Brooklyn natives Merlyn Oliver and Lauren Riley established the Brooklyn Mavens Instagram account to highlight their hometown. The page currently has over 37,000 followers, but social media is only the beginning for the Mavens. Over time, the platform has evolved into a full-on community movement. But they are more than just influencers.
The Brooklyn Mavens is more than just a trend. Merlyn and Lauren are formidable grassroots archivists working hard to preserve the city’s roots.
TheHub.news talked to the dynamic duo about their love for Brooklyn and why they’re never letting go.
Merlyn: We do get this question a lot, and it’s easy to share. I’ll give you the long version. So Lauren and I started Brooklyn Mavens. It was BK Fashion Mavens before. Influencer marketing was so heavy, just starting in 2016 and 2017, so we kind of hopped on that. So it was called BK Fashion Mavens. It was actually really hard to do. Because I mean, we were fashionistas but also spotlighting people. It was very niche. But one of the things that I noticed is that people weren’t remembering BK Fashion Mavens. It was so long. But number two, we got kind of tired just talking about fashion. We want to talk about food. We want to talk about where we’re going. And we noticed that also there wasn’t really a platform that just spotlighted all of Brooklyn, like where to go, what to do. So then we rebranded to Brooklyn Mavens. Easier to say, number one, but we created a platform really for people to come into and see what Brooklyn is all about from real Brooklynites, not just people who just came here and just like, “Oh, let’s just spotlight Brooklyn.”
TheHub.news: You touched on there being some challenges, some things in the beginning that were difficult. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in the initial stages of building Brooklyn Mavens?
Lauren: I think essentially, as BK Fashion Mavens, one of the things is highlighting people. You really have to put yourself out there and not be afraid to talk to people and ask them like, “Hey, can we highlight you? Can we get a photo of your outfit or video?” And so I think that it was just a lot of trying to get out of my own comfort zone to do that. And then, even for our own, we highlighted our own fashion as well. It’s expensive to have to buy the latest clothes and try to seem trendy, and then just even putting together captions. It just became very mundane for us. Not to say that it is. But just from our perspective, it just felt like we were doing the same thing over and over again. And that’s why we wanted just to highlight all Brooklyn has to offer from our perspective because we go out, and we are Brooklynites. We, Merlyn and I, have known each other for a very long time, so why not just highlight the borough from the perspective of not where everyone else was going? Just really try to highlight the true Brooklyn.
TheHub.news: So Brooklyn has a very rich history. I’m always really fascinated by how drastically an area or a city, or a country can change in such a short space of time. From your childhood in Brooklyn to now, what have been some of the biggest changes in Brooklyn?
Merlyn: I live in East Flatbush, the home of Caribbean people. So there’s Haitians, Jamaicans. Fun fact. I was born in Jamaica and raised in Brooklyn. So technically, I can’t say I was Brooklyn born and raised, but I just say it sometimes just for the ease. So one of the things that first come to mind when you ask that question is Kings Theatre. I have walked up and down Flatbush Avenue. I don’t even know how many times since I was three or four. I’m 30 now, but King’s Theatre was always closed until a couple of years ago. And I’ve always asked, “What is this thing?” And then when it actually put into the works to reopen it, I was just like, “Whoa.” And I think that’s mainly because of gentrification or the fact that someone came in and was just like, “There’s this theater. We have to do something with it.” I’m glad they didn’t shut it down or demolish it.
So when I think about that, that’s the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that there were different things in East Flatbush that didn’t exist before. So that was one of the pros. Luckily, I feel like in East Flatbush, we still have that actual sense of being in the Caribbean. You hear reggae and Soca, but also, there are different people here now, right? So you have people jogging and people walking their dogs. And the fact that rent is super crazy for East Flatbush. You’re paying like $2,500 for an apartment. There are certain things that have changed. And plus, I do love the fact that we have a Target in Flatbush because I feel like Black people love Target at the end of the day. I also love the fact that they are building new things within the neighborhood.
Lauren: Yeah. So it’s interesting because I come from a different perspective than Merlyn, I guess. I was born and raised in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. And it’s interesting that even high school people would say, “Oh, you grew up in the white bougie neighborhood,” blah, blah, blah, blah. I always found that Prospect Heights was diverse, but now it’s a little less diverse. Now there are a lot more Caucasian people living within Prospect Heights. Prospect Heights is really small, but it’s a lot more Caucasians. It’s a very family-oriented neighborhood, but it’s changed in that way. And I live right off of Vanderbilt. So one thing that’s really interesting to me is back in the day, Vanderbilt was so desolate. You would not walk down Vanderbilt at all. There was nothing there, really. Maybe a few restaurants here and there. Now, Vanderbilt is bustling with people. Sometimes I work from home, so I don’t always walk around as much as I should, even though I have the best opportunity to do that. But sometimes I’ll walk down Vanderbilt, I’m like, “Oh, this is new. I didn’t know that was there.” And it’s just so crowded. We even do the open streets, and the restaurants have their streets open. I mean, the restaurants have their tables out and everything. So it’s changed a lot for a neighborhood that was always considered to be more of the bougie neighborhoods. Even when we got a Union Market, some of the people that have lived in the building as long as I have were like, “Oh, we’re not going to dine. We’re not going to shop at Union Market. We’re going to stay to our local super markets, blah, blah, blah.” But I love Union Market.
There are pros, right? Me, I’ve grown up in this neighborhood, but I can’t afford to live in this neighborhood alone. It’s entirely ridiculously expensive, but it’s accessible to a lot, and it’s easy to get into Manhattan from here. I like the things that have come with living over here, the accessibility to the gym and certain perks, but I just wish that accessibility didn’t mean that it was displacing natives. Or just anyone, right? I just feel like most people should be able to look at a neighborhood and say, “Just because these are accessible to me, I can still afford to live here. I don’t have to make hundreds of thousands of dollars just to be able to afford this area.” I just wish that it meant that natives of Brooklyn could still look at the possibility of staying here.
TheHub.news: When I read anything, I love to be able to tap into the five senses. So what does the thing smell like? What does it feel like? Brooklyn on nice hot summer’s day. Perfect weather. What does it feel like? What does it smell like? What are the sounds? What’s the Brooklyn energy?
Merlyn: For us, it’s so easy to describe, but it’s kind of hard to describe it at the same time. I think one of the tweets that we shared recently on our Instagram page was like, “Brooklyn Summer is a beautiful feeling.” I feel like that kind of encapsulates what it is together. But it smells kind of tangy but sweet at the same time. Because, come on, New York City. I mean, 80-degree, 90-degree weather in the past two days. You hear the children on the street. You hear the ice cream truck. Living in Little Caribbean, I smell jerk chicken. There are people connecting. Going outside. People are on their stoops. I feel like everyone just came out of hibernation [during the pandemic] and we’re like, “Yeah, we’re all here. Let’s just celebrate within these three, four months.” And it’s like no other feeling anywhere else.
TheHub.news: You touched on gentrification. How does the Black and Brown community combat gentrification? In what ways does the community fight back?
Lauren: I think our platform, specifically, is supporting Black-owned businesses. We’re Black women, so we naturally gravitate towards Black businesses. I just think it’s important. And, of course, we highlight everything. When we emphasize Black businesses, we definitely support them by shedding light on our platform and letting people know that this is here.
Events, through not just highlighting on our platform. But if we’re throwing events, connecting with Black businesses, and seeing how we can collaborate together. I think just the culture in general in Brooklyn, and I think it ties into having events. There’s the TAMA Sundays that they have in Bed-Stuy, and that’s on Tompkins Avenue. It’s really just like a block party every Sunday for the most part in Bed-Stuy, and everybody shows up. Black. White. Everybody shows up, but it’s an emphasis on Black culture. So I think that things like that are very important because it supports Black-owned businesses. Also, Bed-Stuy has historically been known as a Black community. I think it just brings emphasis and money into the neighborhood, but also just emphasis on just Black joy and what that looks like. Things like that are very important. I think that within our generation, the Black community is very good at showing the culture within Brooklyn and highlighting the Blackness and trying to maintain it for the most part, at least.
Merlyn: Another thing that we do, we also try to be a platform where people can find out what’s happening. I know one of the things that we recently shared was the fact that the city tried to take down Graham Avenue—the avenue of the Puerto Ricans. They just took it down, and they said it was a mistake.We were just like, “That was a mistake.” But for the fact that if no one actually posted that and then the word got around, we tried to add on to the fact that this is happening, like, “This is what we need to do.” So I think we made a carousel about like, “This is what’s happening. This is how we fix it. Join your community boards. Talk to your people.”
If you don’t know what’s happening, I learned recently it’s really the fact that other people might come here, and they know exactly what to do to get what they want, and we’ve just been here chilling. This is our city. And then we see things change, and we don’t know exactly what to do. So one of the things that we try to do on our platform, and we’re still educating ourselves, is actually putting it into like, “This is what you can do to actually make an impact.”
TheHub.news: So, given your platform, would you describe the Brooklyn Mavensas influencers, storytellers or archivists, and what part do you feel you play when it comes to preserving the history of Brooklyn and the narratives surrounding the community?
Merlyn: I think it’s all the above, but the influencer part just comes naturally. People see us on the page and are just like, “Oh, those that are the Brooklyn Mavens.” We don’t want to be influencers where you just can’t connect with us. I think we’re doing a great job with Instagram by itself, preserving Brooklyn by sharing what’s happening and what’s going on. Mainly for people who have, again, just been here, and they’re just chilling and don’t know exactly what’s going on. But to give the people who are visiting the 411 on this platform as a resource to say like, “Oh, I didn’t know this area exists,” or, “I didn’t know this event was happening,” or, “These are the small businesses I can actually support.”
Right now, things are just more like a resource as well, but growing into more of the fact that it’s also a community builder or the fact that, again, naturally, we are just influencers because people see our faces. We showed our faces a lot, and then we were just like, “Yes, this is a platform through our lens, but it’s also everyone else’s.” That’s one of the things that we’ve also shifted. And I feel like right now we found this sweet spot to where we are balancing out like, “Yeah, this is what I liked, this is what you like, but this is also what everyone in Flatbush likes or Crown Heights likes.”
Lauren: I also think it’s important to see us as archivists. When you think about just the history from today, we have all these platforms, and then you go back to them, it’s like, “Oh, I remember this. I remember X, Y, Z.” Where we may not really be thinking about it for the future sense right now. This platform we are creating, we can go back to it and [see it and say], “This is what it felt like to be in Brooklyn around that time. This is what it looked like at that time.” We’re really documenting history. We don’t know what, 100 years from now, if people have access to this, what it can provide for the culture of just all of America. If you’re just looking at what people were doing today and how social media is such a boom, you can look at the impact that social media has had with providing information for people and just the vibes of what the essence of a place is or who that person is.
Merlyn: I also think that’s what makes the actual platform very unique against any other Brooklyn platform is that we touch upon different things. You might just get one platform that’s just history, or one platform is just highlighting small businesses, but you’re getting a taste of different things. And we’ve also done the work to say like, “This is what’s missing, and this is what resonates with the people who is our target audience.”
TheHub.news: What are you working on currently, and what is the goal? What are you working towards?
Merlyn: Mainly working towards doing this full-time because we both got 9-to-5’s. We are working on making the platform bigger. We are really big on the fact that everything is on Instagram right now. So moving that to a different platform via websites where people can actually search, and also giving off different types of services. I know you had noted a tour before. We’ve done that before. It’s so much work. But altogether, moving not just on Instagram but moving off Instagram and making it a brand in whole. We want people to walk down streets in Brooklyn rocking merch or being happy that they are proud that they’re a Brooklyn Maven, right? So, all in all, just getting bigger and better, but taking it one step at a time.
Lauren: We want to connect in real-time with our community, so just having events. Right now, it can be smaller events. Eventually, the idea would be that we can work with other partners and create larger events for the community. Not just so that they get to meet us, but we can meet them and people can meet each other. Just to make them more of a friendly atmosphere. Sometimes in New York City in general, not Brooklyn. Sometimes it’s hard to meet people and events. But if we can make it an environment where it’s an open conversation, and great energy, then that would be the ultimate goal for that.
TheHub.news: Does Brooklyn Mavens have any partnerships right now? Are you looking for partnerships? If you are, who would be ideal?
Merlyn: Yeah, we have a partnership with Little Caribbean right now. We’re spotlighting locations in Little Caribbean for people to visit through our own lens. We are working with something towards with BAM. They have a lot of actual events coming up. We want to support them and also host many unique events as well to where our community and their community come together. I mean, we have a couple of things that we want to work towards.
Lauren: We would love to work with the sports teams within Brooklyn. We would love to work with Industry City. We’ve worked with them slightly, but just a bigger partnership would be great. Any monumental or large-scale Brooklyn organization. We also have a goal to be more philanthropic and intentional about that. So if we can work with the other local nonprofits, that would be amazing.
Merlyn: We’re trying to get more into the fact that we have this platform. We have this platform, so how can we leverage each other? So getting more connected to the borough president and seeing what some things that we can highlight or do are. Yes, the platform is beautiful for what we do now, but we want to be more impactful as well.
TheHub.news: How can the community support you?
Lauren: Just telling people about us. That’s one aspect. Supporting our brand, spreading the word.
Merlyn: We’re open to donations. Anything to support us and the fact that we are trying to build a team. It’s just literally us right now doing everything. Sign up for our newsletter to stay connected. Again, that’s one of the things that we have outside of Instagram. The newsletter goes out every Thursday and spotlights maybe 20 to 30 events happening in Brooklyn.
Lauren: And if anyone’s interested in joining our team as we try to grow our team, coming and helping us out, that would be amazing as well.
