Who is Marta?
You've seen her work, whether you've known or not.
FIRST THING’S FIRST: I am going on vacation next Friday. I am debating taking off of the letter, but leaning towards doing some Feed Me: Tax Avoidance 😎 🌴 from Grand Cayman. Just kidding it will be called Feed Me: Island Time 😎 🌴. Those letters will probably be:
Feed Me: Island Time 😎 🌴 GIFT GUIDE
Feed Me: Island Time 😎 🌴 ASK GEN-Z (Please send in your questions ASAP for this one, I have a very serious meeting on Sunday with some very serious, very-online girls born in 2002. If you get me questions before then, I’ll get them answered.)
Feed Me: Island Time 😎 🌴 SURPRISE
If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me “Who is Marta?” over the last eight years I’d probably have… $35? Not bad. I met Marta (who has the blessing of a first name-only Instagram handle) when I was in college. She was running an Instagram account called Hot Girls Eating Pizza, and it was at a time where it was still a little unusual for an Instagram account to belong to a brand or project, as opposed to a human being. She was ahead of her time, and the account was brilliant — she asked people she thought were cool to get pizza, she took a Polaroid of them, she posted it. Marta got an instant network of cool girls in New York, and cool girls got to know Marta as one of the first social media movers in the city.
And then she co-founded skincare brand Dieux with Joyce de Lemos and Charlotte Palermino. And then she started a cannabis brand called Angel Therapy. But today we are here to talk about the thing that she owns and operates 100%, and that the thing that is so unmistakably directly from her brain — Air Milkshake. The name is a long story. If you didn’t follow Marta during the inception of it, then you can go ask her. Air Milkshake is a gifting suite. Hotel room + ~50 really cool brands + editors/influencers/cool people = the mall of your dreams. I saw a friend this week after she visited the gifting suite, and she said it felt like “Adult Disney world.” Marta is a really hard working founder, and I say this not because of how much she balances or how well her brands do, but because of the amount of FACE TIME she has with her customers and network, constantly. Interacting with other humans, actively, is exhausting! And she’s seemingly always doing it!
The gifting suite works for a lot of reasons. It’s photogenic. Girls famously love stuff. The products Marta includes are carefully selected and really good. But more importantly, a lot of the brands (I’m sure some more than others) see a return on their investment of being included, and they probably have an immediate case study of who their audience is/could be. Plus, all of their audiences also get exposed to the brands and potential testimonials of them. Anyway, I thought this would be a fun Friday letter. I really respect Marta and how much she’s balancing, and I can relate to a lot of what she said in terms of building multiple worlds online (and appreciating The Cheesecake Factory, and” praying for exits.”