Doing well, feeling fine #19 | Building steam with Gen Z: culture, circularity and commerce - with Depop's CMO Peter Semple
This week, I am sitting down with Peter Semple, who managed to combine his personal passion and professional mission: Peter is Chief Marketing Officer at Depop. Before that, he spent 7 years in Google’s Creative Lab. His love of culture, fashion, art and music naturally flows into his work as CMO of Depop.
Depop is a global, community-powered, 2nd-hand fashion marketplace with over 30m registered users, over 30m available items, and up to 140k listings every day. The majority of Depop’s users fall into the Gen Z demographic. So Peter and his team truly understand how to build a product that resonates with Gen Y and Z customers, which we unpack.
In our conversation, we cover:
- Peter's time at Google's Creative Lab, working on "other-bet" projects such as weaving electrical fibres into textiles as alternative interfaces with technology
- How to understand next-generation subcultures and trends such as "Y2K", "egirls and eboys", "cottagecore", or "dark academia" to keep a very broad assortment of 30m items interesting. Please also check out episode #13 of this podcast if you are interested in youth subcultures
- How to harness user-communities to aid discovery, e.g., by browsing users' likes and listings
- Whether streetwear is dead (spoiler: no, not dead)
- and what Peter's top3 sneakers are, building on over 20 years of dedicated collection.
In our conversation, we reference the project Exactitudes, which meticulously documents fashion micro-trends. We also refer to DJ Shadow, beat producers and legendary DJ, whose classic album Endtroducing contains the tracks "Building steam with a grain of salt" and "Midnight in a perfect world". Two of my favourite pieces of music. Please do check them out if you love hip hop and beats. A new DJ Shadow album is apparently forthcoming in September.