Let Me Reintroduce Myself

An honest look at what I was building, what wasn't working, and what comes next for The Lauren Letter

There is a particular kind of email I have trained myself to delete without opening or a post I scroll past when it trickles down on my feed. You know the one. The subject line promises something — Ten Things You Need This Season, My Favorite Links, A Few Products I Love — and by the time you’ve scrolled past the eighth affiliate link, you’ve forgotten why you ever subscribed. It is content in the truest, most clinical sense of the word: It is designed to make the sale. You are designed to consume accordingly.

I know this, because I have sent versions of it.

When I started the Lauren Letter, that was not my intention. But, it happened slowly, in the way that well-intentioned things can tend to drift.

I had been watching — really indexing — what was working for other people. The Instagram accounts with the numbers, the Substacks with the paid tiers, the creators who had figured out how to make this a livelihood. And I started copying the architecture of it without ever really examining whether it was mine. The recurring segments. The link roundups. The gentle funnel toward something purchasable. The aesthetics of productivity dressed up as personality.

I told myself it was strategic. That you have to grow an audience before you get to write however you want. That revenue doesn’t materialize from poetry and personal essays alone, and if I wanted this to be real — genuinely, sustainably real — I needed to play the game a little. Learn the form. Do what the people with 100k followers were doing and trust that the writing could live inside it somewhere.

The problem is that it couldn’t. Or at least, it wasn’t. I was copy-pasting an approach that was never built for what I actually am, and the seams were showing — mostly to me, but I suspect to you too.

So I’ve been reflecting critically. And what I found, if I’m honest, is that the parts of this I love — the parts I think you love, too — have nothing to do with roundups or listicles or the performance helpfulness. My soul sits with language. With curation. With storytelling.

So let me do what I should have done at the beginning. Let me properly introduce myself.

---

I believe the world is remarkably beautiful. I fight for that belief every single day — for the romance in it, for the joy, for the refusal to let the ordinary stay ordinary. That is not an aesthetic affectation. It is a conviction.

My mission with the Lauren Letter, if we’re being formal about it, is to romanticize life through storytelling, wit, and design.

I write for a specific kind of woman, and I think you know if you’re her. She is curious and cultured. She romanticizes her everyday — a corner café, a well-chosen candle, the pleasure of a long lunch that becomes dinner. She reads. She has taste without being precious about it. She wants champagne and fries. She’ll ask her friends if they should just do a bottle. She is a professional, a founder, a creative — someone who values taste over trends and wants to feel, above all, genuinely herself. Elevated, not sold to. More romantic about her life, not more optimized within it. She wants someone to see her inner life and name it beautifully.

That is what I am here to do. That has always been what I am here to do.

---

Here’s what stays, and what it means:

The Lauren Letter remains the anchor — my weekly correspondence that holds everything together. Witty, warm, a little editorial, occasionally irreverent.

Love Notes are my poetry, prose, and percolations. It is the most vulnerable thing I will do here, and equally the most thrilling. No utility. No directive. No reason to exist except that the language demanded it and I had the courage to let it out. This is the writing I was made for — lyrical, unhurried, intimate.

Book Club is beginning! One book a month, a proper review, and questions worth sitting with. I cannot wait for us to read together, treating the comments section as our literary salon.

And then there are the Stories — the longer essays, pop culture and lifestyle reflections, and travel guides. These arrive when they arrive. I will not manufacture them on a schedule, nor use them as a trojan horse for affiliate linking, and I think that’s precisely what makes them worth reading when they do!

And finally, The Lauren Warrant.

A royal warrant is granted when a supplier has met the standard of a household of taste and discernment. The Lauren Warrant is my version. It is reserved for pieces that carry the full weight of my taste and authority, and it will appear rarely, because rarity is the point. When something genuinely meets my standard — for beauty, for craft, for ethos — it receives it.

---

This is a smaller table, set more carefully. I think you’ll find you prefer it.

With so much love, as always,

Lauren xx

---

P.S. I promise to always keep The Lauren Letter free as my little exercise of trying to make the world a bit more beautiful. If, in return, you could considering giving this post a “like” or share with a friend, it would just mean the world to me.

---