Halie LeSavage
Halie LeSavage is the retail writer at Morning Brew as well as a contributor to Glamour and Harper's Bazaar. She was previously an associate fashion editor at Glamour and graduated cum laude from Harvard University.
How much of what you learned from earning your English major at Harvard do you use in your daily work? Tell us about how this was foundational to your writing journey.
My Early English Literature professor will be disappointed to hear that studying Milton and Chaucer isn’t very relevant to my career today. I chose to study English because I loved storytelling and writing in all forms, and because Harvard weirdly doesn’t have a journalism department. For a time, I thought I’d become a teacher like my mom.
By my senior year, the English department offered a semester-long journalism seminar that I took and adored. That class convinced me not to give up on writing as a career option.
English is a writing intensive major, so all the essays I wrote in college honed skills I use every day as a journalist: meeting deadlines, paying attention to details, accepting (sometimes tough) feedback. 400+ pages of weekly readings also helped a ton with the research and synthesis that’s central to reporting. A lot of what readers expect now isn’t just telling them what happened, but providing context and explaining how one story intersects with others.
Then there’s the narrative aspect: Some of my favorite stories by other journalists read as smoothly as a novel, and diving into great literature sharpened my ability to structure and rearrange stories. At least, I hope it did.
Tell us a bit about what you do at Retail Brew and how this writing job is different from past editorial roles you've held.
My title is "Retail Brew writer," but my job is a mix of writing, editing, and audience development. I obsessively follow the happenings at major retail brands, then select the stories I think will have the biggest professional impacts on my audience to cover in the newsletter. Then I spend hours sifting through reader feedback.
Retail Brew isn’t just reporting retail news: It’s making retail news light and conversational. The line between fun and fluff is a thin one, so striking the right tone is key.
Before I came to Retail Brew, I worked on the Style team at Glamour. I was hired as a fashion features assistant, then was promoted to associate fashion editor. Working in fashion editorial was pretty straightforward: I wrote display copy for the print magazine (RIP) and pitched and wrote stories for the website.
The biggest difference between those roles and my work at Retail Brew is the responsibility factor. In my new job, I have a lot more control over what I write and the direction of my product. I write in the first person, so I’m more or less the “face” of the newsletter, and I’m also tasked with thinking about long-term editorial strategy for it. Before, I also wrote a ton—but I wasn’t part of conversations about promoting or growing the brand.
What do you like most about the work you do with Retail Brew, and what new challenges has it presented?
When I wrote for other website-based publishers in the past, reader interaction started and ended with texts from my mom. Writing an email newsletter means I can have conversations in my inbox with anyone who reads it. It's been less than a year since Retail Brew launched, but already I’ve heard from thousands of readers in places from Austin, TX, to Auckland, New Zealand. And Retail Brew’s readers are a thoughtful bunch: Many of them work at or around the businesses I cover, so they often share suggestions for stories I should cover or angles I hadn’t explored yet.
As for challenges—retail is a huge industry and I’m covering as much of it as I can as a one-woman team. The learning curve when I began reporting on retail was steep. My retail knowledge was limited to fashion and beauty brands prior to Retail Brew, and I wasn’t exactly reading their earnings reports. I spent a lot of time educating myself on areas I wasn’t as familiar with so I could gain the confidence to write about them for an informed audience of 120,000+ readers.
Nearly a year in, I’m still learning something new literally every day I write.
What's one piece of advice you'd give to an aspiring writer or someone early in their writing career?
I’d say: Give yourself time.
Between Twitter posturing and arbitrary “30 Under 30” type lists, there’s a lot of pressure to become the next Breakout Young Author/Journalist™ and do so with the first thing you publish. I used to get wrapped up worrying that I was somehow falling behind because my first role was in entry-entry level journalism and I’m nowhere near, say, publishing a book.
But a lot of great writers I love published their best work years after they entered the industry. Fixating on everyone else’s accomplishments isn’t productive, and everyone’s journey happens on their own timeline.
