Welcome to Easy, Breezi.

Your friend who sends you a weekly update on what she's working on, reading through, and thinking about – in a list.

Here’s the Coachella business recap thread nobody asked for

1. For the first time ever, Youtube had livestreams of all six of Coachella’s festival stages. This is the start of a 4-year Coachella livestream partnership that Youtube has exclusive rights over – which I think helps to make YouTube a more essential destination for entertainment (against TikTok)

2. Despite the rise of the non-alc category, alcoholic beverages continues to massively outshine and dominate the festival. I read that lines for mocktails were dismal while most of the crowd opted to wait 25+ minutes in the blazing heat for a marg – goes to show that what people say they want versus their actual behavior can often be two very different things

3. Amex, as every year, was payment partner providing members exclusive merch, fast lanes, two free ferris wheel tickets, 1x $10 cash back per $50 spend and lounge access. Why the huge investment in such a consumer event? Coachella attracts an affluent Millennial demo who loves experiences, spending money and getting rewarded for it – exactly how Amex describes their target cardholders.

4. For influencers, the festival is barely about music. I watched a TikTok that dubs this desert weekend as "The Influencer Olympics", a place to flex your views, make content and get as many brand deals as possible

5. It's reported that this year's festival is expected to generate $704 million dollars in economic activity, it's an insanely big deal and leaves ripple effects in many industries: beauty, fashion, tech, entertainment – just to name a few

The 3 main ways to gain brand awareness during Coachella

1. As an official Coachella sponsor: e.g. Neutrogena as the exclusive “skincare and sun care sponsor”, with a host of activations and surprises for festival-goers like sunscreen dispensers all over the grounds

2. Hosting brand popups within the festival grounds: e.g. Kendall Jenner's 818 Tequila hosted the 818 Outpost: a gas station-inspired pop-up that visitors could shop brands like Kylie Cosmetics, Revolve, Tower 28, Emi Jay, Vacation, Lemme, and Liquid IV

3. Sponsoring influencers and leveraging their audience: e.g. influencer Emma Rose went to Coachella with her flights sponsored by Set Jet and her living accommodations sponsored by Bloom Supps and Colorpop Cosmetics

My 3 personal favorite brand activations from Coachella weekend

• Bloom Supps: their limited Coachella PR box, complete with a unreleased branded trucker hat as well as sponsoring daily vlogs of influencers at the festival

• CASETiFY: not only the official tech accessory partner at the festival, but I loved their special festival-themed collection on their website as well as their DiSCO EUPHORiA pop up which had a selfie dome and charging stations

• Beis: dropping their new Sherbet Collection right before Coachella weekend and debuting it by having a bright, colorful ice cream pop up – from reading the comments on this post it looked like tons of people have already purchased!

My parting thoughts on Coachella and the future of what festivals could look like

• The more Coachella focuses on sponsorships, influencers and events – the less it becomes about the music

• Especially with the growing popularity for live-streaming and Youtube's broadcasting partnership, I can see more and more people opt to watch the festival from home

• Which is also super interesting because they're talking about adding Weekend Three into the mix but I wonder how full the crowds would be for that

• It does make me kind of sad to hear about so many influencers waking up at 6am to film makeup videos and outfit content, attend various brand events during the day and skipping the music entirely to go home because they're so exhausted

• Ultimately, the only thing I'm sure of is Coachella is going to be one of those things that our kids will one day study in marketing (or history lol) class because it's all just wild

What is Stoicism and why have I been interested in this topic lately

• In simple terms, Stoicism was designed to help people live their best possible lives

• It’s basically a philosophy of life that maximizes positive emotions, reduces negative emotions and helps you to build the virtues of your character

• It's not so much about history lessons or needing to meditate for hours a day

• Instead, it's really just frameworks and thought patterns you can teach yourself to make you better at dealing with life

• If you like exploring new ways of thinking, I think you'll find Stoicism philosophies interesting like me

Here are 3 of my favorite Stoic quotes

1. “Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been"

2. “Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it”

3. “You become what you give your attention to.”

Not Stoicism, but here's another quote that changed my thinking this week

"In life, most of our regrets are acts of omission—the things we didn’t try, the paths untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us. Not our failures from things we did try"

• This quote is famously given by Jeff Bezos on how he uses a system for decision-making that he calls his Regret Minimisation Framework

• It really stuck with me this week: my biggest regrets will come from not doing something I wanted to

• It will never come from trying something that didn't work

• So if you've read till here – whatever it is that you've been having the itch to do/ pursue/ try ...

• Just do it.

Personal achievements this week that I'm proud of

• Ran my furthest distance yet: 15km at a 5:40 pace!

• Getting ready to kick off developing Breezi V1 on May 1

• I finished the first version of getbreezi.com which took me way too long to animate on Webflow (please don't look on mobile yet I have to fix that)

• Did a user research interview with someone I met in Singapore (!!!)

• Had FaceTime calls with two girls who've DMd me before about Breezi and now we're friends 🥹

What to look forward to in the next newsletter

• Another deep dive on the current world of consumer products hehe

If you found anything in this newsletter helpful, I'd love to connect on Twitter – tweet me a screenshot of your favorite part and let's chat 👋

I'll be back next week with more lists!