How to be a brand on Substack
Rule #1: Respect the creator mentality
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Hello! It’s been a bit longer than usual since my last send—I meant to send a news round-up between then and now, but blame the dog days of summer. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled programming—one news round-up and one actionable analysis per month—in September. Today’s post is a continuation of last month’s deep dive into Substack for brands from a content-to-commerce angle. In part one, we looked at the Substack opportunity as a whole. In part two, we’ll dive deeper with strategies for how brands can actually engage on the platform and interview two experts who know the platform well: Domino’s senior marketing manager Lindsey DeSimone, and Emma Grace Moon, who works with retail brands at the intersection of PR and affiliate marketing. It’s a jam-packed post, but if you work at a brand, be it a publisher or a retailer, and are wondering if you should be on Substack, I think you’ll find it useful.
Today’s post is so long, it needs a table of contents:
Best practices for retailers
Why brands should pay attention to Substack
To quickly recap my last post, I think Substack is a valuable platform for your brand to have a presence on as the social media and content distribution landscape becomes more fragmented. We can assume its users are well-educated and have a decent amount of discretionary income, and as it’s become a destination for personality-driven fashion, beauty, and design influencers, it’s brought in more users with a propensity to shop. The intent is there… great news!!
But, it’s important to set realistic expectations before you actually wade into the Substack waters. Its last publicly reported monthly active user count was 20 million in early 2024, and even though it’s fast-growing, don’t expect posts to get the same reach they would get on, say, Instagram, which has 2 billion MAUs. And if you’re starting a newsletter from scratch, the lift will be high and growth slow—it’s a lot harder to get people to subscribe to a newsletter than it is to get them to click “follow”—but if you’re consistent and authentic, you’ll be rewarded with a highly engaged and loyal community of subscribers, a valuable asset in these times of decreasing search traffic.
Ok, so how should you actually be on Substack? There are two main routes: partner with an existing publication to reach its audience or publish your own newsletter and build up your own audience. Which one you choose first depends on if you’re a publisher or a retailer. A necessary condition to starting a Substack is editorial commitment: you need executive buy-in, budget, talent/headcount, and an established workflow to publish a newsletter. Publishers already have that infrastructure in place as their whole business revolves around editorial content creation and distribution, whereas it tends to ebb and flow with marketing priorities at a retailer. I think launching a newsletter makes sense for some retailers, and we’ll get into that below, but generally speaking, the best route for most is to partner with an existing publication via sponsored takeovers or editorial inclusion.
Regardless of which path you take, it’s important that you respect the creator mentality. Substack is a creator’s platform: its users are there to follow the writers they like and get their product recommendations, hot tips, cultural analyses, and general streams-of-consciousness. No matter what, you need to be authentic.
Below, we’ll get into specific use cases, best practices, and expert insights from both the publisher and retail brand side.
For publishers
Having worked on the publisher side and seen how many different email lists a single title might have, I’d expect there to be more established media brands on Substack by now. Yes, the goals of every newsletter vary and I wouldn’t move over the lists whose primary jobs are to generate ad revenue, send traffic back to owned-and-operated properties, and/or drive on-site user registration, but if you’re looking to reach new users and build a community, particularly for your shopping content, Substack is a great place to be. In line with the theme of respecting the creator mentality, the shopping newsletters that make the most sense for Substack are those that are heavily curated and personality-centric—the ones that feel like they’re coming from a friend-of-a-friend with really good taste, not from a brand trying to get you to buy something.
If you already have a newsletter that fits that bill, I’d explore migrating it to Substack. The benefit of repurposing an existing newsletter is that you aren’t starting your subscriber list from zero and you can focus on deepening engagement with your current audience, all while benefitting from Substack’s network to reach more users. One thing to consider is if your newsletter will have a paid subscription offering, as ones that do tend to get more visibility in the Substack ecosystem (that is, after all, how the company makes money).
A great example of a publisher newsletter that’s playing the Substack game right is Domino, which moved its Home Front newsletter to the platform last December. Curated by the magazine’s editors, Home Front is a standalone experience from Domino’s other digital content and goes out once a week to free subscribers and twice to paid. It features interior design intel, decorating inspiration, and product recommendations—it’s not a dedicated commerce newsletter, but it has a ton of organic shopping content, and paid subscribers get access to exclusive discounts and deals.
Below, Domino’s senior marketing manager Lindsey DeSimone, who spearheads its Substack strategy, shares some insights with me on what the team has learned so far. I love how she describes Substack as a digital newsstand, and I think Domino’s approach to the platform, particularly in launching a paid tier, is valuable for any legacy publisher looking to adapt to this new era of hyper-fragmentation.
Domino was ahead of the curve of brands launching on Substack. What made you decide to move Home Front to the platform?
Our move to Substack was driven by the opportunity to grow Home Front beyond our traditional email audience. Newsletters have always been integral to Domino as a digital publisher. Home Front is us doubling down on that and seeing how far we can push this medium. Moving to Substack gave us an opportunity to bring Home Front to, essentially, a digital newsstand and get in front of an engaged audience outside of our own. Now, roughly one third of our subscribers originate from Substack, who likely never would have found Home Front when we were hosting it on our owned platform and, in turn, we get the chance to bring them deeper into the Domino fold.
Secondly, our owned platform infrastructure was not set up to provide the most fluid tiered subscriber experience. Substack had everything in place that we were lacking—an easily accessible archive for paid subscribers, more immediate ways to connect directly with our audience (or for readers to connect with each other), and turnkey paid subscription conversion tools and packaging.
How did the newsletter’s content strategy and/or cadence change, if at all, once on Substack?
Our newsletter cadence (two sends a week) remained the same as before our move onto Substack. Though paid subscribers may find more bonus content in their inboxes in the not-too-distant future…
One change we made from our early days of joining Substack was making it a point to connect with other Substack creators and feature them in Home Front. Cross-creator promotion is something that Substack makes easy through the platform—from newsletter recommendations to notes and embedding posts in newsletters—and has become a key element in our content and growth strategy. The real-time understanding we gain from Substack’s insights dashboard also allows us to make meaningful strategy shifts week to week as part of our subscriber retention efforts.
What are your main goals for being on Substack?
Growth and retention are our biggest priorities. As different digital mediums adapt algorithms to keep users on-platform and AI is shifting the overall media landscape, building up an owned audience of brand enthusiasts is top of mind for us, and Substack will play a role in expanding that footprint. By holding ourselves to the highest standard for content and the subscriber experience—reader feedback is our North Star—we believe that our audience will only continue to grow and become a substantial part of our revenue stream.
I noticed an emphasis on shopping in the newsletter. How does your Substack play into Domino’s commerce goals?
Product curation is in Domino’s DNA, so the emphasis on shopping in Home Front was very organic. Substack has allowed our editors to build a more personal relationship with subscribers. That friend-to-friend feel we've cultivated makes us an even more trusted resource for readers, and we have seen steady growth in consumers shopping our recommendations since Home Front’s launch. It's a welcome addition rather than an intrusion in your content feed.
For retailers:
Launching your own publication
Launching a Substack is the buzzy thing to do in marketing right now, but it’s a heavy lift and the pay off isn’t immediate, so you should tread carefully. Some of the buzziest retailer Substack launches of the last few months have already fizzled: American Eagle, which partnered with popular Substacker Casey Lewis to edit the first few issues of its newsletter, published three issues before going quiet, and The Real Real, which launched its Substack in February, hasn’t posted since June.
Some of my favorite brand Substacks that have stood the test of time (so far) are Well Said By Madewell, The M Dash by M.M.LaFleur, and Jessie Loves from Loeffler Randall founder Jessie Randall. They all came to Substack in different ways—M.M.La Fleur has over 87,000 subscribers because it migrated its already-robust blog from WordPress, while Loeffler Randall’s isn’t an *official* brand Substack because Jessie writes about her personal life, but at the end of the day, she is getting people to think about her brand. And though their content strategies vary, they employ the same best practices:
They’re consistent: This is really important in signaling to audiences that your Substack is worth their time. Publishing consistently doesn’t mean every week. In my opinion, it’s better to spread posts out in the beginning and give yourself time to build up your editorial calendar and test what works so you don’t burn out.
They’re authentic: Substack is very much an experimental space, so don’t be precious about what you share. People can follow you on any social platform, but the ones who choose to follow you on Substack want more than what they can get on Instagram. Give them a peek behind the curtain!
They participate: Especially if you don’t have a paid tier, you really have to participate in the Substack network to drive subscriber growth. Post notes, cross-promote with popular writers, like and reply to comments. Work the room.
In terms of timeline, I’d give it six months to a year to see results, depending on how frequently you publish and how active you are in the ecosystem. If you have a paid tier, you’ll probably see growth faster because you’ll get more visibility in Substack’s gamified leaderboards.
Ultimately, Substack presents an exciting opportunity to connect more meaningfully with audiences, and from a content-to-commerce perspective, retail brands can treat it as a channel to build a direct relationship with their most loyal customers, one where you can have a back-and-forth. Maybe people who subscribe to your Substack get early access to new product drops or sales, or get entered into sweepstakes to win a product haul. Think outside the box to get your subscribers to shop from your brand, again and again.
Partnering with an existing publication
If you’re a brand looking to reach the Substack audience, partnering with writers, either through organic opportunities or paid spend, is lower lift than starting your own publication, and crucially, respects the creator mentality. It’s a creator’s platform, let them do the talking!
Substack sits at an interesting place within the content-to-commerce ecosystem—since it’s both a social platform and a media outlet, it’s appealing from influencer and affiliate marketing perspectives. You can use it to drive brand awareness, but because so many users are there to read fashion, beauty, and design newsletters, it’s also a valuable outlet to drive sales. I wouldn’t approach it purely as an affiliate play though as immediate conversions through any email channel tend to be more variable than those driven through search.
To better understand the Substack opportunity for retail brands, I spoke with Emma Grace Moon, the founder of Praize Studio, an affiliate PR agency that’s worked with brands like Dame, Victoria Beckham Beauty, and Jones Road to secure performance-driven editorial coverage. Emma also writes a newsletter called Business Wise, where she shares insights and learnings from the affiliate PR space. I love how Emma thinks about all the ways Substack can drive value for a brand.
I'm curious how the perception of Substack has changed among the brands you work with over the last year or so. Do they view being included in a popular Substack as valuable as inclusion in a legacy media outlet?
Substack has definitely moved onto the “must-consider” list for our clients. Getting in a well-known Substack is considered a big win, even when compared to a traditional press hit. In the early boom days, the mentality was “get in any Substack we can”—it was about testing the waters and understanding what the channel could do. Now, with the volume and variety of Substacks exploding, we’ve shifted toward a much more curated approach. It’s less about casting a wide, varied net, more about aligning with the right voices whose audience and tone fit the brand.
How do you partner with Substackers—what's the balance between full takeovers of newsletters and one-off inclusions, paid or organic?
We approach Substack like any emerging channel: start with organic opportunities (whether that is on their social channels or their Substack) to test resonance and engagement, then scale thoughtfully based on results. Even for brands that claim to have a “strong Substack strategy,” it’s almost always layered within a larger marketing ecosystem and often piggybacks on influencer or PR efforts.
Jumping straight into a $10K+ spend without understanding the channel’s impact, or how it coexists with other channels, is risky. The most effective partnerships usually combine organic inclusion, long-term relationship building, and dual-pronged collaborations that extend to their socials, with occasional paid placements when the creator’s voice truly aligns with the brand.
Because Substack audiences vary so widely, and performance can be hit or miss depending on the writer, I recommend treating paid spend here as a test or a brand awareness investment, rather than expecting predictable, scalable ROI from the start.
What are your clients' goals when working with a Substacker, and how do they measure them?
The goals are usually a mix of revenue, discovery, and brand affinity, but Substack can be tricky. Some newsletters outperform expectations, while others underdeliver on revenue despite large subscriber bases. The real value lies in Substack’s creative freedom: audiences come for storytelling, ideas, and connection, which makes it more of a top- or mid-funnel driver.
Often, it’s a first or second touchpoint—a reader discovers a brand in a newsletter, explores the product, and later converts after seeing a paid ad, review in Byrdie, etc. Long-term Substack partnerships, where the audience is exposed to the brand repeatedly over time, tend to have the strongest downstream revenue impact. If you judge Substack purely as a direct commerce channel, you’ll overlook its incremental brand-building power and risk setting unrealistic performance expectations.
Do you find the Substack audience more conducive to commerce than audiences on other platforms?
It really depends on the creator and the timing of the post. Some Substacks can spark a wave of interest and drive strong conversions, while others are better suited for long-term brand affinity. I see Substack primarily as a top-of-funnel channel, a place to build awareness, trust, and connection, rather than a consistent, bottom-of-funnel revenue driver like paid ads or affiliate. That doesn’t mean it can’t convert, but the results are less predictable. In many cases, its real value comes from being part of a broader ecosystem where a reader’s first or second brand touchpoint happens in a Substack, and conversion happens later through other channels.
I hope you found this post valuable (if you made it this far, I’m guessing you did). Though nuanced, Substack is an exciting platform for brands, and one that shouldn’t be overlooked. Even though it might feel saturated, it’s still in its early days. If you’re a publisher or retailer who’s exploring the Substack opportunity, I’d love to talk and help you think through your approach. Learn more about scheduling a consulting call with me here, or just shoot me an email at elaheh.nozari@gmail.com.
Loved contributing to this one! Thanks for having me :)
Very insightful. Thanks Elaheh