New Substack Newsletter Name, Who Dis?

Explaining why I switched my online name to 'Not Lamb Anymore'...

Jan 21, 2025

A colourful, stylised portrait of an older white woman with long, curly, copper-coloured hair. She is smiling and her eyes are closed, and she is wearing a navy and white ethnic patterned jacket with layered necklaces and bold earrings. In the background are hills, mountains and two moons in cool colours. — Me and my imaginary wild mane of copper-coloured curls, thinking about my new Substack name

Some of you may have noticed that my Substack newsletter changed its name — albeit very subtly — last week.

Having started my blog in 2011, I still consider myself an OG blogger. The days of pre-TikTok, Instagram being just square images with pretty bokeh filters, and Google Friend Connect*. The vast majority of bloggers that I used to follow have lonnng since given up their blogs.

*if you know what this is then congrats, my friend — you are officially an OG too.

And some, like me, clung to their blogs for dear life. I wouldn’t exactly say blogs were a sinking ship (because there’s nothing like owning your own platform), but when that ship is a money pit that costs more to run than it’s making, it’s time to make some tough decisions.

I’m docking the ship in the harbour for a little while.

Back in the day, Not Dressed As Lamb was my baby. It’s still there. It still exists. The original blog name, in case you were wondering, is a take on the expression ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. NDAL started life as a What-I-wore fashion blog on my thirty-ninth birthday, so the concept was the idea that I was approaching forty and therefore not young (‘not lamb’) anymore.

(Can you see where this is going?)

At first, I wanted to avoid doing the mutton-dressed-as-lamb thing, but the message soon evolved into Wear whatever you bloody well like and prompted a hashtag that’s still being used today on the regular.

Eighteen months in (at the beginning of 2013), I was getting enough sponsored brand work to warrant taking voluntary redundancy and going full-time with blogging. For several years I made more than a decent living out of it, and times were good.

But, times change. Dwindling numbers, dwindling visitors, the blogosphere becoming oversaturated with content creators, an absence of brands wanting to invest money in a blog and spiralling running costs (since the pandemic hit) have meant that the blog is now — unfortunately — an albatross around my neck. I absolutely cannot afford to keep it running, except maybe just to maintain its existence without adding new content (for now). The blog’s mailing list alone costs me nearly £700 a year to simply exist, even if I don’t send any emails. The whole thing costs four figures to run.

So I’m going to concentrate on Substack (as well as other projects, including writing my first novel which is nearly finished and going to be published this spring, fingers crossed) in 2025, and rest the blog for a year. This decision to concentrate on writing as my main source of income — and not work on brand collaborations — has meant that the fashion and style aspect that I was known for (hence the name Not Dressed As Lamb) has become irrelevant, sadly.

At the beginning of the year, I realised that I wasn’t trying to be not dressed as lamb anymore. (Dontcha just love a double negative?!) My Instagram handle is Not Lamb, and as the blog faded into the background I was starting to become known as Not Lamb more than Not Dressed As Lamb. And as I wrote above,

NDAL started life as a What-I-wore fashion blog on my thirty-ninth birthday, so the concept was the idea that I was approaching forty and therefore not young (‘not lamb’) anymore.

So, please allow me to introduce my (very subtly) rebranded Substack newsletter:

Not Lamb Anymore, by Catherine Summers.

And just to add an extra layer or two of over-explanation, Not Lamb Anymore has a double (triple?) meaning. I’m not young (or should I say young-young), meaning ‘lamb’, anymore. And I’m not Not Dressed As Lamb anymore. And I’m now concentrating on Substack so I’m not even Not Lamb anymore. But no one needs two ‘nots’, so I used a little poetic licence.

I’m sure you get it.

I’m continuing the premise of the newsletter being the ‘ramblings of a perimenopausal fifty-something Brit’. I intend to write stories, recount tales, talk about dogs, and observe stuff and write about it. I’m sure I’ll still write about style, but I can’t promise you I’ll be doing the traditional fashion blogger thing of outfit photos… I honestly think those days are over (if you’re sad about that then do know that I am too).

I may well transfer my Things I’m Loving This Month posts from the blog to here, as well as health and beauty posts and my favourite type of blog posts to write: Listicles, like A List of All My Celebrity Crushes, 1977 to Present and 9 Things I Tried Once and Will Never Try Again.

So let’s see how it goes. And as for paid content, I’ve been saying for MONTHS that I’m going to activate the extra content for paying subscribers ‘soon’. The reason I didn’t get round to it was because I wasn’t writing the blog OR my Substack consistently, and until that happened with the latter I wasn’t going to activate the paid content feature. I feel that can happen now that the blog is having a little rest and Substack is my full-time baby.

Here’s to a new chapter 🍻

(And speaking of new chapters, I’m thinking of making my debut novel something that’s accessible to paid subscribers before it’s officially published — I’m just not sure how that’ll work just yet. I can’t release chapters as they’re written because I skip around so much when writing. To make the earlier scenes fit in with the later ones I go back and tweak things, so constant edits are a thing.)

Anyway - watch this space…!

~ Let me know what you think of the new Not Lamb Anymore newsletter title.

~ Let me know what type of content you like to read.

~ Let me know if Tuesday is a good day for new content (as a subscriber I get nearly all my Substack newsletters on a Friday and sadly can’t read them all).