Podcast appearances and mentions of fabian geyrhalter

Hitting The Mark is back from its hiatus with guest host Kara Ebel interviewing Fabian Geyrhalter. We wanted to do something special for episode 101, and here we go!You know Fabian Geyrhalter as the host of this show, but today we spin things around and have Fabian in the hot seat talking about his innovative hardware startup for audiophiles and music lovers. Trendhunter calls Toneoptic 'progressive,' Forbes 'revolutionary,' and the Financial Times 'clever.' Fabian shares the hurdles and fails, how he crafted the brand strategy and created bootstrapped journeys and experiences for his tribe, and he dives into all things branding, marketing, and entrepreneurship. An episode as unique as his company's product. Enjoy! 

Our guest is none other than Fabian Geyrhalter, a renowned brand strategist and creative director based in Los Angeles. With his wealth of experience in brand consulting and running his own consultancy, Fabian is a true expert in the field. On the newest episode of The Businessology Show, Fabian expresses his awe and appreciation for several mind-blowing product examples. He emphasizes that effective branding is not limited to expensive, high-end designers, but rather it's all about accurately portraying the brand's message to the target audience. Fabian brings to light the importance of brand strategy and its role in connecting with consumers. He explains that while business plans focus on creating a product and making money, brand strategy focuses on how to position the brand to resonate with the target audience. Listen to the full episode and hear Fabian share how businesses can effectively use brand strategy in their own business plans.

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Today on Journey Map, we're joined by Fabian Geyrhalter, Principal at FINIEN. In this episode, we talk about Fabian's transition from Europe to California, the power of saying no, and why he's choosing to keep FINIEN small.Learn more from Fabian and FINIEN:Visit FINIEN: https://www.finien.com/Connect with Fabian: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geyrhalter/Visit Toneoptic: https://www.toneoptic.com/Fabian's books: https://www.finien.com/books/Hitting the Mark Podcast: https://www.finien.com/podcasts/

Fabian Geyrhalter is the Principal at FINIEN.  He spent years working at a different branding agency until one day he realized that he had it!! He decided to go against the grain of the dog and pony show and start his own business that gets right down to business. He joins the Host of Disruption / Interruption, Karla Jo, to talk about how he is disrupting branding agencies.    Takeaways:   There are three key ingredients for disruption; Courage, determination, and perseverance. All of these skills are needed if you really want to disrupt an industry. Instead of being hungry for more work, it's important to think about the direction of your company and where you want to go. The agency model is broken. Every agency wants to become agency of the year instead of actually focusing on what they want to do. In the time of the great resignation, people are looking at what skills they have and are deciding they want jobs that better fit that and make them happy. Don't be afraid to say no to a client. A no can open a door to a better yes. A key approach to branding agencies is bucking the trend of the dog and pony show and instead let your work speak for itself.    When working on a project, the vision comes down from the person that has hired you so you want to make sure that you get along with the person and agree with what they have in mind.   Quote of the show:   1:42 “I think there are three key ingredients, and the very first one is courage. You can't disrupt if you don't have guts, if you don't have Moxy. That leads me to my second point. it's determination. Disruption is swimming against the stream and it's going to take everything out of you. So I really think courage, determination and perseverance are the three key ingredients to actually get to that point where you can disrupt.”   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/geyrhalter/ Company Website:  https://www.finien.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/FinienInsights   Ways to Tune In: Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/eccda84d-4d5b-4c52-ba54-7fd8af3cbe87/disruption-interruption Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disruption-interruption/id1581985755 Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cub21ueWNvbnRlbnQuY29tL2QvcGxheWxpc3QvODE5NjRmY2EtYTQ5OC00NTAyLThjZjktYWI3YzAwMmRiZTM2LzNiZTZiNzJhLWEzODItNDhhNS04MDc5LWFmYTAwMTI2M2FiNi9kZDYzMGE4Mi04ZGI4LTQyMGUtOGNmYi1hZmEwMDEyNjNhZDkvcG9kY2FzdC5yc3M=  Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6yGSwcSp8J354awJkCmJlD Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/disruption-interruption YouTube - https://youtu.be/EDJ4AUC-l64 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

#170: Building an online brand is easy right? Wrong, but if you use the right strategies and ask the right questions, it's a lot easier!I heard today's guest on a podcast with Chris Do on the Futur. I loved what he had to say, and had to get him on the show!Fabian Geyrhalter has been running his brand consultation agency for 20 years. He's developed systems to nail your brand positioning in the marketplace.Want to get clear on your why? This episode is for you!https://www.finien.com/Books: https://amzn.to/3aqlQaM

In this episode of Devour—the podcast for the hungry entrepreneur, I have the pleasure of talking to Fabian Greyrhalter—brand strategist and founder and principal of FINIEN. Buckle up! We'll be launching into his journey building his brand consultancy agency, his unique approach to design education, and the importance of design workshops. This is not one you wanna miss! — Dain's Links: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dainwalker/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dainwalkerofficial YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz1eMJcjy8HfyvWJ_U1_WxQ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dainwalker/ Website: https://dainwalker.com/ — Fabian's Links: FINIEN Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_finien_/ FINIEN Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FINIEN FINIEN Website: https://www.finien.com/ FINIEN Twitter: https://twitter.com/FINIENInsights

Today, there are commodity-type products, also known as “so what products,” that have no differentiators on the product or service level, and yet people love them. These brands do not have an enhanced design, new technology, or innovative offerings, instead, they've developed an emotional connection with their customers. But how do you create that connection?In this episode, Fabian and I talk about how you can create a brand that everyone falls in love with. We talk about three of his eight brand traits that will help any business transform into an admired brand. They are Story, Delight & Solidarity. Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yvonneivanescu/Visit my website: https://yvonneivanescu.com/

Visit Clare onlineSupport the show-------->Fabian Geyrhalter:        Welcome to the show, Nicole.Nicole Gibbons:            Thanks so much for having me.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Absolutely. No, it's so great having you here. You are the founder of Clare, where you saw a huge opportunity to paint the interior paint industry in new, specifically with designer-curated colors, mess-free peel and stick paint swatches, which are really cool, and premium zero VOC paint delivered to your customer stores. You set out to take the pain out of paint, which I read somewhere on your site. That's not me saying this. You're your modern brand that has pioneered an easier, faster, and more inspiring way to shop for paint. Your mission is to help people everywhere create a home they love.Clare is just a little over four years old and must've been born out of the interior design company you're also running, but your career started at Victoria Secret where you served as the global director of communications and events. Tell us a little bit about how did that idea of Clare, how was it born? How did it all begin?Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah. Well, I just want to correct one thing. We're actually only two and a half years old. Yeah. So we're a very young startup in our trajectory, but the idea was really born out of this desire to help people create beautiful spaces. I spent, like you've mentioned, a decade working in retail as a PR executive. While in that job, I started side hustling to explore my passion for interior design. So I did that sort of overlapping for about five years, more or less writing a blog every day and doing dabbling in small interior design projects on the side. Then finally at the beginning of 2013, took the leap to focus on building my design business and my personal brand full time. So after doing that for a few years, I started thinking about what would be the next extension of my personal brand.I never wanted to just be an interior designer. I loved the Martha Stewart approach in that she parlayed her career as a food and lifestyle expert into products that spanned multiple categories and just this massive career that enabled so many people to buy into the Martha Stewart aesthetic. So I started thinking about what I could do in the home space that was along those same lines and explored a number of business opportunities and kind of stumbled upon this white space that is paint.As a designer, I bought lots of paint. I shopped for lots of paint. I helped lots of people choose paint colors, whether it be my private clients, people that I would help doing television projects, or even just folks who would write in on my blog, or be a social media where I was just sort of offering unsolicited free advice when they had questions.I realized that shopping for paint is a really difficult process for the average person. If you're lucky enough or fortunate enough to be working with a designer, or an architect, or someone who can guide you, the process is quite easy. You have someone that you trust who makes the selections for you and you pretty much trust their judgment and sign off, versus the average person who's going at it alone, walks into a Big Box home improvement store, stares up at a wall of 3000 colors. If they want something as simple as white paint, they think it's going to be easy. And then they realize, Holy pal, there are 300 shades of white. How do I know which one is right? And then sort of thus begins this cycle of this painful experience, decision fatigue.Once I realized how the industry was structured, it's highly consolidated, there are really like two or three major players that dominate the whole entire paint market. It just felt like the perfect opportunity. The companies that dominate the paint industry are centuries old. So these are brands that are so giant. They really never felt the pressure to innovate or modernize.When I started Clare and really kind of came up with the idea, probably around four years ago or so, there were so many other industries where difficult shopping experience had been improved and modernized. Think about glasses with Warby Parker or mattresses or all these other categories where someone took a product that was really difficult to shop for and made it an easy, convenient experience. As someone who is incredibly passionate about home and about helping others create beautiful homes, this just seemed like the perfect opportunity and it was a massive market. I didn't want to just do a furniture line or something that would have been more expected and obvious for an interior designer to pursue. I really wanted to build something from the ground up, tackle a massive market, and create a sort of industry-changing business model and brand.Fabian Geyrhalter:        That's remarkable. Those peel and stick paint swatches, it sounds like nothing, but it's so huge, right? I mean, if anyone who went through that painstaking process that you just hinted at on how to come up with the perfect paint choice, you have to get all these tiny little cans, which by the way, is horrible for the environment, all these tiny little cans from paint stores. And then you have to paint on your house, most of the time on the exterior interior, depending on what you paint, and you keep going back and forth between the hardware store in your home. It's a mess, but those swatches, they seem kind of like post-its by nature. It's just so simple. You just put it on the ball.How did you guys around to matching the color on, because we're talking about print and "paper," versus paint, which is such a different medium. It must be so hard to match that identically. I think you guys pulled that off, right?Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah. I think we nailed it. I mean, the interesting thing about color that most people don't realize is that color is a science, and any color, really all forms of color has data associated with it and can be broken down into numerical data so that when you're in the color matching process, you can actually measure the accuracy of our paint swatches to the finished actual paint finish within the most minutiae of a Delta E.So it's actually quite a scientific process to ensure the color match. It's somewhat manual, somewhat scientific. You might have to go back and forth a few times until you get it right, but if we can kind of measure to make sure that you're within pretty much an exact match range and that's how you ensure color accuracy.So we have a pretty detailed process. I think a lot of like with traditional paint brands, when you have thousands and thousands of colors, and they're not offering peel and sticks watches in most cases. So there's the little tiny paint chips that you take off the wall at the hardware store. A lot of times people feel they don't match. I think when your pallet is to the point of being four or 5,000 colors deep, you sort of lose some of that quality control.It's very difficult to maintain 100% accuracy when you have that many colors and especially if you're not actually controlling your distribution channels, because a lot of people also don't realize when you buy paint from a Big Box store, they're carrying multiple brands. So they have to have a color it dispensers or sort of colorant in store that work across all the different brands that they carry. So with that, you almost lose a little bit of quality control as well, because you're working within a colorant system that maybe isn't proprietary and there's just more margin for error for the output in the store to look different than the swatch.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Clare is 100% D2C. It seems like having your paint salt at a hardware store would go against what you stand for as a brand, but would you toy with Clare experience stores or pop-up stores of any sorts?Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah. My belief and the whole reason I started Clare was that I felt that the paint shopping experience needed to be re-imagined. We started online because that's where our competitors were not, but I think that there's a huge opportunity to reimagine the future of what a paint store looks like, or what a paint aisle within a Big Box store might look like. So that prospect is super exciting and definitely something we think about, and it's really a matter of timing and opportunity, and those kinds of two things being aligned before we'll probably make it happen.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Which obviously is not during a pandemic. But other than that, it's an interesting opportunity. Absolutely. Let's talk about the evil side of paint, how to dispose of leftover paint. How do you navigate sustainability with Clare?Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah, I mean, I think for us, sustainability is a focus on kind of two major things. One is the product and how it impacts your home, and your health, and the air inside your home. And the other are just business practices. So things like our packaging and other efforts that we make to ensure that we're really minimizing our impact on the environment.So a lot of people don't realize that paint as an industry is one of the most dishonesty and misleading industries out there. It's a chemical product first and foremost. So no matter how you try to spin it, there is no such thing as a safe chemical paint. It's still a chemical product at the end of the day. Now you can certainly have a better formulation, but it's still a chemical product. It's not like the paint is made of grass and leaves or whatever.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Yeah, yeah.Nicole Gibbons:            So the paint industry has really been misleading with customers about what's in their paint. Even stemming back from like the 40s and 50s when paint was made with lead, which as we now know, is very toxic and harmful to humans and to the environment, but one of the biggest paint companies in the world knowingly continued to sell paint to their customers for decades, knowing that it was harmful to human health and didn't stop selling lead paint until it was banned by the federal government in the 1970s.So that's a very good example of how the paint industry has historically operated at profit over people, I think. Even in more recent times, every few years, in fact, one of the major paint companies is paying massive fines to the FTC for misleading marketing.Several years ago, when the government started regulating, or the EPA started regulating VOC contents and paint, and stands for Volatile Organic Compounds, it's essentially like carbon emissions and CO2 emissions that are emitted by a lot of paints, not Clare, but when the government started putting these thresholds, so they would say, canopy can't have more than X volume of VOC content, what brands ended up doing, and another important thing to understand is how paint is actually sold at the point of sale.So generally companies like a Big Box store or a hardware store will stock a base paint formula, which is essentially like a white paint. And then the colorant is dispensed at the point of sale. So brands would manufacture those base formulas to fit zero VOC thresholds, but then the colorants that were being used were not zero VOC.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Interesting.Nicole Gibbons:            So people thought that they were buying a product that was better for them, healthier for their homes, et cetera when in reality, as soon as you've chosen your color and they put the color in the can at the hardware store, you have a paint that's now back to being filled with chemicals. So even that type of misleading was happening in more recent times.So for us, transparency is super important as well. All our paint is zero VOC. It's GREENGUARD Gold certified. GREENGUARD is a green certification that applies to many products, but GREENGUARD Gold is the highest tier of GREENGUARD certification and for paint. What that means is, they actually put the paint in an environmental chamber that's meant to mimic the air inside a typical home environment, and it measures the off-gassing for two weeks to ensure that it stays below the zero VOC threshold during that entire time, because paint can continue to off-gas for years actually. So when you buy a paint that's not zero VOC, it will be emitting carbon compounds into your air potentially for years. A lot of people don't realize that. Especially nowadays, when we're spending all of our time inside in our homes, it's very important that we make better choices and there's just so much harmful stuff all around us. So we just wanted to minimize that as much as we possibly could.A lot of our packaging and products, like some of our paint supplies and things are made from recycled materials. So whenever possible, we really try to make the best possible choices and we are not doing everything perfectly admittedly. As a young company, there's still a lot of room for improvement. There are certain things that we want to make even more sustainable, but I think we're off to a really good start and we're as transparent as we can be with our customers. We hope that that gives them competence in our brand and in our product.Fabian Geyrhalter:        I love this. Just in my last episode, I talked about that same idea where even though you're trying really hard and you think like you're doing everything as well as possible, there are some things that you yourself know as a brand. You're not quite there yet. You talk about that too. I think that alone is such a huge difference when you think about the paint companies from the 40s and 50s, right. It is so nice as a consumer today to see brands talk about not only the things they do well but also the things that they know want to improve upon because that is just as important and that's how you feel like a brand is really transparent.Let's talk about transparency for a second here. Moving over to your brand language, which is really real. It's very down to earth, you had an instant post about wop remixed, which of course, stood for where there's paint. Your colors are named Headspace, Whipped, No Filter, and Dirty Martini. How did the brand language manifest itself? Did it start with a mantra that you set and then it organically built from there?Nicole Gibbons:            Honestly, so much of it is an extension of me and my personal brand voice, to be honest, but also like the customer that we're reaching and what I think resonates with them. Also just looking at the market and looking at traditional paint brands, I think paint brands are pretty boring. We wanted every element of our brand experience to feel memorable and to evoke emotion. So when it comes to things like the color names, we wanted to have fun with that and create names that made you feel something. Our brand voice on social media, we want to be relatable. We want to talk about what's happening in pop culture and relate our product back to that because that's what people can care about. That's what's top of mind.We don't want to just be this faceless corporate entity that no one actually cares about. We want to be a brand that people connect with and they follow us because we are approachable and, or entertaining, and inspiring. So that's super important. We try to have those core brand, voice pillars of being friendly and approachable, carry throughout every aspect of the brand from the website to our social and more. It's really just, I think, another way that we differentiate ourselves from the market.Fabian Geyrhalter:        I was just about to ask that, how do you set and keep those standards as it relates to the voice? You just answered that there are certain pillars around which you want to navigate as you talk to your customer. But talking about naming, how did the name come about? It's a very modern take on naming. We have many first-name brands floating around, but not Nicole, it's Clare.Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Once you try to actually get some help finding a perfect color, you agree that with a message on your website that says, "Hi, I'm Clare. Think of me as your personal interior designer. I'm here to help you find the perfect color for your space." What's the story behind the name? Who is Clare?Nicole Gibbons:            So it's so funny. I wish I had a more profound name, but originally, when I was thinking of names or when Clare was just in the idea phase, I wanted to be able to talk to some people about what I was working on. So initially, my only intent was just to come up with a working title, just like a good enough name for now and then come up with something perfect later. So I probably spent like 20 minutes. I was looking on a baby naming website where you can reverse look at, like name meaning. So if you wanted your kid's name to mean happiness or whatever, you type in happiness, and it tells you all the names that relate back to that.So I literally typed in things that tied back to color. So I looked up adjectives like bright, and colorful, and vibrant, and whatever, and saw what names came out. Clare just sort of stood out. Clare comes from a Latin root word, clarus that means bright and brilliant. There's a lot of fun wordplay there, both brilliant and bright in terms of color, but also brilliant in terms of being innovative and forward thinking as a brand. I Googled it. There was no other brand that really had the name Clare. There was like an insurance kind of, I don't remember exactly what they sold. There was something, but in a completely non-competitive space.So it was a name that was available and it was a good working title. And then as I really started kind of moving forward with the brand and doing some conceptual branding work and things like that, it sort of just stuck and it fit. There was no other name that made sense. But I think originally, I knew I wanted a name that was personified so we could really build a personality around the brand. That's why I went to a baby-naming website. And I wanted it to be friendly and approachable. And I intentionally wanted a feminine name, because in the paint world, all of the brands that dominate are these hyper-masculine names, Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore.Fabian Geyrhalter:        So true. Yeah.Nicole Gibbons:            I think they are not appealing to who's really making the household decisions, which is usually the woman of the house. I felt like paint brands are overly masculine in their appeal.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Yeah.Nicole Gibbons:            I think part of the reason is because a lot of them are catering to professionals and a lot of pro painters are men. But at the same time, when you think about the DIY market, the people making the hustle decisions are women.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Yeah.Nicole Gibbons:            I think the big brands are kind of failing to really resonate in an authentic way. So that was something that was super important as a brand founded by a woman in an industry that is dominated by men to take a complete 180 approach to every aspect of our brand, including the choice of name.Fabian Geyrhalter:        So interesting. I never thought about how those paint names are just absolutely not reflecting today's do it yourself customer. Super interesting. Your selection is still narrow and it's highly curated, and that is by design, less is more. A recent customer review on your website stated, "The limited, but lovely colors totally saved me from having an existential crisis over the thousands of options from other brands. How do you control the number of options to give your customers once you introduce a new color? I know you just introduced a couple of new colors, how do you play this game of keeping things fresh, but yet having it very curated so that people don't freak out about the 4,000 options of white?Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah. Well, I mean, we launched with 55 colors and originally, we believed that those covered most of the use cases you would ever have in a home, right? There are certainly opportunities to expand the palette and mix in a few new things, but it's not hard to keep things curated relative to the traditional paint brands that are in the thousands.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Yeah.Nicole Gibbons:            Building on from that original 55, our approach has always been well. If we're going to introduce new colors, let's make sure they're colors we know our customers will love. So, so far every new color we've introduced has been crowdsourced or with some sort of crowdsource feedback from our customers. So they'd either voted on the colors, or with our most recent set of colors, we did a march madness style paint playoffs bracket. The predictions from the customers ultimately dictated which colors ended up in our palette. The two newest colors that we launched were actually a part of the original, like our paint playoffs from last year where we ended up introducing a blue and a green, but there was also a pink and a yellow, but that were super popular. So we introduced those after the new year, this year in 2021. That's always core to us is making sure that we include our customers in the process. And then another core part of our color differentiation is that we're designer curated. So even the colors that our customers helped choose were sort of pre-vetted by me through my interior designer lens. Our original 55 colors were curated by me.I think in the future, there might be some collaboration opportunities with other designers to kind of maintain that voice of authority of being interior designer-curated colors. But I think that having that expertise behind the color palette, as well as input from customers to ensure they'll love the colors really helps to take the guesswork out of the process, and again, give people less choice, but the best choice, right? So really just simplifying those decisions for the customer to help them get to faster decisions, because that's another terrible thing about the paint industry is because there's so much choice. People get paralyzed and it actually takes them a really long time to make a decision, and the buying journey can be really, really long.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Yeah, absolutely. Looking back, because I thought your company was founded 2017, but that's I think when you just started laying the groundwork, and really it's a very young brand.Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter:        What was that one big breakthrough moment where you felt like, "Okay, we are moving from startup into brand right now." What was that one moment? It could have been a seed funding or Series A, could have been a moment that you had with a customer where you felt like they totally get it, it could be sales figures, whatever. What was that moment where you set back and you're like, "Wow, this was a special moment."Nicole Gibbons:            Honestly, I think it was the Daily Launch because I had spent probably almost two years at that point, a whole year just thinking about the idea and then another year actually putting that idea into making that idea a reality, and raising capital, and then building behind the scenes all before we launched to the public.So on the day that we launched, we had a tremendous amount of press coverage and the media really got it and described our brand relative to the competitors in the market. I think really captured well how we stood out. And then immediately the customer feedback was super validating. And kind of like the quote that you read from the customer, we heard that kind of thing since day one. "This has been the best easiest paint shopping experience I've ever had. I'm never going back to the Big Box store again." That kind of thing, we heard from the very beginning.Again, are we doing everything perfectly? Probably not. Still a ton of room for improvement, but the basic premise and the basic problem that we set out to solve, I think immediately was validated that we were solving a real problem and creating a much better experience than what these brands who have been around for 200 years have not been able to create. I think we're super proud of that.We're still at what feels like in the beginning of our journey. So there's a lot more room we have in the works to continue improving upon the paint shopping experience, but I think we're off to a great start.Fabian Geyrhalter:        You might be surprised, but I never heard that answer. And I asked that question pretty much on every show, because I think it's so interesting, but usually it's not right when you launch, and usually it's when you launched it, you get some good customer feedback, but that the press was immediately so interested because they themselves knew here is a category that hasn't been disrupted yet, and that hasn't been done in the right way. I remember fast company said the Warby Parker of paint is here, right? So it very, very quickly happened that the press led this conversation, which is, I mean, that's the biggest success you can have if that happens immediately upon launch, because then you know everyone will see a need for this. So that's really great.Well, on the flip side, was there any brand fail that you went through where you felt like, "My God, we just did a huge [inaudible]," and maybe something that listeners can learn from?Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah. I don't know if it's so much of a brand fail as more of a business fail or a general marketing fail. We so far, thankfully, have not had any major snafus with our brand voice or anything like that, but we're going through this really painful experience right now in that when we launched, I didn't have a technical background. I'm a very non-technical founder. So I hired a super talented team of people who were great designers to build our website. But at the time, without knowing then what I know now, we built an overly complex custom website. We're a small team. We don't have any in-house developers. So it requires a lot of resources to maintain our website.Then on top of that, I think the architecture wasn't as clean as it could be and it has just created so many problems for us. So two and a half years in we're actually re-platforming our website fully onto Shopify, which is such a great e-commerce platform. Especially when we had zero customers, in general, with MVP, you kind of start small and grow from there, but we came out the gate with this super custom website that looked beautiful, but behind the scenes is just kind of really messy and complicated and it just creates a lot of backend pain points. So we're going through that process right now to re-platform. It's a big undertaking. Actually, I feel like it's more work to re-platform the site than it is to build a brand new site from scratch, because there's more that can go wrong.When we originally built our site, we didn't have any customers yet. Now we have hundreds of thousands of people that visit our website and we don't want to disrupt that experience or lose functionality that was there before. So there's just way more room for errors with this kind of next go around. Yeah, it's taking up a lot of time that we didn't intend to be spending.So I would say launch your brand on Shopify, because you're going to learn everything you need to learn. Maybe when you get to a certain scale, you can go custom, but that was a big lesson learned in what I would consider somewhat of a failed, because I just didn't know better and we just spent way too much developing and building the site that we have that doesn't actually function the way we need it to.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Well, and you come from an interior design background. So of course, the design is most important in the beginning, right? And so one thinks. Think about tens of thousands of people starting shopping on Clare.com immediately, but since you're successful, that happens next. So I think it's extremely important that you talk about something which some people might not think is important. It can be extremely disruptive to a business. I work with an agency that does a lot of Shopify websites. For them, it's the exact same customer that keeps coming back to them. They created it in a different environment, then everything was really clunky. And then it becomes ... I mean, we're talking about a lot of money being spent when you have to redo a site in Shopify.Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter:        This is important.Nicole Gibbons:            It's a young startup, so cash is king, so to make a costly mistake is really painful. This is definitely a very costly learning experience.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Yeah. No, totally. Like you said, it's not necessarily a brand fail, and it's not necessarily fail period, because it's just kind of like, it's that whole fail forwards ideas. It was a logical thing to do, to do a site that just looks good.Since this is a branding podcast, I love having my guests always answer this one question, and it's not an easy one, what is one word that can describe your brand? If you literally think about your brand inside out, the culture, what you stand for, your customer, your offering, if you would put it all through a funnel, and outcomes one or two words of like, this is what we stand for, what would it be for you?Nicole Gibbons:            I would say inspiring. That's a word that I think permeates every aspect of our brand experience and how we hope that our customers perceive us from the shopping experience. That is a world of difference from that cluttered aisle and a hardware store in full of inspiration to how the brand engages with us on social media. We want to be there to guide them and there to inspire them, to create a beautiful home that they'll love coming home to every day, and in our color assortment in just our overall brand voice. We want people to walk away feeling inspired by Clare. So that would be the one word that I'd say sums up-Fabian Geyrhalter:        I love it.Nicole Gibbons:            ... everything we're about.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Now that we talk about branding, and I've warmed you up, what does branding mean to you? I mean, obviously you lived in the world of branding all your professional life in one shape way or the other. You were in Internet Kiehl's, then there was the Victoria Secret job, and then you're running your own service company really as interior design. So I think you've seen a lot of different facets. What does branding mean to you?Nicole Gibbons:            That's a good question. I think it can mean many things, but if I had to simplify it, it's creating an aesthetic that could be translated into a lifestyle. I think of Clare very much as a lifestyle brand, but also everything I did before in my career ultimately was around building a lifestyle. So I think in the world of e-comm consumer, you can't just be a nameless, faceless brand because right anyone can create a logo and a tagline, and come up with a name and call it branding. But I think it's truly branding when what you've set out to achieve is absorbed by your customers and that your customers actually relate to, and your customers can derive value from. So that's kind of a little bit of a long-winded answer, but that would be what I think of as branding and what I think creates a successful branding.Fabian Geyrhalter:        I absolutely agree with you. Yeah. It's like there's the foundation, which everyone needs a logo, and a name, and colors, and all of that good stuff, but that doesn't make a brand. That's important to have, but what makes a brand is really the soul of it. And that might start with the founder who injects it into the company, or it might be certain principles, or a greater purpose.Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter:        I'm glad that you said that. Absolutely.Nicole Gibbons:            It can't just be some abstract thing. It really has to resonate.Fabian Geyrhalter:        What's a piece of brand advice for founders? Maybe even commerce founders, as a takeaway from what you learned besides starting on Shopify, obviously, but from a brand perspective, is there anything that you can advise the next generation of founders on?Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah. I would say focus on experience, you know. I mean, even from the school of Jeff Bezos, but something that I can attest to within Clare is, if you can continuously deliver a delightful experience for your customer, that is what's going to propel your brand forward.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Absolutely. Absolutely. What's next for Clare besides potentially looking at the impersonal retail experience, which I kind of pulled out of you? I'm sorry if you didn't mean to talk about that, but what are you really excited about with Clare for the next, I don't know, six months, a year?Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah. I mean, six months, I think in the world of startups still is kind of forever, but just thinking about new products and how we can continue to deliver more for our customers. So we have some exciting things in the pipeline there. Obviously, I touched on this new website that we're in the process of building, which aesthetically will probably look quite similar to our current site, but hopefully, we'll deliver a better just overall experience. So I think that's like a top, top priority that's going to take us even through Q2 and have some cool partnerships in the works. So creating opportunities to reach more customers, but also without giving away too much. But yeah, just creating a cool opportunity for us to get in front of new audiences and things like that. So, yeah, I'd say in the short term, those are the key things that we're most excited about.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Very cool. Where can listeners learn about Clare and start painting the walls on you?Nicole Gibbons:            Yeah. Well, visit us at Clare.com, spelled CLARE. You can also follow us on social at Clare Paint, and we hope to see you soon.Fabian Geyrhalter:        Thank you so much for taking the time to be on hitting the marketing call. We really appreciate it.Nicole Gibbons:            Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

Join Tomás O’Leary and Brendan Walsh as they discuss mega-vendor profit margins, IBM's sale of Watson Health and the Facebook, Google and Microsoft legal battle brewing in Australia. Then, Fabian Geyrhalter of Finen joins to give a branding perspective on the consumer technology purchases of big mega-vendors, the perplexing situation NewCo finds itself in and how technology companies can take a note out of the Nike branding playbook.

What is the difference between marketing and branding?It's ridiculous to argue about what's more important, branding or marketing. It's important to understand the difference between branding and marketing so you know how they work together to attract, inspire, and engage customers and create raving fans. In this episode, Brian discusses the definition of brand and marketing, and shows you how your brand can align with the principles from Donald Miller's book, Business Made Simple.Read this podcast episode at Aespire.com(I recommend listening to Chris Do discuss the merits of both marketing and branding with Melinda Livsey and Fabian Geyrhalter).

Fabian Geyrhalter is a brand strategist and creative director who was born in Vienna, Austria, and has been living in Los Angeles for over half his life. In this episode Sean and Fabian dive deep into the importance brand, brand strategy, and storytelling play in any business and how we must stay the course in authenticity in order to truly connect with the people who use our services.  Get in touch with Fabian on his website, check out his books, and listen to his podcast.   

Do you know what your brand's vision, mission and message is? What actions do you want your audience to take? Are you communicating something meaningful? What short and long term impact do you want your brand to have. This is all one of the most critical components of building a brand, a brand strategy and executing successful marketing and PR campaigns.Today, I'm speaking with Fabian Geyrhalter a brand strategist and creative director of FINIEN. Fabian has deep expertise in guiding companies through their brand transformations and has written and published international Amazon best-sellers, now go-to resources for entrepreneurs and marketers alike including How to launch a brand, Bigger than this and The Brand Therapy Book.Support the show (https://www.thesilvertelegram.com/the-pr-playbook-podcast-1)

Learn more about mmhmmLearn more about the reasoning behind the name, plus see the platform in actionSupport the show and even get on monthly mentorship calls with Fabian. Join here.Full Transcript:Fabian Geyrhalter:Welcome to the show, Phil,Phil Libin:Thank you. Nice to be here.Fabian Geyrhalter:Based on your new video communication tools, really neat demo in which you are actually the star. We now know that you have 123,195 unread emails back then when you filmed that. I'm thrilled you were able to take the time to be,Phil Libin:It's climbed a little bit since then.Fabian Geyrhalter:I had a feeling. I had a feeling. As a little intro, maybe it's not so little after all, but here's the story, how Fabian met Phil. We really only met twice, but a common acquaintance of ours in the Silicon Valley startup world contacted me to tell me about how the former CEO and confounder of Evernote has created this mind blowing new way of conducting and experiencing online meetings. He then told me that he would like to make an introduction, since he believes that I'm an amazing speaker. Those were his words, not mine. That he would like to have Phil give me VIP access to test drive his presentation tool in private beta. I was flattered obviously. Then he shared his secret agenda with me, which you most probably don't know, Phil. He wanted to make sure I could use my intro call with Phil to persuade him to change his mind on his company's name, because it was a very, very strange and crazy name.I got a slot on Phil's schedule a week from that call, but then on the very next day, I found myself mentoring a group of Founder Institute students. I think it was in Singapore or London, who knows, somewhere and as they introduced the two other mentors of the day to the group, there was Phil on the call, mentoring students on, and now hold your breath, naming, with me! How to create the perfect theme for your startup. Here I am my dreams of convincing a man to change his company name after mentoring a group of founders on naming had been shattered. His naming presentation was marvelous, and even the reasoning behind his new company's name started to make at least a little bit more sense. One sentence stuck with me. Phil, you said creating a great name is the down payment on your reputation. I have since tried out your presentation tool and it truly is game changing. While I have seen your new brand with that very name and all launched very, very successfully. Phil, why don't we start with the name? Mmhmm? Will you tell my audience or shall I reveal the name?Phil Libin:Please go for it.Fabian Geyrhalter:Oh, I think I just did.Phil Libin:MaybeFabian Geyrhalter:This is very confusing. Your platform's name is Mmhmm. M-M-H-M-M, correct? That is hilarious, like many things you say. It was important to have a name that you can see while you're eating. You can do that. I definitely checked off that goal. What are the goals did you have with the name when you said set off to create this name?Phil Libin:There's lots of jokey reasons about why we, when we named it that. In factI just put up a demo of Mmhmm. Users demo and some of our new features, talking about all of it, or at least some of the very jokey reasons for it, but really, I wanted something unique. I wanted an unusual name. In that mentoring session that you and I did at Founders Institute, I didn't talk about the name Mmhmm. It was still secret back then. I don't think I advise people to do anything like this. This is definitely not the conventional way of naming products, but we've been making and naming things for a few decades we wanted to do something different.Fabian Geyrhalter:What I found so intriguing about Mmhmm is that you told me that it might just be crazy enough that, in half a year from now or so, we may see all these legacy companies start struggling to come up with similar names as they will try to compete with Mmhmm. They're going to try to fit in, and they're going to have a really, really hard time fitting in with a name like Mmhmm. Now that your platform has launched it all looks really not crazy, but really ingenious because you created a talking point. Not only is the app, the platform, the experience something totally new, something totally different, but you matched it with a name that is so different that everyone grins. I've seen a couple of interviews or people talking about the platform and everyone who talks about it just has to mention the name and has to talk about it. It's really ingenious talking points, so how could we have ever questioned you, Phil?Phil Libin:I think people make fun of the name a lot, which obviously we knew it would happen and you can't be afraid of being made fun of. That is probably the fear that holds back the most creative people from doing things in life and it's okay. It's okay to have something that's funny. That's going to be the talking point. We were very much not convinced in the beginning, and I'm still not convinced, that Mmhmm isn't a really bad name. It might be. It might be a terrible name, or it might be a great name. Actually quite likely it's both, it's probably really good for some things and really bad for other things, but that's sort of typical.That's typical of things that are sharp. They are both great and terrible. It just comes down to optimizing. You don't net those out, the bad things don't take away from the good things or vice versa. You just have to decide what's more important. I think for most things, many things in life, but not all, but most things creatively, the positive is more important than the negative. You don't pick the name that's the least bad, or that averages out to the best. You pick the name that's the best, even if that name is also the worst, because then at least you're guaranteed not to have a name that's boring. T that's the worst case scenario, is just something that no one remembers.Fabian Geyrhalter:Especially for a brand like yours, where it's anything but boring, you actually want to shatter that idea of boring online meetings. It starts to have personality and you couldn't have a name that is not fun, or doesn't have personality, or it doesn't shake things up.Phil Libin:We could have.Fabian Geyrhalter:You could have, but it's smart that you didn't.Phil Libin:Our actual thinking was that the product that Mmhmm the product, the company, it's really for performing. We think about what is the verb that you do in our product. We decided pretty early on that we aren't trying to be a communication product. We're not trying to be a collaboration product. There's a lot of those, there's a lot of very good ones. We're not trying to replace where your team works together. We're not trying to be the new Slack or Figma. We're not a place to hang out and meet interesting people like Clubhouse. What you do in Mmhmm, the verb, is you perform. Mmhmm is for performing and it's for micro performances. Our theory is that everyone is a performer now. Everyone has multiple times every day where you say, attention on me, I'm going to do a bit. I'm doing something right now.Pay attention to me. You're on. Maybe only for a few seconds, or a few minutes, or maybe for a long time, some of these micro performances are pretty macro, but you're always performing. You're performing for your coworkers, for your kids, for your investors, for your social media followers, whatever. Mmhmm is the thing that elevates that performance, especially over video, since all of us are now living on video, it's more important than ever, because for most people performing over video is just dreary and ineffective. The product is for performing. I really liked the idea that the name Mmhmm is a name that is extremely easy to say accidentally. Everyone says that, just in this conversation. I think.Fabian Geyrhalter:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Phil Libin:We both said it just in agreement. Exactly. You just notice it all the time now. It's trivial. Everyone can say it without thinking about it, but if you want to say it intentionally, if you want to say it on purpose, like say it as the name of the product, even I have to like pause for half a second consider how I'm going to say it. Consider which syllable am I going to inflect? I have to take a half second pause, I have to breathe, and then I have to say it. Every single time you say the name intentionally, it's like a little performance. I thought it was really beautiful that the product that's meant to elevate your performance starts with a little mini performance every time even think or say the name.Fabian Geyrhalter:Performance that is so natural, like riding a bike, but then explaining how to ride a bike. That's the problem. Actually having to say, Mmhmm, it just takes an effort, which-Phil Libin:There's something really interesting about the mindfulness and the intentionality of it. Something very zen. I'd like the idea of know every other thing that I've ever named, every other company or product. In fact, every other product name, I think, that I've ever encountered in my life, you can say it thoughtlessly. You can say it. You just rattle it off, after you learn it after the first couple of times you learn it, you just say it and it doesn't mean anything. You can say it without thinking. I think it's really unique to have a name that you can't say thoughtlessly, at least I haven't been able to get, and I've been saying it for a couple of months now. You can't say thoughtlessly. It mindful. It's almost a zen thing, which I find really beautiful, but also completely realized that people are going to make fun of it and that's totally fine. We decided to lean into their making fun of it. We had all sorts of jokey reasons about.Fabian Geyrhalter:You really bring that home. You're not hiding that, because it's impossible to hide! I think it's also hilarious how even during this conversation Mmhmm keeps coming up and now I'm super self-aware, because now it's actually your brand. You have completely brainstormed us. Every time we say Mmhmm, we're like, oh, that's right. Which is definitely more effective than if you just casually say Zoom.Phil Libin:Yeah and I think Zoom is actually a really good name for that kind of product. It's good. It's great. I think we try to do something both a little bit better and a little bit worse, and we knew that it would be simultaneously better and worse. We were fine with that, because we really care about the better part. We discount the worst part.Fabian Geyrhalter:You leaned into it, celebrated it. On your LinkedIn, you have these hilarious one liners describing your roles. For your time at Evernote, you state, "Assembling a brilliant and hardworking group of people, then making sure you have enough coffee to change the world." and for Carrot Fertility, you write, "Help with strategy and product design, all my name ideas have been rejected." that is the description of you advising Carrot Fertility. Sometimes you're swimming against the stream with your naming ideas and people do question them, so-Phil Libin:Usually.Fabian Geyrhalter:That's hilarious, but back to the whole Mmhmm brand and how it came together. The logo, which by the way is really, really cool. It reminds me a bit of the flexibility of the iconic MTV mark and those of us who, you and I are close in age.We remember that iconic MTV mark. It's a three-dimensional cube made up of really fat letters. That's what yours is like, M-H-M, which lends itself to any color or image effect, hence perfectly showcasing what Mmhmm is all about. It's about versatility and presentation. Then that's what that entire cube is about and the way that you guys rolled it out, you guys and girls over the last couple of weeks, how did that logo get crafted? I know you were very hands-on with the name and the copy, since it is very much your style, but how much so with the visual aspects of the brand?Phil Libin:I love the way that the logo came out. It's actually the name, it's M-M-H-M-M, just the other two Ms are on the other side of the cube.Fabian Geyrhalter:Correct, correct.Phil Libin:You can't see them, but if it'll ever rotate it'll do that. I have no discernible talents. I had very little to do with actually like making or drawing it. I've worked closely with the designers. I'm just lucky enough, we have amazingly talented visual designers. The logo was a collaborative effort. It was made by Carlos [Rockford 00:00:12:57], and Allie [Packard 00:00:12:58], Gabe [Kapadoniko 00:13:00], Chris [Plobe 00:13:00], a bunch of us brainstormed on it, did iterations. We all live in Figma. I actually left off a few people who worked on it, because there was like a dozen people, but Carlos and Allie were the two main visual designers at All Turtles that worked on this. We all live in Figma, so we just spent, it was a couple of weeks of diving in and exploring lots of variations and talking about them and trying out many, many different things. I used to do this. I think I actually did that. I did a little presentation during our FI class together about the Evernote logo. We talked about the process we went through.Fabian Geyrhalter:You have, you have, and that's actually one of the topics I want to jump into, but yeah.Phil Libin:I think we will eventually do, it's a little bit presumptuous to do this for Mmhmm. Let's see if it's actually successful in a few more months, but I'll probably do a similar thing, but it was great, but the short answer is I'm a ridiculously talented designers and let them do what they do and try not to get in the way too much.Fabian Geyrhalter:I think it's overly smart to actually to actually hide the rest of the name behind the logo, because it is three dimensional, which also speaks so much about how your presentation tool is actually changing the experience, because everything suddenly becomes more dimensional and you add all of these layers. In a way, seeing that the name is different and is problematic. The logo is too, because now you're only showing half of the name, which already is problematic, but if you actually look at the big picture, it is really ingenious and it's absolutely cool. I would invite everyone to at least check out the Instagram handle and take a look at some of those variations of the Mmhmm logo, because it comes to life really nicely.Phil Libin:Almost daily we're posting different variations of it on Instagram. It's just beautiful. Clever and interesting, fine, but it's just beautiful. There are versions of it and some of the treatments that honestly make me want to cry when I see them. They're just so nice. I'm just overwhelmed by the talent of the team. A lot of times it's playful, you mentioned the old MTV logo and that was definitely an inspiration, like very much so in fact, really early in the process, I said, I love that the eighties MTV logo and the fact that I can remember versions of it, where it was furry, or had a leopard print, [crosstalk 00:15:25] around, it would go to the moon. I really loved that vibe. We very much wanted to capture some of that spirit, as an homage to that early burst of creativity around MTV.Fabian Geyrhalter:I'm glad my mind reading skills are still there. The beauty of that is that it can survive a decade without a problem, because you can just adjust it to whatever the next trend is in logo design and it's still the same logo and I think that's-Phil Libin:It's rarely the same twice in fact. In fact, we already have probably a hundred different treatments of it. The shape itself stays the same, but we specifically made it to, it contains multitudes. We can put things inside of it. We can put it on top of other things. It's meant to be constantly changing and adjusting its mood, just like the idea of that what the product does.The product is consistent hopefully, but what you can do with it is endless. We want it to get some of that spirit across.Fabian Geyrhalter:What has been the biggest success of the past weeks since launch? We talked before launch, I think you said you're going to launch on June. What was it June 43rd?Phil Libin:37th.Fabian Geyrhalter:37th. Did you launch on the 37th? You made it?Phil Libin:July 7th, also known as June 37th. Originally the joke it was, I told investors that was going to launch in June, that the beta was going to launch in June. Then we actually looked at the schedule and how much work we had to do. We're like, well, okay. June 30th. The last day in June. I wanted to make sure I was true to my word. We decided to launch it on June 30th, but then we realized that that was right before the 4th of July weekend, which in the US you don't want to launch right before then, because I want employees to be able to enjoy the weekend without the death march of saying, "Oh, we just launched and there's bugs and whatever." so we decided to just postpone it by a week, but at that point I already told investors sometime in June. It was easy to just say, well, June 37.Fabian Geyrhalter:Since then, what has been the biggest success? Or how do you or will you measure success with Mmhmm?Phil Libin:It's way too early. We're only a few weeks into this. We're only a month old or something, depending on when this airs. Way too early to declare any success, the way we measure, the way we're going to measure success is impact. What we care about is making the world a little bit better, because our product exists in it, than it would be if a product didn't exist in it. For Mmhmm specifically, that's about getting into the hands of people whose careers lives, jobs, art, whatever will be enhanced, will be improved, because they've got access to this product. It's really a community measure of success. We are starting to, very early days, but starting to work very carefully about getting this into schools, into the hands of teachers and students, but also to artists, and performers, and entrepreneurs. At least in the beta, we want use cases of people who can literally say, "Something important in my life, my job, my career, and my art, my studies, my teaching, something important to me was made better, because I used this product." once we have that, then we can think about, can we make that true for 10 people, for 10 million people, for a billion people, the scaling comes after the impact.Fabian Geyrhalter:I like that. This is only one of many products that share your vision of making entrepreneurship get the job done, as you call it, with your company All Turtles. How did the All Turtles name come about? It is definitely a very unusual name and I assume you're not all moving extremely slowly in your software development. Besides June 37th, but tell me the story behind the Turtles.Phil Libin:I think it was almost a dry run for Mmhmm, I wanted something unusual. What we're doing at All Turtles is I think a fairly unique model. It's very easy to compare us to other things that feel like they're similar to it. Various incubators, and accelerators, and labs. That's inevitable, of course, we're going to be compared to that and that's fine at the end of the day, everyone wants to compare things to everything else. It's okay, but we wanted an unusual enough name so that it added some friction. I wanted a name that was so unusual that it forced you to make a new box in your head to put it in, so that it wasn't natural to like, oh, okay, it's one of these.And stick it into the box next to other things. Obviously, that's asking a lot for a name. We don't expect the name to do quite that much heavy lifting, but that was the philosophy behind it. It comes from turtles all the way down, which is, I think it's a Bertrand Russell anecdote or reference, it's probably apocryphal, but the idea is Bertrand Russell was giving a lecture about the structure of the solar system. At the end, everyone claps, but except there's one old woman that gets up. In the story, it's always an old woman, because old stories are always misogynists. In fact, when I was telling the origin story originally, I was to say, and then this old person gets up. Then my confounder, Jessica, was going to be corrected and be like, "No, the story is old woman, because [crosstalk 00:21:06] misogynist. Don't mask that just say old woman." you're right. Whenever I disagree with Jessica, like 98% of the time, she's right. A good quality to have in cofounders.This old woman gets up and says, "Oh, everyone knows that this is totally wrong, what you said, because really the earth rests on the back of a giant turtle." and he says, "Well, that doesn't make any sense. If that's true, then what's the turtle resting on?" and she says, "Everyone knows that! It's turtles all the way down." it comes from that, it's turtles all the way down. Whatever we've built, we did it, because we stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us. We hopefully support the next generation of people who are going to build the stuff on top of what we make.Fabian Geyrhalter:It's a nice story. Of course, when you go to allturtles.com, all you see is All Turtles. Literally it is a site about turtlesPhil Libin:That is not our website, but yeah, that's true. Our website is all hyphen turtles.com. [crosstalk 00:22:06] turtles URLs.Fabian Geyrhalter:Which brings me to the ever-fascinating topic of mine. How important is having a dot com to a brand these days, in your opinion? Everyone knows my opinion, but in your opinion, how do you advise startups on this?Phil Libin:Look. I don't think it's that important. I know you think you do it is. I think, look, it's nice to have, but if you look at the list of 10,000 things that are nice to have, or even 20 things that are nice to have, I wouldn't rate this in the top five. I just don't think that most entrepreneurs have time to work on anything other than the top five most important things. Until they do, until you're much bigger and better resourced and whatever. I would say, I would try to get the dot com and if you can get a great, and if you can't, I wouldn't let that block you from doing something. Definitely don't fixate on that.Fabian Geyrhalter:It's not in your top three or five criteria for having a .com domain?Phil Libin:It's not in the most critical things. I would much rather have a great brand and not have the.dot com URL than a mediocre brand and have the dot com URL. That's clear to me, at least.Fabian Geyrhalter:Did you knock on the turtles website and ask if the domain might be available?Phil Libin:I think we tried to. I think we actually made some progress with the person. They disappeared or something and we had more important things to do, so I don't know. Some day. I'm not opposed to having it. I just don't think [crosstalk 00:23:45]Fabian Geyrhalter:I think it's always so fascinating, because as of late, and that might also talk a little bit about the trend in this and that I might be able to wrong fixating on the dot com very much with branding work, is I interviewed these founders and they have amazing brands, like yourself. Then I go to the website and it is horrible, horrible, horrible website work of someone that owns a domain name, but it's pathetic. It's something where you know, this is just someone who has a hobby and who hasn't attended to the website since the days of Netscape. Yet they don't even get back to your emails. They're not interested in making a quick buck for a website where no one goes to it! It's fascinating for me, but now that we have already entered the animal kingdom with All Turtles, why don't we talk about Evernote? How Evernote got an elephant as its logo, because I definitely want to check that off our today.Phil Libin:That was the other reason for All Turtles is that Bertrand Russell origin story refers to the Hindu, it was some version of Chinese and some version of Hindu origin, cosmology creation myth where the earth is actually standing in the back of a giant elephant and the elephant stands on the turtles. Then it's turtles all the way down from there. My previous company was an elephant and the next fundamental animal is the turtle, so it made sense. Then it's turtles all the way down, so it's going to be All Turtles from now on. That was the little bit more esoteric reason.Fabian Geyrhalter:The logo, that's the story behind the elephant and why the elephant was chosen for Evernote?Phil Libin:I didn't name it. I didn't pick the name, the name existed before and I wasn't that crazy about the name. I thought it was okay, but basically, at that point it wasn't worth changing. It was fine.Fabian Geyrhalter:A little too descriptive for Phil?Phil Libin:I think that's right. I think basically, the framework I like for naming, which we don't really follow ourselves, but it's fun to know about it. The thing I recommend that people read is the Igor Naming Guide, which talks about four different types of names. I think it's useful to read it, even if you don't follow it, which we don't really follow it, but it's useful to read it just to understand the vocabulary, so that you can have a discussion about names. You at least have the right words to use, because it's hard to do it. There's so much philosophy and theory behind it. It's hard to have a general discussion without the basic vocabulary.It's useful for that, but Evernote, to me, feels a little bit too functional, but obviously having said that the name worked out great, but the other lesson from that is the name is just one part of the brand. The name isn't necessarily the most part of the brand. It's one part of the brand. The logos is a big part of the brand, the whole identity, the fonts, the colors, the brand voice, how you talk about it. These are all brand. You assemble a brand out of all these things intentionally and very rarely do you have the luxury of choosing every element of a brand at the same time. We had that luxury at Mmhmm, but it's really rare, where we could say, we can control everything. We can control the name, the colors, the logo, everything. We set the voice, all of it. The vast majority of the time, you don't quite have that luxury. With Evernote, we did it so that the name was there, but we did everything else.Fabian Geyrhalter:The logo with the elephant, to a regular user, it seems pretty far fetched to understand what the Evernote has to do with the actual app. How was that story conveyed or did it even matter and it just became a symbol that was, quote, unquote symbolic from the get-go and it was so different?Phil Libin:We hired this amazing designer, Gabe [Combdako 00:27:55], in the early days of Evernote to help us think through the identity. Ex Apple person and he's currently the lead product designer for Mmhmm and All Turtles, actually.. Still working with him, what's it been now? 14 years later or something. The most important thing is once you find amazingly talented people, do everything possible to stay in their economic orbit. This is the main thing that I do, is I try to find every possible way to keep a group of hyper talented people together, because you can walk through walls with them. You just need to have an appropriately reasonable destination and you can get there.We hired Gabe and we went through a process. We had lots of different options. There's, I think, presentations of me online talking about it, but didn't start out as an elephant. There was lots of options we considered. In fact, he came back with a few different options, including a couple of elephant treatments, which we rejected, because the group that I set up to try to figure out the logo said the elephant is too dangerous to go with, because there's too many negative connotations, "Oh, it's slow and it's big, feels [inaudible 00:29:14], blah, blah, blah." I liked it, because elephants are very good memories, an elephant never forgets, I thought Evernote was about remembering things, that was the connection, but we rejected the elephant, because it was the most bad of the designs and we wind up going with something really boring.Then basically I woke up the next day after that decision was made and it didn't feel right to me. I think we picked the safe choice and I just didn't feel right, but we back and said, "Let's go with an elephant, but we need a few more iterations of the elephant." and the elephant itself, we had literally a hundred different versions of the elephant. There's pictures floating around of different elephant versions. We went through lots of different ones. For a while, it looked too much like the Republican party elephants. We panicked and said, "We got to make sure that it doesn't look like it's the Republican elephant. It's a totally different elephant." but eventually we came up on this one and it was great.It was a by far the best decision early on that we made this logo, this identity for Evernote probably got us literally a hundred, $200 million worth of free publicity and marketing by Apple, by Google, by Samsung, but all of these companies that were putting up app stores and platforms, and they all just featured us, because we had a pretty good product, but I think equally as importantly, because we had an amazing looking identity that they were just like, it looked better than the app icons and logos of other stuff that they would put up. We would get into every single poster, marketing campaign, whatever, because it was a good product, but also, because it looked really good. That was by far the best few thousand dollars that we spent. The ROI of that was pretty incredible.Fabian Geyrhalter:It's so difficult to show ROI with a brand identity, or with a brand name. It's really difficult. I love that you say that, because it is measurable. What I also really, really like is that you, throughout the entire episode today, you really talk about how a safe choice is most often not a great choice. As you know, with most of corporate America, that is absolutely the other way around with decision making when it comes to name, when it comes to brand, when it comes to all of those pretty intrinsic ideas that they come out and very often they end up being a little bit too meh.That is the lesson that just everyone has to hear over and over again. Coming from someone who sold their software development company for $26 million 20 years ago. Then you co-founded Evernote. Now you're kicking serious butt with All Turtles, and it looks like with Mmhmm. Obviously you did plenty of things in between. These days, you also mentor startups on a lot of topics, including branding. I want to circle back to that, you already started talking about it, but what does branding mean to you after everything that you have branded in your life and that you've been through what does branding as word, because it gets pretty bad rap, very often the idea of branding, especially with startups. It seems like it's a waste of time. It's a waste of money, but you and I both know if you actually do something that's really outstanding, it can be a huge game-changer for a startup.Phil Libin:This is the lesson that I keep learning again and again in life. Maybe I'm starting to demonstrate learning behavior and actually like internalize it, but I'm an engineer, by background. I'm a programmer, computer scientists, computer nerd. I had a very large amount of disrespect early on in my life and career for anything that had to do with marketing, with branding, with intellectual property. I didn't like any of that stuff. I had the typical nerd, programmer approach, like, hey the programming is the real work and everything else is marketing, blah, hate it. Then I started working with people who were much smarter than I was in these fields. At Evernote, the person that ran our marketing was Andrew [Sincove 00:33:17] he's a big, important person at Etsy right now. [inaudible 00:33:24] the lesson from him.He was like, "Look, yeah. When you say marketing is stupid, what you mean is bad marketing is stupid and it is, and the vast majority of companies have really bad marketing and it's really stupid. If your attitude is marketing stupid, you're going to get bad marketing. You're going to prove yourself to be right. Good marketing is actually amazingly important, just as important as anything else. Shut up and let's do some good marketing and you'll see." and I was like, wow, absolutely. That's totally right. The same is true as naming and the same is true with branding. If you do it badly, it's dumb, but if you go in with the expectation that it's going to be bad, then yeah. It's going to be bad and it's going to be dumb.I felt that bias, that engineering bias, but my eyes were opened repeatedly by various people that I work with about this. Same thing with intellectual property. Leonid [inaudible 00:34:18] has been working with us on IP for more than a decade now, since Evernote days. I would get into these big arguments with him about patents, like patents are stupid. Patents are bad for the world. The IP industry is terrible. He was like, "Bad patents are bad, good patents are good." patents that are written to be either poorly or specifically written to be bad for the world and not actually describe anything and try to do all this stuff. Yeah, those are really bad.Let's not do those. Let's do good ones. This philosophy, again, I'm not smart enough to understand that from the first time was explained to me, so it has to be explained to me over and over again, but it's fundamentally true. Definitely feels this way with brand, with everything else. Now I think that you're making a product, you're making a company, the brand is, at the end of the day, I don't know if it's the most important thing, but it's in that package of most important things. It's so important that it's hard to separate from anything else. It's hard to separate from the team, it's hard to separate from the product design. Those are all areas. The product design, the team design, the culture, the brand, they're all so amazingly central and important that, if you do them right, they're inseparable and you definitely need to have the appreciation of what all of them mean.Fabian Geyrhalter:Listen, I promised you I'm only going to take that much of your time. Most important. Listeners who want to learn more about Mmhmm or get an invite to be a beta user, where and how can they go about that?Phil Libin:You can just sign up at mmhmm.app, M-M-H-M-M dot app. I like palindromes. That's one of the names. I like names that are the same forward and backwards. Go there and sign up. We are inviting people, hopefully pretty rapidly. We're sending out invites every day. There's always a wait list, but we're sending out invites every day and we are planning on going live, full general availability release. It's Mac only for now, for this stage of the beta, but a Windows version is coming and we're planning on being live on Mac and Windows this fall. Not too long to wait until it's generally available for everyone.Fabian Geyrhalter:Especially in 2020, it seems to go by rather quickly, which is a really, really good thing. I would say. Phil, thank you so much for having taken the time. Really appreciate your insights. This was absolutely amazing.Phil Libin:Thank you. That was super fun to talk to you.

Renowned Brand Strategist and Creative Director Fabian Geyrhalter is a prolific author and speaker on the subject of branding. He is the founder and principal of Los Angeles-based brand consultancy FINIEN. Geyrhalter is a columnist for Forbes and Inc and has been published by the likes of The Washington Post, Entrepreneur and Mashable. His best-selling book ‘How to Launch a Brand ' became a go-to resource for entrepreneurs and creatives alike. His latest book is ‘Bigger Than This - How to turn any venture into an admired brand.' https://www.linkedin.com/in/geyrhalter/

Fabian Geyrhalter —How to Create a Memorable Brand | Brought to you by Mallama “If you infuse heart and soul into a venture, and if you create a distinct voice, and if you share values with your customers, then you actually will turn into a brand.” Fabian Geyrhalter Renowned Brand Strategist and Creative Director Fabian Geyrhalter is a prolific author and speaker on the subject of branding. He is the founder and principal of Los Angeles-based brand consultancy FINIEN. Geyrhalter is a columnist for Forbes and Inc and has been published by the likes of The Washington Post, Entrepreneur and Mashable. His best-selling book ‘How to Launch a Brand' became a go-to resource for entrepreneurs and creatives alike. His latest book is ‘Bigger Than This - How to turn any venture into an admired brand.' Geyrhalter is also the host of ‘Hitting The Mark,' a podcast about the intersection of brand clarity and startup success. Through his consultancy, Geyrhalter works hands-on with medium-sized to large corporations on crafting strategic, verbal and visual brand clarity. ✅ Hey guys! Enjoy this EPIC interview w/ acclaimed top-selling author, gifted speaker, and Brand Consult Fabian Geyrhalter! Fabian takes us all the way back to his college days and shares with us his backstory which ultimately shaped his career and his future!

Branding is a tricky activity in any day and age, but as we enter a “new normal” and a market that is shifting constantly, brands are trying to figure out how and why to create a brand direction in this new extremely digital world. What are the keys to creating a trusted brand? How do you create brand clarity and how do you know if how you're marketing is an authentic representation of your personal or company brand? In this episode branding expert, Fabian Geyrhalter shares how to convey your brand vision through marketing and communication no matter what medium you are pursuing.Support the show (https://www.thesilvertelegram.com/the-pr-playbook-podcast-1)

We have the amazing MELINDA LIVSEY on the show today! She is a brand strategist and also a Co-Host at THE FUTUR. In today's episode, she talks about BRAND STRATEGY for beginners. Starting from the basics to resources for BRAND STRATEGISTS. . Resources mentioned in the episode : giveall.io How to launch a brand by Fabian Geyrhalter - https://amzn.to/39O7IWr Bigger than this by Fabian Geyrhalter - https://amzn.to/2u5GPhg Designing brand identity by Alina Wheeler - https://amzn.to/323pEtt This is marketing by Seth Godin - https://amzn.to/2SEsH8n . Links to Melinda's profiles : Website - https://www.marksandmaker.com Prelance - https://pre-lance.com . Thank you for listening! Huge shoutout to this show's sponsors! SKILLSHARE has been my favourite online learning hub since I started out. With thousands of classes on almost every topic makes it the best among all. Get 2 MONTHS OF SKILLSHARE and take your design skills to a next level. Sign up today at https://skl.sh/blesscreatics . Find me on Instagram - www.instagram.com/theblessshow

 Learn how to position your brand, establish your company culture, and your story Discover how to structure your ideas and ultimately craft a well-defined brand that will be easy to buy into for your audience Find-out how a brand with a strong foundational DNA ultimately create a focused and authentic story your audience can believe in Resources/Links: Master your BRAND LAUNCH (an online version of Fabian Geyrhalter's popular Resonaid® workshop):Gain Brand Focus Now: Check-out the Course Through This Link: https://www.resonaid.com/ Summary Renowned Brand Strategist and Creative Director Fabian Geyrhalter is the founder and principal of FINIEN, and a prolific author and speaker on the subject of branding. He is also a columnist for Forbes and Inc and has been published by the likes of The Washington Post, Entrepreneur and Mashable. In this episode, Fabian shares how he ensures clients are set up with a strong brand foundation, have structured ideas that ultimately craft a well-defined brand that is easy to buy into for your target market. Check out these episode highlights: 01:16 – Fabian's ideal client: "Our ideal client is a founder of a company that needs to define his or her brand foundation, name, and identity. Or if part of a rebranding, it's a founder or a marketer, a CMO, who needs to re-evaluate the brand's positioning identity and voice." 01:39– Problem Fabian helps solve: I create clarity and focus.. 03:15 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Fabian: "You have a product but no one cares, despite it being an actual good offering, so that's a problem. Or they have a service that sells but they don't get an engagement as the brand. So, you know, or the third one is actually their launching a brand but they have difficulties understanding themselves what the true north is, why people would deeply care about the brand." 04:02 – Common mistakes people make when trying to solve that problem: They try to be too many things to too many people, right? And that's why brand clarity creates that focus that allows them to attract the right people. I call it your brand DNA, right? You have to define your brand DNA and voices it that actually stick to it . 05:42 – Fabian's Valuable Free Action(VFA): Define that brand DNA.So, write down in a sentence, here's what we sell, and here's who we sell it to, and then finish the sentence with because. 06:49 – Fabian's Valuable Free Resource(VFR): They can visit our website, which is https://www.resonaid.com/ 07:28 – Q: "Why is Fabian obsessed with branding?" A: Because I really strongly believe that branding is the new advertising. I feel like stories are now real and brands can't wear costumes anymore. So today, branding, if you do it in a transparent, authentic and meaningful way, you can create better companies, better cultures, and quite frankly, a better world. Then who would have thought that branding could ever do that for you. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “Branding — if you do it in a transparent, authentic and meaningful way, you can create better companies, better cultures, and quite frankly, a better world.” -@FINIENinsightsClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland: 0:09 Hello, every one a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible, and my name is Tom Poland and joined today by Fabian Geyrhalter. Fabian, a very warm hello, good day from Australia, and welcome. Where are you hanging out? Fabian Geyrhalter 0:22 I'm hanging out in Long Beach which is greater Los Angeles, Tom Poland: 0:25 Long Beach, California, well away from the fires, I hope. Fabian Geyrhalter0:29 Yeah, just far enough. But yeah, we can definitely see the smoke.

 Learn how to position your brand, establish your company culture, and your story Discover how to structure your ideas and ultimately craft a well-defined brand that will be easy to buy into for your audience Find-out how a brand with a strong foundational DNA ultimately create a focused and authentic story your audience can believe in Resources/Links: Check out: https://www.resonaid.com/ Summary Renowned Brand Strategist and Creative Director Fabian Geyrhalter is the founder and principal of FINIEN, and a prolific author and speaker on the subject of branding. He is also a columnist for Forbes and Inc and has been published by the likes of The Washington Post, Entrepreneur and Mashable. In this episode, Fabian shares how he ensures clients are set up with a strong brand foundation, have structured ideas that ultimately craft a well-defined brand that is easy to buy into for your target market. Check out these episode highlights: 01:16 – Fabian's ideal client: "Our ideal client is a founder of a company that needs to define his or her brand foundation, name, and identity. Or if part of a rebranding, it's a founder or a marketer, a CMO, who needs to re-evaluate the brand's positioning identity and voice." 01:39– Problem Fabian helps solve: I create clarity and focus.. 03:15 – Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Fabian: "You have a product but no one cares, despite it being an actual good offering, so that's a problem. Or they have a service that sells but they don't get an engagement as the brand. So, you know, or the third one is actually their launching a brand but they have difficulties understanding themselves what the true north is, why people would deeply care about the brand." 04:02 – Common mistakes people make when trying to solve that problem: They try to be too many things to too many people, right? And that's why brand clarity creates that focus that allows them to attract the right people. I call it your brand DNA, right? You have to define your brand DNA and voices it that actually stick to it . 05:42 – Fabian's Valuable Free Action(VFA): Define that brand DNA.So, write down in a sentence, here's what we sell, and here's who we sell it to, and then finish the sentence with because. 06:49 – Fabian's Valuable Free Resource(VFR): They can visit our website, which is https://www.resonaid.com/ 07:28 – Q: "Why is Fabian obsessed with branding?" A: Because I really strongly believe that branding is the new advertising. I feel like stories are now real and brands can't wear costumes anymore. So today, branding, if you do it in a transparent, authentic and meaningful way, you can create better companies, better cultures, and quite frankly, a better world. Then who would have thought that branding could ever do that for you. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast) Tom Poland: 0:09 Hello, every one a very warm welcome to another edition of Marketing The Invisible, and my name is Tom Poland and joined today by Fabian Geyrhalter. Fabian, a very warm hello, good day from Australia, and welcome. Where are you hanging out? Fabian Geyrhalter 0:22 I'm hanging out in Long Beach which is greater Los Angeles, Tom Poland: 0:25 Long Beach, California, well away from the fires, I hope. Fabian Geyrhalter0:29 Yeah,

How to Launch a Brand by Fabian Geyrhalter --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bestbookbits/support

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Fabian is a creative director and a true expert when it comes to re-shaping brand strategies and helping companies excel at their vision. As a best-selling author and Forbes columnist, he likes to re-invent the concept of branding and points out that every company creating a product or a brand ought to come down to this: “In the end, what’s important is that the brand has a soul, that is the difference between a product and a brand, that it formulates a deeper connection.” In the 8th episode of our podcast we explored the world of brand concepts, company strategies and modern guidelines for a brand’s success.

Fabian Geyrhalter is the principal and founder of FINIEN, a Los Angeles-based branding agency. Fabian's also a prolific writer; you can find articles he's authored in Forbes, Inc., The Washington Post, Entrepreneur, and Mashable. He's also written two books: How to Launch a Brand, and his latest, Bigger Than This: How to Turn Any Venture Into an Admired Brand. Fabian and I talked about his books, his agency, and the approach he uses with some clients to build out an entire brand platform from scratch in one very long day. We started off talking about his background as a designer and how it contributes to his work. He feels it helps him imagine the strategy coming to life in the real world-visually and verbally-which puts him "a couple of steps ahead." After talking a little about the types of clients FINIEN helps, we got to a unique aspect of Fabian's process: the one-day strategy intensive. Throughout the day, he takes his clients through a series of exercises. As they work, they complete an interactive PDF on screen. At the end of the day, the PDF contains all the key elements of the brand platform: positioning, core values, philosophy, personality, mission, vision, target, and competitors. "I figured, if I worked with startups, they are founders, they are entrepreneurs, they think very much like me; they want to get to the heart of their brands very quickly, and they don't have the time. Usually, literally, they don't have the time. They need to launch in a couple of weeks from now. Doing a couple-of-week exercise to talk about brand purpose, brand philosophy, and positioning is not going to happen with them." - Fabian Geyrhalter Later in his process, he creates the brand's identity along with a variety of touchpoints needed to launch, which he refers to as the "brand atmosphere." Next, we talked about Fabian's new book, Bigger Than This. He was inspired by brands like TOMS, which "are absolutely commodity-type products," yet consumers fall in love with them. He explored this phenomenon further, looking at many similar cases, and distilled eight "commodity brand traits." The book outlines each trait along with an example and some practical recommendations. As usual, we wrapped up the conversation with some book recommendations and advice for junior people in the industry. To learn more about Fabian, his branding agency, and his books, visit the FINIEN website. (Also, here's a hint: You can buy his books on Amazon, but if you want a signed copy of Bigger Than This, buy it through his website.)

Bigger Than This & Present Your Power on The Tony DUrso Show with Fabian Geyrhalter & Abigail Rebecca Pugh. This show is dedicated to Helping our audience Visionaries, Manifest Their Vision. Fabian Geyrhalter is the founder & Principal of Finien, a Los Angeles-based consultancy specialized in creating strategic, verbal & visual brand clarity. His client list ranges from high-growth startups such as Jukin Media & Survios to established brands like Warner Brothers, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & Goodwill. Abigail Rebecca is a Presentation Coach, CEO & founder of the Whole Shebang Project. After working over 20 years in corporate as a senior leader, training & mentoring thousands of people on public speaking & talking to camera, Abi decided that enough was enough, moved to the seaside & embraced her inner hippy. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts (iTunes).

Bigger Than This & Present Your Power on The Tony DUrso Show with Fabian Geyrhalter & Abigail Rebecca Pugh. This show is dedicated to Helping our audience Visionaries, Manifest Their Vision. Fabian Geyrhalter is the founder & Principal of Finien, a Los Angeles-based consultancy specialized in creating strategic, verbal & visual brand clarity. His client list ranges from high-growth startups such as Jukin Media & Survios to established brands like Warner Brothers, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & Goodwill. Abigail Rebecca is a Presentation Coach, CEO & founder of the Whole Shebang Project. After working over 20 years in corporate as a senior leader, training & mentoring thousands of people on public speaking & talking to camera, Abi decided that enough was enough, moved to the seaside & embraced her inner hippy. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts (iTunes).

Bigger Than This & Present Your Power on The Tony DUrso Show with Fabian Geyrhalter & Abigail Rebecca Pugh. This show is dedicated to Helping our audience Visionaries, Manifest Their Vision. Fabian Geyrhalter is the founder & Principal of Finien, a Los Angeles-based consultancy specialized in creating strategic, verbal & visual brand clarity. His client list ranges from high-growth startups such as Jukin Media & Survios to established brands like Warner Brothers, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & Goodwill. Abigail Rebecca is a Presentation Coach, CEO & founder of the Whole Shebang Project. After working over 20 years in corporate as a senior leader, training & mentoring thousands of people on public speaking & talking to camera, Abi decided that enough was enough, moved to the seaside & embraced her inner hippy. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts (iTunes).

Bigger Than This & Present Your Power on The Tony DUrso Show with Fabian Geyrhalter & Abigail Rebecca Pugh. This show is dedicated to Helping our audience Visionaries, Manifest Their Vision. Fabian Geyrhalter is the founder & Principal of Finien, a Los Angeles-based consultancy specialized in creating strategic, verbal & visual brand clarity. His client list ranges from high-growth startups such as Jukin Media & Survios to established brands like Warner Brothers, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & Goodwill. Abigail Rebecca is a Presentation Coach, CEO & founder of the Whole Shebang Project. After working over 20 years in corporate as a senior leader, training & mentoring thousands of people on public speaking & talking to camera, Abi decided that enough was enough, moved to the seaside & embraced her inner hippy. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts (iTunes).

Bigger Than This & Present Your Power on The Tony DUrso Show with Fabian Geyrhalter & Abigail Rebecca Pugh. This show is dedicated to Helping our audience Visionaries, Manifest Their Vision. Fabian Geyrhalter is the founder & Principal of Finien, a Los Angeles-based consultancy specialized in creating strategic, verbal & visual brand clarity. His client list ranges from high-growth startups such as Jukin Media & Survios to established brands like Warner Brothers, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & Goodwill. Abigail Rebecca is a Presentation Coach, CEO & founder of the Whole Shebang Project. After working over 20 years in corporate as a senior leader, training & mentoring thousands of people on public speaking & talking to camera, Abi decided that enough was enough, moved to the seaside & embraced her inner hippy. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts (iTunes).

Bigger Than This & Present Your Power on The Tony DUrso Show with Fabian Geyrhalter & Abigail Rebecca Pugh. This show is dedicated to Helping our audience Visionaries, Manifest Their Vision. Fabian Geyrhalter is the founder & Principal of Finien, a Los Angeles-based consultancy specialized in creating strategic, verbal & visual brand clarity. His client list ranges from high-growth startups such as Jukin Media & Survios to established brands like Warner Brothers, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & Goodwill. Abigail Rebecca is a Presentation Coach, CEO & founder of the Whole Shebang Project. After working over 20 years in corporate as a senior leader, training & mentoring thousands of people on public speaking & talking to camera, Abi decided that enough was enough, moved to the seaside & embraced her inner hippy. Listen to The Tony DUrso Show on VoiceAmerica Influencers Platform every Friday at 2pm Pacific or listen on Apple Podcasts (iTunes).

What is marketing? What is branding? Is one more important than the other? What's the difference and where are the overlaps? This conversation with sparked by a controversial post by Story Brand author, Donald Miller, who states that branding isn't necessary unless you are doing more than $50m in revenue. Melinda Livsey and Fabian Geyrhalter join the podcast to share their thoughts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There is an age-old debate on which is more important marketing or branding. Those which a marketing background tend to have a bias toward marketing versus designers who tend to have a bias toward branding. The truth is everything comes down to how you define marketing and how you define branding. These two are not in competition with one another but are compliments. There is no way you can implement marketing without branding, and a brand can only grow if it utilizes marketing in the right way. So what does this mean? Marketing is the tactics and strategy used to gain people's attention, while branding is about creating consistent experiences to build trust in your customer's/client's mind. Once you are clear on the definition of both marketing and branding than how each impacts your business becomes all the more clear. Donald Miller on branding - https://youtu.be/oxvlGfw85cM Chris Do, Melinda Livsey and Fabian Geyrhalter discuss branding on TheFutur: - https://youtu.be/yK7Rk7Oe588

I chat with 28-year old Devon Townsend, who quit Microsoft, became a viral Vine comedy star and yet he ended up creating Cameo, a platform that lets you book personalized video shoutouts from your favorite athletes, actors, and entertainers. His 60+ employee strong company, which has received 15.8+ million in funding to date, dispatches over 1,000 videos a day and signed up well over 10,000 celebrities, from Ice-T to Kevin O’Leary and from Charlie Sheen to Snoop Dog who are all happy to send you or your loved ones a personal message anywhere from 5 Dollars up to 2,500 bucks a pop. Cameo was one of TIME Magazine's 50 Most Genius Companies of 2018 and Devon was named to Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 list this year, yet he is happy to connect with you via e-mail if you have any feedback for him. Devon and I discuss creating a delightful and transparent brand, the obstacles of naming and how to craft an authentic visual and verbal brand language that people will freak out over and scream and laugh and cry. Yes, all of the above is possible with Cameo. ____Full Transcript: F Geyrhalter: Welcome to Hitting The Mark. I just spent two weeks back in beautiful Austria, so I apologize in advance if you have to suffer through an unusually strong reactivated German accent on this episode. Today I'm thrilled to welcome Devin Townsend, Co founder and CTO of Cameo, a platform that lets you book personalized video shout outs from your favorite athletes, actors and entertainers. Prior to Cameo, Devin was popular on the app Vine, with hundreds of millions of views and called on that experience when building Cameo to create something influencers and the fans would love. F Geyrhalter: Devin has also worked at Microsoft as a software engineer, and met his co founder at Duke University. His 60 plus employees strong company dispatches over a thousand videos a day and signed up well over 10,000 celebrities from Ice-T to Kevin O'Leary, and from Charlie Sheen to Snoop Dogg, who are all happy to send you or your loved ones a personal message anywhere from five bucks up to $2,500 a pop. Devin was named to Inc. Magazine's 30 under 30 list this year, and this is exactly how I learned about him in the first place. Welcome to Hitting The Mark, Devin. D Townsend: Thank you. Happy to be here. F Geyrhalter: Yeah, it's great to have you here. So you quit Microsoft, became a viral Vine comedy star and yet you ended up creating Cameo. Give myself and my listeners a bit of that backstory and why you love it so much that on Inc. Magazine I read... You said you would not want to sell the company because you would just have a lot of money, be bored and probably try to start a company that's very, very similar to Cameo. D Townsend: Yeah, absolutely. So my friend and I in... this is in 2014 when my friend and I were both working as software engineers. And we had read some travel blog, got the travel bug, and we decided that we wanted to travel. So he had already been playing around in the app Vine and he was pretty popular. His name is Cody Ko, he's now a full time YouTuber. And we quit our jobs, I was working at Microsoft, and we traveled the world for a year. And we spent our time coding independent websites and apps that were fun just to make money to support ourselves and also posting funny vines on our Vine account called Devon And Cody Go To Whitecastle. It was super fun, and we came back to America, and that was a lot of the experience that I drew on when creating Cameo. F Geyrhalter: And at first sight, Cameo might look a little bit like a celebrity monetization platform. Right? But now that I spent some time on it prepping for our conversation, in my eyes, you actually built a brand that generates delight. Would you agree with my assertion that delight is one of those big traits behind the Cameo brand? D Townsend: Yeah. Absolutely. When we set out to build this, my goal was to make Cameo so fun that what we call talent, the supply side of our platform, the celebrities on our platform, they would do it for free. And so in a lot of ways, I think the fact that this generates revenue and that it costs money to book a Cameo is partially just a limiting factor. It just means that it's almost like a feature in the sense that it prevents celebrities from having way too many requests that they're not able to fulfill. But it's just super fun. F Geyrhalter: And I also heard one of your co founders talk about how transparency is another important trait of the Cameo brand. How do you celebrate transparency from within your company, so the accompany culture, all the way to your talent managers, which I believe you have a good amount of that actually interact regularly with the celebrities? D Townsend: Yeah, so this is actually one of our values. We call it no surprises, and it's super helpful internally, externally. Basically we just want to share everything so people are not caught off guard, especially in unpleasant ways. But another thing that we do that I think is a little bit unique, especially for companies our size is every morning we have a stand up with the entire company, we go over all of the relevant key metrics of the business like revenue and Cameo has completed in the previous day, how many talent were onboarded. And I think, especially for new people, it's really relieving to see that level of transparency and to know that everybody has access to the same information. F Geyrhalter: That's really cool, and it's also very different from, without naming any startup names, some other startups that are popping up and becoming really, really big and employees very quickly start complaining about the zero transparency and top down kind of company culture like in Fortune 500's. And so it's awesome to see you guys do that round up in the morning, which is very much like in restaurants, right? Like everyone comes together and talks about what happened the day before, talks about what will happen this day and super transparent. It's very cool. And talking about pricing, which you already mentioned, people also use Cameo to have celebrities deliver messages to their boss saying that they quit the job or marriage proposals to the girlfriends or coming out messages via DragQueen to their parents. But I'm actually surprised by what some celebrities do for very little money and how your site showcases that self worth of talent. You can literally browse through A list celebrities and gain an idea of how much they believe they're worth by in a minute. So how did you go about setting any kind of pricing suggestions initially, and how did the pricing range develop over the years as you moved from sports, I believe, to internet influencers and now A stars? And above all, how did you project it would turn into a sustainable and growing business? It's all about pricing in the end, right? D Townsend: Yeah. So we actually did something pretty interesting, which is we took the number of work hours in a year, which I think is 4,000... so I think it's like around 50 weeks times 40 hours. And we looked at how much money people were making. So if you're in the NBA and you're making $25 million, divided by 4,000, I think that comes out to around $125 per minute, somewhere in that range. And so that was one thing that we used early on. D Townsend: When people didn't know what to price themselves, when the talent on our platform didn't know how to price themselves, we used that formula, which ended up being really powerful, and it just proves that with Cameo, the fact that you can do a Cameo video in a minute, the economics, even if you're cheap, even if you're $10 or $20, you can make a lot of money in a very short amount of time just because it's so seamless and quick and easy to use. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. No, I totally agree, and I love that calculation and presenting that to your talent saying, "Look, this is how we came up with that number. You can go down, you can go up." And I also agree how much money you can make with this. I'm on a platform called clarity.fm where I give advice to entrepreneurs who might not otherwise be able to afford me and unlike 350 or something an hour, but I've got 15 minute phone calls, and I get maybe a hundred bucks. But it's so much value for the recipient, and in the end, like I made well over $10,000 too in the last couple of years just by giving advice. So I totally agree. I think it's a win win situation. Let's talk about your name. So Cameo is such a fantastic name for service like yours, as it stands for, and I'm going to read this straight from the dictionary, a small character part in a play or movie played by distinguished actor or a celebrity. But because of you Devin, I watched the 1986 video of Cameos. Fantastic hit, word up, this morning. How did the name come about first then, and were you aware or concerned about Cameo videos showing an 80s band on Google instead of your videos with shout outs by Snoop Dogg or Charlie Sheen? D Townsend: Yeah, that's the challenge when you choose a name that's a little bit more recognizable. So obviously, with a name like Cameo, there's going to be things that people associate that with. So the band being one of them. I'm pretty often stopped in public by people when I'm wearing a Cameo t-shirt and they're like, "Oh my God, Cameo, I love that band." And I'm like, "Awesome." So originally, we came up with a ton of names. We spent a lot of time trying to think of the right name. As I'm sure you're aware, it's not easy. And we worked at a branding agency too. We had the name Hypd, H-Y-P-D, we had the name Hero Hub. I think like Thrillo was one of the names. And we never were super happy with any of the names we were playing around with even as we were building this thing and we were pushing ourselves to launch. And so we actually launched with the name... Now that I think of it, we actually launched with the name Power Move. Powermove.io was original website. But we continued to noodle on a name and try to find the perfect name, my co founder's brother John, thought of it one day and we were just like, "Yeah, absolutely. This is the perfect name." And we did that look up. We expected that the website would be taken, we expected that there would be... the name space would be totally failed, but we found that the website was gettable and there was nothing really in our space with that name. F Geyrhalter: And usually, it's the trademark search that puts a big hold onto it, especially with a word that is so common. But it seems like you guys found a word that was somehow still available and you purchased a dot com. And besides you being stopped on the streets, and besides the word up videos showing up at some point, all seems to all seems to be good. I just wish Cameo... The lead singer of Cameo, if he's still alive, that he should be on your platform. That would that be good. That would be good. D Townsend: It should be perfect. F Geyrhalter: So Cameo was one of Time Magazine's 50 most genius companies of 2018, which is insane. Congratulations to that. And I saw Ellen featured a video of yours on her show, which is also a dream of any company for that to happen. How does the PR machine behind Cameo work? It seems like right now is that magical moment. And you and I chatted about this just a minute before we went live, it's this magical moment in time right now where Cameo videos are turning into a household term. So just like you'd say, YouTube videos, you say Cameo and people already know what is being referred to. How did PR or even branding help get Cameo to that point? How much of it was organic and viral food videos and how much do you feel was actually planned and scripted looking back at the success story of the brand? D Townsend: So we went a while flying under the radar. I think it's very natural when you're starting a company to... and especially when you think you have a good idea, to want to keep it to yourself and try to minimize PR because you don't want anybody to steal your idea. And at one point, maybe six months after we launched, The Chicago Tribune, I believe, did a story on Cameo, and we saw that it went viral among news outlets. So all these other news outlets across the country picked it up. And we found that this is just a story that people love. And I think that's personally why our PR strategy has just been so successful and why people love to write about this is just... it's like something that everybody relates to, everybody understands, and it's really exciting, and it has that mix of pop culture and celebrity that really appeals to people. F Geyrhalter: So true. So it really was a Zeitgeist fit. It just happened to be at the right time, no one else was doing it and everyone can relate to it, and that's how it started to spread. D Townsend: Yeah. My co founder, Steven is also super talented when it comes to PRs. He spends a lot of time doing interviews and stories and stuff like that, which has helped. F Geyrhalter: Very cool. And one thing that I'm sure that my listeners, as they go on your website, they're going to realize that you have tons of serious A list celebrities, but then you have hundreds of... how shall I say, questionable personalities and even adult actresses. So what standards do you set to keep your brand aspirational for potential talent, as well as customers, as well as press? Or does it really not matter that much? And if so, why would it matter or not matter how clean you keep the site as far as what type of talent you have on there? D Townsend: We want anybody in the world who has fans to be on Cameo, whether that's a really popular high school football coach who is a celebrity in their town or The Rock, who's one of the most famous actors right now. And so we don't really set out to police people based on their political preference or anything like that. So our platform is free to use for anybody who has fans. We have a couple of rules, no inciting violence, no nudity. But as long as you play within those rules, then we we're not incentivized to make those decisions. F Geyrhalter: Very cool. And besides being very much of a behind the scenes brand, you definitely celebrate Cameo as a brand by, for instance, having each team member have its own Cameo page, which is real fun, where you can actually book them and get to know them. Some of them are free, some of them actually charge. So you basically celebrate your team, just like actual celebrities. And on your site, you state that Cameo "creates moments that inspire", your Twitter account features a screenshot of a hater saying that @bookCameo, which is your Twitter handle, "is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of," as your actual Twitter brand page banner, which is just absolutely hilarious. How do you deliberately craft the actual Cameo brand's visual and verbal language, or how much of it is just organic and is done by different team members? D Townsend: So, when we started, we worked with a branding agency to develop the look and feel of the brand, which is what we're playing off of now. So the visual look was set back then. And as far as the verbal brand, a lot of that just had to do with... When we launched, it was just me and my two co founders, and so our Twitter and all the copy on our site, we had to come up with. And so generally, we just picked stuff that we thought was funny, that we thought was engaging, that we thought people would want to read. And I think one of the things that I believe, before you even start a Cameo, but that I've seen with a Cameo is that people really respond to authenticity. Like in our case, we wrote stuff that we thought it was funny. Our Twitter header was something that, whatever that tweet was, book Cameo is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. And so that's of what we do, and I think people will notice that it's a little bit different and it resonates with them. F Geyrhalter: And it definitely comes across as authentic. And I keep preaching that to my clients all the time. And branding is such a misunderstood term, and it feels like it's so fake, it's so crafted. But what does it mean to you? So branding, either with Cameo or personally, because you are a serial entrepreneur, brand is very important to what you do. What does it mean to you? D Townsend: I think one of the things that I've seen is that branding is just how you represent yourself to the world and how the world perceives you, and in this case, the company Cameo. I think like we've done a lot of things that just represent what we think is cool, what we would want to use. That's a lot of what we've done is built a product that we would want to use that we do use. As you mentioned, you can book any of us on Cameo. And the cool thing about building something that you would want to use and having that point of view is that it will really resonate with some people, and some people will be like, "This isn't for me," which also saves you time because the last thing you want when starting a company is these lukewarm people who think that they might be interested but they're not actually interested and so you spend time trying to build something that would work for them or convince them to try your product and ultimately, it's not a good fit anyway. So I think that that little bit of polarization is really powerful. F Geyrhalter: That's really wise. And it seems so logical, but everyone struggles with that. Every company, even my own consultancy. I have to make sure that I don't get all those lukewarm leads that are just not right for me and I spend time with them, which is really a waste of time. So it's the exact same thing with every brand. You have to make sure that you project exactly who you're for so that you exclude the many and you gain a few, or in your case, you actually have huge traction. So well played. Devin, you're 28, you got 15.8 million in funding the last time I checked, that might have changed by now, but what is one piece of brand advice for other founders that are listening? D Townsend: I think it's really important to pick a brand that represents you because... I think it's really tempting to look at your market and try to decide who you want to be, and then craft your brand to fit that. But if you stray too far from what's natural and what you've been doing for years and what you are the best in the world at, then you're not going to be the best at executing that vision and executing that brand. But picking something that really resonates with you, you have such a super power in that, you know what excites you, you come into work excited, it doesn't feel like work, so you can work unlimited hours and just really pour your heart into it. Townsend: And with that niche, you can really be the best in the world. I don't think it's really possible to get to the level of best in the world unless you're doing something that really represents you and that you believe in more than anybody else. F Geyrhalter: And that goes straight back to what you said in the very beginning or what I quoted you saying about, you really don't want to sell the company because you would just start the same company over and over again because it is passion and passion can only come from within, and if you create the type of environment that you really, really enjoy. And so I think that that is super, super important. It goes back to authenticity, and I think that's a big, big takeaway, that even with a brand that seems to be built on hundreds and hundreds and thousands of personal brands, the actual athletes and the actual celebrities, you yourself and your co founders created a brand that feels so real, and so authentic, and so transparent, and so natural to you that you enjoy building it and you keep being there and not creating a company that you just basically flip and... you get out of, right? D Townsend: Yeah. We built this to be the most fun company that we could think of. And so far, we've succeeded. We set out to be like, "All right, what's the company that we'd want to work at? What are the things we want to work on?" Every day, we build what we want to build, what excites us most. And so I think it's almost akin to going up to a really popular standup comedian and proposing that that person sell their standup comedy career. They would never do that because they've spent all this time building something that they absolutely love and that represents them. F Geyrhalter: So what does it say about you because you stopped your comedy career to start Cameo? D Townsend: Yeah. And that was one thing that was a little bit tough. And I think at the time, a lot of people were confused by that, like why I didn't, at least, try to start a YouTube channel and see where that would lead. But I've found that I really like the sort of... I've always really liked programming and computer science and the hard side of things, so in this case, I get to be pretty technical and focus on hard technical challenges, but also trying to think of like, "Okay, how can we make this really fun? How can make this resonate with people? What's our message? What can we build that people will freak out over and scream and laugh and cry?" F Geyrhalter: And that goes back to the tone of voice in your brand. And a lot of that is being crafted by you organically, and it's a great outlet where you can balance the two things, which before, in comedy, you didn't really have, you were mainly focusing on monetizing one side of it and now you can really play with the two, which again goes back to how it is so important to really understand what you set out to in this world as an entrepreneur and what you should do in order for you to give back the most and to actually enjoy what you do every moment of your time. So definitely agree with that. That's why I changed running a 15 people agency to a two person consultancy because life is great, and that's how it should be. You should just really find your niche. So, how can our listeners get their personalized video from Snoop Dogg or Lance Bass, or for 11 bucks, I think, even from yourself? D Townsend: Yeah, so go to Cameo.com, C-A-M-E-O.com, check it out. We have over 10,000 selling on our platform now. You mentioned a few, pretty much... And our goal is to get everybody who has fans so that your favorite person in the world will be on Cameo. But check it out. Give the product a try and let me know what you think at devin@cameo.com. F Geyrhalter: Awesome. Yeah, I definitely want to tell everyone to take advantage of that. I think I've got some insanely amazing and just truly talented entrepreneurs on my show, and a lot of them give out their cell number, and a lot of them give out their email, and I think that's not normal. You're not going to see that in a lot of magazines and other podcasts. So I'm super, super appreciative of that, and I want everyone to take full advantage of being able to actually do that and share their feedback. So, thank you Devin for your time. I'm so glad that we finally got a 25 minutes podcast today. Thank you for your time. Based on your rate on Cameo, your minute is about 11, so I guess I owe you around 240 bucks now. And thanks to everyone for listening. And please hit that subscribe button to not miss any future shows and do give the podcast a quick rating. It is the one thing I'd love to get in return from you guys. This podcast is brought to you by FINIEN, a brand consultancy creating strategic verbal and visual brand clarity. You can learn more about FINIEN at finien.com. The Hitting The Mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness Won. I will see you next time when we, once again, we'll be hitting the mark.

Talking with the de Haas twin sisters about their brand of premium mixers: How they managed to build a beloved brand at a young age (all while finishing their masters degrees and having started careers in finance). We talk about their story from idea to bottle to shelf, the advantages of having a co-founder, how the brilliant name Double Dutch came about (yes, it all happened at a bar), how the brand's fun copy has come together organically over the years and why Joyce and Raissa (who made it onto the Forbes 30 under 30 list this year) wish they would have paused and created a more cohesive visual and verbal brand when they saw initial interest in their products. You can learn more about Double Dutch and see where you can get your mixers for the perfect cocktail at www.doubledutchdrinks.com ________________Full Transcript: F Geyrhalter:                 Welcome to Hitting the Mark. Today we travel to London, via the Netherlands as we welcome identical twin co-founders, Raissa and Joyce de Haas, whose award-winning premium mixers "Double Dutch" are winning craft cocktail fans hearts around the world, while gaining international attention for their innovative take on sodas and tonics. I first came across the brand in Europe, and then a few weeks ago, I noticed Raissa being featured on the 30-under-30 list by Forbes, where they had the following to say about the brand. "The de Haas twins, born in the Netherlands, are the co-founders of Double Dutch Drinks; a range of soft drinks developed specifically for pairing with higher quality spirits including gin, whiskey, rum, and tequila. Since its 2015 launch, the London-based brand has sold 10 million bottles and raised 1.9 million British pounds. The drinks are available in 22 countries and they're sold in more than 4,500 outlets, including Michelin-star restaurants, luxury hotels such as the Savoy and the Mandarin Oriental, as well as 2,000 supermarkets." With that being said, welcome Raissa and Joyce. Raissa:                          Hello. Joyce:                           Hello. F Geyrhalter:                 Hey, it's great to have you here! So first off, I'm a big gin-tonic fan, too bad it's early in the morning when we record this, my time. For you it's already in the evening. But gin itself, the history of it, it actually traveled just like you from the Netherlands to London, correct? Gin actually comes from the Netherlands. Raissa:                          Yes, very much. The Dutch, they invented it decades and decades ago in the Netherlands and actually the Dutch King of Orange, he was on the tour here in the UK and he just banned everything that was not Dutch. Then he started importing it into the UK and that's how gin became so popular here in London as well. F Geyrhalter:                 And you followed the trail of the inspiration. That's great. Let's talk a little bit about your backgrounds. So, molecular gastronomy, such a big thing in Northern Europe. Is that your background? Or, how did it all start? It seems like you were right on the zeitgeist with your idea. Less than a year ago, the conglomerate Ketel One released Ketel One Botanical, doing essentially a similar thing by harnessing the flavors of herbs and fruits without sugar, making it artisanal, craft style cocktails that have more flavor and are more balanced. What inspired you to be on the forefront of what now became a trend in the beverage industry? You started the concept while you were in college, right? Tell us a little bit about that story. Raissa:                          Yeah! We always grew up with our parents in the Netherlands. They always were big gin drinkers and they had a little wine and spirit shop in our garden, basically. So, we kind of grew up building a big passion for spirits. We knew lots of the local distilleries and just grew up a little bit drunk. Then, we moved to Belgium to study at university and everyone in Belgium drinks beer, obviously. We always grew up with quality spirits so, at university we threw parties on Wednesdays and Thursdays at our flat. We kind of put a ban for people who came to our parties to bring beer. We told people to bring different bottles of gin or vodka or tequila to our parties, and then Joyce and I would make different sodas in our kitchen for the week ahead. It was very primitive, we would just, for example, heat up strawberry and mint in a saucepan, add sugar, then you get a syrup, and then add carbonized water. We did that for a couple of years, did it just for fun, and just did it because we thought the choice of gins, vodkas and spirits was so big but the choice of mixers and tonic waters was boring. So we just started experimenting with different flavors. We did that for fun, kept doing it for friends and family, and then graduated, both in finance actually. I started working for a small, private wealth management firm in Antwerp and Joyce started working for a bigger corporate bank in Brussels. But soon, after four months, we decided that finance wasn't maybe for us. F Geyrhalter:                 You had to go back to drinking. Raissa:                          Exactly! We wanted to follow our passion for drinks. We decided to move to London, study the second Master here in technology, entrepreneurship and basically devoted our year about the beverage industry here. We wrote a dissertation about the fact that spirits were becoming more and more experimental. There was this whole gin hype and movement and spirits was definitely becoming more popular. But again, we saw in the UK and in London, tonic waters and mixers were pretty standard and we decided to write a dissertation about that. Our end goal was basically to develop a range of mixers and tonic waters that were more innovative, that were more exciting, that offered more choice, and we brought something different to the market. We eventually launched, after we graduated, with cucumber and watermelon, and pomegranate and basil. Two very different flavors. We wanted to launch with one more summery, more fresh flavors so cucumber and watermelon, and one more botanical herbal flavor which is the pomegranate and basil. Just launching those two and adding different flavors across the years to the drinks. How we came into the flavor development, all our recipes are actually based on flavor pairing techniques. We look at our flavor development model from a molecular pairing point of view and for example, it's basically the same kind of way how Michelin-star restaurants and chefs make their menus together. F Geyrhalter:                 That's amazing. That is such a great story. You say you launched it, and you say it's so easily. But breaking into the food and beverage industry, into that market, is super difficult. There's so much that goes into it, just understanding all the rules, understanding the suppliers and how to get on the shelf. You say it like it was "oh and then we launched." But really, how did you get all the contact? You basically at that point were straight out of school, straight out of your masters, you did a dissertation. But at that point, how do you actually go from that idea, even though you've already mixed the product and you have that idea? How do you go into packaging and getting on shelves. That's a whole big step right there that we didn't discuss. Joyce:                           I think for us it was challenging because we were only living here in London for less than a year. So, we didn't really know anybody, we didn't really have family, friends that could advise us on contacts and little things like legal advise, those kind of things. I think that was definitely challenging. But, I guess we were, the two of us were just stop and start knocking on doors, we were gonna stalk every potentially beneficial person on Linkedin and that's just how we started growing our network. Then we randomly, we found this guy who helps startups find bottling plants, helps startups make recipes more commercially, somebody who is, just this one man band who gives consultancy to startups on how to commercialize, basically your recipes at home. He helped us also find bottling plants. We find little bottling plants here in North London. They had 2 machineries, very small [inaudible 00:08:24] labeled all our bottles ourselves overnight. It was a lot of long nights. F Geyrhalter:                 The good old days, the good old days. Joyce:                           Then basically we had our first six stars in bottles and that's where we just went to London which we had this list of [inaudible 00:08:42], restaurants, and bars and hotels we talked and they would be amazing as our first customers. People were actually really open to try people. Then, I think in London, maybe everybody just was so helpful. We would have one bartender who really liked it, he would say like "oh but I have a friend there and I have another friend whose working there. Go there with my regards. He'll take your product on." I think it just moved step by step, slowly from there. F Geyrhalter:                 Isn't it surprising, in large metropolitan cities like London that there's so much human kindness right? And that people just want to help get you to the next place. Raissa:                          Yeah, for sure. I think people are just really supporting starting businesses people who wanna do something different. Then I think, yeah, that we really showed off. Joyce:                           Yeah, so very grateful for this. F Geyrhalter:                 Oh, I'm sure and there was a lot of hustle. You guys literally walked personally from bar to bar and trying to just get the product into the right hands. So, it's not like it came easy in any way. Joyce:                           No, but it was fun as well. F Geyrhalter:                 Oh absolutely! I did read that you received the support of none other than Sir Richard Branson. What was that the big breakthrough moment for your brand? I think it was a startup competition that you won, correct? Raissa:                          Yes, exactly! He awards most innovative food and beverage brands in the UK every year. We won it after we launched three or four months later. So that was amazing and definitely was a turning point which was really quickly after we launched. So we were very lucky to win that. It just gave us incredible credibility with potential customers, gave us a massive amount of press nationally and internationally, and kind of gave us that headstart. That really helped us massively. F Geyrhalter:                 Is that how you got on to the first shelves too? There's always this amazing moment when you see your products' first on the shelves? In any shop, it could be the smallest local shop. What was the first chain that said, "yes, we will actually store your product." Raissa:                          Our first shop was Harvey Nichols in London and after that, I think, Fortnum & Masons, which was amazing. Then Selfridges just took us on and all the other department stores. F Geyrhalter:                 And then it just kept going, exactly. Raissa:                          Yeah. F Geyrhalter:                 I mentioned Richard Branson, but look I'm in L.A. and we're known for our celebrity culture. So let's just stick to the most mesmerizing of characters out there with whom you seemed to co-mingled day in day out, if I look at your Instagram account. I have to ask, how was that meeting with the late and great Karl Lagerfeld? Did you chat it up or was it just more for photo opportunity? But I'm just so mesmerized that there's the two of you and Karl Lagerfeld. Joyce:                           Great spotting. F Geyrhalter:                 Has nothing to do with branding whatsoever. Joyce:                           It was a very long time ago. Actually before we started Double-Dutch, we met him or quickly saw him in a bar on holiday. Then we thought, we'd just go up to him, ask for like a [inaudible 00:12:07]. Raissa:                          And he was actually very nice. It was a fun evening. Joyce:                           Yeah, it was a really a good evening. F Geyrhalter:                 That's fantastic. Looking at Karl Lagerfeld, you never would say he's a funny person or a fun person, right? Because, he has this certain look about him. But, look it's personal branding and I think the two of you are very much about personal branding too, right? It's the whole idea of Double-Dutch and the twin sisters. How is that working with your twin sister? I guess one of you should step out of the room now. One at a time. But, tell us a little bit about the challenges. Because, I know a lot of founders say, "look, I need a co-founder, it's better to have a co-founder." A lot have co-founders and then things don't work out. For the two of you, are literally by birth and now all the way into the actual company, so attached to each other as a personal brand. How does this work? Or, what are some advantages, what are some challenges? Joyce:                           I think it's great. I think you're right. I would recommend everyone to have a co-founder. But, to be able to do it with my twin sister is amazing because we can 100 percent trust each other, anytime, even if we might disagree or we would fall out. We wouldn't really fall out for more than half an hour and then we have to make up again. I think it's just amazing. We're always on the same kind of thinking and even if we're not, it's not a big deal. We don't need to tip toe and be careful to say what we think. We just say how it is and that's that. Yeah, I think it's great. Raissa:                          Do you Joyce? No, I do love it. I think there's not really any challenges that I can think of. The only thing is that our sister life has become so much integrated in business that, we guess, we came here together in London, we have very much the same friends group and we go on holidays together, and everything's so integrated with each other. But, that also means that we can just never switch off from Double-Dutch because when we're drinking and we're in a bar, we're having fun, 100 percent Double-Dutch will come up at some point. Because we're like, "oh! have you ever thought about that?” It's always Double-Dutch. There's not really any leisure time off from it. Raissa:                          I think, if we probably would not have started the business together then that would have probably been a bit less. Nevertheless, I mean, it's both our baby so we love it. I think, it's amazing to just do it with the two of us and especially, because we have had such a similar journey and we've always been super close together. We don't have any other siblings, so yeah, I think, it's really really great. F Geyrhalter:                 That's great! Now that was a fantastic answer by both of you. It's not different with a lot of co-founders that are married to each other, where they spend a lot of time together and then afterwards they have to figure out how not to talk about work. The two of you are constantly together and then you have to figure out how to not talk work. I think, you should just not go to bars anymore. I think, you should just have a complete sober lifestyle, which of course would ruin your brand. Alright, let's switch it over to talk branding a little bit. Let's talk about the name Double-Dutch. There is so much thought that must have gotten into it, or maybe it was just like this quick idea that you had. But, I noticed at least 3 puns in the name, right? But, tell us the story behind the name, and how you came up with it? Raissa:                          Well, actually it was very coincidental. When we knew that we would start a new type of mixer brand, we thought about the most lame names ever. I think, we had like List Soda, High Ball, I mean I can't remember all of them but F Geyrhalter:                 Oh, don't say them. It's not good for your brand. Don't say these. Raissa:                          Yeah exactly. And then again everything happens in a bar. We were in a bar, just drinking with English friends and we started saying like "oh guys, would you know like any name for us? We're like stuck at these names that are really not a good fit." The evening went on and on and on. People started saying "oh, just call it Double-Dutch and I think the next morning we had such a hangover Joyce:                           The only thing Raissa:                          We could remember was like Double-Dutch and we felt like "oh my God, that's such a good name. It's catchy and like really suits us." What you see it is like at least 3 different types of meanings that are so relevant for us because obviously we're Dutch twins, so Double-Dutch. Its double flavors. All of our flavors are Dutch-Double. Then speaking Double-Dutch, if you're a bit drunk. F Geyrhalter:                 I didn't even think about that. Raissa:                          So yeah I think, I love the name and it gets so much good feedback that the name makes a whole brand. F Geyrhalter:                 Great. I have one to add. I was thinking about the rope jumping double-dutch and that is kind of like mixing, right? You're constantly shaking and you're moving. It's so many good thoughts and the name just arrived in one drunken evening, which is how the brand should have been born. I mean it makes a lot of sense for your brand. Let me read a few lines from your website. "From the world's best mixologists trough to those who prefer their G&T on the sofa at home, the Double-Dutch twins have created revolutionary mixers to intensify enjoyment of spirits, or to be drunk solo." It's actually really funny that the copy you decided to write and another line is, "the perfect twin for your spirit." So, how was that brand voice crafted? Did you hear copywriters to a certain point? Are you working with an agency? Or, is it the two of you, like organically changing the copy on this site. Raissa:                          It's definitely more organic, just kind of randomly coming up with different slogans and then they just stick. Along the way, we've worked with a few copywriters, but it's definitely more just friends and the team that just constantly, organically, change it a little bit more. F Geyrhalter:                 Great. When, did you actively start investing in branding? I'm sure that packaging design is so important. The look and the shelf appeal and in the bar, and the entire spirit industry is really based on packaging design. How did you go about that? Was that very organic too? Or, did you do a lot of research and A/B testing? Did you hire a designer? How did that go about? Raissa:                          I think naturally from day one, we knew what we wanted to stand for and what our identity should be. We knew how we wanted to have our brand come alive. We knew we wanted to have it like a general brand, firm, innovative, young, natural, healthy, colorful. So, I think, with that we initially had different types of labels which were really not great. But we brought that to the markets, knew that they were not great and then really listened to feedback of our customers, to see what they wanted to see in our branding, in the whole vision. It quite quickly became clear that they really wanted to see the story in the whole branding. So, we, after 6 months, after we launched, we used a branding agency and they were really amazing. We gave them the brief, like what we really wanted to see and they completely visualized it in our labels. They made a brand identity for our website and just really turned that around. F Geyrhalter:                 That's fantastic. It makes a lot of sense, that journey. The two of you being so part of your own brand and you having established a quite amazing brand, at a very young age. What does branding mean to you? Because branding is such a nasty word. A lot of people feel like branding is just the logo but it's so much more. What does it mean to you? Raissa:                          I think, brand is really about feelings, not facts. It's about who you are, what you stand for, what your identity of your brand is and it is your whole company, basically. It's definitely just not a label, or website, or social media. I think, it's really important that a brand should trigger feelings with your consumers and customers. F Geyrhalter:                 Yeah absolutely. What was it feel, like a big ginormous pin flied that you went through, that other's can learn from? We have a lot of founders, a lot of entrepreneurs on this podcast. What was something that you went through where now looking back you're like "oh my God, I could have totally avoided that if I did A, B or C." Joyce:                           So, many things. F Geyrhalter:                 Right? The last couple of years, most probably. One day it was a win, and one day it was a fail. Joyce:                           Well I think, what we didn't do from the beginning, if we would start all over, I would put much more focus on bringing one identity together. What we didn't do is bring it all the way 360 degrees. We made a website, we made the label, and then we had the leaflets. I think everything was not one entity, and we should have defined everything in one entity, sooner. Going from exhibition stands, has the same look and feel as our social media to our texts on the websites to the labels, to the fonts, leaflets and think our whole branding. It took us quite a long. It was a very step by step that we brought everything together. I think that it could have probably been much quicker. F Geyrhalter:                 It's when cohesion that is so important, especially in the beginning. It's so difficult as a startup entrepreneur to say, "let's stop right now when we have traction, let's stop and really analyze the branding, create that style and say this is us and we're just going to use those two colors, those two fonts, this is our tagline, this is our look and feel." It's so difficult when you're in amidst of it, which is like take that breather and say "no, let's do this professionally and let's step back." It's actually exactly what I do with my consultancy because I go to startups and say, "look, now it's the time to stop and now we actually need to do all of this and you're going to be back on the road in one month." But, I totally understand that it's super difficult to do that. Especially, because that's the time where you start meeting consumers because you need leaflets, you need the packaging, you need to get out there. And it's hard to like pull back at that point. Raissa:                          Yeah, true. F Geyrhalter:                 So, listeners who fell in love with your brand, just now, where can they find Double-Dutch? I know we have them a majority of listeners, here in the U.S. But, right after that there's the U.K. which I know you're widely available. Then there's Belgium which it sounds like you should be available and then we also have a lot of listeners from Australia and Spain. In which of these countries can my audience start mixing up the best Gin Tonics ever, tonight? Raissa:                          You can find this in all those countries except for the U.S. We're only starting in the U.S. in about 5/6 months. We're just seeing who the best partner is. But, keep an eye on our Instagram. Its called 'Double Dutch Drinks' and we're announcing our new places. But, we are in Belgium, we're in the U.K. We're widely available going from thousands of different bars, restaurants, hotels to Ocado, Amazon, Fortnum and Mason, Selfridges. We're launching in Waitrose in May and then in Spain, we're in lots of bars and restaurants. In Australia, we actually just launched. So many many places. But, do send us an email, either on Instagram and follow us on social media and we'll definitely give you a list of where you can find us. F Geyrhalter:                 Well, fantastic! And I also sent you my mailing address, hint. Thank you both. This was so much fun and insightful. I really appreciate you taking the time from running your company. Having both of you here is so amazing that you'd share your stories with our listeners. I'm super super grateful for your time. Raissa:                          Thank you so much for having us. F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely, and thanks to everyone for listening in, for hitting the subscribe button and giving this show a rating. It means a lot to me to help spread the word about hitting the mark, to founders and investors around the world. This episode is brought to you by another London based brand, Mister Maginsky, possibly the greatest invention in men's underwear since men's underwear, itself. Find out more and grab a double pack today at mistermaginsky.com. The Hitting the Mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness Won. I will see you next time, after I'm having myself a quick Gin Tonic, when we once again will be Hitting the Mark.

Mark is an entrepreneur who is dedicated to both relaunching iconic dormant brands as well as investing in early-stage consumer packaged goods companies, focused on better for you products. His fund, Spiral Sun Ventures and his brand revitalization company, Dormitus Brands, are currently collaborating on reinventing the soda brand Slice as a "better for you" beverage. This episode is full of branding and startup nuggets that no entrepreneur or marketer should miss out on. This episode is full of branding and startup nuggets that no entrepreneur or marketer should miss out on. Mark has been doing this for a while and gained an enormous amount of knowledge and his passion is contagious. You can learn more about the new Slice, reach out to him via LinkedIn or ask me for his personal e-mail and I am happy to facilitate an introduction. We will soon announce a way Mark asked my listeners to participate in the new Slice brand definition. Stay tuned by following us on Instagram as it involves some free product samples while being part of informing this re-birth of an iconic brand. ________________Full Transcript (includes notes cut from the podcast due to Skype reception issues): Fabian Geyrhalter:                    Welcome to episode number 6 of Hitting The Mark. Today we are fortunate to have a conversation with someone who does not fit into the founder nor the investor category. Why? Because he is both, and I promise you this will be an episode that every brand's builder may it be an entrepreneur who a marketer should listen to. Mark Thomann is an entrepreneur who is dedicated to both relaunching iconic dormant brands as well as investing in early-stage consumer packaged goods companies, focused on better for you products. His fund, Spiral Sun Ventures, and his brand revitalization company Dormitus Brands brands, are currently collaborating on reinventing the soda brand Slice as a better for you beverage. That being said, welcome Mark. Mark Tillman:               Thank you very much. F Geyrhalter:                  So, mark I read about you in Entrepreneur Magazine. I think it was the latest issue, and I was fascinated by what you're doing. So the headline in the magazine read "Remember Slice soda? It's back, but very different". Why these entrepreneurs spent on nostalgia for the old soda brand? So, interestingly enough, I released a book last year that talks about several traits that I suggest today's companies to own in order to turn into an admired brand. Heritage I sone of them, which is a very close neighbor to nostalgia, and tell us that strategy behind that more. How did it come about? Where you are currently at with bringing this, I guess it's a Pepsi Cola brand form the 90s, where are you at with bringing that back in a whole new light? M Tillman:               That's a great question. I'm very passionate about brands and history, and Dormitus Brands and prior to that, river west brands, which is owned by Dormitus Brands, would look at relaunching iconic brands at certain categories, and whenever I look at brands, there's a part of me that is always trying to figure out ways to give it a new reason to believe and make it new and different and innovative. So, with Slice in particular, and because of the fact that I invest in the health and wellness category what spiral sun ventures, we saw a formally a brand that was quite significant not only in the US but globally. It's still one of the larger brands in India, frankly, today, which Pepsi Co owns. But I see a category that's very significant from a revenue standpoint. In certain categories where private label's very small, it's a great indicator for whether or not a brand matters in that category, so soda I particular, beverage in particular, is very much a lifestyle and people identify by what they're drinking. So, when we looked at Slice, and I acquired the rights to slice with my partner who was a former trademark litigator. We ended up getting the rights to slice in North America, in the US and Canada, and we are in the process of launching the brand. We'll have product probably within the next 45 days. Our first significant run is going to happen, and we have about to thousand grocery doors committed to it already without actually having the product bottled or canned. But, the whole ideas when I looked at the soda category and I saw it was a category that was declining and the natural part of the beverage category was actually rising, I said to myself, "well people really need something that may be a little sweeter than sparkling water, but not as sugary as the slice of the 1980s and 90s and 200s." So, slice was really created to be a bridge for people that are no longer wanting the sugary drinks like soda, and giving them something that's all natural, that has no sugar added, that's seven grams of sugar that comes from organic juice, and otherwise, it's completely just natural juice as well as sparkling water. So it's sweeter than a Lacroix for example, but much healthier than a traditional soda. F Geyrhalter:                  So, congrats first. I mean, that's an amazing launch already, pre-launch, being in so many stores. So that idea of the name working for you and to your advantage has already left its mark, it sounds like. M Tillman:                     Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I remember when I first started talking about it. I was first interviewed about Slice, a lot of people were very interested in trying the new slice, but I remember one blogger came out and said: "Doesn't he know that coca cola failed when they came out with new coke?" And my response to that blogger was, "You know, if I was just reinventing slice as what it was before, I would have absolutely no interest. And frankly, the soda consumer has changed. I'm a previous soda drinker, I no longer allow the family to drink soda. It's obviously too much sugar, and it actually came from my wife who reminds me that she is the one who basically told the kids they can no longer drink soda, so it's water or healthier drinks. And today, I believe that the consumer wants a new type of drink that has some sweetness, but it's all natural so it's better for you. F Geyrhalter:                  So, that's fascinating to me, and it's a strategy that caught wider attention after Shinola famously took its name from a defunct shoe polish brand. And then I think in 2011 they launched as the Detroit watch brand. At least, then they were the watch brand. Now they're so much more. But, how do you change the brand narrative with a legacy name? I mean, especially in your case with Slice, where it is basically the opposite of what it used to be. So, how do you do that form a brand language perspective? How do you suddenly say "Here's slice, we want you to still associate it with the old brand, but in a very, very different way." ? M Tillman:                     That's the trick. That is the difficult part. You have the old attributes and what people remember of Slice, but I think it's very important that regardless of the brand, the product has to be right, and the data has to support the product launch. Taking Slice and reinventing it primarily for a new consumer, and also for consumers that had previously been dedicated to the beverage, that is a tricky thing to do. To reinvent. But it's not different than buying a house from the turn of the century and keeping the exterior, but modernizing the interior. And people would rather live in a house that was built in the late 1800s, because of the beauty and the way it was built, but inside, and for the family that's living in that house, you want the modern accessories and conveniences that come with the house that was built in 2018, or 2019. And so, that's really what I try to do with a brand, is play off the heritage, but more importantly reinvent it ina way that it appeals to not only the old consumer that is not longer drinking those sugary beverages, but also appeal to the new demographic, the millennials etc, that don't want a lot of sugar in their drinks. So, you have to look at the data. The data has to support the re-launch, but without question, you have to reinvent, and I'm thinking this is going to be a successful re-launch, but sometimes they're not. And for varied reasons why you ask the question. My guess is the date is there to support a successful launch, the retailers are there to support the launch, and hopefull,y the consumers will be there to drink the new slice. F Geyrhalter:                  Right. Absolutely, and last but not least the design is so important with consumer packaged goods. How involved were you with the design agency with the process of form the font choice to how much of the boldness of the old slice to we bring into the new, and how should the shelf appeal be? Did you work very directly? Were you very hands-on involved with it in meetings and in strategy, or did you let them run their thing? M Tillman:                     We were very involved as a team. We have a group that comes from a pretty deep routed experience within retail, a group called revolution brands that's doing a lot of the RND as well as the packaging work etc. But we not only sued our internal team. We did focus groups, and we also used the retailers to help us with whether or not the packaging actually appealed to their consumers. And so, we really drew upon the entire community within slice, including our initial launch partners at grocery to determine what we thought was the right packaging, and we did a lot of consumer research, and we looked at also what the competitors were doing, and frankly that took a very, very long time. Most people don't realize that there's a shortage of cans out there, aluminum cans out there, so - F Geyrhalter:                  Oh, really? M Tillman:                     Yeah, because the big companies are utilizing all of the capacity. So you have to pivot when you see there's a shortage of slim cans, you move to a more conventional can, but the packaging itself was a collaborative effort, and I was very much involved, and so were all my partners. F Geyrhalter:                  Interesting. When you go through that entire process, and it sounds like it was quite a prices. There was so many data points, so many opinions that you sought from different partners, retail etc, how much of the old brand was still intact, or how much of the old brand were you even allowed to utilize? I know there was litigation, I know you got the name. In the end, is there anything left besides the name? M Tillman:                     There's a nod and a wink to the heritage and the brand with the slice from the fruit that's still on the packaging, so there's a tribute there, but it's not ... Obviously, it couldn't be identical to what the old slice looked like. But the name itself is a great name on its own, regardless of the heritage of the brand, and it denotes exactly what we're trying to convey with the new beverage, and we've protected it vigorously since we have been able to obtain the trademarks. There have been a number of companies that have tried to file trademarks to use the slice name in various variations within beverage, and the great thing about having a fantastic trademark litigator as one of your partners is that he's very good at what he does in protecting the trademark and also, he was very important obviously in obtaining it in the first place. F Geyrhalter:                  You've got the right partner there. M Tillman:                     Yeah. F Geyrhalter:                  Let's talk about this often mistaken, and yet so important to you word that is branding. What does branding mean to you? It obviously means a huge deal to you, but how would you describe branding? I know it's a very difficult question, but how would, you describe branding? What does it mean to you? M Tillman:                     You know, it's a great question, and if you were to ask me when I was solely doing the relaunching of iconic brands, I may have had a different answer. And that answer was probably more about restoring, revitalize, those types of adjectives to describe what branding was. Today, and working with these early-stage companies that we invest in, but primarily in health and wellness, but primarily in food and beverage, I often think about community, and neighborhood. There was an old ... The old speaker of the house in the 80s was a guy named Tim O'Neal from my neck of the woods, originally I'm from Boston. And he became famous because he had the quote, all politics is local. And I believe branding and building a brand is the same thing. You first want to own your community, in your neighborhood. And then, word of mouth spreads when you have a great product. It's so important to build from a foundation, or a community that's ... we have a brand that we invested in called base culture, and the founders, a young woman, incredible entrepreneur named Gordon, and she was a cross fitter, and that cross fitter community started to really engage with her brand of gluten free paleo products. And that community is the one that goes to Walmart, and goes to whole foods, and goes to Publics, and goes to the HEB, goes to all these retailers to find her product. And it creates a movement. So to me, branding is about community, about creating a movement. And once you can do that and you have the foundation, you can become a great big brand. But you need that foundation first F Geyrhalter:                  Right. Absolutely. I think that's a very fresh take on it. Here's a quick personal story: So, my dad is a violinist, and in his prime time, he worked on some of the biggest stages in the world, right? Carnegie Hall, Musik Verein, and all of those. And one day, when he came back from a tour in Japan, he brought home this tiny but mighty super high-end tape recorder by a company called AIWA. And it was a marvel of technology and quality. It was so tiny, that he used it to secretly record all of his solo concerts on stage, because he could just sneak it in there, that no one saw it, and then at home, us kids were just not allowed to ever go near it because it was so expensive, and no one could ever touch it. And you actually owned Iowa and one point, and to me, that is just truly amazing. How did that come about? I know that is not the main topic today, but I just want to quickly ask you, how did that deal come about? M Tillman:                     Yeah. It actually goes into the bigger question of how you relaunch a dormant brand and it really is about surrounding yourself by talented people, even if it's a relationship with the grocer, with the distributor, or with the teams. It's about not only investment capital, but human capital. And AIWA, I was able to get the trademark rights here in the United States first, and then I found a very entrepreneurial group that had an incredible background in consumer electronics. The company was called Hail electronics, and the entrepreneur was a guy named Joe Borne who was a fantastic inventor and engineer. He actually invented something called the skip doctor which fixed scratches in CDs and he had a great small company, but he didn't have a brand, and he was always inventing new audio products, and I remember going to have a cup of coffee with Joe and saying "Joe, why don't we team up? Why don't you rename the company AIWA USA, and your reception at retail and on Amazon etc, direct to consumer, is gonna be very, very different by having a brand with great high-end consumer electronics and consumer audio." And that's really where Iowa began. IM still a significant shareholder int eh company. I'm still a board member, and I'm still a big advocate, so the company grew from ... Was relaunched and grew from zero to a multimillion dollar company in a very short period of time. But for me, I like to marry these early-stage companies with brands. And in particular, brands that were once loved and successful, and then taking new innovations and bringing that to the brand is so vital to make it successful. And that's where my innovation comes from. It generally comes from other people that just don't have the brand to go with great product. F Geyrhalter:                  It's really Brand Upcycling, you're doing here. Right? M Tillman:                     You're right. F Geyrhalter:                  But how did that fascination start? Was there a certain moment, or was it just organic that you had one opportunity and you thought about it, and you tried it out and it just kept growing into a real habit? M Tillman:                     You know, for me, I love history. At one point in my career early on, I taught history, and for me, seeing these brands go to the waste side because these big companies would consolidate and it wasn't the band's fault that they were discontinued. It was generally through acquisition, and Brim Coffee for example, when general food sold to Kraft, all the sudden, Kraft had sunk an end to Brim. And so, they had to pick, and they discontinued Brim. And so when I relaunched Brim, it's a line of not coffee. There's still some coffee, but it's primarily a line of appliances but their appliances, if you go to Brim dot com, it's not just any old coffee maker, it's coffee pour overs and cold brew machines, and grinders. It's artisanal, and there're things that the new consumers are looking for right? With an old brand on it. But for me, it is about the preservation of history, and I couldn't understand why these great brands from my childhood would go away. And then I started looking at ways to revitalize them as I was looking at launching new products and new brands. Why not take an old brand and reinvent it for a new consumer, and giving a nod to the heritage of the brand? In some cases, it's very, very difficult. I own Collico and Collico vision, which was an old gaming brand. An extremely difficult category to create content, because it's extremely expensive to create games and ones that actually appeal to my kids for example. Look at the old Collico catalog, they're like ... They play it for li two seconds. They're like eh. I'm bored. But, that's one where it was probably a better option for me just to license it, and it does very well, but it's a flashback that sold throughout retail and online, and I get a royalty. It's a licensing deal. But it was just too difficult for me to reinvent it in a way because of the category, because the competition, because the amount of investment to make new games, it just didn't make as much sense as taking in Iowa and reinventing it, or taking a slice, or taking a brim, or taking any of the other brands that are currently in or portfolio. So, at times I basically say okay. I can't do it. F Geyrhalter:                  Yeah. And it's so much a timing thing too. It's a scythe guys thing. I went to a bar the other day, and everyone played Nintendo games on big screens and I'm like what just happened? So I think a lot of it has to do with that. But okay. So, lets put your investor head on. Question about the startups that you invest in. When do you advise your better for you consumer products startups to invest in branding? And obviously, for them, the packaging is super important, but where does it start with you for branding as an investor? Where do you see look guys and gals, we gotta push more into this direction, really think about brand strategy or really think about positioning a really ... What are some of these key advise pieces that you give brands? Well, startups. M Tillman:                     Well, it has to be early on it, and branding has to be authentic. We like brands where founders are very much value-oriented, and values from their own ethos as individual entrepreneurs, but we like brands that have a mission for example. I'll give you a quick story just to illustrate that and a challenge that the brand has. So, once of the brands that we invested in is called Patcha soap. And Patcha soap is a handmade soap. Its made in their own facility in Hastings Nebraska. Wonderful, wonderful people Abby and Andrew who are now married, but at the time they were just the two entrepreneurs, and they ended up getting married, and the mission-based company, they give back millions of dollars to where they source their essential oils and so forth in Africa, and they teach people, indigenous people in Burgundy in particular, how to make soap and how to start businesses around soap, so it's a little different than a tom's shoes. Where instead of just giving away soap, they're actually teaching them how to create new businesses around soap, and they also dig water wells and so forth. So they have incredible passion about the mission. But, you probably have never heard of Patcha soap, but I guarantee you've seen it before. If you have ever been in a Whole Foods, and you see that beautiful colorful- F Geyrhalter:                  I think I've seen it. M Tillman:                     Yeah. That's Patcha soap. So they have a great product with incredible distribution, but people don't know their brand, and people don't know their mission. And once people understand their mission and know what the brand is due to that mission and through a branding process, I think they're going to be even more successful than they already are. And the company's growing like crazy, but they need branding. They need to really build their brand because these companies, when they sell, it's really ... and they generally sell to the big companies, the big CPG companies. It's all about brand building. And because the Krafts, The General Mills of the world know that they can take a hundred million dollar brand and turn it into a billion dollar brand cause they have the trucks and the distribution necessary to take it from a hundred to a billion. But they have to see their brand being built in the proper way. So my suggestion to the Patcha soap folks is to really find the right agency, find a way to build that community that I talked about earlier, and to not only be a product company, but they need to become a household name. They need to go into points of distribution which are much more about band building. They have very little presence online for example. They don't sell a lot on Amazon. So, one of the key initiatives today is to build an Amazon site, and be able to go direct to consumer. Cause they also need to know who their consumer is. F Geyrhalter:                  Right. M Tillman:                     And they need that type of feedback. And so, yeah. Great challenge for the company. I love the investment. I love the mission. I love the people, but they truly need to figure out how to build the brand. F Geyrhalter:                  Well, the great news is now everyone knows where there is a great brand consultancy and I'm happy to talk to them. M Tillman:                     Yes. I would absolutely love you to do that. F Geyrhalter:                  This is interesting because it all comes back to ... For you, with that particular, it really came back to the founders and their passion to actually really move the needle and do something that's bigger than just the product. I mean, really touching people in many ways. Where it's not the Toms model like you said, but it educates and it goes down to the ground level of let's help people became more self-sufficient. And grow. What are the top criteria when you pick a start-up to invest in? Obviously, it's the team, it's the passion. In his case it's not so much the product, it's potentially more market fit. What are one or two of the key things that you look for? M Tillman:                     The data has to support that there's white space there. There's lots of me too brands out there. It has to be disruptive, it has to be innovative, and it has to fill a void. And yes, it's always about the entrepreneur and the founder, and making sure they have the right values, and they have to ... You're just going to assume that they're gonna work their tail off, but most of these early-stage brands fail. So, a lot of these founders and the reason I created spiral sun was really to help give them the network of brand agencies, distributors, retailers, things that maybe they couldn't pick up the phone and call the right distributor and call the right grocery store. They just really needed those connections and that network in order to really see business. So, we're a little different in the fact that I am an entrepreneur. I'm also an energy director of a fund. It helps because I can understand their plight. Right? And for me, it's so gratifying to be able to help them, and also about six, seven years ago, I personally got sick, and I started looking at our food system being a bit broken, and I became very passionate about making a legacy, and not only investing in dormant brand, but investing in better for you food. And so, for me, it became a passion so help these entrepreneurs succeed. And so, for my own ethos, I definitely wanted to combine my love for taking these dormant brands and relaunching them, but also for making them better for you from a food and beverage standpoint. F Geyrhalter:                  Right. I relate to that quite a lot. Really appreciate it Mark. Listen, I know where the first one hundred people listening can get their hands on some Slice if they want to leave some feedback, but where can others find slice? What kind of market will it be in, in a couple of weeks from now, and how can they learn more about spiral sun ventures? Where do you want them to go to get in touch with you? M Tillman:                     I'm big on answering emails personally. It's very easy to find me. If you don't want to use linked in, they certainly can email me, and they can request through you or whatever the case may be. We'll figure that out, but I have no problems answering emails and making sure people know how to get to slice. But slice will be available regionally, the northeast, the Midwest. Really a national footprint, but in the first year, it's going to be at retailers like Wegmans, and High V and Publics etc throughout the country. So we'll have to figure out in the first year where people are so they can get it, but we'll also have it in converse sight. So you can get it through Amazon, we'll be able to deliver anywhere. F Geyrhalter:                  Anywhere but India right? M Tillman:                     Can't do India. F Geyrhalter:                  And that will be a second podcast episode where we will talk about that. M Tillman:                     You know, the mango flavored slice there is extremely popular. We will probably have a mango flavor at some point. F Geyrhalter:                  There's no surprise there when it comes to flavors in countries. Thank you, Mark, from the bottom of my heart for taking the time during your busy schedule, especially now when you're in this pre-launch phase, and for sharing your thoughts, your stories, your advice without listeners. It's really, really appreciated. M Tillman:                     Oh, I appreciate it. I enjoy this, and I look forward to doing it again sometime. And I'll put you in touch with the CEO Patcha. F Geyrhalter:                  Thank you. I appreciate it. And thanks to everyone for listening, and yes I have to say it again. Please hit that subscribe button and give the show a quick rating. It's a brand new show. It needs all the TLC it can get, and this podcast is brought to you by FINIEN a brand consultancy creating strategic, verbal, and visual brand clarity. You can learn more about FINIEN and download free white papers to support your own brand launch or rebranding efforts at finien.com. The hitting the mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness Won. I will see you next time when we once again, will be hitting the mark.

Fabian Geyrhalter, Principal of Finien, joins the show to share ideas for start-ups to become admired brands. He discusses examples from his new book, Bigger Than This – How to Turn Any Venture Into an Admired Brand. Fabian is also a columnist for Inc and Forbes, and has been published by the likes of The Washington Post, Mashable, Entrepreneur and The Huffington Post. And, he hosts a new podcast called Hitting the Mark! Thanks to Social Joey and Franchise Dictionary Magazine for supporting Social Geek Radio!  

I made a promise to myself to never feature a client - or former client - of mine on the show, but I am good with sprinkling in an entrepreneur now and then who I also call my friend. Today is such a moment and I am sure you will all appreciate that I did so. I personally am always delighted to talk with him, learn from him and be the critic he never asked to have. If you are a founder, marketer, designer or just a curious human being, this episode is not to be missed as it clearly shows us why Chris Do, and his online platform, The Futur, have such a fanatic following and why the company is seeing 300% growth year over year. Chris shares his insights on how his passion project turned into a small phenomenon (hint: teaching is the best form of marketing), why you should put your media buy budget towards content strategy instead, if it is dangerous to be the face of your brand, how important data really is in marketing (hint: it may not be quite what you thought), why culture is more important than branding (amen!), why copying is OK – sometimes even strategically sound – and of course: What branding means to him. And…so much more, hence we nicely doubled on time in this special episode. To see what his company, The Futur, is up to, visit their YouTube channel for a start.

Today you are in for a treat. A mouthwatering treat that sadly will remain a verbal-only treat to you and me as we will spend this episode with an innovator in a segment a lot of us would love to dive right into: Kentucky Bourbon. If you're a foodie, if you like soy sauce or bourbon, perhaps both, or if you run an F&B business, this is an episode to indulge in. Matt created a brand that is rooted in a romantic story; a story of place, taste, and craftsmanship. A story that created a company that continuously grows between 38-50% a year yet each of the 5,000 gallons of their soy sauce are still being meticulously hand-numbered. You can peruse Bourbon Barrel Foods' products via their site.

Founders creating physical products, even more so if they are consumable, and even more so if they have to show provable results, sure are fascinating! Dr. Ginger's story from a swift idea to a working formula, design and actual consumers picking up a tube of toothpaste in stores around the US is surprising and uplifting. Listen to Dr. Ginger Price and her brand of oral care products, which will soon be seen at Target and Whole Foods stores around the country. You can learn more about her company and products through below links: Dr. Ginger's website Dr. Ginger's Instagram For the podcast deal to get Fabian's book 'Bigger Than This – How to turn any venture into an admired brand' for $6, click here.

Fabian Geyrhalter talks to Raaja Nemani on this inaugural episode of Hitting The Mark. Raaja is the Co-Founder of Rogue Trading Company (the parent company to Rogue Advising, MarketerHire, and Rogue Brands). Previously, he was the Co-Founder and CEO of Bucketfeet (a D2C, artist-designed footwear brand). Bucketfeet was acquired in 2017 by Threadless. We dive into Raaja's factory-direct platform and discuss how brand strategy has affected his recent company launches as well as when he was scaling the successful footwear marketplace Bucketfeet. Branding went far beyond the image and was tremendously important to Bucketfeets' positioning, sales as well as company culture. Select companies Raaja co-founded that are being discussed in this episode: Rogue Brands Bucketfeet You can connect with Raaja via LinkedIn.

Snippet from my interview with Fabian Geyrhalter - How to Turn any Venture into an admired brand.  As per usual hit that subscribe button!! 

 Fabian Geyrhalter - we discuss branding, Fabian's story and his new book "Bigger than this - How to Turn any venture into an admired brand"  Reach out to Fabian here: www.finien.com  Fabian's new book - well worth a read: www.biggerthanthis.com  As per usual - Click the subscribe button!   

Turn any venture into an admired brand.  In this episode I talk with Fabian Geyrhalter from Finien. This guy is a serieus knowledge bomb. We talk about turning ventures into beloved and trusted brands by using storytelling and other techniques. It's a really value packed episode, enjoy!  We talk about: Bigger than this, his latest book, highly recommended! (affiliate link) Finien, Fabian's agency How becoming a more strategic designer can you and your client Fishpeople, a great case study You connect with Fabian on his instagram and LinkedIn or twitter. I'd appreciate it if you could rate the podcast on itunes. It will help me in reaching other designers. Get the latest podcast in your inbox. Sign up with your email address to receive news and updates. Email Address Sign Up We respect your privacy. Thank you! This episode is supported by HolaBrief Very few projects end up with exceptional results. HolaBrief makes it easy to ask all the right questions and nail your design brief every time. Built by designers, for designers. Get early access to Holabrief by subscribing now. Check out Holabrief

Today we get an update from Women Worldwide alum Fabian Geyrhalter and learn a little bit more about empathy and branding in the age of social media. Building a brand has never been more important, and today that means "dressing down" and connecting with a like-minded consumer base in an authentic way.   Fabian Geyrhalter is a brand strategist, author, and mentor known for helping turn ventures into admired brands. He is the founder and principal of Los Angeles based consultancy firm Finien, as well as a Global 100 Mentor at the Founder Institute. He is a contributing columnist for Forbes and Inc., and he has been published by the likes of The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and Mashable.   In this episode we are discussing the different “traits” Fabian has identified in successful brands. Stay tuned to learn more about Fabian’s new book Bigger Than This and how you can turn any venture into an admired brand!   In This Episode Empathy and transparency in branding Being accessible and walking a fine line How brands disrupt without innovation or tech Winning hearts and minds The 80/20 Rule   Quotes in This Episode “Branding kind of became the new advertising.” —Fabian Geyrhalter   “People just ache for brands to be trustworthy friends.” —Fabian Geyrhalter   “At the core, every brand knows their number one customer, and their communication is tailored to that type of person... And the idea of ‘don’t talk politics’ is thrown out the window!” —Fabian Geyrhalter   “[Brands] really only disrupt... through brand thinking.” —Fabian Geyrhalter   “80% of what I put out there via social media needs to be communications-focused around my value propositions. So, what do I actually give potential clients, potential readers, potential listeners that they themselves can turn into actions...” —Fabian Geyrhalter   Resources Connect with Fabian on Twitter and LinkedIn www.Finien.com BiggerThanThis.com Bigger Than This How to Launch a Brand Fabian's previous appearance on Women Worldwide

In this episode, Fabian talks about how brands can build their brands using storytelling. He also talks about four steps to launching a brand and how can anyone learn about design.

Segment 1: AJ Wilcox founded B2Linked.com, a LinkedIn Ads-specific ad agency, in 2014. As official LinkedIn partners, they manage among the world's most sophisticated advertising accounts worldwide.Segment 2: Fabian Geyrhalter is a renowned brand strategist and the founder and Principal of FINIEN, a Los Angeles-based consultancy specializing in turning ventures into brands. A frequent speaker and mentor to entrepreneurs worldwide, he is a “Global 100” mentor at the Founder Institute, and  his book “How to Launch a Brand” is a #1 Amazon Bestseller. His newest book is “Bigger Than This.”Segment 3: Nicole Hardin is the Director of Product Management at Sage. She is an industry thought leader for businesses leveraging next-generation technologies. Nicole is presently leading innovation for one of Sage's global accounting cloud products: Sage Live. Segment 4: Mark Howley is the CEO and majority owner of Pacific Bag, Inc. which manufactures their patented one-way degassing valve (i.e. the little belly button in coffee bags) and supplies premade bags for coffee & snacks throughout the world. The business services over 5000 customers in over 60 countries. PBi celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015.Segment 5: Barry Moltzshares how to get your business unstuck. Sponsored by Nextiva.

As a business owner, you have to create a business brand. A personality that resonates well with your customers. During this episode, Fabian Geyrhalter shares with us just how to do so and offers some valuable insights from his book, Bigger Than This: How to Turn Any Venture Into an Admired Brand. Listen and learn […] The post TSE 768: How To Develop An Effective Brand Personality That Sells appeared first on The Sales Evangelist.

"Everyone thinks that branding isn't important today but branding is the new advertising." Despite media and technology shifts, the brand behind your stories and status updates is more important than ever. We unpacked all of this and more on this week’s episode of the On Brand podcast featuring brand strategist and author Fabian Geyrhalter. About Fabian Geyrhalter Fabian Geyrhalter is a renowned brand strategist and the founder and Principal of FINIEN, a Los Angeles-based consultancy specializing in turning ventures into brands. Geyrhalter is also a columnist for Inc and Forbes, and he has been published by the likes of The Washington Post, Mashable, Entrepreneur and The Huffington Post. He is an advisory board member of Santa Monica College and has served as an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California and Art Center College of Design. A frequent speaker and mentor to entrepreneurs worldwide, he is a “Global 100” mentor at the Founder Institute, and his book How to Launch a Brand is a #1 Amazon Bestseller. His newest book is Bigger Than This. He lives and works in Long Beach, California and is a graduate of Art Center College of Design. Episode Highlights Why is branding so important today? "Things have really changed. It's so intrinsic today. Take Everlane, for example. It's all about transparency." In everything they say and do. Branding is easier for startups. "Startup brands have it easy — all they have is the brand." Due to their small size, they can also exert greater control over the various brand touchpoints. Look at Shinola — The innovative watch company acquired an inactive brand name — Shinola — and established a sense of place around Detroit, endowing the new brand with meaning in the hearts and minds of their customers. How can a brand that's lost its way successfully rebrand? "Hire the next generation. You also have to find the secret sauce again. It all comes down to why the founders (of the business) did what they did." What brand has made Fabian smile recently? Fabian told us about Poppin — a company that's disrupting the office supplies category by delighting customers through quirky touchpoints such as the order confirmation email. To learn more, go to the website for Fabian's new book Bigger Than This, follow him on Twitter, and connect with him on LinkedIn. As We Wrap … Before we go, I want to flip the microphone around to our community … Frequent listener Sean Carpenter gave On Brand a shout on Twitter in a roundup of his favorite podcasts. Thanks for listening! Did you hear something you liked on this episode or another? Do you have a question you’d like our guests to answer? Let me know on Twitter using the hashtag #OnBrandPodcast and you may just hear your thoughts here on the show. Subscribe to the podcast – You can subscribe to the show via iTunes, Stitcher, and RSS. Rate and review the show – If you like what you’re hearing, head over to iTunes and click that 5-star button to rate the show. And if you have a few extra seconds, write a couple of sentences and submit a review. This helps others find the podcast. OK. How do you rate and review a podcast? Need a quick tutorial on leaving a rating/review in iTunes? Check this out. Remember – On Brand is brought to you by my new book — Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small. Order now at Amazon and check out GetScrappyBook.com for special offers and extras. Until next week, I’ll see you on the Internet!

Fabian Geyrhalter, the founder of FINIEN, an LA-based brand consultancy, joins host Deirdre Breakenridge on Women Worldwide. Fabian is the author of the book How to Launch a Brand: Your Step-By-Step Guide to Crafting a Brand - From Positioning to Naming and Brand Identity. He is also published internationally by the Washington Post, Graphis, Communications Arts and the Huffington Post. On the show, Fabian takes a deep dive into the meaning of a brand and what it takes to prepare for a brand launch. He shares what entrepreneurs get wrong 99% of the time when it comes to branding. As a result, he offers a step-by-step guide for those entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping but know brand development really matters far beyond a product or service they offer. In addition to discussing company branding, Fabian also shares his thoughts on personal branding, how technology affects a brand and why you should align with the right people. A little more about Fabian Geyrhalter … Fabian is an active jury member of the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts. As the winner of 23 American Graphic Design awards, he is frequently invited to judge international design competitions. Fabian has served as an adjunct professor at USC and Art Center College of Design and he's currently an Advisory Board Member of the Santa Monica College. You can connect with Fabian on LinkedIn and Twitter @FINIENinsights

Fabian Geyrhalter is the Founder and Principal of FINIEN, a Los-Angeles based consultancy specialized in turning ventures into brands. Fabian has been published internationally by the likes of The Washington Post, Graphis and The Huffington Post and he has written about branding for publications including Mashable and Entrepreneur and is a columnist for Inc. His consultancy has worked on branding projects for startups like Jukin, Survios, Bandito Brothers and Vimmia to large companies like Evolution Juice, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and W Hotels. Show notes at http://hellotechpros.com/fabian-geyrhalter-unplugged/ What You Will Learn In This Episode Why it's a good thing that we are constantly "ON" about business. How to work harder with less stress. A process that will allow you to filter through the thoughts in your head, reduce your anxiety and get clear on the most important actions you need to take. Why your stress levels increase when your mind and body are out of balance. How to determine which activities you can safely stop doing by finding and aligning to your purpose.