FOR BYRON LINNELL EDWARDS, WELLNESS IS PART OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS
WORDS BY TOM BARKER FOR HIGHSNOBIETY
HIGHSNOBIETY
This story comes as part of our collaboration with On, available from July 6 on the Highsnobiety Shop.
If you want to find out a bit about Byron Linell Edwards, then looking at his social media bios will give you a pretty well-rounded view. Written there is "Conscious Socially Connected Spiritual Gangster," five words that he tells us over email "defines who I am, my values, and my personality."
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Byron Edwards, TSR’s head of social impact, said that to reach Black people, you have to talk to “the roommates.” If you’re a fan of the brand, “you check your likes, and then you check The Shade Room,” Edwards said.
The Shade Room tags all of its political content with the hashtag #TSRPolitics. Back in 2016, TSR was still mostly focused on celebrity news, but as the Trump presidency unfolded, Nwandu knew it was important to start communicating political news to TSR’s audience. By 2020, TSR was running full voter registration campaigns.
“I got a vision in 2018 that showed us as, like, a Black CNN,” Nwandu told me. “It had always been a dream but that vision sparked me thinking like that about this company. We were at AfroTech in 2019 in front of 4,000 people, and I said ‘We are going to influence the election this year. Help me do this because this is what I want to do and I don’t know how to do it yet.'”
From there, the partnership requests rolled in.
Prior to the election, The Shade Room partnered with the Collective PAC on the #VoteToLive campaign to get at least 150,000 Black Americans registered to vote. By Election Day, it exceeded that goal and had helped register 162,722 voters (though The Shade Room was unable to provide a demographic breakdown of those newly registered voters).
Edwards knew from previously working in marketing and public relations that The Shade Room was key to reaching a wide audience of Black people. Working with Collective PAC allowed The Shade Room to serve its audience in a way that joined a larger get out the vote push, instead of creating its own.
“We knew in 2018 that the 2020 election was going to be just as big as it was,” Edwards said. “But whenever you’re thinking of reaching the voters, you have to think of how you can reach a wide range of voters and who are these people you’re to talking to, and you can’t bypass The Shade Room when you think of that, so wanting to do that, you also have to make sure you do it responsibly, which is how we started the conversation with Collective PAC.”
More than 93,000 people are subscribed to TSR’s texting service through Community, which it used to register eligible first time voters on their birthdays. Normally, Edwards explained, subscribers would get a “Happy Birthday” message from The Shade Room. But this year, the messages included information asking them to register or check the status of their voter registration.
“Digital is the new wave,” Edwards said. “This is one of the places where you can actually come and see your favorite artists, see the president, see the former president, the [former] First Lady, your favorite rapper, and learn a little bit of news. There’s not many other places you can really get that.”
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