Secret Menu feels different than reading most newsletters, which of course is the goal. That experience is part of the conversion funnel, and for this team, the investment makes sense.

While some newsletters are still working on building out a single strong revenue stream, they’ve managed to create five: 

• In-newsletter classified ads, which cost $200 per ad. They offer five slots per issue, and those slots frequently sell out.
• Sponsorship of the newsletter itself. This gets a logo at the top and a clearly marked shoutout in the body. 
• Affiliate commerce, like through links to Bookshop, which offers a 10 percent commission on all books sold.
• Their consulting work, which ATOT serves as a form of advertising for
• Subscription revenue from The Secret Menu. Membership costs $4 a month, and members auto-renew monthly.

They use their platform, and the revenue they make from it, in intentional ways. The first month’s fees for new subscribers to the Secret Menu are donated to a non-profit. Past recipients have included the Radical Monarchs, a scouting organization for young girls of color, the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, which supports Black trans people, and Midwest Access Coalition, which provides assistance to people seeking abortions.

Consuming Mazur and Cerulo’s products, one could easily gloss over how much work goes into them. They appear seamless in the way that is only possible when undergirded by a fanatical attention to detail. There’s no room for a delay in publishing the podcast episode when the newsletter can’t go out without it. You can only link your past content if you created it last year, kept track of it, and made time to do it. Because they overlook nothing, even their book recommendations are curated into one (easily shoppable) list.

This type of project management has more in common with an established media company than it does with a romanticized version of a sole-proprietor newsletter. It’s probably not attainable (or needed) by most newsletter writers, and it’s a place where Cerulo and Mazur’s previous experience and resources informs this phase of their business development.

It’s also notable what’s missing from Cerulo and Mazur’s operation: Open threads or other clear community-building opportunities. Such offerings require moderation to work well, and they’re more clearly advantageous to a reporter model where the discussion yields potential story ideas and interview subjects. 

The Pros and Cons of Lifestyle Content

The best part about running a newsletter business, Cerulo and Mazur say, is having an outlet for their finds. They like being able to spotlight new or unknown designers, and the money and business opportunities it brings is nice too.

“We just have that inclination to share this stuff and to celebrate it,” says Mazur. “I think [the newsletter] is a really nice way of doing it.”

That’s not to say the endeavor is without drawbacks, some of which are intrinsic to the type of newsletter they’re running. People feel entitled to your time and energy, Mazur explains, echoing complaints I heard from other newsletter creators whose publications overlap with their personal identities. ATOT and Secret Menu are about discoveries in a range of lifestyle areas, so there’s pressure to use even free time “productively,” or in a way that generates new content. Can that dinner recipe go in the newsletter? How about that new book?

“We don’t self-identify as influencers and certainly don’t consider that our business model,” says Mazur, “and yet at the same time there’s obvious crossover there.”

In our conversations, the issue of burnout didn’t come up explicitly, but it seemed to be lurking around the edges. Especially for creators who are monetizing themselves in one way or another, the line between work and the rest of their lives can be blurry. This is especially true on Instagram, where Cerulo mentioned she feels pressure to keep posting for work reasons, even though she’d prefer not to. If they were starting over, Cerulo says, they’d likely build up a dedicated brand account and de-emphasize their personal ones. But now, with their personal follower accounts dwarfing the brand numbers, they feel locked in.

These overlapping issues stem from the difficulty of, in effect, monetizing one’s personality and tastes. It’s not a new problem (see: Martha Stewart, influencers in general), but it is a problem that more people have now, and will acquire if they start these types of newsletters. The freemium model can also muddy the question of what’s being bought with a subscription.

As Cerulo and Mazur consider expanding advertising revenue, they must guard the authenticity of their relationship with readers, Mazur explains. “We need to be really conscious of only partnering with advertisers who we feel like we could personally endorse,” she says. “That’s not a question a magazine ever needs to ask itself.”

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