Hallelujah! It’s Sunday!
Time for my favorite part of the week, ICYMI for HSR Insiders.

ICYMI ₊♡₊˚ ❣️・₊✧ ₊

• LA HSR Walk: To all my LA Insiders, SOS, I am devastated but we are going to have to reschedule next week’s planned walk on Feb 24 to the middle of March. Unfortunately, travel is out of my control. Either way, I cannot cannot wait to meet you all IRL but just need to find a time that works with my (and Katie’s!) travel schedule. Stay tuned! More details soon.

• Vegas: I had some serious lucky girl syndrome all weekend. ICYMI I got featured in Vogue and got a ride home in the sickest Fisker Ocean car because I forgot to book a flight home (oops). I’m breaking down what went into planning my Vegas weekend and what went into getting “the shot” below and it’s not as simple as it might seem. For limited time and for my Insiders only, I am sharing a copy of my deck I used to plan my Vegas weekend! This is a secret link on the Shopify store that you can only access from the newsletter!!

• Girl Bossing Too Close To The Sun: I found my self alone in the 1 Hotel back in LA earlier this week after horrible apartment updates. ICYMI, you can find out why in this video. Sometimes it’s exhausting being single, but like I said in a previous video, being single is a privilege even when it feels extra hard.

• Deal Mode: To add to the insanity of my life, HSR Ventures is currently raising its biggest SPV ever! It’ll be close to 6x bigger than anything else I’ve ever raised and this is honestly what is keeping me going. This is who I am. An investor and brand builder. ICYMI, I showed the process of wiring an investment to a portfolio company using Sydecar and Plaid (which apparently you loved) so I can’t wait to share more behind the scenes of this deal when it’s done!!

• Home Sweet Home: There’s a massive Presidents’ Day sale at my fav place Lulu and Georgia for up to 25% off so I placed a huge order for my HSR apartment. With all of the chaos that took place in my apartment this week, I realized I need to get this place set up for real for when I move back in.

• What You Should Know About Love: Obviously I’m not an expert, but luckily for you, my therapist is and I broke down the 9 things he’s taught me. I don’t know if anyone else feels like this but, I feel like Valentine’s Day and major holidays or moments are days where either you decide you’re happy and move forward or it ends up casting a lot of doubt in your mind about if you’re excited for a future with your partner. I mentioned this on Kenzie’s podcast that I was on but if you’re in a state of contemplation over your relationship and you're wondering whether this is the right thing for you, I made an HSR relationship test that you can use to answer once and for all, “Do I Like Myself Around Them?”

• What I’m working on: ICYMI, I shared that I’m working on being okay with not doing everything myself and trusting my growing team as the #1 thing I’m working on so scale HSR Media and HSR Ventures. When you’re a one woman show for so long, you just know how everything gets done and when you have an ADHD brain like mine, it’s not a system thats replicable for anyone. I’ve been really trying to figure out how to scale the team in terms of processes, and integrating people into all of our systems (notion, g-suite, canva, quickbooks…the list is endless). I’d love to share more of this with you as the process unfolds so let me know what you want to hear!

This Week’s Moodboard

♡ Consumer News ♡

Consumer content, news, things, or people I’m currently obsessed with

Dress For Success: This article says it all about why I took so much time to plan out Vegas and the looks I was wearing. Like it or not, this is reality and like I said in the earlier video, networking can LITERALLY make your career.

DTC Marketing: I have always been a huge believer in diversified marketing and not being over indexed in paid spend so it made me so happy to see that even tho the cost to advertise on Meta (IG and Facebook) was down 22% YoY in 2023, it hasn’t been enough to entice DTC brands back to the platform as they continue to invest in marketing spend through other channels. I loved seeing Clearstem Skincare with a direct mail advertisement in my mail box this weekend and even with Meta costs down, I would continue to think about a diversified approach to marketing.

Shopify: My home town hero, Shopify, beat analyst estimates this week which is a huge indicator that they’re doing a great job of fending off the rise in new marketplace sellers like TikTok and Temu.

The Shop: You know I’ve been a huge believer in the men’s grooming and beauty segment for years and was excited to see LeBron James take a stab at it. Super interesting that they’re launching with Walmart as their wholesale retail partner. Without this Walmart partnership, I would bet on this not being successful even with the largest athlete in the world (a la Tom Brady’s struggling brand success since graduating from the NFL).

How I Landed a Feature in Vogue

Ok, I’m here to stop the gate keeping on how creators and celebrities get photographed and end up in the pages of Vogue, Forbes, or The Business of Fashion. Because it doesn’t just “happen” even though that’s what social media would like you to believe. It takes strategizing, planning, and executing. But honestly, I think the biggest gate kept secret is that it requires a team. So I wrote down my formula and am sharing and template for how I planned my Vegas Super Bowl Weekend and landed a feature in Vogue. This is a secret link on the Shopify store that you can only access from the newsletter!!

Be strategic: Pull up Google and research key cultural moments, events, and conferences throughout the course of the year that make sense for your industry. You’re going to have to prioritize and make decisions about where and why you want to go to events and pass on others. I said this last week and I’ll say it again. The sole purpose of me going to Vegas for Super Bowl was for business development and to market myself and my companies, HSR Media and HSR Ventures. This was not a trip for pleasure and honestly staying up until 5am out partying is not my idea of a fun time but it’s how deals get done. Once I knew my objectives, I was able to get laser focused on what types of events made sense for me to be at and how I was going to get invited.

Fail to plan, plan to fail: Once we had an understanding of the strategy for the weekend, my team kicked into high gear confirming meetings, invites for events, and dinners. This is where me and my team spent sooo much of our time making sure I was set up to execute over the weekend. So what did we plan? Literally everything (except my travel home….oops):

• The travel: How and when I was getting to Vegas (including getting to LAX to catch my flight), where I was staying, and where my Fisker driver needed to be at all times to get me from point A to point B, C, D…in Vegas all weekend long.

• The itinerary: We planned my itinerary down to the minute with hair, make-up, travel time, events, eating, sleeping. The devil works hard but I worked harder over those 4 days.

• The people: We put together a slide of photos of people I needed to connect with, what events they’d be at, and links to their LinkedIn and social accounts. Literally a la Miranda Priestly in the Devil Wears Prada.

• The looks: This was one of my favorite parts because I approached it so differently to how I have before and it seriously paid off. I worked with Justine Logue, an amazing stylist. I provided her outfit inspo (weeks in advance), we had 2 fittings, she helped me pack, and took final outfit photos with links and tags for all of the designers and products so I knew exactly what I was wearing. This was game changing and helped build so much confidence.

• The hair and make up: I mood boarded images from Pinterest and looks I’d worn to previous events that I loved for each outfit. My team then booked hair and make up artists for each day to execute on the vision.

• The photo and content inspo: But I didn’t stop with just the outfit and hair and make up. We took it a step further and literally made a mood board of the types of poses I liked and the photos and content I needed to get in each outfit.

Execute: Having a plan literally made it 5,000 times easier to execute and make sure that we were crushing every single event. By the time Super Bowl rolled around, I knew where I was going, what I was wearing, what I was going to look like, who I was meeting, what content needed to happen, and what I needed to post about. And believe me, when you’re on Day 4 in Vegas and are exhausted, you need a plan to follow.

Surround Yourself With People: I shared this on LinkedIn, but my team has been growing and this weekend literally would not have been possible without them. It took my business parter/sister, my agent, my assistant, my stylist, and my bff Marvin in order to make this weekend work.

But I haven’t answered the main question - how I got into Vogue? Well here it is. I made the right strategic decision to attend Super Bowl weekend over NYFW, I have networked my ass off over the last 10 years to get invited to the right parties and to know photographers who’d be there, I had done the research of who I needed to be talking to and connecting with, I invested in my self by hiring a stylist and hair and make up to make sure I looked great to build confidence, and I had parts of my team with me in person to bring it all to life.

So the next time you come across a photo of a creator or a celebrity at an event and think to yourself, ugh they make that look so easy, remember it’s not.

You’re HOT SMART RICH

If you haven’t shared with me before, I’d love to learn more about you in my

TYSM, I♡U!!!!

In case you're new here, I sporadically do secret giveaways for the people who are supporting me on this journey of becoming an accidental creator and media entrepreneur while I continue to do what I love most, which is invest in companies and work with founders.

To enter this week's giveaway from the HSR PR closet, comment on this video with a ❣️ emoji and the thing you’re afraid to ask for and from who!!