A day after unveiling a podcast deal with iHeartMedia for her monthly book club, Reese Witherspoon announced Sunnie, a new Gen Z-skewed sister label to her media and production powerhouse Hello Sunshine, on stage at Cannes Lions on Wednesday (June 18).
“Hello Sunshine has been around for seven years now,” Witherspoon said at a packed keynote alongside e.l.f. Beauty chief marketing officer Kory Marchisotto at the Debussy Theater.
“We have thousands of people showing up for our live event, Shine Away, that we have every year. We have over 160 million followers across every platform. But I thought, What are we doing for the younger generations? How are we trying to reach them?,” she said. “In the same way that we did, we built and created this brand for people by people, with so much user-generated content, I thought, this is an incredible moment to really do some research about Gen Z.”
This new label is “for Gen Z,” she said, adding that the “exciting thing” is that it will have
advisory board of teenage girls. “We got over 20 teenage girls all together!”
Marchisotto, who will be part of Sunnie through E.l.f. Beauty which is a foundational partner, said “At e.l.f., we use our platform to create pathways for growth for the next generations.”
“Our stars align with Sunnie’s mission to help young women star in their own stories. We are joining forces to create cultural change and give rising stars what they’ve been missing to reach their highest potential: tools, support and space to shine,” Marchisotto continued.
Witherspoon also talked about being inspired by her lookalike nieces Abby, who’s studying film production at Loyola and visited her on the set of the “Legally Blonde” prequel, and her younger sister Draper Witherspoon.
She said GenZ “don’t want us to tell them what they think. They know what they think. They don’t want to hear from me. They’re athletes (…) They love makeup. They love fashion, but they also love technology and AI.”
The actor-producer also talked about her drive to option her first two books to turn into movies, “Wild” and “Gone Girl” which she pointed out made “over $600 million in the box office and got three Oscar nominations;” and ultimately launch Hello Sunshine to empower women with more opportunities. She said the idea for it came after reading too many scripts that she felt “incredibly demoralizing and somewhat even borderline and misogynistic.”
“I remember reading this particularly bad one that was just about some goopy guy joking about his girlfriend’s boobs or something. I called my agent and I said, Well, this is awful. I mean, I don’t want to see this. I don’t want my daughter to see this. I’m not going to be part of the conversation casting in this,” she said.
“My agent said to me, every actress in Hollywood wants this part. It was such an eye-opening moment for me that I realized when women are not part of the creation from the inception of the script and the filmmakers who shape the stories and ideas, literally, the stories do not serve them or reflect their realities.”
Hello Sunshine also announced yesterday that its weekly “Bookmarked by Reese’s Book Club” series will be anchored by journalist and TV host Danielle Robay. The podcast is being co-produced and distributed by iHeartMedia’s iHeartPodcasts division.
