Almost seven years ago, Brooke Hammerling’s girlfriends began texting her about Baby Yoda. They hadn’t watched The Mandalorian, but they’d seen the tiny creature popping up on social media and had become, in their own words, obsessed. The more Brooke explained about pop culture, and the more friends she explained pop culture to, the more she realized that she should consolidate all that explanation—and in late 2019, her newsletter Pop Culture Mondays was born.
PCM quickly grew into a full-fledged site that covered the trends, memes, and conversations that shape our digital lives. But as the audience expanded, she started hearing that her readers were frustrated with the look and design of the site. Enter WordPress, where flexibility and customization allowed Brooke to bring her vision to life. Now, PCM is a true extension of Brooke’s voice and perspective, from the videos she embeds to the images that star her dog Potato in situations drawn from that week’s stories. “There is nothing better on the market than WordPress’s AI generator,” she says of the tool that helps her concoct the images. “It’s remarkable.”
Today, the brand has expanded even further with her podcast, Pop Culture Mondays on Thursdays, which brings the same sharp perspective and commentary into a new format. Pop Culture Mondays stands as a testament to how a clear point of view, paired with the right tools, can grow into something uniquely your own. “Nobody has a site like mine,” she says. “Everybody on WordPress has a site that’s based on what they want, their experiences.” That holds true every day of the week.
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