Today I’m announcing the launch of my Patreon, which will unlock exclusive content and more! Here’s the sign-up link, and read on for a brief retrospective of the years that have led me here.
I’ve been writing about menswear for a while. This is how my blog looked when I started it, in 2012:
That’s the interior window of the office I occupied for my day job at the time.
I later started a Tumblr, rode the #menswear wave, then in 2017 launched this self-hosted website.
In 2022, I started going to Pitti Uomo to widen my exposure to people in the industry, trends, and to cover the show.
Each time I go to Pitti, I have found that events converge that reveal to me something that pushes me forward into the next phase of this journey. It’ll be random conversations with people, or chance meetings, or observations I make that all coalesce to tell me something. Every time I’ve gone, this has happened.
At the January 2024 Pitti, that something was a new, clarified mission. It came to me after a few separate incidents. First, I had asked someone I knew for some input and advice on something new I was thinking of doing. He’d done what I was looking at doing before, so I asked for his guidance. In response, he gave me zero help and zero guidance. That was a bummer, but kind of tracked with previous interactions we’d had, so I didn’t get too bent out of shape over it.
Then, once I arrived in Florence, I was staying with a friend I’ve made during my various visits to Pitti, and he was telling me how Jake Mueser was helping him on this big client project. As my friend said it, “Jake just wants to help,” so he was working to figure out a solution for my friend’s client situation.
Later during that same week, I was thinking about my dad’s lifelong reputation for being the best, in every context you might meet him in. Specifically, he has this reputation with his managers, bosses and the executives he works for, whenever they have a one-on-one conversation or meeting, to ask them, “Is there anything I can do to make your life easier?” Actually he says that to me on the phone whenever we talk, too.
And so at the end of the week of Pitti January 2024, all these events converged to clarify for me the driving force of what I want to be known for:
I want to be helpful.
That’s been my driving force all along, actually, but I had never consciously put it into words until that week in January. Once you have a mission put into words, that can help you make all kinds of decisions when the path forward is unclear.
I hope that helpful content is what you find here, and on my Instagram, in my eBook and anywhere else you see my stuff. As much as possible, I try to share helpful tips, concrete examples, lessons learned, all illustrated as best as possible.
This brings me to today, on which I’m announcing the launch of my Patreon. If you join, you’ll have access to a monthly Q&A session I’ll be doing, where members will have the opportunity to ask me anything, and each month I’ll compile those questions and answer them in a video available only to members. It will also create a space for direct feedback, which I find helpful to me as I try to create helpful, valuable content for you. In-depth articles as well as most of my Pitti content moving forward will be exclusives for Patreon subscribers, and brand reviews will be timed exclusives. And this decision will free me to create some content that previously didn’t quite fit anywhere else—by being member-only, I don’t have to worry about ideal SEO or anything like that.
As we go forward, the membership experience will evolve to better meet your needs, too.
I’ll still publish some content free for all. Specifically, I plan to continue posting curated sales alerts and curated seasonal drop posts for everyone.
So check out the Patreon page. The sign up process happens over at patreon.com/menswearmusings. Then once you have an account and are registered, the Patreon-exclusive posts on this website have a a button to log into your Patreon account to grant you access.
I am sincerely thankful to everybody who reads and supports my content.
