Bridget Reid

Have you heard about dirty bread?

I'm Bridget Reid.

I'm a futures writer at New York Magazine.

I cover all kinds of oddities and phenomena.

Yeah, that woman is named Rachel Parcell, and she had a blog in the mid-2010s called Pink Peonies.

She was one of the first true influencers on the internet where instead of just having a blog, sharing her life, she was actually linking to the products she was buying, the clothes, how she was decorating her home, what she was buying her kids, and then linking that stuff, actually making money off the links and having followers kind of mimic her lifestyle.

Explaining that now feels almost silly because it's endemic to how people live and make money online.

But this was long before that was actually an income.

And, you know, Rachel was a stay-at-home mom.

She's practicing Mormon in Utah.

And it really became a job for her because it was something she could do while being at home when she eventually had children.

So she's kind of a...

a pioneer as the Mormons were in the state of Utah of the influencing industry as we know it.

Why are they so good at doing that?

Mormonism as a religion, first of all, is quite a gendered religion in that women really do have a very specific role, which is as caretakers in the home.

You could think of it as a quite traditional role.

sort of domestic division, right, where women take care of the kids, take care of the home, and that's really what they're supposed to be striving for.

What we both were raised in is... Spend the morning with me as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or a Mormon mom.

We have to be to church in 20 minutes and neither of my girls are even awake yet.

It's just luck.