Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Roz Brewer explains her strategy for Walgreens, Brittney Griner will return to the WNBA, and five years in, Hello Sunshine is just getting started. Have a terrific Tuesday.
- One to watch. If you've flipped on Netflix or Prime Video over the past few months, you've likely seen a project by Hello Sunshine. The production company that started as an outlet for actor Reese Witherspoon's voracious appetite as a reader—and as a strategic thinker about what was missing in Hollywood—has ramped up its production, putting out new projects that center women's stories.
In December, the company debuted Something From Tiffany's, a Prime Video holiday rom-com starring actor Zoey Deutsch. This month, Hello Sunshine aired a new Witherspoon project, the Netflix rom-com Your Place or Mine. And in March, the company will release what may be its most highly anticipated project yet: Daisy Jones and the Six, a Prime Video adaptation of the popular Taylor Jenkins Reid novel about a Fleetwood Mac-style '70s band.
"We've been at this for five years, but you're starting to see some of the work of the last few years come to market," explains Hello Sunshine CEO Sarah Harden. Harden launched Hello Sunshine with Witherspoon as a platform for stories that center around women's experiences. She has guided the business as it expanded from its earliest offerings—often content starring Witherspoon, like The Morning Show on Apple TV+ and Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu—to projects featuring other actors, nonfiction programming, and commerce off the screen. (The latter includes a book club and Container Store products sold in partnership with the women behind the Home Edit franchise.)
Hello Sunshine has built a consumer-facing brand with "55 million social touch points," rather than a more typical industry-facing production company, say Harden and president of film and television Lauren Neustadter. The approach has put Hello Sunshine content in front of an audience that extends far beyond streaming platforms and movie theaters. That brand awareness—not to mention book club picks that often end up on screen—has taught consumers what to expect from a Hello Sunshine project and made them more likely to tune in.
The company is now majority-owned by Blackstone's Candle Media, which has helped it execute these strategies.
"We built Hello Sunshine in a blind spot. It was a blind spot based on conventional wisdom about what audiences would show up for," Harden says. Harden and her team theorized that there was a market for women's stories both at home and in the theater (the company's first theatrical release was Where the Crawdads Sing in 2022).
The Hello Sunshine team argues that we're just beginning to see the results of their strategy. As Harden says: "It's really rolling now."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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