Run clubs have waitlists now. Twenty-two percent of Gen Z calls them the new dating app.
Speed dating is sold out in most major cities. Eventbrite saw 1.5 million searches for singles events in a single year. Coffee meetups and running clubs are up 233%. Local art walks are up 49%. Book clubs have quietly turned into the new networking event.
Researchers have a name for this: friction-maxxing. People are deliberately choosing the harder, slower, less convenient option — showing up, in person, on purpose — because the easy version never actually gave them what they wanted. Sixty-nine percent of Millennials say in-person connection feels more genuine than anything they get online.
I don’t think this is a dating trend or a Gen Z quirk. I think it’s a referendum on every “connection” tool your brand has been leaning on for the last decade.
Here’s the catch. You have more ways to reach your customer than you’ve ever had — email flows, DM automations, AI-personalized offers, retargeting that follows them across four apps. And yet loyalty is harder to earn than it was ten years ago. Referrals are harder to earn. That gap should tell you something: your customers didn’t just ask for more touchpoints. They asked for something touchpoints can’t give them.
So what do you actually do with that? You don’t add an Eventbrite link to your content calendar and call it strategy. You ask three questions — the same three a very well-known beauty brand just answered in a very public, very expensive way.
The Glossier Lesson
In 2020, Glossier closed every one of its physical stores and went all-in on digital. On paper, it was the obvious call — 80% of their revenue already came from their website. Founder Emily Weiss explained the logic simply: they’d met people where people already were, which was online.
Except their customers didn’t stop asking for the stores back. Weiss later admitted the community had been vocal that they missed Glossier retail. So the brand reopened — and the response wasn’t polite interest. It was lines around the block. Over a million visitors to Glossier’s stores in a single year.
Fast forward to now. Glossier’s new CEO just announced the company is closing nine of its twelve remaining stores. If you stopped reading there, you’d assume digital finally won. It didn’t. The three stores staying open aren’t being scaled back — they’re being rebuilt into what the company calls experience-driven spaces, built around events and community instead of straightforward selling. Why keep them at all? Because those three locations alone generate 55% of all store revenue and 60% of new customers.
That’s not a retreat from physical retail. That’s a senior leader looking at an entire business and making a hard, specific call about where real connection actually lives — and having the numbers to defend it.
Three Questions Before You Invest Your Marketing Dollars in IRL “Connection”
1. Where are your customers already showing up for you in person — and are you doing anything with it?
Trunk shows, in-store events, client appreciation nights, local partnerships — most brands have at least one place customers already show up. The question isn’t whether to invent something new. It’s whether you’re actually using what’s already working, or just letting it happen passively while you pour budget into another email flow.
2. What are you willing to cut to fund it — instead of just adding it on top?
This is the one most business owners skip. They bolt an event onto an already-full marketing plan instead of asking what’s earning its keep and what isn’t. Glossier didn’t just add three great stores. They closed nine to pay for it — a hard call, but a clear one.
3. What number will tell you it worked — before you spend the money, not after?
Revenue from the event. New customers acquired. Repeat purchase rate from attendees. Pick the number before you commit the budget, so you’re not scrambling to justify the spend after the fact. Glossier could defend closing nine stores because they already knew the three staying open drove 55% of revenue and 60% of new customers.
The Real Shift
None of this means you need a flagship store or a run club. It means someone senior needs to be asking these three questions before the budget gets spent — not after, when you’re trying to explain a line item that didn’t move the numbers you actually care about.
Imagine what your marketing looks like when every dollar aimed at “connection” is a deliberate, defensible bet instead of a reflex borrowed from whatever’s trending. That’s not a bigger marketing budget. That’s a real experiential marketing strategy — built with intention, not urgency.
If you’re already sensing where your brand’s version of this decision is hiding — the thing you’ve been meaning to evaluate but keep letting slide into “we’ll get to it” — that’s usually the first sign you’ve outgrown deciding it alone.
If that’s where you are, let’s talk about a Marketing Strategy Intensive. It’s exactly built for this moment: the point where you need someone to look at the whole picture and tell you what to keep, what to cut, and how you’ll know it’s working.
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