You’re reading this, so first, and unequivocally: thank you.
Maybe you’re a friend or an early subscriber in the newsletter’s earliest days and interested enough to go through all the content that’s available.
Maybe it’s years from the time I’m writing this and you find yourself curious about what led to this newsletter, or why it is as it is.
Regardless, I’m glad you’re here.
From the time I had the idea to start Haute Impact, I knew my first post would be something like this. I knew I wanted to start with a statement of principles—a resilient answer to the question of how I would go about writing the kind of newsletter that I myself would want to read.
To answer this question, I’ll start by quoting—in its entirety—the manifesto I wrote for the Haute Impact business plan. I put a great deal of thought into the manifesto because I wanted it to stand as something I could always refer back to as my north star—my set of guiding principles to keep me on the right path. I hope it resonates with you.
The Haute Impact manifesto
This newsletter is for luxury enthusiasts who believe their purchases can help change the world.
Image: Erce / Shutterstock
The luxury industry is often seen as out of touch, or worse. It doesn’t have to be this way. At its best, luxury can lead technological innovation, champion sustainable practices, and drive social impact.
All too often, brands logowash: lazily slapping a logo on a mundane product, raising the price, and calling it “luxury”. This practice betrays everything luxury can, should, and must stand for in today’s world. Unfortunately, it happens more often than it should.
However, when a brand commands a premium on account of its genuine innovation, sustainable practices, or measurable social good, that’s the luxury promise fulfilled.
At its core, the luxury promise is a pact that a luxury brand makes with all its stakeholders: customers, of course, but also its shareholders, suppliers, employees, and the communities it touches. It’s a commitment to how the brand creates and sells its goods and services:
Using appropriate technology in ways that genuinely improve quality and functionality without encouraging premature obsolescence.
Adopting sustainable craftsmanship, responsibly producing and delivering heirloom-quality goods that last a lifetime.
Uplifting people and communities, improving the lives of those who work for the brand and those who live where it operates.
At its heart, this newsletter is a personal endeavor. We strive for accuracy and fairness, while celebrating the perspective each contributor brings. We strongly believe that diversity of thought is a strength.
We don’t impose a single tone on our contributors. The “voice” of Haute Impact is collective, a harmony of all who will eventually write for and otherwise contribute to the site. I aspire for my personal voice to be candid, analytical, and reflective, striving for empathy and purpose—but that’s for you to judge.
Every week, we’ll deliver in-depth articles on luxury goods and services and the people and brands behind them. Our hope is that every article will improve your understanding of how luxury intersects with technology, sustainability, and social impact, and equip you with insights to make your own luxury choices more impactful.
You can expect an in-depth flagship article every Wednesday and field notes on a luxury product or service every Saturday. (Oscar Wilde once said that “consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative”, but we suspect he never had to catch a morning bus.)
In the future, we’ll share more about our code of ethics and why it matters. For now, know that we accept no advertising or sponsorships of any kind and we collect no affiliate revenue. Money is inevitably distorting, even with the best of intentions, and its distortion grows over time. We choose to remain independent.
Haute Impact will grow along with you, our community. In the future, you can look forward to new tools and formats, additional contributors, and more frequent content.
Our goal is to create something larger than ourselves: a movement to make luxury better. Better means luxury that is more innovative, more sustainable, and more impactful:
We reject shallow logowashing and premium prices without substance. They cheapen and ultimately betray luxury.
We celebrate luxury that’s grounded in technology, driven by sustainability, and purposed for social good, fulfilling the luxury promise.
We insist that luxury premiums reflect real value, whether innovation, artisanship, or provenance.
This is our movement—a community of like minds championing a version of luxury that leads in innovation, sustainability, and impact. Together, let’s redefine luxury for the 2030s and beyond.
Two areas of focus
Contrarian-ism part one, or, human-ing when others are machine-ing
I’m extremely comfortable with AI tools. I am certified in and use them in my professional life, and I’d guess that I spend 30–60 minutes a day in my private life in various large language models (LLMs) (mostly ChatGPT and Gemini). I believe that LLMs are already tremendously useful and that we’re only beginning to discover just how useful they can truly be.
I also hate AI-generated content.
Image: designium / Shutterstock
Not all AI-generated content, of course. If that were the case, and I were spending half an hour or more every day interacting with AI models, my life would be hell. I appreciate AI-generated content when I’ve directed its creation in order to help me understand something better.
What I hate is when lazy or greedy humans try to pass off—whether lying outright or by omission—AI-generated content as human-generated.
A recurring theme of this newsletter will be the human desire for stories—narratives we create or adopt about some aspect of the world and why it is as it is. And I’m fundamentally uninterested in stories told by machines. I stop reading documents, stop watching videos, stop consuming any media the moment I realize that someone used an AI to create it and didn’t tell me.
And yet, when I ran my business plan for this newsletter through various LLMs, one of the most consistent pieces of feedback they gave me was to use AI to augment my finite ability to generate more content for the site.
I’m going to do the exact opposite of that.
In the earliest versions of my business plan (I’ve been working on this idea for a while now), while I always planned that my flagship article each week would be completely human-authored, I also planned on using AI to provide more of a steady stream of content—news summaries, quick luxury product and service reviews based on my fragmentary notes, and the like. It seemed like a reasonable balance between two conflicting constraints: my finite time to work on the newsletter and my subscribers’ desire for more content. And I felt that as long as I fully disclosed which content was AI-generated, and kept it limited, that would be a reasonable approach.
As I’ve refined the business plan leading up to launch, though, I’ve gradually removed more and more of the options for AI-generated content, to the point where now I’ve decided not to have a word of it on the site. I want my proposition to my readers to be consistent: If you’re reading something here, a human wrote it. If you’re looking at a photo here, a human took it. If you’re looking at a chart or other graphic here, a human designed it. Simple.
Why make this decision?
As I wrote above, I’m fundamentally uninterested in stories told by machines. But it goes beyond that.
The Web is awash in AI slop. I hold no illusions about my ability to meaningfully change that. But I can refuse to participate in it. And I believe that a backlash will come in which many people will seek out content created by their fellow humans. If and when that happens, I want this to be one little corner of the Web where they can find it—one of many, I hope.
Contrarian-ism part two, or, free-ing when others are monetizing
The other most consistent piece of feedback I received from LLMs on the Haute Impact business plan was to monetize it in every way possible. It’s a fair point. Everyone does it, right? Advertisements. Sponsorships. Affiliates. Referral codes. I follow plenty of wonderful content creators—people whom I respect—who recommend products and services that I also respect. And sponsorship-type revenue could fund improvements ot the site—more content, new tools—that would make it more useful to everyone. So it makes sense.
I’m going to do the exact opposite of that.
As I wrote in the manifesto, “Money is inevitably distorting, even with the best of intentions, and its distortion grows over time.”
Image: Utoimage / Shutterstock
I’ve seen too many YouTube channels that have gone down this path, where at some point, every video they publish contains an advertisement. I’ve yet to see a YouTuber say, “I didn’t use this product before the company gave me free samples, but I hope you buy it.” Or even something as simple and honest as, “Is this product the best of its kind? I’m not qualified to say, but if you were to purchase it, that would help me financially.”
Some of the saddest YouTube channels out there are where someone had, in the past, built up a little bit of credibility in a domain. They started taking sponsorship revenue, and then at some point an advertiser came to them and said, “We’ll pay you to make a video completely devoted to our product.” I’m sure the advertiser said all the right things about editorial independence and not needing to review the video before release. Consciously or unconsciously, though, the creator skewed the video to favor the company, because they wanted more money trucks to pull up to their house.1 Other companies saw this, approached them, and cut similar deals. You can look at channels like this and literally watch as the videos become more sycophantic over time. It’s human nature. And of course at some level, the audience senses this and tunes out, and the channel withers and dies.
Endorsements are an exchange of value. Person A endorses Company B’s Product C and in so doing, Person A transfers some of their social capital to Company B. If…
you have plenty of social capital to spare,
your social capital is valuable enough that you don’t have to sell much of it be paid well, and,
the company and/or product in question isn’t toxic to your social capital, then,
…endorsements can be reasonable.
The problem comes when you have so little revenue coming in, in absolute terms, that everything you do becomes—you hope—an opportunity for sponsorship. George Clooney transfers a little bit of his social capital to Nestlé every time one of his Nespresso commercials airs, but it’s okay, because those transfers are droplets from an Olympic swimming pool of social capital. Even for him, though, if he did twenty more similar deals, it would get old pretty quickly, and he could do real damage to his personal brand. He doesn’t have to, though, because each of those droplets of capital is worth so much.
It’s different for fledgling content creators. Revenue opportunities are far more limited and if they’re full-time, they have ends to make meet. This is where things become dangerous.
What this means for you
Will I never use AI? Never say never, but sitting here today, not only do I want this to be the newsletter I myself would want to read—which means no AI—but I believe that at some point, perhaps sooner rather than later, my insistence on human authorship will be a distinct advantage for Haute Impact. I hope I’m right.
What about monetization? If I’m not going to accept advertising or sponsorships of any kind, will Haute Impact forever remain a passion project? Probably not. At some point, if I have enough free subscribers, and if I’ve consistently delivered enough high-quality content to them that they wouldn’t want to give it up, I may choose to convert this newsletter to a paid model. As the extremely wise Kevin Kelly wrote (and I highly recommend reading his essay in full):
To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans…
Here’s how the math works. You need to meet two criteria. First, you have to create enough each year that you can earn, on average, $100 profit from each true fan. That is easier to do in some arts and businesses than others, but it is a good creative challenge in every area because it is always easier and better to give your existing customers more, than it is to find new fans.
Second, you must have a direct relationship with your fans. That is, they must pay you directly. You get to keep all of their support, unlike the small percent of their fees you might get from a music label, publisher, studio, retailer, or other intermediate. If you keep the full $100 of each true fan, then you need only 1,000 of them to earn $100,000 per year. That’s a living for most folks.
That day, if it comes, is far off. I have a thousand true fans to gather. I hope you turn out to be one of them.
A question for you
What’s one thing I could do that would make this site so compelling to you that you’d be willing to pay for it?
1 The comedian Bobcat Goldthwait was once asked why he had agreed to star in a forgettable Police Academy sequel, and he replied—in his inimitable delivery—”Because when the money truck pulls up in front of your house, you don’t say, ‘Oh, no, that’s not for me.’ You say, ‘Hooray! The money truck is here!’”
