This week’s episode marks a major milestone: our first-ever live guest joins the podcast! Keeks — aka employee number one — is N/OW’s first visual hire and the creative force helping bring our aesthetic universe to life.

We talk about her 8-year journey at Nordstrom, her take on the evolving relationship between fashion, digital culture, and mental health, and how we’re building a platform that merges inspiration, play, and emotional clarity. From the earliest mood boards to our emerging design guidelines, Keeks shares what surprised her about the N/OW direction and what it means to create something eccentric, adventurous, and satisfying.

This week’s episode is a little different! Coming off our first ever board meeting, we did what any great team would do. We debriefed. In this episode you’ll hear from the N/OW crew as we reflect on how we’re feeling, what moments stuck out to us the most from the meeting, and what we’re excited to work on next.

This week, things started to come into focus. After sitting with the research, user interviews, and a conversation with Rickie, we finally landed on the core problem, insight, and solution. It’s clear what we’re building and why. Plus: updates on how we’re using AI to move faster, what we’re learning from the data science team, and a quick check-in from Jacob!

In this episode, I share what we’ve been learning from real conversations with Gen Z about how they engage with fashion and trends online. From feeling overwhelmed by constant content to craving deeper understanding. Plus, a little teaser: an interactive page with interview clips and insights is coming soon!! 

After a week of remote work, the team met IRL for the first time at the Russell Building in Seattle. We aligned on four key problem spaces, explored early feature concepts, and spent time exploring in the behind-the-scenes world of photo studio and marketplace onboarding. We closed the week with a walking tour through the city — from Glossier to Atelier — to ground the team in how Gen Z actually shops.

Hi! This week marked the official kickoff of N/OW Lab. We began by answering key guiding questions to clarify the direction of the app, and aligned on two core personas: the N/OW Shopper and the N/OW Content Creator. Our research focused on Gen Z’s evolving relationship with fashion, AI, beauty, and luxury, along with an analysis of what has made past social platforms succeed or fail. On the technical side, we set up GitHub Enterprise and established our Claude team to support research workflows. We also began experimenting with AI styling and virtual try-on capabilities. Overall, we’ve seen meaningful time savings using AI for research and synthesis — though when it comes to generating strong feature concepts, that’s an area we’ll continue to push on next week. That's all from us & N/OW You Know!