Game On

Salty is here to warm up your week

Hi!

Welcome to Salty — a home for conversations on culture, viewed via the lens of fitness and wellness, as well as fashion, travel, food and hospitality.

Salty is a new space for all the BTS things in my career as a journalist. This will be an adjacent hub for the yaps I have with friends; the unpublished takeaways of interviews with CEOs, creative directors, brand owners and thought-leaders, plus the things I am noticing across the various sectors that I cover in my print-published work.

Why?
There is so much research and on-the-ground pulse-taking involved in every single I piece that I write; often, hour-long interviews that are filled with cool ideas and thought provoking chatter end up becoming a one-line quote in a story because that’s all there’s space for. Via Salty, I want to expand on those conversations to keep connecting the cultural dots — discussing green shoots of trends before they even take root. This will be a place to discuss what’s what. (As my work is internationally published, it often takes a long time before any nascent trend has enough legs to become legitimate. An example: the idea for my anti-vegan backlash story (published in January) was born 18 months earlier, in a 711 in West Hollywood after I saw (and ate, obviously — a journo’s gotta get the scoop) a packet of crisps made from egg whites.)

Over the past few years, I’ve turned my hobbies and personal interests into a professional niche. My love for sport started when I pitched a story to the Financial Times about all these running clubs I’d seen popping off on Instagram; I decided I had to actually join one (again: journalistic research). It set me on the path that I am on now.

I owe a lot to that story. I’ve since ran many major marathons, and two ultra marathons (including The Speed Project, an illegal non-stop relay race through France — a guerrilla event which is influencing the big sports brands). I’ve become immersed in everything to do with fitness, wellness and the culture building around it — my fascination spans everything from the latest food and beverage trends (like status protein shakes, which I wrote about for the Financial Times recently) to our over-obsession with electrolytes (a Salty topic coming soon) and the new-found playground that is cocktail-like coffee — a direct result of health-conscious millennials and Gen Z consuming far less alcohol.

Other things currently on my mind is the new way that “recovery” is being marketed (look out for forthcoming Nike story) and how our love for fitness is altering what we look for in a vacation (also coming soon). I’m interested in how sport is shifting what we wear, how we interact with our clothes, and how it will shape garment design moving forwards.

Athletes are the new celebrities; protein is the latest must-have accessory. Fitness is modern culture now. I’m interested in the subcultures that build around a particular sport or trend, and the IYKYK signals that can turn each into playful typecasts — something I love reporting on in jest — but which also represent enormous business opportunities for all kinds of brands, whether sunscreen (sweat-proof) or ice cream (protein?).

I’m interested — literally — in the why of everything.

Salty will be the place to noodle through these thoughts, with exclusive interviews to amplify those conversations. It’s the BTS and then some.

Thank you for being here. I hope you enjoy what’s to come.

Grace