What the Upcoming Uni Watch Changes Mean for This Substack

All your questions answered (I hope).

Hello! I hope everyone’s 2024 is off to a good start.

If you’ve been busy with New Year’s activities, you may not be aware that big things have been unfolding over at the daily Uni Watch blog. First, we have a new logo to celebrate Uni Watch’s upcoming 25th birthday (or “universary,” as I like to call it). You can learn more about that here.

Uni Watch’s new 25th-”universary” logo.

More importantly, I’ve also announced that I will be leaving Uni Watch in about five months and will no longer be writing about uniforms after that. This will have implications both for the daily blog and for this Substack. If you haven’t already read the announcement that I posted today on the blog, I urge you to read the whole thing here before reading the rest of this article.

Here’s the part of that announcement that pertains to this Substack:

Up through May 26, my Substack will be the same as it’s always been, with four feature-length Uni Watch articles per month. After that, I will keep writing and publishing on Substack, but not about uniforms. Starting in June (or maybe July, because I may decide to take a little bit of time off), my Substack will get a makeover and become, for lack of a better term, a Paul Lukas zine, probably under the name Inconspicuous Consumption.

I will use that platform to focus my usual obsessive gaze upon various detail-driven and minutiae-centric topics, along with object-based storytelling, personal storytelling, some food-related stuff, and so on. This will include a new regular feature about people’s favorite objects, along with other content that may be similar to some of my past projects, like Permanent Record and Key Ring Chronicles. I also suspect there will be some stuff I haven’t thought of yet. I mostly want it to be a mechanism for me to express curiosity, enthusiasm, delight, and deep thought. I’m still figuring out the contours of it, but I’m excited by the possibilities.

After the Substack gets its makeover, I’ll probably let it be free for the first month or so of non-uni content, just so people can get a sense of what I’ll be doing. After that, it will once again be paywalled.

My Substack will become my “home base” — the center of my creative activities. If you want to keep tabs on what I’m up to, that will be the place to do it.

I realize my Substack followers probably have some additional questions about all of this, so let’s shift into Substack-specific FAQ mode:

When you say this Substack will remain “the same as it’s always been” up through May 26, what does that mean?

Among other things:

• There will still be four feature-length Uni Watch articles per month, most of which will still be paywalled, just like they’ve always been.

• I will still do the MLB Season Preview in late March.

• I’ll do another of our quarterly “Ask Me Anything” installments in March.

• I’ll continue to do the weekly Uni Watch Blog Digests. (The digests have been on hiatus for the holidays, but they’ll start up again soon.)

And so on. In short, it should be business as usual here for about five more months.

What’s this about changing the Substack’s focus to “detail-driven and minutiae-centric topics, along with object-based storytelling, personal storytelling” and all that?

Over the course of my career, I’ve written a lot about what I call, for lack of a better term, “inconspicuous consumption” (that was the title of my 1997 book), which basically means that I obsess over the small details of material culture, consumer culture, personal artifacts, collections and the collectors who collect them, mid-century design, conceptual art projects, and things like that. The “Can of the Day” feature that currently runs on the Uni Watch blog is a good example of that; ditto for some of my past projects, like Permanent Record, Key Ring Chronicles, Gromm•It, Show & Tell, the Pandemic Porch Cocktails photo series, and so on.

My 1997 book, Inconspicuous Consumption.

That’s the type of thing I expect to be exploring here on Substack after I stop writing about uniforms. There will probably be a few regular features, including one about people’s favorite possessions (maybe you’d like to be featured with your favorite item!), and another about unusual stories from my youth (which might be written or might take the form of a podcast — not sure yet). I imagine things will probably develop in surprising and unexpected ways, especially as I get feedback and input from the readership.

When I shift to non-uni content, the Substack will still have the same URL (paullukas.substack.com), but it will get a new design, new branding, and a new name (probably “Inconspicuous Consumption”). It will no longer have anything to do with Uni Watch.

The first month or so of the relaunched Substack will be free, just so everyone can get a sense of my new direction. After that, I’ll restore the paywall. For now, I’m expecting to keep the subscription price at its current level — $35 for one year, or $5 per month. (For what it’s worth, that’s less than most Substack writers charge.)

Wait a minute! When I signed up for a paid subscription to this thing, I thought I was paying for articles about uniforms. I’m not interested in paying for articles about key rings or collectors or whatever. Can I cancel my subscription?

I’ll get to that in a minute, I promise. Please bear with me while I address a few other questions first.

When you start writing about those non-uniform topics, will it still be on a weekly schedule?

I’m hoping that the new version of the Substack will have a more freeform schedule. I promise you that “freeform” will not mean “slacker” — there’ll be plenty of content! But I’d prefer not to be locked into a rigid, deadline-driven format. So I might do three short posts during one week, then nothing the next week, then two long-ish posts the week after that, and so on.

Or at least that’s how I’m currently envisioning it. But for better or worse (probably a bit of both), I have a habit of routinizing things in my life, so it’s possible that I may end up with a regular publishing rhythm here — we’ll see.

Even though you won’t be publishing new uni-related content here on Substack after May 26, will you keep doing the blog digests?

No, I’ll stop doing those at the end of May. Sorry.

What about “Ask Me Anything”? Will that continue after May 26?

I’m not sure yet about that. We’ll see.

What’s this about you possibly taking a break after the end of May?

I expect that my final weeks of Uni Watch in May will be busy and possibly exhausting, so I think I’ll probably take June off and then launch the new version of this Substack in July.

If I do end up taking some time off, I’ll add that time to all paid subscriptions, so you won’t be paying for dead air while I recharge my batteries.

What else will these changes mean for our Substack subscriptions?

At present, this Substack has about 12,000 free subscribers (they get to see the first few paragraphs of the paywalled posts, plus the entirety of non-paywalled posts like this one you’re reading right now) and about 2,400 paid subscribers (they get to read everything).

If you are a free subscriber as of July 1 (or whenever I start publishing non-uni content here), you will keep getting each post via email. For the first month of the non-uni content, you’ll be able to read everything in its entirety. After that, you’ll go back to being able to read only the first few paragraphs, unless you upgrade to a paid subscription. As always, you can unsubscribe at any point by clicking on the link at the bottom of any emailed article you receive from me.

If you are a paid subscriber as of July 1 (or whenever I start publishing non-uni content here), you will keep getting each post via email. If you decide that non-uni content is not for you, you can cancel your subscription. Here’s how to do that:

1. At the top-right corner of this page, click on your personal Substack avatar, which should produce a drop-down menu.

2. Click on “Manage subscription.”

That should bring you to a page that shows when your subscription is due to renew. It also includes a “Cancel Subscription” button. If you click on that, your subscription will run up until its current term is completed and will then be cancelled.

My paid subscription runs through November. If I cancel in July, I’ll still be paying for several months’ worth of non-uni content that I don’t care about. Can’t I get a partial refund for the unused portion?

I’m going to ask all paid subscribers to try the first month of non-uni content, just to give it a chance. After that — probably around Aug. 1, assuming I begin doing non-uni content on July 1 — you can contact me and ask to cancel with a pro-rated refund, and I’ll arrange that for you. So if your paid subscription still has, say, three months remaining at that point, your refund would be a little less than $9; if you have two months remaining, the refund would be a little less than $6; and so on.

My annual paid subscription ends in February. I want to stick around for the last few months of uni-related articles, including the MLB Season Preview, but I don’t want the non-uni content, so I won’t want to renew for another year. What should I do?

When your current annual subscription comes up for renewal at the end of February, you can switch from annual to monthly and just stay subscribed for those last few months. (Obviously, the same approach would apply to people whose annual subs end in January, March, or April.)

It seems like this change will probably result in you having a smaller audience.

Yes, it probably will — and I’m okay with that. Based on past experience, I’m pretty sure that there’s a small but enthusiastic audience for the type of content I’m planning to publish here, and that’s enough for me at this stage of my life and career. Obviously, I’d like to reach as many people as possible, and I’m hoping a lot of Uni Watch readers — or even most Uni Watch readers — will stay on board. But if I end up with a smaller following, I’m comfortable with that.

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I think that’s it. If you have any Substack-related questions I haven’t addressed here, feel free to post them in the comments and I’ll do my best to respond. Thanks for listening. Peace.

Paul Lukas has been writing about uniforms for nearly 25 years. If you like his Substack articles, you’ll probably like his daily Uni Watch Blog, plus you can follow him on Twitter and Facebook and check out his Uni Watch merchandise. Have a question for Paul? Contact him here.