Tomato Baby is Angie Meltsner
and Angie Meltsner is Tomato Baby: an independent cultural insights and trends research studio based out of Boston, MA.
I’ve spent the past 15 years helping brands be more culturally relevant and better connect with the people they care about through strategic and thoughtful research projects (as Tomato Baby since 2022).
I’ve worked with and at top agencies, consultancies, and in-house brand and product teams to unearth and explore consumer attitudes, desires, and behaviors and, just as importantly, the shifting cultural forces by which we’re all influenced.
What Makes Me Different
I like to ask: can we address the challenges of our time using the same perspectives that got us here?
How I source information and data (diverge) and spot patterns (converge) is what sets my research practice uniquely apart. I’m very online (don’t ask about my media diet) and also always out and about in the real world (and maybe the simulacra) looking, listening, noticing… being on the ground / in the field is absolutely key to keeping my research practice and insight development sharp and nuanced.
I also bring a semiotic lens to all the work that I do: that is, looking at the signs and symbols in visuals and language to unpack their deeper meanings, how they’re being communicated, and what they signify in culture — that which consumers can’t tell us themselves (for more on semiotics, see this lesson from a comic book character workshop I attended or this Michael Keaton monologue in The Founder).
