Connor Blakley used to tell America’s biggest brands what Gen Z wanted. He’s no longer waiting for them to listen

The useful part

In 2018, Connor Blakley, then 18, mailed a handwritten letter to the CEO of J.M. Smucker Co., the fifth generation of the Smucker family to lead the business. Blakley was pitching the services of his Gen Z marketing consultancy, called YouthLogic.

How it works

• He decided, for fun, to DM it to Mark Smucker on Instagram, with the message "Remember this?" ("He watches all my Stories," Blakley tells me.
• "That's how I found his Instagram.") For a decade, Uncrustables, the crimped, crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, all but...

Details worth keeping

Mark Smucker probably should have taken the meeting. " I grew up eating Uncrustables," Blakley tells me. (Smucker declined to respond to Fast Company 's requests for comment.) Blakley, who now oversees a multifaceted business and media empire of his own, called Dropout, with a growing stable of consumer brands operated under Dropout Cos.