Interview With Sascha Lewis, Flavorpill

Flavorpill already produces nine email newsletters including its well known city guides. This week Flavorpill relaunches its site to offer its 300,000 newsletter subscribers and 500,000 monthly site visitors the ultimate culture destination on the web. But who actually reads these newsletters and why? We asked co-founder Sascha Lewis to explain the Creative Class he’s feeding with his flavored pills.

Congratulations on the launch.

Thank you - we’re all very excited to say the least. The whole idea with the
relaunch is to create a cultural destination  - a place to go for art,
music, fashion, literature and cultural events. The site will feature
constantly refreshed dynamic content, searchable of archives of all nine of
our publications, RSS feeds, and loads of other fun features rolling out in
the next few months. Our goal is ultimately be the destination where people
go to organize and manage their cultural lives.

I wanted to talk to you about the people who read your newsletters
and now your site. You describe this audience as this Creative Class.

Who are the ‘Creative Class’?

Richard Florida defined the concept of the Creative Class in his book ‘The Rise Of The Creative Class‘ - this a group he estimates at over 40 million
people in the US alone.  These are artists, publishers, designers, etc  who
all use creativity in their work and often fuel economic and social trends
to the mainstream.   

This class is the driver of our community -they are engaged, want to
participate and importantly they embrace technology. One of our goals at
Flavorpill is to stimulate this community and eventually appeal and covert
the mainstream. Publications like Flavorpill and PSFK are ahead of the curve
- we’re seen as thought leaders for the Creative Class so it is shared our
opportunity to expand peoples minds with dynamic, quality content.

Do you think there’s a risk that all this information about culture from
different places will breed homogeneity - we’re all wearing the same
clothes, all listening to the same music, all eating the same food?

That’s the dark side of this endless information highway we’ve created. I’m
more optimistic, I think this is a movement that is breeding individuality,
expression, and multi-culturalism as "the" people have be empowered by
technology. Look at the Mash-Up craze - people are sharing information,
code, ideas and mashing it up to create something that creates more value
for the community. That benefits all of us. It’s very collaborative - it’s
compelling, creative and combats the sameness you are suggesting.

Where is this all going?

The Creative Class is at the forefront of the new "new" media resurgence as
they are driving how we communicate via blogs, social networks, photo
sharing: they’re using Flickr, MySpace, del.cio.us, upcoming.org. They’re
feeding the resurgence of the web - the realization of the Web 2.0. What’s
awesome about this growth is that it’s being led by the people, not by
mainstream media or because the major portals are pushing certain services
and features. We are technologically engaged, we find it exciting and we use
it as a dynamic creative outlet for our lives.  We’re sharing our knowledge,
passions…let’s call it "peer-to-peer creativity"!

www.flavorpill.net

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