# _profile.md — Stratification Map (Wave 0, FROZEN)

**Study:** emijay · VOC-EmiJay-01 · window 12mo · frozen 2026-07-16
**Corpus:** 3,356 records · **Focal (Emi Jay) verified mentions:** 58

> This is the denominator map. Every prevalence number downstream is counted against
> the base defined here. **Brand attribution is by keyword-in-text**, NOT the capture
> `brand` bucket (the bucket over-counts — e.g. YouTube pulled all comments from videos
> that merely ranked for a brand query).

## Source mix (updated after TikTok capture 2026-07-17)
| Source | Records | Note |
|---|---|---|
| reddit | 2,723 | brand mentions (listing path) + topic trees (`_topics`) |
| youtube | 577 | keyless InnerTube sweeps (video + comments) |
| **tiktok** | **388** | **web-cli session (video discovery) + Apify actor (comments), $0.48** |
| instagram | 51 | Apify hashtag (low-volume, $0.02) |
| onsite | 5 | Invisibobble Judge.me only; 5 rival stores walled |

**Corpus total: 3,744.** TikTok per brand: emi_jay 191 · kitsch 55 · chunks 48 ·
invisibobble 44 · machete 29 · slip 21. Emi Jay's richest single source is now TikTok.

## Kind mix
post 1,653 · comment 1,662 · video 36 · review 5

## RATED base (critical)
**Only 5 records carry a star rating** (the Invisibobble onsite reviews). There is
effectively **no cross-brand star data**. → **Star-rating comparison is FORBIDDEN**
(rigor rail 7 / pitfall 1). All competitive comparison is **theme-incidence vs
theme-incidence**, complaint-base to complaint-base.

## Verified brand-mention base (keyword-attributed, the real denominators)
| Brand | Verified mentions | Praise | Complaint | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| chunks | 316 | 28% | **44%** | Highest volume + highest complaint (breakage/snap) |
| kitsch | 191 | 42% | 28% | Mass-market workhorse, mixed |
| invisibobble | 87 | 33% | 34% | Polarizing (hold vs. slip) |
| **emi_jay** | **58** | **36%** | **15%** | **Best praise:complaint ratio; low complaint volume** |
| slip | 36 | 55% | 19% | Silk/no-crease halo, small clip footprint |
| machete | 7 | 57% | 0% | Tiny footprint — premium/niche, near-zero organic chatter |

*(praise/complaint = % of that brand's verified mentions matching the praise/complaint
regex; NOT satisfaction scores — a signal-separated incidence read.)*

## Time window
Records span ~2025-05 → 2026-07 (12-mo window holds). `created_iso` is dirty on a
minority of records (some scraper rows carry "5 years" etc. in the field) — time-trend
claims are made only on clean-dated subsets and flagged.

## Data-quality exclusions (logged)
- **Machete Reddit (4 records) dropped from brand analysis** — false positives
  ("Machete vs Coca-Cola" mentos experiments), not the hair brand. Machete voice =
  YouTube + IG only.
- **`brand` capture bucket not trusted** for prevalence — re-attributed by keyword.
- **Non-English** (~Thai/Spanish/Portuguese IG posts) kept where they carry brand
  signal; excluded from English-tone claims.

## The category denominator (brand-agnostic buyer problem)
**70 records** describe the core category pain: *claw clips / accessories that slip or
won't hold thick, fine, long, or curly hair.* This is the buyer's problem the whole
category competes to solve. Anchor: `[reddit·t3_1nimybo]`, `[reddit·t3_1osbf6e]`.
