ICYMI: Jeff's in the rearview
Here's what it means for all of us.
THIS EMAIL ORIGINALLY WENT OUT ON FRIDAY FEB 28, 2025.
Hi Geezers,
This email is a little different. It’s an announcement, an ask, and a roadmap for the future. But this year is different too, and I’m excited to tell you how Gee Thanks! is changing, how it’s not, and how I need Geezers to help me!
TLDR: Gee Thanks! is rethinking our relationship with Amazon and bringing the focus to shopping small businesses in 2025 by using the Gee Thanks! Flagship as our own virtual general store full of community-recommended products, brands and businesses.
Fill out this survey and tell us about which of your fav businesses and brands should be stocked in the Gee Thanks! Flagship store!
I want to hear about your favorite artists who sell their work online, your favorite hot sauce you can only find in a few novelty grocery stores in your hometown, your favorite shop in the town you vacationed in as a child (the place that sells the best popcorn). The yarn store you love. The tee-shirts you exclusively wear from a small brand. The place in your city that sells really good glassware. Small brands that aren’t even in stores! Small brands that are in stores! Women-owned, queer-owned, Black-owned! And I want to hear why you love them, and why you recommend them to the Geezers.
Yes, you can plug your own small business!
My goal is to bring those brands and businesses into the Gee Thanks! network so we can introduce them to tens of thousands of Geezers — shoppers they may have never otherwise reached — with your seal of approval.
Why are we doing this? Here are the details (with some Amazon screenshots included so keep reading if you’re nosy):
Over the last few months I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching as I think about the future of this company and the Gee Thanks! community.
To me, Gee Thanks! is about far more than just sales — even though, yes, we love a sale. The world is constantly shifting and reshaping how we approach shopping and spending money. It’s an incredibly complicated time to be a shopper and consumer, and when people say there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, they’re right. But that also doesn’t mean we give up and don’t try at all to reconfigure how we do things and where we bring our dollars. To me it means we try our best, be open to change, and spend less time beating ourselves up for the systems put in place by billionaire losers. Listen, sometimes diapers are the most cost-effective when you buy them from a big box store. That doesn’t make you a bad person, no matter what people online want to tell you.
Since the summer, I have been challenging myself to think about what my responsibility is as the owner and operator of a shopping and product recommendation network, and I have some ideas about where we go from here.
Here’s where I’ve found myself.
The first step? Pulling away from Amazon — about 90% of the time
Last August I made the decision to wind down Amazon links.
Prime Day felt weird.
The regular prices felt inflated, stuff was all over the place, and I felt like I was a cog in a Big Bezos Money Grab.
It didn’t always feel this way.
While I still pay for Prime (I can’t quit the video streaming, love my Kindle, and like to have the option when I need fast turnaround shipping), I am trying to be more thoughtful about how I personally use Amazon, which has naturally snowballed into how I talk about and recommend Amazon to all of you professionally.
And here is where we must be nuanced: Amazon is an incredible tool when we’re talking about mutual aid organizations like Trans Santa, which allows trans kids and young adults to use Amazon to create wishlists that we can easily shop from each holiday season. Amazon was fast, efficient and invaluable when people all over the country wanted to send emergency supplies to help LA fire victims via our partner organization Pandemic of Love. Do I wish something else existed? Yes. Am I going to let my feelings about Amazon keep me from helping these specific mutual aid organizations and ultimately helping other people? No.
I also heard the Geezer community loud and clear: You’re all kind of over Amazon, too. It just feels yucky to use — even if there’s no better way to get bulk toilet paper delivered. (Yes I know about Who Gives A Crap, but I personally don’t like the product! I’m sorry!) You’re not a fan of Jeff Bezos (and same). You don’t need more stuff for stuff’s sake. The sales don’t feel that good anymore. Their pricing feels tricky and sneaky.
And to fight it, you’re spending more time trying to buy things from small businesses. AND SAME!
The downside for me: Pulling away from Amazon links, roundups, and gift guides for Black Friday and Prime Day has had — and will continue to have — a profound effect on the Gee Thanks! finances.
From the perspective of an “influencer,” Amazon has been a major tentpole of this business. It was the first place I ever registered for an affiliate account, which allowed me to generate links to products I was recommending. To be transparent, when I started Gee Thanks! In 2019 I generated about $250-500 a month for the first two years. By the end of 2022, that average monthly income from Amazon links was between $3,500 and $6k, with July and November adding big spikes for Prime Day and Black Friday.
Making the decision to pull back from Amazon links basically guaranteed a $60,000 deficit in annual company income. It was not a decision I made lightly, but it felt like the right decision for me and for this community.
To show you how immediately that impacts the finances:
Here’s what last year’s commission earnings looked like from Feb 1-19, 2024:
And here’s where we are for the same date range in 2025:
After I made this call in August, it sparked 3 questions that guided me over the last 6 months:
If we’re shifting away from Amazon, how can my small business stay afloat?
How can I help Geezers shop more mindfully — and how can we all help each other shop more mindfully?
How can I keep the Facebook group free? I do not want to gate-keep our best community resource.
Here’s where I landed!
How Gee Thanks! will stay in business without relying on Amazon:
Brand Partnerships
Even though Gee Thanks! has been around since 2019, I only brought on a brand partnerships manager in the Spring of 2023 (hi Molly!). Together we work with bigger brands that Geezers and I already like to shop, pitching them on paying a flat fee for sponsored content across platforms, which you can recognize with #ad hashtags and #brandpartner hashtags.
In 2024, we worked with brands like Osea, Walmart, Kohl’s, Dermstore, CurrentBody, and more. The response from you all has been positive, overwhelmingly helpful, and always nuanced and in good faith—especially in the conversation around a big box store like Walmart as a partner. I heard feedback from Geezers across a wide range of regions, ages, incomes, lifestyles, and access to convenient shopping that convinced me Walmart was a good “big box” fit for this community. (Funnily enough, I don’t even have a Walmart near me in NYC — they signed on with us based on the feedback of all of you!)
The Gee Thanks! Inner Circle
In September of 2024 I launched the premium Substack subscription, which allows me to provide paying subscribers with more content while also not taking any existing Gee Thanks! content and community away from free subscribers. Keeping all of our current free resources free (the Holiday Shop Hub, our Facebook group, etc) is my number one priority.
Shopping Small
The main piece of feedback when we talk about pivoting away from Amazon? You want to shop smaller! I do too. And I’ve made it my mission to highlight more small businesses and brands by introducing them to a bigger audience — you!
Affiliate links are usually the answer. But affiliate platforms often exclude the smallest of businesses because the major platforms charge brands thousands of dollars to join, on top of the affiliate commissions promised for creators who can convert sales. This is an easy spend for a “mall brand” like a Madewell or a Walmart who can make up that cost in a day of revenue, but out of the question for an artist who makes bespoke ceramics or a small-town chocolate shop that offers nationwide shipping.
Some of you know where this is going: Since March 2023 I’ve used Flagship to connect Geezers to the small businesses I love, and our Flagship store is currently about 85% small businesses. Flagship is a relatively new platform (similar to LTK and ShopMy, if you are familiar), but it really benefits small brands by not charging them a fee to sign up for the platform. I was one of the first creators to join Flagship, because I knew it would be a hit with the Geezers. And it has been!
Flagship welcomes brands at no charge, and then each individual brand works out the commission split with the creators they choose to work with on the platform. Sustainability-focused luxury leather goods company Hyer Goods, for instance, gives me 15% commission on sales made from my Flagship. And I have learned through working with small brands that they love the affiliate commission model. If a brand sells a $100 wallet and you buy it from a Gee Thanks! recommendation, the brand is happy to give me $10 or $15 as a thanks for facilitating the brand awareness and the sale, and bringing them a new customer.
It allows my business to exist, their business to exist, and you, the shopper, to discover and shop a small brand.
SO FILL OUT THIS SURVEY, and let’s map out the Gee Thanks! future of shopping together!
We’re learning as we go. We are essentially turning the ship in a new direction. We are not promising that we’ll never share another Amazon link again, but we are putting our whole butts into trying something new that both honors what we’ve built, what the Geezer community wants, and the shopping landscape we find ourselves facing in 2025. So let’s do this together! I am SO excited to discover new brands, products and makers through you!
Follow Gee Thanks! on Instagram for daily sales, exclusive discount codes, and more life-changing recommendations.
Join the Gee Thanks! Facebook community to give and get life-changing recommendations of your own.
Shop Gee Thanks! recs on our LTK!
Shop even more recs in our Flagship Store.
Thank you for doing this!