Podcasts about finien

Fimm und Finien erzählen den Drachen die Geschichte von der Libelle Leissia. Die Lieblingsgeschichten von Fligi und Drachi gibt es inzwischen auch als Buch: https://www.story.one/de/book/fligi-und-drachi/

Die Drachenkinder erfahren das Geheimnis von Fimm und Finien. Die Lieblingsgeschichten von Fligi und Drachi gibt es inzwischen auch als Buch: https://www.story.one/de/book/fligi-und-drachi/

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.

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

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)

La messe de Minuit sera célébrée dans le village de Clonard, près de Dublin, qui doit sa célébrité à saint Finien, moine et fondateur d’un monastère, pépinière de moines évangélisateurs. Clonard, petit hameau à environ 50 kilomètres à l'ouest de Dublin, est l'un des premiers sites chrétiens d'Irlande. Cette année 2020 marque le 1500e anniversaire de la fondation du monastère de Clonard par saint Finien (ou Finnian) (470-549). La messe de la nuit de Noël 2020 sera limitée à un petit nombre en raison des restrictions de la pandémie du Covid-19. La paroisse de Clonard a préparé une liturgie dans l’esprit de Noël, simple, belle et joyeuse. Le Père Tom Gilroy préside la célébration qui met en valeur des chants de Noël irlandais traditionnels. L’ensemble musical Clonard, un trio à cordes et piano et probablement trois voix de femmes, va animer la célébration sous la direction expérimentée de Tally Flynn, cheffe de chœur.

Learn more about Anna Sheffield Fine JewelryLearn more about Bing BangSupport the show and get on monthly mentorship calls with Fabian. Join here.-------->F Geyrhalter:Welcome to the show, Anna.A Sheffield:Thanks for having me. I'm so happy to be here with you today.F Geyrhalter:Oh, thank you. It's such a pleasure. You have two physical ateliers, right? One in LA on Melrose and one in New York City on Bleecker. How have these past four months affected your operations and brands? How did you have to pivot like everyone else?A Sheffield:Oh, it's been, yeah, very interesting. Fortunately for us, we were already kind of doing remote with me being back and forth between LA and New York. So, we had a little bit of practice. But at the onset, we closed both of the store locations and we shut down our production office and our headquarters.So, in the beginning, it was just a small remote team. I had to furlough most of the team in the beginning because there was nothing for them to be doing while the cities were shut down. We've since brought almost everyone back, which is amazing. But we pivot into really ... Yeah, we're so fortunate that we still have a clientele that's been waiting and is thrilled to have us back in the flow.But we pivoted to being mostly virtual appointment, which we actually do a lot of that anyway because we have clients from all over the world and they can't always come to New York or LA. So, during that time, we just got to hone those skills and really work on better ways to be digital, with our clients. So, customer service and sales and showing them stones and talking about the capabilities for making things bespoke.So, it was really just shifting to that digital platform and kind of going quietly for a minute. And then we've been able to ramp it back up over the last couple of months as things kind of shifted in Los Angeles and in New York, both, sort of at different paces. But by and large now that the stores are back open part time, we're doing appointments in real life, which people are also really thrilled about. And that's encouraging.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, congratulations. That's a big sigh of relief that everything went the way it did. It also sounds to me that because you had to dive much deeper into digital than you usually would have, most probably you come out a little bit stronger and smarter with your digital and appointments because I assume it's difficult to show stones over Skype or like Zoom.A Sheffield:It is, but actually, we have a few of our, and I mean, this is fortunate too, we work with a lot of different vendors for stones because they come from all over the world and I kind of cherry-pick the different people that we work with based on their ethics and their products and a number of things for diamonds as well as precious and semi-precious gemstones. So, a lot of them actually have pivoted to being more digital as well with having like really great videos of their product. So, there's a lot of beautiful assets that we have to work within terms of showing clients what's possible.But also over the last couple of years, we've really leaned into being able to advance the kind of dialogue with our customers and even with potential customers via the website. So, we've done a lot of kind of building out that knowledge base where people can kind of tap into, like, oh, what does this brand think about sustainability? How do they approach it? Or how do I learn about diamonds in the tone of voice that this brand has?So, we have a diamond school and we have a getting started so that people can kind of understand how to get through the engagement ring process or just different love stories or impact like all the different givebacks and things that we do. So, we really worked on doing that in a robust manner on our website in the last couple of years. And that definitely helped during this time also.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, I mean, look, this is a fascinating ... There were so many things that you said that we're going to have to dive deeper into. But just to start with the diamond selection part, it is a nerve-wracking, overwhelming journey for anyone, right? Because it is so hard to understand because there's a list of 10, 16 ways that you should judge a diamond. And the question is, I mean, how much of that is really visible to the eye and how much of that within the industry do you feel is a little bit of an upset. What do you think is really important?A Sheffield:Yeah, to me, I think imperfections and oddities are beautiful. So, from the onset, I've always kind of embraced that and put those forth as options for people and really trying to take what feels a little bit stereo instructions.F Geyrhalter:Yeah.A Sheffield:Like, oh my god, how do I put this together, the four Cs, the blah blah blah, what matters, what doesn't matter.F Geyrhalter:Right.A Sheffield:And really this distill that in a way that makes it easy for people to understand that they can trust us because I am honestly interested in conveying that information but in a way that makes sense for people. So, I really love what's meant to be the tippy top is the white diamond. So that's what's been held aloft as the purist white diamond with no inclusions with a perfect cut, with the largest carat. That's supposed to be the thing, which were the size. So, those are the things that were meant to be the most perfect.And then what I really to do is show people, yes, that's possible. But also like an off white stone, especially if it's an antique diamond, can be really beautiful, especially if you're putting it in yellow gold. Or I like gray diamonds and that's really a diamond that has so many imperfections that it looks grayish or even has speckles and spots, or intergalactic beautiful fractal sort of crystal in layers within it.And if you were looking at white diamonds and then moving over to a gray, you might be like, oh my gosh, that's not a very nice diamond. But really, they're beautiful. So, I've always kind of embraced that and tried to walk people through it.Champagne diamonds are actually just on the scale of brown, but they have their own sort of set of really beautiful hues. And when we're selecting champagne diamonds, we pick the ones that have kind of pinkish hues or really nice kind of subtle, kind of vanilla cream soda kind of tones. So, there's a lot in it that's kind of aesthetic still and it doesn't have to just be technical. So, we try to present that. And also to design things that work with those stones.F Geyrhalter:I guess it was John Legend, who in one of his majorly cheesy songs said perfect imperfections.A Sheffield:Exactly. Yes.F Geyrhalter:I love that idea of perfect imperfections. And I love what you just said because, I mean, that creates character, right?A Sheffield:Mm-hmm (affirmative).F Geyrhalter:Not in the diamond term, but yeah, absolutely.A Sheffield:We got it actually. Yeah, we call it the fitzy character.F Geyrhalter:Oh, no way, perfect.A Sheffield:Yeah, because it feels like, why not take that into consideration?F Geyrhalter:And it's so good.A Sheffield:Everybody individually has different tastes, so allowing for that, some people sparkle, some people prefer luminescence, some people prefer color. It's good to sort of have character as part of it.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. While we talk about this, I want to read two sentences from your bio to set a little bit of the tone for this. Throughout her career, Anna has demonstrated a deep commitment to the highest standards of jewelry production and to giving back both missions fueled by the inspiration that she gains from the worlds of art, nature, spirituality, and indigenous arts and crafts. Ethical sourcing, responsible practice and philanthropy are core pillars of the Anna Sheffield brand and can be seen through her use of single-origin gem sourcing, reclaimed melee and recycled gold, as well as initiatives like the Future Heritage Fund, which in partnership with the New Mexico Foundation, the NMF, aim to preserve and protect the cultural heritage and landscape of the southwest.A Sheffield:That's a lot.F Geyrhalter:I know. You know what's so amazing? This is two sentences. I could have written it. It could have been a German sentence structure.A Sheffield:Yeah.F Geyrhalter:But I mean, there's a lot to talk about.A Sheffield:Totally.F Geyrhalter:Especially when you talk about ethical sourcing, which I'm really, really interested in and there were many instances or let's say a few instances where I wanted to go out and look at that myself and it was always very, very complicated for me to actually get a lab-grown stone for instance. But you source only recycled gold and conflict-free stones and you do also work with diamond Foundry to source lab-grown stones. How has that impacted the industry? Is lab-grown the future in diamonds?A Sheffield:I think it is to some degree. I think there will always be a desire for natural diamonds, like mined diamonds. But what I try to do in that respect is to mix in the reclaimed as much as we can. So, the melees or the tiny little diamonds that are in pave, and even to some degrees side stones up to about three millimeter, I couldn't get reclaimed stones. So, I try to incorporate as much reclaimed as I can.But we also have the opportunity to do Foundry for the manmade, so the lab-grown stones and then to try and offer antique, or even to go through more single-origin or even just working with vendors that have just a really transparent supply chain.So, I think that lab-grown is an important element for this industry to be able to investigate and I think for clients to be able to ask for it really, and that people should be able to supply. But in some cases, for example, with champagne diamonds or gray diamonds, that you can't really make those. That's not doable in a lab.F Geyrhalter:Interesting.A Sheffield:There are limitations to the carat size. There are limitations to the clarity and color. And in some instances, it depends on the company, I like Foundry because they are carbon neutral. But in some instances, I don't see that it's any better for a company to use a ton of fossil fuels to manufacture a diamond versus mining for it.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, right.A Sheffield:And there are also a lot of them that are treated after the fact. So, they heat them to make them more white because they turn out yellow in the original crystal. So, there's a lot to it. There's still just so much beneath the surface that is not customer-facing, that's more industry-sided knowledge.F Geyrhalter:Yeah.A Sheffield:And I think that it's important that those conversations happen for people as well because I think the consumer needs to know the difference. And they need to know, oh, if I'm not only asking for conflict-free or for a lab grown, I'm also making sure that that lab-grown is from a zero-carbon company, or that the natural diamonds are coming through some sort of a supply chain that's traceable. So, you know that the cutters are being treated well. That the rough has been chosen by someone that you trust.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely, yeah.A Sheffield:There's a lot of different layers to it. So, yeah. As an industry-wide standard, I don't think there's a lot of really client-facing information about that. So, I've really worked to bring that forth as much as we can, as much as I'm aware or can be to try to improve on it. And I think to set new standards as a small company, I think it's important.F Geyrhalter:That is important. The term alone "lab-grown" makes me assume that the output is indefinite. I mean, is it very easy to get lab-grown diamonds these days? Do they just pop them out like there's no tomorrow, or is the process very different than that?A Sheffield:It still takes time and it takes a lot of energy. And again, there's different ways that you can grow the diamond crystal. So, lab-grown can vary between companies, but the Foundry has a certain way that they grow their stones. There are limitations. So, you won't find a lot of larger size, carat size stones. And you won't find a lot of high clarity stones. And often they're going to be in a low color because they don't treat their stones. So, there are limitations as well. So, you can't just decide, "I want a 10-carat, perfectly white diamond," and just push a button and print it out.F Geyrhalter:Okay. Yeah. That was my naive question, which as a shopper, that's what you think. You're like, "Lab-grown, oh."A Sheffield:It's good to know.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. And that's what I realized, too. As a typical male consumer in this world, very last minute shopping. So, what I do usually, it's like a week or two before anniversaries or anything, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, that's coming up. I need to do something." And that's why I have never been able to get a lab-grown diamond because it's always too late. Because it actually takes a little bit of planning for those things.A Sheffield:Yeah, exactly. A lot of diamond jewelry does, especially if you want something bespoke because it takes time to source the stone and then make the piece and get it shipped to you wherever you are.F Geyrhalter:Exactly, yeah.A Sheffield:Yeah, hence, we try to send lots of reminders for those things.F Geyrhalter:Well, yeah. And hence, my wife hasn't gotten any bespoke jewelry in a little bit.A Sheffield:Yeah, so planning ahead.F Geyrhalter:I mean, reading up on you and your personality and how you run your brand, you talk about the spirituality, as well as reclaimed and recycled a lot with your jewelry. So, I am brave and maybe sleep deprived enough to ask this rather esoteric question.A Sheffield:I love an esoteric question.F Geyrhalter:Well, let's see. Let's see, you will. To what extent do you feel that some of these stones that are reclaimed carry the soul or the spirit of the person who actually used to own them? Is that a consideration for you? I know some people buy a house and then they walk into the house and they're like, "Oh, someone deceased in this house. We can never live here, right?"A Sheffield:Yes.F Geyrhalter:You know where I'm heading with this.A Sheffield:Of course.F Geyrhalter:How do you feel about this? Because I mean, you feel the stones that you receive, right, and I mean, for you, it is an art?A Sheffield:Absolutely. Yeah, I do think that many things, many objects, I think the objects can carry a resonant kind of feeling not only from a person that might have held them before but also their origins, which is why the sourcing is so important.F Geyrhalter:Right.A Sheffield:But I think with all things that have that kind of base level of sentience or some sort of attachment spiritual, energetic kind of their own sort of glow, if you will, I think people can perceive those things, even if it's only a slight perception. But I think when you're looking at diamonds, and I don't think this goes so much for the melee because they're very small and they've been sort of cultivated from all these different sources. But if you're picking out an antique center diamond, for example, and you're looking at four or five, old euros or old mine cuts that these are pre-World War I, so, even potentially more in the late 1800s.So, if you're looking at these stones and you know that they're antique, you're imagining that, yes, these have probably been set in jewelry before, may or may not have been an engagement ring, could have been something else. But the chances are high that this has been someone's talisman, someone's amulet, someone's piece of jewelry at some point in their life.And I do think that when you're looking at them and you're interacting with them, that you can kind of tell which ones are that have extra shine to them, and which ones are dull or don't have that kind of beautiful resonance. So, I think that's one of the good things about letting people choose their stone. Even with a modern diamond that you know hasn't been in someone else's jewelry before, there's still that feeling of where it came from, its provenance, what it went through to get to you. And I think that it's important for people to sort of have that time to be able to look at something and feel it and choose it. And there are definitely folks out there that do not want a recycled or reclaimed diamond. And there are people that might just get that stone and then put it in some sea salt and let it sit out for a full moon overnight or something to leave it. Those are all possibilities too.And I think it's important with any gemstones, personally with my own jewelry, too, I take things off now and then and I just kind of let them do their own little clearing. Put them on a crystal or I'll put some sage or I'll clean them with saltwater or something just to get the energy moving through them.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, yeah. Well, I am glad I asked.A Sheffield:Yeah. As witchy as you want to be would be my answer.F Geyrhalter:So, talking about witchy, you have a cult following, I would say, which includes countless celebrities from Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Kerry Washington, Helen Mirren, Charlize Theron, et cetera, et cetera. I could go on. But obviously, it's not always been like that. I mean, you started somewhere. How did you start off? And did you always have the drive that you knew that you wanted to create your own brand at some point?A Sheffield:No, it was a total and complete accident actually, which was I think fortunate because I think I can overthink things. So, it was kind of good that it happened in a more meandering way. But yeah, I was right out of art school. I kind of thought, oh, I should have a little sole proprietorship so that I can do my thing and sell my art and maybe make things for people if I want to make something. I do steel, metal arts and stuff.So, I got a sole proprietorship thinking, oh, this will be just an easier way for me to get paid when I've worked with a gallery or do an open studio. So, I chose a name, Bing Bang, B-I-N-G B-A-N-G because it felt like two hands with a hammer and an anvil getting stuff done. And it was just a total fluke because I was like, nobody will ever know this name. I just have to publish it in a paper and then my sole proprietorship is active.And so, I started with that. And then I was making jewelry a little bit in addition to my art because I was making sculpture at the time. And I would just make jewelry when I felt stuck or just wanted to do something that wasn't so heavy. And then I started wearing that jewelry and then people would see it and ask about it. And then I would be like, "Oh, I'll make you one." Wear it into a little store in my neighborhood and try on jeans and they'd be like, "Oh my god, that ring is so cool." "Oh, I made it." And then, that's how it started.So, I didn't really plan on having a brand whatsoever. I didn't pick the name thinking that I was going to have a brand. So, that was the first bit of the happy accident. So, then as that grew and I still do that brand-F Geyrhalter:Yeah, Bing Bang is around, right, which is amazing.A Sheffield:Yeah. We'll be 20 years this year. So, I started in 2001. And it was my first sort of foray into that whole thing. And I had no experience in fashion. And I had never thought about branding or advertising, or even really designed for that matter. I didn't know anything about the fashion industry. So, I just kind of went with it. And it kind of took me to this place where I was living in New York and Bing Bang became my full-time gig.I wasn't really making art anymore. I really just leaned in to doing jewelry and all these things that I didn't really know were working, I kind of learned about in retrospect as I really learned about branding and marketing. So, there were a lot of fun things. I didn't realize that there was this thing called managed scarcity, which is when you run out of something and people are like, "Oh, my god, I have to have it." Basically like the line at Supreme is managed scarcity is their business model.F Geyrhalter:Right.A Sheffield:And so, early on with Bing Bang, I was making everything by hand. We had early success with celebrity. That's way before Instagram, before the internet really, but I was selling at Barneys and making everything by hand in Brooklyn. And all of a sudden, a celebrity would be wearing, Drew Barrymore, or Jessica Simpson, or somebody, Maggie Gyllenhaal would be wearing something of ours.And they would get credited and People or Star or Us Weekly, and it would be like, Bing Bang Jewelry at Barney's and then it would be like, they'd call me frantically. "Oh, my god, those earrings, we don't have any left. There's people that want them." And I was like, "Okay, well, I'll start making them today and I'll have them [inaudible 00:21:36] in a couple weeks." And people will be like, "What? I have to wait?" It was like this whole thing. So, getting little by little, I was like, okay, I have to figure out hiring people. I have to figure out branding. I didn't really have a logo. I never had a business plan.So, in the beginning, Bing Bang was just this thing that I built, like a little castle out of Legos, one little brick at a time. And then watching it evolve has been so magnificent and so fun. So, by the time I started my fine jewelry brand, I really had gained a lot of experience. So, that was magical. And to be able to have that opportunity basically to learn on the job and to start with something that was just really fun for me and it's always been fulfilling, it was a little like lower stakes because it didn't have my name on it. It was always like Bing Bang. It's like this little-F Geyrhalter:Right, right, right.A Sheffield:It's a little crew, a little team. And it is still a team, which is wonderful. So, when it came time to start the fine jewelry, I had just sort of reserved my name because I was making art. I was like, "I'm a sculptor. I want to use my name for my art."F Geyrhalter:That's why I was wondering, yeah.A Sheffield:And I didn't really have an intention of being a jewelry brand or doing a brand or being a brand. So, when it came to it, and I really wanted to start playing with fine jewelry, I started to explore diamonds and gold and making fans growing up, I started this brand and my big name in my 20s and I was in my 30s. And I was like, I want things that last and I want to make things that are precious.And so, it was really interesting in the beginning to kind of look at it and try to unravel that like, what is my brand. That was the hardest of all because Bing Bang really came so naturally. It just fell into place. And building my brand has always been much more complicated.F Geyrhalter:Well, you were reluctant using your name, right, because that's a big step.A Sheffield:Yes.F Geyrhalter:I mean, I did the other way around. So, we actually founded our company at the same time. I founded mine in 2001 as well. But I actually started with my name. I started with Geyrhalter Design. Then I realized we're doing more than design. So, 10 years later, it was Geyrhalter & Co. And then I realized, well now, I'm doing something totally different. I need to change my name. And plus, what if I ever want to grow or sell my company. It should have a different name, right?A Sheffield:Exactly.F Geyrhalter:I pivoted into FINIEN. And now everyone is like, "Hey, why is your company called FINIEN if you're only a consultant with a couple employees?" And I'm like, "Well."A Sheffield:Different journey.F Geyrhalter:It's a journey. There's a lot to it. But why were you so reluctant? Was it because of everyone else in the industry? Was it a norm that everyone used a name? And that's why you wanted to go against it?A Sheffield:Yeah, by and large. I mean, when you look at the big boys like Tiffany's and Harry Winston, there's a lot. Even among more contemporary designers like David Yurman, or, yeah, people use their name and I don't know. I just felt very reticent to do that. I felt shy. It felt like I was really ... With Bing Bang, I could always kind of hide behind this like, it's an us thing, like we.Whereas once I put my name on it, it was like I'm the solely responsible for whether this is good or bad. I'm solely responsible for the success of this thing that is like where is unintelligible where the line is between me and it. So, that was hard. And like I said, as a spiritual person, it's also like, oh my god, do I really want to put myself out there like that?F Geyrhalter:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I mean, did that idea of branding then affect your company culture? Because obviously, you have a good amount of employees now.A Sheffield:Yes.F Geyrhalter:On the one hand, that is your name on the door, right?A Sheffield:Mm-hmm (affirmative).F Geyrhalter:Nice, big and shiny, everything you always feared.A Sheffield:Yes.F Geyrhalter:But on the other hand, your brand is very purposeful and there are plenty of shared values your team can be inspired and driven by, right?A Sheffield:Yeah.F Geyrhalter:How does that work with the team? How does that brand relate to how your culture actually works?A Sheffield:Well, I think it's interesting because I've always been such a part of it. We are independently financed. So, it's not like I have to answer to anyone or that anyone else has to answer to anyone. So, it's always been a bit of a community. And it started small. So, everyone that's worked with me, and I'm still friends with, been close with many of the people who've worked with me over the years, it's such a group effort. And it's one of those things with small companies, where everybody just kind of does whatever needs to be done. It's like a ship. Everybody has their role, but also it's like when things are happening, it's just like, "I'm closest, I'll do that" or "I can manage that." Or "Why don't we do this together, it needs four hands." So, it's always been about this kind of group effort.And I think people seeing me really be in the company, running the company, making decisions, helping, I've done everything that everyone can do in my company now, with the exception of those who have incredible expertise. But I used to upload everything to the website. I used to take all the photos. I used to style everything for the cases and write all the copy. So, it's been good in that way just to, I think, to be a part of a team where people can really see that all my team can see that I'm in it. I'm in the trenches. I'm doing things. I'm working all the time. And I'm trying to be a good leader.But at the same time, I think where it comes to the branding, same thing, I never started out with a brand guide and a deck and an investor. It was always kind of I'm making it up as we went along. So, with my company, I did end up eventually doing a brand guide. And it was amazing for me to work with people whose expertise is just that. I worked with my brother and a few others. And we went in and really mined for that information, really pulled forth the values and the pillars and the ideology and the ethos and aesthetic, and all of these things that are just ... So, they're tangible, but you have to really be able to walk all the way around them to identify them, to put words to them.So, we did that exercise. I think it's been maybe about four years ago. And it's been so instrumental even for me to be able to have that to look back at and to share with new employees as we expand to bring new people on as we open new stores or look for new marketing opportunities or add new content franchises to our social media. It's really great to have this kind of bible as it were that you can look to for many of your answers. And also, if there's things that are no longer resonating, then you can realize where you're evolving.F Geyrhalter:I so agree. I just did one of these workshops on Thursday and Friday with an Italian interior design company of all places, which was nice because I felt like I'm actually going out of the country. I think at 4:00, they started mixing negronis and I'm like, "Wow, that's nice." And they have to go in a cigarette break. And I'm like, "Oh, okay."A Sheffield:Oh, Italy.F Geyrhalter:Oh, it was so beautiful. But the reason why I say this is because afterwards, they said, "Oh my god, Fabian, you're a miracle worker." And I'm like, "I'm not a miracle worker because everything that came out of the workshop was from you." Right? So, basically, I'm just a therapist. I just get it out of you.And so, it's really great to hear that from you after you've been in business for so long. And then finally, you realize that you are expanding, you are hiring, you need to put all of these values down, you need to put the pillars in stone.And to actually feel that relief and to have this clarity moving forward that now it's all on one page or on a couple of pages and here, this is our brand, right? Even if you grew it very organically and authentically, those things are important. They're not fake. Either they come from you, which I think is so important.A Sheffield:Precisely.F Geyrhalter:Talking about Italy in one of your Instagram posts, you cited the famous Benetton campaign from the [crosstalk 00:30:32] by Oliviero Toscani, who was a big reason why I decided to actually study communication design and advertising. In the post you say, it makes me remember that the brands we support have the option to integrate the present with the future we want to see. I hope that we can continue to bring that belief into our brand and exemplified at ASG as united in the bold vision of all for love.So, that being said, which is so great, and I love seeing that because this entire campaign to me was so ... It was just so important in my growth as a designer in the way that I wanted to make a dent in the world as well. How has the Black Lives Matter movement influenced the way that your brand communicates in these sobering but also very empowering and very important times? Did things change for you? I mean, it affected every brand, right? And everyone was kind of standing their deer in headlights like now, but ... Right?A Sheffield:Yes. Well, I think, I mean, the good in it like you said is that this is bringing a lot out into the light. And a lot of people are being held accountable. And everyone is being required to look really sobering, take a really sobering view of themselves and their businesses and the businesses they support and their friendships and their families and the world we're living in.So, in many ways, I think it's wonderful. And I think that you can only change what you're willing to work towards. So, I think this is a good moment for America and for the world. And I think that that's why the Benetton campaign felt so relevant to me because that was a really early moment for me in my life is like, I don't even know, I was probably seven or eight, looking at these shiny, beautiful ads in a magazine or as I was going through in airport and seeing these beautiful faces and thinking, oh, my goodness, that is beautiful, not even knowing the word "compelling" but feeling compelled.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, yeah.A Sheffield:And I've always tried to find ways that we could do that, not just with our visual, not with our creative and marketing, but just with our words and with what we really strive to do with this brand. And because we make engagement rings and wedding bands, and fine jewelry that mark moments in people's lives, I don't want anyone to feel alienated from that, not just because of the price point but because of what our visuals look like and what kind of models we're using or how we speak to people, and also how we use our platform to support in moments like this.So, one of the good things that we did that I felt was empowering for us was to be able to lean into sharing information because we are a platform with a lot of followers. So, being able to aggregate content from others and to share and amplify messages from those who really deserve to be heard right now and to champion different causes that I think are really important, like the trans movement, the Trans Lives Matter Movement is so important. And I have friends that are trans and I have since I was in college.And I think that being able to look at that from a personal perspective, but also, oh, well, how can I use my brand to show people that maybe don't have a trans person in their life or that haven't had first-hand experience with this, to show them that this is beautiful and sacred and that it's important to be able to have this dialogue and to rally the troops. This is where we can help. But also, this is where we can listen. And this is where we can learn. And this is how we can bring our message forth and act.So, I think that trying to find ways to use the brand to be a part of that conversation is really important. And I feel like I don't want to say we've done a good job, but I think we've been authentic to that purpose. And I think thankfully, it's always been part of our dialogue so it didn't feel like it was a leap because since we mentioned it earlier, but the Future Heritage Fund I started about four years ago, 2006, I think, because I grew up in New Mexico and in my early life, I lived in the Navajo Nation. My parents were working for the Indian National Health Service. So, I spent the first few years of my life living in the Dine community. And I was a child, but I was there within this beautiful community.And the artwork in our house and the other people that we lived near and the whole southwest is very steeped in the Native American cultures that are there the Navajo, Dine or the Pueblo tribes, the Apache tribes, there's a lot of that art and artisanship and culture and belief systems and sacred places. So, I really wanted to bring that into my work.And as this person who left New Mexico and moved to New York City and has this kind of different life, a very different life than I would have had if I had I stayed in New Mexico, to be able to take that and show how important it is to support these artists and communities and to talk about cultural preservation and try to really, I don't know, just share this experience that I've had firsthand growing up in this place that's so beautiful, and to not only talk about the problems there, but also to talk about solutions.So, I think it's really important too to approach this conversation where it relates to the indigenous people in America. And so, it is also part of this movement, I believe, in so many ways. So, I think, having been working on that for the last five years, it was also really important to at the beginning of COVID lean into that too because it was adversely affecting in a lot of native communities here in the states.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. I'm acutely aware of that too because I worked with an organization called the Wind River Foundation, and they are very much working towards the same goals as you explained. Actually, there was so much that you just said. But it came right back to the question. But I would actually urge everyone to look at your Instagram account because you're doing amazingly on your Instagram account. I love the stories. I love the cameo stories that you created, which are not Cameo the brand, which I interviewed them here too, but it's actual cameos.It's extremely authentic. But it's also very, very well curated. And it's just a pleasure to follow. On your website, you also state this and I absolutely love that. You say it's around us, between us, within us. It's alchemy. So, with that, and since we're slowly coming closer to an end here, I want to ask you the big question, which you knew I would ask you. What does branding mean to you, now that you've done this for almost 20 years? What does branding mean to Anna?A Sheffield:Well, I mean, to me, it's the stories. It's those things that people can hear you, tell and they can conjure up their own images, and they can feel where it relates to them and really feel enveloped by the mood and the meaning that you're putting forth with your stories. And I think that can be told in words. It can be shown in the product. It can be a part of our visuals. And it can be also how we speak to things like the cameos. These are amazing people I love that I want you to know about and they're going to have a little cameo on my Instagram today.So, taking all the different stories that we have and putting them out for people to experience I think is what branding really, what it really is at the end of the day because it's taking something so visceral and moving it into something physical. And for people to have an experience around that, I think it has to be multilayered. It has to be multisensory.F Geyrhalter:I absolutely love that. And that's also the reason why I wanted you to be on my show so badly because it's not easy to do what you just said in the jewelry, fine jewelry space. It's really, really difficult because everything is stereotyped, right?A Sheffield:Yeah, very much, yeah.F Geyrhalter:It is an entire stock photography industry. And so, to actually be able to stand out and to create an authentic experience and yet be able to scale you do is really amazing. So, I think there's a lot that our listeners can learn from just analyzing your website and your Instagram. And I would actually encourage everyone to go to your website because just going through the ethics section alone is it's a joy.A Sheffield:Thank you.F Geyrhalter:I mean, it's a beautiful site. Its functionality is really fantastic. So, it's a pleasure. If you can take your brand and you put it through a funnel and outcome is only one word, what would be your brand's DNA? What would be one word that could encompass the entire brand?A Sheffield:I think what you just said, it's alchemy. Alchemy is definitely the one word because there's magic in how things come together. And that's exactly what we do. There's alchemy not only in the diamond that came out of the center of the earth that was forged by fire and pressure and this is an amazing, cosmic thing. But also taking that little diamond and putting it into something that honors it like a setting, that design that really shows what it is even those perfectly imperfect ones in their best light and then how that also then becomes a part of someone's life and a part of their love story. And that there's an alchemy in that and how it becomes an heirloom or talisman that then holds all of this energy, and all of these memories, and all this meaning.So, I feel like alchemy is really that, where these different things combine to make something so much greater, so much more profound. And I think jewelry should absolutely be that. Even with Bing Bang, we work towards maintaining meaning in what we do, even though it's less expensive and more attainable and more fashion-forward, younger, still there's an alchemy in that too in those moments in our life.So, I think particularly with fine jewelry though and with the materials and the clients that we serve, I think that the alchemy is just absolutely the end all be all because it feels everyone has a part in it too. The changes and the transformations are what among so many people touching, feeling, experiencing, wearing and being with the jewelry.F Geyrhalter:And what you just said over the last couple of minutes is the power of having clarity in your brand, being able to actually put it down to word like "alchemy" that is so all encompassing, I mean, really tells the entire story of what you do and how you do it and why you do it in one single not overused word. It's so powerful. I mean, I love that. I love hearing that. It's really, really great.To finish things off, do you have any brand advice for founders that are fresher to the whole intrapreneurial journey, that you feel you can leave them with, anything you learned over your years where you feel like, you know what, I'm going to leave the show with these thoughts.A Sheffield:Sure. I mean, this advice is pretty standard for me. I feel like, we all know, our intuition is so powerful. Those little gut feelings and the senses that we have about what's good and what's bad, I think it's important to follow those as much as you can, and to not let anyone tell you that that's a bad way to do business. Because there's all this conventional wisdom that there should be data. Of course, there should be data. That there should be experience, of course, there should be experienced.But also you can't undervalue how someone just having an idea and believing in it can make something really wonderful happened that no one else has done and that those stories come up time and again. But I think that really trusting in yourself is so important. And I think it's one of those first things that you, I mean, at least for me, I would think, "Well, I mean, there's no reason why I should think this is a good idea, but it feels like a good idea."Sometimes I don't follow my own advice. And I don't follow my own intuitions and that's okay, too, because you have to fail to learn. You have to have moments of doubt to come out the other side with more direction and more conviction. But I think that, yeah, the one thing I would say is just to follow your gut.F Geyrhalter:And I've been I've been hearing this quite a lot in my podcasts lately and that is a really good thing because I'm really glad that more people hear that because it's actually not easy to trust your gut. It sounds like it would be easy, but it takes a certain personality. It takes certain charisma. And it takes guts to listen to yourself and to just say, "I'm going to go against the grain. I'm not going to look at data. I'm just going to go with this because my instinct tells me."And I think a lot of it comes with experience where you start ... Because you know, you yourself just know that this might be the right direction.A Sheffield:Exactly.F Geyrhalter:And you have the experience to say, I'm just going to go down that path.Anna, it was so great having you on. I have a feeling that people can find you ... The best way to start is annasheffield.com, right?A Sheffield:Yes. That would be a big part. And on Instagram, the same, it's @annasheffield.F Geyrhalter:Perfect.A Sheffield:And then Bing Bang if you want to look at the beginnings and how that's evolved over 20 years, how I stayed 20 for 20 years. It's @bingbangnyc and same for the website. So, they're both worth looking at. I love both brands and I still wear both brands. So, I think it's kind of cool for people to see the connection between the two.F Geyrhalter:I know. I know. It was really interesting for me, too, as I researched your brands a little bit more. Anna, thank you so much for having been on the show, for taking the time out of your day. Stay safe, stay healthy.A Sheffield:Yeah.F Geyrhalter:And keep trusting your gut, right?A Sheffield:Yes, yes. I will. I do my best. Thank you. Thank you for the wonderful questions.F Geyrhalter:Oh, my pleasure, my pleasure. Thank you so much.A Sheffield:Take care.

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!

 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,

 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.

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).

This marks the beginning of 3 back-to-back episodes featuring female founders. All 3 of these upcoming guests succeeded in an industry with many curve-balls that is hard to make it in: the food industry. And out of sheer co-incidence, 2 of these founders happen to be Brazilian women taking the US food market by storm.We kick it off with Raquel Tavares, the founder & CEO of Fourth & Heart, who migrated at age six to Northern California with her mother and brother in the early 80’s. She currently lives in Los Angeles and is a mother of two young boys.  Raquel is the principal creator of Tava Organics, the parent company of 4th & Heart, which also happens to currently be the 4th fastest growing Food & Bev company in the country.If this quote by Eckhart Tolle, which appears on the Fourth + Heart web site, speaks to you (as much as it inspired me), then make sure to not miss this episode: "Life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be."Links mentioned:Fourth & HeartFourth & Heart on InstagramHitting The Mark Patreon PageFINIEN Brand ConsultancyHappiness Won____Full Transcript:F Geyrhalter:                 Welcome to episode 23 of Hitting the Mark. This is also the beginning of three back-to-back episodes featuring female founders. The only exception will be a very special episode, that I will sneak in between, which will mark the one year anniversary of this very show. All three of these upcoming guests succeeded in an industry with many curve balls, that is hard to make it in, the food industry. And out of sheer coincidence, two of these founders happen to be Brazilian women taking the US food market by storm. We kick it off today with Raquel Tavares, the founder and CEO of Fourth and Heart, an artisanal food brands based in Los Angeles, set on a mission to modernize ancient pantry food staples starting with a line of grass fed flavored, pure spreadable butters, known as ghee. Raquel a devout Ashtanga Yogini, snowboarder, lover of all things food was born in Brazil and later migrated at age six to Northern California with her mother and brother in the early eighties.She currently lives in LA with her family and is a mother of two young boys. She is the principal creator of Tava Organics, the parent company of Fourth and Heart, which also happens to currently be the fourth fastest growing food and beverage company in the country. She prides herself on the ability to tackle family, work, self and play. She wants to milk each minute of each day. And that being said, I'll make the most of each minute while I have her on the show.Welcome to Hitting The Mark Raquel.R Tavares:                     Thank you for having me.F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely. I rarely have locals on the show, so this is fun. My company actually started out of a garage in Venice Beach on Rose Avenue, which I believe is also your stomping grounds and we don't even know each other. So I read about you in Forbes, I believe, but ever since I reached out, you also made it onto the Inc. 5,000 list on number 70 with a three year growth rate of 4,279 percent. So first off, congratulations on your tremendous success.R Tavares:                     Thank you. Thank you so much.F Geyrhalter:                 You're one of those few startups that must have found it so much harder to launch since you're not only introducing your brand, but you also had to educate a fair amount of your potential customers about ghee, what it is, its benefits. So please share the power of ghee with our listeners. What is it, what makes it so good and what makes it so good for you?R Tavares:                     Well, when I was thinking of what I wanted to do, and eventually came to me and what I thought of ghee or what I thought ghee could do is basically do what coconut oil has done as an ingredient. Meaning all of a sudden coconut oil went from being something that we've put topically on her skin and then all of a sudden you see it as an ingredient in chocolate. Then people are popping popcorn with coconut oil and then came MCT oil. So, so on and so forth. And then of course it went into beauty as well. So I loved ghee because it's shelf stable and lactose free and dairy free. And I really just thought of it as a shelf stable butter, which is what it is.And some of the other benefits, the health benefits are that it's easier for your body to digest because it doesn't have the lactose in the dairy. It has a unique fatty acid in it called butyrate, which is something that's found in the lining of your gut and helps your body to assimilate nutrients. And over time what happens is people eat a lot of processed foods and that starts to kind of deteriorate in the lining of your gut. And therefore this replaces that. And really, I just call it the golden ingredient, the gift that keeps on giving really.F Geyrhalter:                 Yeah, we're actually using it at home. It's a very smart choice, but how much education about ghee did you have to include in your launch? Did you launch locally here in LA where obviously the thirst for wellbeing is pretty unquenchable or how did it all start off?R Tavares:                     Yeah. So I started drafting the business plan in 2012 and it really took a while to get through the iterations of the different flavors that I wanted to do. Eventually in 2014 is when I sold it for the first time at the Echo Park Craft Fair and it was in Christmas and that was the first time I had it in front of consumers. I was able to hear what they had to say about it. And it's always important to see it live because you know if it's authentic, then at that that weekend we sold about 3,000 dollars in ghee.F Geyrhalter:                 Oh my God.R Tavares:                     Which was so much money at the time and it really blew my mind. So that kind of gave me the beginning feeling. I had a proof of concept. So then after that I sold it into different stores in Los Angeles. So yes, I launched it locally, initially selling everything myself. And then it was in, later in 2015 where we got our first distribution, national distribution.F Geyrhalter:                 And when you sold it yourself, was it just basically in jars and just hand labeled or like laser printed or how did you sell it? I mean it must've been very, very low key at that point, right?R Tavares:                     No, actually, yeah, it wasn't. If you know me, I don't like to take anything for granted when it comes to aesthetic.F Geyrhalter:                 There you go.R Tavares:                     Pretty much holds true and if you come to my home, everything is merchandised effectively. Same thing with the product. I really wanted to bring forth something that would be marketable at a grocery store level because I did not intend on selling it at farmer's markets. I intended to go directly to buyers because I felt buyers of grocery stores would know if that, if it had legs to stand on. So it was branded and in the jar, the same jar that it is today and they were Italian jars that I sourced, beautiful packaging. It was a different variation of the packaging, but nonetheless, it was still beautiful under the brand name Tava which was the first brand name. But I had to change it to Fourth and Heart after getting a cease and desist.F Geyrhalter:                 I was curious about that. Is that how it happened? Okay, interesting. Very interesting. Well that's a curve ball you didn't necessarily expect.R Tavares:                     No, not at all. But the branding was so important because ghee, it does have the education curve. So when you have that beautiful packaging and branding, at the very least it piques the curiosity and it increases the odds of someone wanting to try something as what can seem like a very obscure ingredient. So that was just so important to have beautiful packaging.F Geyrhalter:                 And it's interesting because even when you were still, working on the Tava brand name, your packaging already won awards. I saw it on Dieline, which is a pretty big, packaging design website. So you were very, as you said, you were very, very design focused. But then with Fourth and Heart, you also did a complete redesign of the entire branding, right?R Tavares:                     Yeah, I did. Originally, when I first founded the company at my yoga studio, there was a young guy that I met there and we started talking about packaging. He was starting a beverage company. He then said that he really loved this agency in Boulder, Colorado called Moxie Sozo. And I called them and they were out of my price range at the time, but I made a note and I said, okay, we'll go back to that. So when I got the cease and desist, we had just done a small friends and family round and I was able to afford a rebrand. So at that point I thought, you know what, let's take advantage of this situation rather than fight a cease and desist and create something even better than we have now, that would be even more marketable to the masses. So that's how Fourth and Heart came to life.F Geyrhalter:                 I see. And let me read some of your brand's copy on your website. Fourth and Heart is an ode to the heart chakra. It's the intersection where most of us get stuck. We think through everything and we really feel our way through it. Our intellect gets in the way. I find the most lasting decisions are heart choices, not hard choices. Fourth and Heart hopes to inspire others through the passion we put into our product and to inspire heart decisions, not hard decisions. We move forward with bold intention and with your hearts in our hearts in mind, we want what we put into our product to move you, motivate you, inspire you.So the brand name is rooted, I suppose in Hindu yogic and chakra, Buddhist tantric traditions. You also ran a successful yoga studio as you mentioned, which you sold in 2008 was the Yogi tribe also your first audience? And was it kind of inspirational to a lot of, not only the language that you use in the name, but also some of the design aspects of your brand?R Tavares:                     Yeah, I think it just comes natural to me that I think that way because I've done yoga for such a long time. I've been practicing yoga for going on 25 years now and so it's kind of in my veins, in my bones, if you will. So it wasn't that the yoga community was my first audience really. It was just that the art and science of yoga is kind of part of my fabric and therefore it just spills over into the brand because the brand is very much a part of me. And I effectively, I wrote that copy for the website.F Geyrhalter:                 Oh great. That's awesome. I love to hear that.R Tavares:                     Yeah. I'm a writer. I love writing too as well. So I thrive on writing and I thrive on creating and it just so happens I'm lucky enough to be able to put all of my favorite things to do into Fourth and Heart.F Geyrhalter:                 And you have a marketing background, correct?R Tavares:                     I do. Yeah, I well, I was a marketing director of marketing at a telecom company way back, well, way back now in San Francisco. And I ran a partner marketing department there.F Geyrhalter:                 Which doesn't sound quite as inspiring as Fourth and Heart.R Tavares:                     It was a great, amazing job actually. I love marketing but, and gave me a good of flexibility. So it was great. But no, of course Fourth and Heart is for sure my passion and one of those things that I'm fortunate to be obsessed with because they say you have to be obsessed with what you do in order to really be able to do it well and every day.F Geyrhalter:                 Oh absolutely. And I have a lot of respect and admiration for people who actually quit their careers and you were at a good point in your career, but you quit it to launch a brand and then especially I have a lot of respect for those who actually go into retail. And then even more so who are not afraid to deal with the FDA and go into food and beverage, which is really, really difficult. But on top of it, you're a woman, you're a mom to two boys. You recently though closed a successful series C round, raising 7.6 million. How do you do it? Like your brand has health and self care at its heart, no pun intended, but do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by it all and suffer some minor anxiety attacks like so many founders do or do you have a trick? Do you have a trick on how you balance mind and body while running your brand and your life and I guess the life of two others? Right.R Tavares:                     I wish I had a trick that was a one size fits all.F Geyrhalter:                 Yes. That's what we need. That's what everyone needs.R Tavares:                     I wish there was an answer for that. I absolutely have bouts of anxiety and it is definitely one of the hardest things I've ever done. I'd say it's as hard as being a parent is because it's something you create so it's like an emotional piece of your person, but at the same time you have to be able to run it like a business. And you can't, you have to actually be able to remove yourself out of that attachment, so to speak. But I would say the way I handle stress and anxiety and balance, everything is with a lot of help. So like I have people helping at home, I have people helping me in the office. It's not a one woman show by any means.So I would say it's me leaning on people and listening to people, sometimes taking advice, sometimes not taking advice, and it's usually, it comes in a wave. So it'll be full throttle, running a thousand miles. And then you know, I always say it's like you're running through the forest and then boom you hit a tree and then you have to sit down and probably just take a beat and then get back to it. Because sometimes there's like a lull and it's calm and everything's going well, and those times I have to sit down and really appreciate those times. Because cause I know the other uphill is just around the corner and there's a lot of unforeseens in food. So it's important to have that downtime where you really meditate and do yoga and take care of yourself. I would say that's the foundation of being able to deal with the accompanying anxiety.F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely. And it's beautiful that it's part of your entire brand messaging, right? So even when you work, you can kind of be reminded by those thoughts. One of those beautiful quotes you have on your website, which you didn't write it's by Eckhart Tolle, who I'm also a fan of myself. He said life isn't as serious as the mind makes it out to be. And I think that's kind of a nice summary of what we have just talked about. Your tagline is fuel happy. How did it come about? I mean obviously it sounds like most probably you came up with it, but how did it come about? What made it the guiding light for the brand, fuel happy?R Tavares:                     So full disclosure, I did not come up with it.F Geyrhalter:                 Yeah, perfect.R Tavares:                     My branding agents actually did come up with it, but it was definitely a team effort and a lot of brainstorming involved. But I liked it because it was really just about, I always believe that food should be first fuel for your body, and that basically what you put in is what you get out and effectively, pardon the cliche you are what you eat. It's true. So I felt like that embodied all of that messaging, which I find to be very true.F Geyrhalter:                 And it's great. It's punny, right? The idea of feel happy, fuel happy, and there's a lot in there in two words and as a brand strategist, I can appreciate how much you can get out of two words. It's really great.R Tavares:                     Yeah. Not easy to do. Right. We have to appreciate that work, that's for sure.F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely. Yeah. Talking about one or two words, and I know you knew that this is coming because I usually warn my guests of this one, but what is one word or two words that can describe your brand? I call it the brand DNAs. So Everlane would be transparency. For SAPOs, it would be customer service, or Tony Hsieh would call it most probably happiness. What would it be? What would Fourth and Hearts one word or two word be that could actually describe the brand in its entirety?R Tavares:                     I guess at this current stage where the brand is now it would be wanderlust.F Geyrhalter:                 Huh.R Tavares:                     Or wonder or wonderer, because the brand, we really want the brand to evoke a sense of curiosity and following your bliss. But who's to say where the brand will go?F Geyrhalter:                 Right, right. But I like that. I think that's really interesting. And I think it's interesting because A, the way that the company is currently the brand is expanding into a lot of different, sub product, and I saw a lot more products on the website yesterday than I did a couple of months ago. And I also liked that idea of you actually having to be someone with an open mind to try those type of products and actually exchange some kitchen staples for something totally new. It's a great brand mantra and I agree it doesn't need to stick around forever. Right.What was the big breakthrough moment? Obviously we talked about when you tried out your product at basically at the market, which you didn't really try it out as in like here it isn't in a self made jar, but you already had it designed, it was ready, you just needed to get feedback. But what was that one big breakthrough moments where you just figured, you know what? This is turning into a real thing into real brand, into a major player. When was that moment where you just patted yourself on the back and said, you know what, I think I just made it now?R Tavares:                     Well, I don't know that I feel like I've just made it because I feel like if I embody the feeling of making it, then it will potentially trigger something. It's like if you repeat something over and over again or if you tell something to someone that something has happened that you start to think it did happen and then you won't make it happen. I don't know. It's like this weird theory. So there was a moment where I thought I feel like this has legs and it was probably after 2000 and or a full year of revenue in 2016 and we were in all Whole Foods. So I feel like after we completed a full year of revenue and I knew that the product kept moving, that's when I knew that it had legs.But I always like to feel that there's so much more to grow into then not disguise the possibility for the brand. So it's kind of like a... I think of it in two ways, but sometimes I have to actually remind myself to think of how much we've done and where we've gone and how incredible it is. Because sometimes you get lost in the weeds of the work day. So it's important to sit down and remind yourself of the accomplishments.F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely. Sometimes you should listen to the intro that I say on the podcast for instance, and actually let it sink in rather than, oh, that's the staple. That's always like that. I mean, seven million dollar funding, you're in Whole Foods, all kinds of stories. It's remarkable and it's especially remarkable while you still have two boys and there's a lot going on. So I'm very, very impressed. Food and beverage founders that I talked to when they know, when they get through the Whole Foods challenge basically, and when they see that after a couple of months at Whole Foods that it's actually picking up and people are repeat customers. That's pretty much it. So it sounded like it's a lot. It's that that was very, very much how it was with you as well. What does branding mean to you? It means a lot, I know, but what does it mean to you?R Tavares:                     Well, it means identity. It means communication, education. There's so much that, inspiration effectively with our brand. That's what I want to do is the, to inspire, to educate, to build the brand identity and so people can also identify back with the brand, and form a connection with the brand as well. And I feel like we've accomplished that so far with existing group of consumers that we have and fans and family and all of that the next phase is going into not, away from the low hanging fruit, so to speak. But I feel like we still have a lot of work to do with our existing community as well. So, yeah, I would say the brand means those four pillars. Educate, inspire, communicate and build identity.F Geyrhalter:                 I love that. And how do you engage with your tribe, so to speak? I know you're doing recipe videos, which are like unscripted, fun, quirky and I know you're extremely active in on Instagram. What are some ways where you feel like there's a really good dialogue going on between you and the people who actually appreciate your product?R Tavares:                     I would say social media would be number one. I will go in myself typically on weekends and just start responding to people, correspond with people there and I'll just usually let them know that is me, if it's me speaking. So I would say there, sometimes I'll go to live speaking engagements at the consumer trade shows as well. I'm communicating often with the consumer. And I would say those would probably be probably be the three times. And then, if it's just an external dialogue wherein I'm just speaking, it's typically on podcasts.F Geyrhalter:                 Right. I see that. I hear that.R Tavares:                     Well, yeah, we do do videos as well. It's just that we paused last year a little bit on the marketing front because we had to focus a bit internally. However, next year we'll be kicking that up again. And my goal is to create eight potentially an IGTV show where I'm doing interviews myself, short interviews with some of our investors or fans or influencers, something that would just be quarterly, to keep it manageable. But we're going to be kicking that, taking that off next year, early next year.F Geyrhalter:                 That's fantastic. That's really cool. What is a piece of brand advice, if you have anything like on top of your mind for founders that might be following your footsteps that might go into a category like food and beverage or just brand advice for any founder as a takeaway? What have you learned in the last years of making your brand into a reality?R Tavares:                     So advice I would give to new new entrepreneurs, I would say that if you're a creative and you have a feeling that you know what you want, that I would be very authentic in your voice and go with your intuition and try to get the message across of what you want to see with a really great professional who can design what you have in your mind and put it on paper. I often actually just sketch it and then I give it to a designer to bring to life.And then if you can also, if you can afford it, I would recommend doing a small consumer study to understand what messaging is important to the consumer to see on the front of the packaging, the back of the packaging. If not, it's not that important. You can probably Google it and then if you're not, if you're a finance operational type, I would find your favorite brands out there and pulled them all together and figure out who did their design, and go to that agency and tell them what you like and what you don't like and get your vision through that way.So I feel like it really depends on what kind of founder you are and lean into that where you can and get support where you need it.F Geyrhalter:                 Great advice. When you talked about consumer studies, do you actually hire a company to do consumer studies or is it something where you basically just say, like you go out there and you just interview people?R Tavares:                     No, we do, we have, it's kind of like a hybrid situation. But yes, we have done consumer studies now that we have more at stake. So, and now we're really curious as to what the consumers are thinking.F Geyrhalter:                 For sure.R Tavares:                     For example, we have a chocolate spread called Chocti, right. And on the packaging, I wanted it to be a hybrid between adult-like and child-like. But at the same time, I didn't really think about how is the consumer going to use this? How are they going to see it? Is it going to be a family, is it going to be a single person? And what we found out after we after the fact, is that probably should have done something more fun and bright and white. And there was probably some hiccups that I could of solved for if I didn't just go with my own wish. Right. So that's kind of an example where I could've probably used some more pragmatic research in the design of the Chocti. But we were still pretty young when that came to life. So, it's just kind of growing pains, but if you can hit it on the front end, that's what I would say to do. Even if it's just like your own, 12 of your best friends in a room with 10 good questions. That could work.F Geyrhalter:                 Totally. Yeah. If you have to bootstrap it, bootstrap it, but if you can afford it, the more information you can get upfront, the more success you will have quickly. Absolutely. Where can me, myself and I find that the chocolate spread and more important, where can our listeners find your products?R Tavares:                     Well, you can find everything in Sprouts. And Whole Foods has all of our products as well. Kroger or Gelson's and Wegmans if you're in the East coast, Publix and then Amazon, of course. Amazon has everything.F Geyrhalter:                 Perfect. Very good. Excellent. Well, thank you Raquel, for making the time to swing by the show. I really appreciate your thoughts on branding and marketing and the entrepreneurial advice that you shared with my listeners.R Tavares:                     Well, thank you so much. I'm honored and flattered to be here and I love what you've done as well, so thank you so much for your time.F Geyrhalter:                 Oh, thank you. And thanks to everyone for listening. Head on over to patreon.com/hittingthemark to show your support. Just like Florian Felipe of Los Angeles who joined this community on the Brandster level, and Devroni Liasoi Lumandan from Malaysia for upgrading to the Co-Brander level. Join the group and learn about the many perks you receive for supporting the show at patreon.com/hittingthemark.This podcast is currently brought to you by Finien, a brand consultancy, creating strategic, verbal and visual brand clarity. You can learn more at Finien and also dive into an assortment of my brand insights while you're there. 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 that Mark. 

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).

President Obama praised Scott Harrison, and so have Arianna Huffington and Michael Bloomberg. Without a doubt, I knew he would be a charismatic and smart guest. But having Scott share his inspirational story and dive into the details of how he built the brand, and how branding was actually a crucial component of charity: water's success, went beyond my highest expectations.Scott is the founder and CEO of charity: water, a non-profit bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in need around the world. He is also the New York Times best-selling author of Thirst, a story of redemption, compassion, and the mission to bring clean water to the world. In the 13 years since he founded his organization, charity: water has mobilized over 1 million donors around the world to fund more than 38,000 water projects in 28 countries and bring clean water to 10 million people.He was ranked number 10 in Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in business. And in this episode you will witness why.To get inspired, not only for the ways in which you build your brand, but for the way you live your life, give this episode a listen. Links mentioned:charity: waterTHIRST - the bookSpring - the videoHitting The Mark Patreon Page ____Full Transcript:F Geyrhalter: Welcome to Hitting the Mark. President Obama praised my next guest, so has Arianna Huffington and Michael Bloomberg. Today I'm fortunate to have him on the line. I usually spend around two hours prepping for my guests the day prior to the taping. And then, at night, I listen to some past interviews while on the treadmill. This was different. When prepping for my next guest I got so sucked into his stories that I spent the majority of my day diving into the rich and fascinating journey of Scott Harrison.Scott is the founder and CEO of charity: water, a non-profit bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in need around the world. He's also the New York Times best-selling author of Thirst, a story of redemption, compassion, and the mission to bring clean water to the world. Harrison spent 10 years as a night club promoter in New York City before leaving to volunteer on a hospital ship in West Africa as a photo journalist. Returning home two years later, he founded charity: water in 2006. In the 13 years since, the organization has mobilized over 1 million donors around the world to fund more than 38,000 water projects in 28 countries and bring clean water to 9.7 million people.Scott has been recognized on Fortune's 40 under 40 list, Forbes' Impact 30 list, and was ranked number 10 in Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in business. He's currently a World Economic Forum young global leader, and lives in New York City with his wife and two children. Out of sheer coincidence though a mutual friend I got introduced to his wife, Viktoria, who is also Vice President of Creative for charity: water, who in turn made this interview happen since Scott was already somewhat familiar with my work to some extent, just seeing my books on branding lying around the house. Welcome to the show, Scott, and thanks so much for making the time.S Harrison: Hey, thanks for having me. This will be fun.F Geyrhalter: So, Scott, your inspiring story has been told many times, and as of late also in your best-selling book, Thirst, which I picked up a few days ago. It's a fascinating story and a remarkable journey. Could you share a little bit of it with our listeners? Like how did your career begin, and how did you end up running one of the most trusted and admired non-profits in the world?S Harrison: Yeah. Well, I guess I'll start early on. I was born in a very middle class family in Philadelphia, raised in New Jersey. When I was young, when I was four years old, there was a terrible accident in our house. We got carbon monoxide gas poisoning from a heater that leaked. My dad and I were lucky enough to find the leak and we recovered, but my mom, after passing out one day unconscious, just never recovered. She became an invalid. Her body's ability to just function normally in the world ended with this carbon monoxide poisoning.I grew up in a pretty sheltered Christian home taking care of mom. An only child. I didn't smoke. I didn't drink. I was in a caregiver role really. Then at 18, maybe no surprise, woke up one day and said, Now it's my turn. Now it's my turn to move to New York City and to do all the things I wasn't allowed to do. Now it's my turn to take care of myself. I joined a rock band which was a terrible idea because we broke up a couple of months later because we all hated each other.But I found that there was this unique profession in New York City called a night club promoter. And if you could get the beautiful people into the right clubs you could make a lot of money drinking for a living. I was 19 years old, a couple of years before I was even legally allowed in these nightclubs, I started throwing fashion parties and music parties, and pulling crowds of people together, doing deals with the clubs. I thought this was the greatest life ever. I mean I was chasing girls. I was chasing fashion week around. I was chasing the cars and the watches and all these things that I thought would bring fulfillment and happiness.The next thing I know 10 years is over. I'm 28 years old. I've worked at 40 different clubs in New York City over a decade. And my life is terrible. I have a cocaine problem. I have an Ecstasy and MDMA problem. I've got a serious drinking problem. I've smoked two to three packs of Marlboro reds for ten years, so I have a coughing problem. Gambling. Strip clubs. Pornography addiction. I mean, you name it, every vice that you might imagine would come with the territory had found its way to me and I'd taken it on.I had this really extreme contrast of a life that looked great on the outside. Going to beautiful dinners with fashion models at 10:00, and going to the club at 12:00. So then this life that was really rotting on the inside. Often I wouldn't go to bed until 12:00 or 1:00 or 2:00PM the next day, taking sleeping pills to try to come down off a high.I had some health issues. I read about this in the book. One day half my body goes numb. Maybe to a listener, no freaking wonder. But I go see doctors as you would and get the MRIs and the CT scans and the EKGs, and they can't find anything wrong with me. And I just really have a moment where I'm faced with my mortality. I realize, Boy I've made a mess of my life, and if I continue down this path I'm leaving the most meaningless legacy that a person could leave. I drink for a living. I get others wasted for a living. I'm doing nothing to serve others. I'm doing nothing to serve humanity.And I also realized I'd come so far from the foundation of spirituality and morality of my youth. And I wanted to come home. I wanted to find my way back to that. So that was 28, and one day I decide I'm going to leave night life and I ask myself the question, What would the opposite of my hedonistic, disgusting, sycophantic life look like? I thought, Well, serving others on a humanitarian adventure. I'm going to go do that. I'm going to go serve people without being paid, and I thought it'd be cool to go to Africa and do that.I found out this was very difficult when you're a nightclub promoter that gets people drunk for a living, because serious credible humanitarian organizations aren't exactly interested in taking you on. So I got denied by 10 or so famous organizations that everybody would have heard of.F Geyrhalter: To do volunteer work, which is pretty amazing.S Harrison: Yeah. I didn't even want to be paid.F Geyrhalter: We don't want your free work.S Harrison: Right. But I looked toxic on paper, right? So finally one organization said, Hey look, Scott, if you're willing to go and live in post-war Liberia, West Africa, and if you're willing to pay us $500 a month you can join our mission and you can be our photojournalist. I'd actually gotten a degree at New York University in journalism and communications just because it was the easiest degree I thought I could get. I was a C-minus student. Never even say the diploma. I just sent it straight to my dad because I felt like I owed it to him for saving up.So I on paper was technically qualified to do this job or this role. And I said, Great. I've got some cameras. I can write and I can't wait to see what amazing humanitarian work you're doing and how you people are, I'm sure, saving the world. So it happened very quickly, Fabian. I would up a couple of weeks later in West Africa embedded as a photojournalist with a group of humanitarian doctors and surgeons who would operate on people who had no access to medical care from a giant 522 foot hospital ship.The ship would sail up and down the coast of Africa bringing the best doctors and surgeons to the people who needed medical care. Thousands and thousands of people would turn up, and we would help as many people as we could. My third day in Africa, my third day on this mission, I was faced with the reality that there was so much more need than we could handle. 5000 sick patients turned up for 1500 available medical slots and we wound up sending 3500 people home.I would up just falling in love with the work of these doctors. Their heart, the purpose behind it. I had an email list of 15,000 people. So I had in a way a little bit of a built-in audience. Now granted these people had been coming to parties at the [inaudible 00:09:47] for Vogue or Cosmopolitan magazine for years. But I was able to tell them the stories of these patients of these amazing doctors. I learned that the same gift for promoting nightclubs, the same maybe skill that could get people excited about spending $20 on a vodka soda, could also be used to tell more redemptive, important stories, and also be used to raise money.I wound up doing a year there. That turned into a second year. And in the second year that I was back in West Africa, in Liberia, I saw the water that people were drinking in the rural remote areas. As I traveled around the country I just couldn't believe that there was no clean water. People were drinking from swamps. They were drinking from ground ponds, from viscous rivers. I learned that half of the country was drinking bad water, and half the disease in the country was because of that bad water.So I really started evolving into what I was interested in. If you'd asked me in the first year it would have been surgeries and medical procedures. If you'd asked me in the second year it would have been, Hey we need to get people water so that they're not sick in the first place. Let's get to the root cause of this, not just treat the symptoms.So all in, it was two years. It was a life changing, extraordinary experience. I came back to New York City at 30 with a completely new lease on life, a new purpose. I'd shed the vices. I quit smoking before I joined the mission. I quit drinking. I quit drugs and swore off porn and all that stuff obviously. I just wanted to change everything about my life. And now I had my issue. I wanted to help see if I could bring clean drinking water to people around the world that needed it.F Geyrhalter: And what was that one big breakthrough moment where you knew that this is not going to be a small non-profit? This is actually turning into a brand with a huge following, and it's going to affect millions of people. When was that moment when you knew now we're going over that curve, you know?S Harrison: You know I think I was pretty clear early on about the importance of branding to our success or to any sort of scale. So, okay, the different between mission and vision for us. So the mission was going to be let's bring clean drinking water to every person on the planet, and we'll know that we've achieved our mission when there are zero people left dying of bad water. Zero children dying in their mom's arms because they had to drink from a swamp. Zero women being attacked by hyenas, or lions, or crocodiles at the water source. So that's the mission.However, I had the advantage of being 30. The term social entrepreneur wasn't invented yet. And I really didn't know any better. I was just hanging out with everyday people who worked at the Sephora store. Or they worked at MTV. Or they worked at Chase Bank. And I realized that most people that I talked to didn't trust charities. They didn't trust the system. I learned that 42% of Americans said they don't trust charities, and 70% of Americans ... This is a more recent poll by NYU… 70% of Americans said, We believe charities waste our money when we donate.So I thought, this is actually the bigger opportunity. The vision for this thing is going to be reimagine, reinvent charity. How a charity should think and feel and act. How a charity should connect and serve its supporters. So we had a mission but then the vision would be this bigger thing that we did, and it would require effectively rebranding charity to take the cynical, skeptical, disenchanted people and say, Hey take another look. We're doing something very, very different here. We think we're actually speaking to your objections and the reasons why you're not giving. So "charity:" kind of on the left side being the vision and then "water" being the mission.F Geyrhalter: Right. And how did that come together? So when you instill trust in people and you have to change the stigma around charities not being trustworthy and how money goes to salaries, how did your business model, for instance, address this?S Harrison: Yeah. The biggest problem people had was they don't know where their money goes. I would just hear a version of that time and time again. You know, I give to a charity. How much is actually going to reach the people that need it? Is any of it going to reach the people? And I thought, Well, what if we could make a promise that 100% of the money would reach the people that need it.F Geyrhalter: Which is crazy.S Harrison: Which is crazy.F Geyrhalter: Right, yeah.S Harrison: And it really, on face value, it's a really dumb idea. Because if every donation goes straight to, in our case building water projects around the world, well then how would you ever pay for your own salary? Or your team's salary? Or your office costs? So I deeply believed that I could find a very small group of people and get them excited about that, about paying for the unsexy overhead costs, if they knew, again, that they were opting in to pay for this and if we were able to run a really efficient organization.So I literally opened up two bank accounts with different numbers 13 years ago. And said, 100% of the public's money is only going to go in this bank account and it's only going to build water projects, that we are going to prove. We're going to use photos and GPS and show satellite images. We're going to put trackers on the drilling rigs so people can just feel so connected to 100% of that money.And the other bank account, I'm going to go to entrepreneurs and business leaders and say, Hey, look, we have overhead costs, do you mind covering those? Because I can get you a great return on that investment and you're going to help me build a movement of clean water and restore people's faith in charity.So that was idea #1. The second idea was really just proof and finding ways to connect donors to the impact of their donation. So if a six year old girl gave $8.15 could we track that $8.15 to a village in Malawi and show here a picture of the project that that $8.15 went and supported? Could we even show her the names of the other people who made up the rest of that water project? So proof just became this core pillar.The third was really building an epic brand. You know 13 years ago if we were doing this podcast I would have told you that branding was going to be key to our success. And I would have quoted from the New York Times, a writer named Nick Kristof, who said that toothpaste is peddled with far more sophistication than all the world's life-saving causes.F Geyrhalter: I can see that. Yeah.S Harrison: I thought it's true and it's broke, and right? Colgate and Crest are better marketers. Doritos can spend hundreds of millions of dollars. Junk food companies, literally killing us and our children. But yet the most empowerful life saving causes on the planet often have anemic brands. In fact, there's almost a poverty mentality. You know if our brand looks too good maybe people won't want to give us money.F Geyrhalter: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.S Harrison: So you saw a lot of beige out there in the sector. You know dropped panel ceilings, florescent lights, cubby holes with the fuzzy linings on them. And I thought, man, the brands that we all look up to, the epic brands, the Nikes, the Virgins, the Apples, the Teslas, these are imaginative, inspiring brands. These are brands that don't use shame and guilt to peddle their wares. These are brands that try to call forth greatness and innovation and beauty. And I just didn't see that in charities. I saw charities trying to make people feel really bad about how much money they had and then guilting and shaming them into giving.While that may work in a short term for fundraising, it's not how you build a brand. Nobody goes and tells their friends about the charity that made them feel shameful. Or guilty. But you do go tell your friends about something that you're inspired by. So brand was really going to be this third core pillar. And that would look like attention to detail, valuing design, trying to hire the best designers and convince them not to work at Apple but to work at a place like charity: water and use their design skills for good.F Geyrhalter: Unheard of, yeah.S Harrison: And then the last thing was just making sure we worked with local partners to get the work done. I thought for our actual work, providing clean water to people around the world, to be culturally appropriate and for it to be sustainable it had to be led by the people in each of these countries. So by Ethiopians in Ethiopia, and by Kenyans in Kenya, and by Indians in India. Our job would be to create a global movement, energy and awareness around the clean water crisis. Use 100% of the money and track those dollars, but then empower the locals, now in 29 countries, to lead their communities and their countries forward with our capital.F Geyrhalter: Amazing. And obviously you care deeply about design, right? Your organization has been praised for its imaginative approach to branding. I just got a chance to review your 86 page brand guide last night. It states the following. It states: We believe a strong sense of brand can set us apart and amplify every message we send. Very much to what you just said, but when you started you had pretty much zero money. Zero experience, right?, in not only the non-profit space.S Harrison: But we had good taste.F Geyrhalter: That's right. And that can set it apart, right? But you didn't have experience branding necessarily, right? I mean as a nightclub promoter to a certain extent, flyers, stuff like that. But people don't care that much. How did then the visual brand come together? How did you arrive at that really now iconic bright yellow water can logo? What was that journey like?S Harrison: Well, so the first person that I hired was someone to help me go and work on the water projects, go and find the partners and figure out who we should send this money to to get impact. The second person I hired was a creative director, a designer. I later married her, so that's the story for the book.F Geyrhalter: Good choice.S Harrison: And she became my wife. But for a charity to make an early hire as a designer is unheard of. I mean that's normally hire 30. It's hire 60. Sometimes it's hire never. You know you hire some agency and you shop the whole thing out. So I just believed that brand would need to be the core of this thing, and it should be the second person.So when I hired Vik, she was working at an ad agency. She was working on Toyota campaigns and Clinique and she hated it. Her agency's motto was Create Desire, and it was basically sell people more things that they don't even want, certainly don't need, and then we make our clients rich. So she had come across charity: water. I'd done this outdoor exhibition in New York City where I put dirty water from New York City ponds and rivers into big plexi tanks and I showed people what it would look like if we had to drink the same water that people were drinking around the world.F Geyrhalter: That was a great campaign, yeah.S Harrison: Yeah. And she volunteered at that, and at the end she said, Hey, I'm a designer. Can I be useful? I'm like, Absolutely. Can you show up tomorrow? And she was an animator. She was a graphic designer. She wound up teaching herself how to shoot, edit video. And just really the all in one designer, then VP of Creative later. So it was really the three of us at the beginning kind of concepting these campaigns. How do we raise awareness? How do we get people to think differently about water?So I think it was just valuing that really early on, and then she wound up staying with the work for nine years and building up an amazing team and an amazing creative culture. You know, it's interesting. My wife, Viktoria, left a couple of years ago. She's now a brand consultant and starting her own business just trying to teach brand to other startups and other non-profits.She walked in the office the other day. There's 100 people here and we have a stunning 35,000 square foot office in Tribeca, New York and there's huge 14 foot light boxes and donated TV screens with images and with video loops. She walked in and was kind of like, Oh my gosh I don't know a lot of the people anymore. And the design looks even better than I ever remember it. And I'm like, Yeah, that's the testament to the culture. We posted a job for graphic designer at charity: water. I think we had 480 people apply at a non-profit. So that's really the culture.So it was valued at the top. It still is. I'm still pixel pushing every once in a while. I'll go over and I'll change a color or complain about a font. But I think that's the difference because a lot of non-profits are run by academics. Or they're run in a much more institutional way that doesn't value the creativity and the aesthetic.So it was two things. It was having the good taste. I couldn't do it myself. And then hiring and then putting the money in that direction for years that's helped. The jerry can you asked about. I absolutely resisted that. I didn't like the yellow jerry can. I didn't think anybody would know what it meant. And Vik always saw it as our Nike swoosh symbol. You know this is the symbol for water throughout so many countries around the world. The jerry can is not going away. And we want the water in every single jerry can in the world to be clean water. You know, it's the yellow can. I argued it for maybe a year.F Geyrhalter: Oh, wow. Persistent.S Harrison: And in the vein of my wife, typically right. And it turned out that she was. It's been a distinctive mark for us.F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. It's a little bit like the name where it feels at first a little generic, and then you can own it. And you own the entire history that's behind that simple image. Right?S Harrison: It really is. I mean I laugh about that. Right? It's a charity that helps people get water. I mean at least you know what we do.F Geyrhalter: So let's talk about that. Let's talk about that, because I wonder was it intentionally picked to allow for an extension into anything else than water at some point?S Harrison: Yeah. So that's why the core. So charity: would be the core entity, i.e. the vision. This effort to bring in new donors, to inspire generosity, to speak to cynicism around charity. Right? Build this huge community of givers who wanted to help people, help end suffering around the world. And then water would be the first initiative. Right? We were going to do that. We were going to live out the vision through the mission.F Geyrhalter: How long could it take, right? A couple of years then we should be done with water.F Geyrhalter: Check.S Harrison: I thought the next year I was going to imitate Richard Branson and I was going to launch charity: educaton, charity: health, charity: malaria, charity: justice, charity: shelter.F Geyrhalter: Well, I'm glad you didn't. We're all glad you didn't.S Harrison: I actually registered a bunch of domain names. I think I still own charity:education.com.F Geyrhalter: Because all the ones you haven't registered, they will be registered by the time that the podcast airs I'm sure.S Harrison: Yeah. Yeah.F Geyrhalter: They're going to sell it to you for millions of dollars, Scott. That's what they're going to do.S Harrison: Exactly. Exactly. So that was the idea at the beginning. And then as it happens, first of all you realize how difficult it is to do one thing well. Also, by the way, Fabian, there are 663 million human beings without clean water. So we just passed through 10 million that we've helped. So that's 10 million of 663 million. So 1/66th of the problem, or 1.5%. So we're at the very beginning of this journey and our impact we hope.And the beauty is as we got deeper into our first mission, our first initiative, charity: water, we learned that water impacted just about every other thing we were interested in doing. It impacted women and girls and gender equality. It is only the women and the girls that are the ones getting the water. It radically impacts health. 50% of the disease throughout the developing world, caused by bad water and lack of sanitation. It dramatically improved education as we could bring clean water and sanitation to the one in three schools worldwide that don't have clean water. I mean imagine sending your child to a school with no clean water and no toilet. Imagine sending your teenage girl to that school. Well, she doesn't go four or five days a month to a school without water and toilets and falls behind in her studies.So water became like this onion that the deeper we understood the importance and significance, the more we realized we were accomplishing so many other things. We were ending so many other aspects of human suffering by doing the one thing well. So 13 years later there's still no plan to brand extend. But, you know, as generic as the name is I think we've been able to own it through campaigns and through design and through, I mean gosh, we've probably made 800 to 1000 videos in house over that last decade or so.F Geyrhalter: I feel like I watched 100 of those yesterday. You get sucked into it.S Harrison: Some of the old ones are a little painful.F Geyrhalter: I don't think my Google search got me that far. So it's all good. Let's talk about storytelling a little bit more. I mean, it's key in the non-profit world. We talked about that most lead by using tools of shame and guilt. But hopeful storytelling in contrast has always been a tremendously important aspect of charity: water. And where other people use statistics, which are a far contrast to personal stories which lead to empathy more naturally, you guys you tell unbelievably sophisticated and personal stories. I heard one of those. I think it was on MentorBox, of giving a drilling rig a Twitter account and mounting it with cameras to tell its story while raising funds for it. And things did not always go quite as planned with the rig's journey. But you still shared those hiccups or failures with your tribe. Can you tell us that story, and perhaps how other brands can learn from the transparent way that charity: water tells its stories?S Harrison: Yeah, gosh, I feel like I've got to be careful not to use any of the buzz words.F Geyrhalter: It's a branding podcast. Go for it.S Harrison: For authenticity.F Geyrhalter: I did empathy. It's open. The door's open.S Harrison: Yeah. I mean I think if you're trying to solve for trust people just want to know how things really are out there. And if you present a picture of everything works all the time, and everything always goes well, well, people just know that's not how life works. That's not how any company works. That's not how any organization works. I think over 13 years we've just been honest and vulnerable about some of our challenges, whether they're broken wells out there. Whether it's drilling wells and not being able to serve communities like you mentioned.So in that specific story, we had crowd funded a well deep in the Central African Republic for a tribe of Bayaka Pygmies. This is a marginalized tribe. It's an oppressed group of people. They never had clean water before. In fact, the well driller that we were working with had gone in three times before and failed. A couple by hand, not finding water deep enough. Once with a small rig. He was sure that this time with the proper equipment, with a million dollar drilling rig and our money, he would be able to go and succeed.And we really believed him. We got thousands of people to learn about the Bayaka tribe, about their heroism, and their courage, and how they take care of their kids, and what the families are like. Just how extraordinary these people are. And we asked people to give money and said, Hey, please help. We promised that if we raised enough money to help them, then we would fly back and we would drill the well live via satellite so people could see the payoff. And what happened was we got another dry well. We tried, and we tried, and we tried for a couple of days. And we just broadcast the failure. We didn't sugarcoat it. It wasn't a happy ending. We wound up pulling away, leaving the village no better off than we found them. And perhaps worse because we'd raised a sense of hope. And we'd lit about $15,000 on fire in front of our supporters.But it was one of the most popular videos we ever shared because it was true. We've all been in car accidents. We've all maybe made a bad investment or a bad decision. And this wasn't for the lack of trying. This was actually a tenacity and a courage that was to be commended by our local partner in the effort of never giving up on these people, of never giving up on this tribe. But this time didn't work and all this money was lost.I just remember the emails coming in. It was sympathy but it was more respect, like, wow, we respect you guys for just being honest with us, for letting us know how hard it is out there to do what you're trying to do, by not sugarcoating it. And we will continue to give to charity: water. We know it didn't work this time, but if you want to go back we're in it again. And we actually did go back a year later, and we were able to finally successfully drill for that community in Central Africa with even more and different equipment. And then send that video around of eventual success. But I think just being willing to live with the reality of the moment and to share that built a lot of community.F Geyrhalter: And that's radical transparency, right?, which kind of by now even became a little bit a buzzword. But for you guys that is something that is really entrenched in how you actually run.S Harrison: Yeah. I was saying that 13 years ago on stage and to anybody that would listen. Radical transparency. Hyper transparency. I mean I just believe that the great businesses and certainly the great non-profits in the world, they will thrive on being honest and having integrity, on sharing their successes, sharing their challenges, and also sharing their failures.F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. And it's also important to you share the impact any specific group investing into your organization has, right?, if it goes right or wrong, but just to show what is happening. So data plays a huge part in charity: water. I watched your keynote from Inbound last year and you promised to share the impact that specific audience, if they would donate, right?, the impact that they would have on communities after five years.Now the way that I actually first learned about charity: water was the campaign you did together with Depeche Mode during their Delta Machine tour. Obviously a huge audience around the world. I believe a total of two million people attended once that tour was over. And the partnership continued in the Spirit tour a few years back. Did you have a system in place back then to track how much, let's say, the Copenhagen audience contributed versus the Paris audience? Or how many wells were built based on this one tour?S Harrison: Yeah, the Depeche Mode money was actually raised primarily through-F Geyrhalter: The watch, right?S Harrison: ... a partnership with Hublot. Yeah. A partnership with Hublot. However, they did have a campaign online and I remember all the band members donated their birthday. The fans were able to contribute to their birthdays.F Geyrhalter: Talk about that a little bit. Talk about that initiative because that's something most people are probably not familiar with, and it's such a great ... We're getting sidetracked but let's go there for a second.S Harrison: It was a simple idea. Look, it was a simple idea. We have birthdays every year. Our birthdays are typically about us, celebrating ourselves. We get gifts often that we don't want or need. We throw ourselves parties. Often other people throw parties for us that we don't necessarily even enjoy. And I thought, What if we could reclaim the birthday as a moment of generosity? And what if we could make our birthdays about others, and involve our friends, and our family, and our community in significant change around the world?I said, Look, here's this sticky marketing idea. Let's turn them into fundraisers and let's have people ask for their age in dollars, or pounds, or euros. So I tried this by doing my 32nd birthday. I said, Hey, if you've got 32 dollars please donate 32 dollars for my 32nd birthday. 100% of the money will go help clean water and we'll prove exactly where every dollar goes.To my surprise, my goal was $32,000 which was ambitious, but this idea spread and I ended up raising $59,000. Then a seven year old kid in Texas took the idea and he said, I'm turning seven and I want $7.00 donations for my birthday. He started knocking on doors, telling the story, talking about water. Wound up raising $22,000. A seven year old kid. We had 80 nine year olds donate for their birthday, asking for $89. It was kind of a beautiful multi-layered idea because so many kids around the world are dying before they reach their fifth birthday because they've had dirty water.We realized that as we donated our birthdays, people could actually have more birthdays. They could live longer. They could live healthier. They could thrive with clean water. And our friends don't want to get us crap anyway. You know, we don't want to get our friends an iTunes gift card, or a wallet, or a handbag.F Geyrhalter: Especially the iTunes gift card.S Harrison: Or scarves. Or socks. Or whatever, right? So people would much rather give to a cause that you care about. So this movement has helped us now get over two million people clean water around the world. Over 100,000 people have donated their birthdays. They've raised over 70 million dollars. In fact, if anyone is just interested in learning more you can just go to charitywater.org/birthdays. Even if your birthday is 13 days from now or 11 months from now, you can learn more. You can pledge. And we make it so easy. I've done eight birthdays now. My son did his first birthday when he was one, and people just love it. They love being able to see the impact of seeing something that was really focused on us turned to help others. Depeche Mode donated their birthdays. Will Smith donated his birthday. Kristen Bell donated her birthday. Tony Hawk. The founders of Twitter and Spotify and people at Apple. It's been amazing. Everyday people. Kids donating their birthdays to huge executives. It's helped us raise a lot of awareness and raise a lot of money.F Geyrhalter: And it's one of the reasons why you're one of the 10 most innovative people in business today, most creative people in business. It's those little ideas that come so quickly and afterwards they have such an impact. As we are coming slowly to an end here, I need to ask you this one question. What is one word that can describe your brand? So I know you believe in simplicity. It's important for the organization. This is brand simplicity at its core. Everything charity: water does. Everything it stands for all condensed into that one word that I call your Brand DNA. Can you think of that one word?S Harrison: Yeah, yeah. Inspired.F Geyrhalter: Great.S Harrison: We are trying to inspire people. We are inspired by the stories of courage and heroism. We're inspired by our local partners. We're inspired by our volunteers. We're inspired by the beneficiaries out there, the women that are walking for water, that are providing for their families under dire circumstances. We're inspired by our donors. We're inspired by our team members that we get to work with. It's my favorite word for the brand, and hopefully we're able to continue inspiring others to join us.F Geyrhalter: And I think you just have. In your book you state, and you stated this earlier in the podcast too, that good branding is key to charity: water's success. What does branding mean to you?S Harrison: I mean, gosh, there's so many definitions. I think branding is the perception. It's how people think of us. Does charity: water bring a smile to their face? Do they trust us? Do they believe that we are a bunch of hard-working, intelligent, passionate people that are doing this for the right reasons? That are trying to use our time, and our talents, and our money in the service of others? In the service of clean water? It's all of these little, little ideas and moments and brushes with a person at charity: water, or the brand, or a video, or an image, or a quote, that adds up to the brand. I think, I guess branding is the things that we do to not protect that but really move it forward. To continue inspiring. To continue designing with excellence and integrity. To continue telling stories that move people towards a greater generosity, and compassion, and a better version of themselves.F Geyrhalter: It's the sum of it all. Absolutely. I want to urge everyone to pick up a copy of Scott's book entitled Thirst. Proceeds go to charity: water.S Harrison: That's right. Yep. I don't make a penny.F Geyrhalter: You will do yourself a favor just to unlock the engaging digital component of the book, which is so cool. I got so sucked into this yesterday. It's a wonderfully curated and displayed content. But Scott, what do you want listeners do to help your cause? Where else would you want them to go to be part of the change?S Harrison: So there's a video that we made as we turned 10. It's called The Spring. It's really our story. It's an exercise in storytelling and branding. It's now gotten over 20 million views across platforms. But people could watch that. They could learn about The Spring, which is this new community we're building now across 110 countries of people who are showing up for clean water every month, in the same way that they might show up for Netflix or Spotify or Apple Music.So it's a community called The Spring and you could share the film. You could watch the film. You could join us in The Spring. Or you could just post it. So many people have learned about charity: water coming across a video, specifically this video. So that's at ... It's pretty easy to remember. It's just charitywater.org/thespring.F Geyrhalter: We'll link out to that.S Harrison: Or even thespring.com. So I'd say learn a little more. I think it's one thing to hear me talk about it. It's another to see the images, to see the video of people suffering and the need. But also the amazing relief. You get to see wells being drilled. You get to see people drinking clean water the very first time in their life. I would say it's an inspiring video, I think. So we'd love your help. Watch it. Maybe join us in The Spring, and then just help us share it. Because so many of your friends don't know about this issue, have never heard about us. And this is how we've grown really, through word of mouth.F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. Thank you, Scott, from the bottom of my heart. I know you need to go. Thanks for taking the time during your hectic schedule and for sharing your stories and advice with our listeners. I'm forever grateful for the time you spend with us and for the positivity, the inspiration, and the hope you provide through charity: water.S Harrison: Of course. Well, listen, come visit in New York City. I'd love to show you around headquarters, and thanks so much for just investing time to learn about us and doing your research. I really appreciate it.F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. Well, my pleasure. And thanks to everyone for listening, and please support this podcast so we can turn advertising free and solely listener supported. Just like Yacoub Yassin from Cairo, Egypt, Chris Wertz from New Orleans, Abda from Karlsdorf-Neuthard in Germany, Devroni Liasoi Lumandan from Sabah, Malaysia, Pablo Valles (who I do not know where he’s from), Rod from Fort Mill in South Carolina and last but not least, and this is just too awesome, Viktoria Harrison from NYC whose husband you just listened to for the past 45 minutes, and who has been integral in the creation of the Charity: water brand. Wow. This is amazing, and what a truly international group. All of these new subscribers joined on the Brandster level and are now part of my monthly group calls. Join them by heading over to Patreon.com/hittingthemark to show your support. And please leave a quick rating and review wherever you listen to the show. Hitting the Mark is currently brought to you by Finien, a brand consultancy creating strategic verbal and visual brand clarity. You can learn more at finien.com. The Hitting the Mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness Won. And I will see you next time when we once again will be Hitting the Mark.

If you look at a cannabis product by Beboe you would not think of weed, rather of art, design and fashion. This was derived through great brand thinking and design. Clement Kwan has reached great heights of success yet decided to follow his heart and, together with Co-Founder Scott Campbell, launched a luxury brand in a segment that has not seen much sophistication before. Today, the Beboe brand has its own store within Barney's in Beverly Hills and has also carved out its own clientele. Listening to Clement's fascinating story from growing weed in college to make tuition, to becoming an M&A investment banker in Silicon Valley, to holding the president of Net-a-Porter position and learning how he yet turned to where his heart told him to go is inspiring on many levels. But it is also an episode about the sheer power of great design, honest storytelling and how having a deep understanding of a particular audience can make any product succeed, even in a market that did not know it was ready for it. ____Full Transcript: F Geyrhalter: Welcome to Hitting The Mark, episode number 20 of Hitting The Mark to be exact. What an inspirational journey it's been for me, and I hope the same holds true for you. I know for a fact that it has been an inspiration for the latest supporters of the podcast, Nathan Cain from Little Rock, Arkansas and Lav all the way from Serbia. Both are monthly supporters on the Brandster level, which means they will partake in my next monthly group call in September, which I'm greatly looking forward to. So thank you Nathan and Lav for your support. And I'd love for you too to turn into a Patreon by clicking the support button on hittingthemarkpodcast.com, so we can try to keep this show advertising-free and community-supported. For this special 20th episode, I'm thrilled to welcome our first guest from the new green economy. Indeed, we are talking THC and CBD, a space that has been on a fast rise and one that has been a fertile playground for entrepreneurs with a keen sense for branding. On the forefront of this movement is the bespoke brand Beboe and Co-founder Clement Kwan. Beboe is a lifestyle cannabis brand founded in 2016 which the New York Times has called the Hermes of Marijuana. Beboe includes cannabis vaporizers and edible pastilles and caters to discerning consumers. Beboe merged with Green Thumb Industries in late February of this year, 2019. Kwan started his professional career in tech mergers and acquisitions and transitioned into business development and executive roles across the fashion industry working for companies such as Theory, Diesel, and Dolce & Gabbana. In 2012, Clement joined the YOOX group as President of U.S. Operations. Kwan graduated from UC Berkeley. Welcome to the show, Clement. C Kwan: Thank you very much, Fabian. F Geyrhalter: Let me start off by saying what a great pleasure it is to have an entrepreneur like you on the show who clearly understands and strategically utilizes the power of brand in everything he touches. So without going any further, let's start off with the question of all questions, what does branding mean to someone like you? C Kwan: Having worked in the fashion and luxury world for so many years and having built Beboe with Scott Campbell, branding really is emotion, and it's a incitement of emotion, which is really, I think, fascinating to see. Not to go off into a tangent, when I was at YOOX and running the U.S. operations, I decided to chat with and communicate with our 10 largest consumers. These are people who spend at least $250,000 per year online. And I decided to call and/or have tea with them. And what I realized was one lady in particular, who spent exactly $274,000 per year, told me that she doesn't drink. She doesn't do drugs. What she does is shop online as it makes her happy. So from that moment on, I really realized that a brand incites emotion, and any good brand incites emotion either through aesthetics, story, or just some X factor that you can't really describe. So not to get really hippy-dippy or too Venice on us, but there's just juju involved, and we can attest it to emotion. F Geyrhalter: Totally, no, and I love that story. And sorry for jinxing the YOOX name. I read the story behind the name YOOX, so I figured maybe it's just the letters, but it's not Y-O-O-X, it's YOOX. This was a great way of describing branding. It really comes down to emotion. And it's interesting how you say it's something that you really can't touch. It's something that you feel, and it's really hard to talk about how it's being derived. And that is one of the reasons why I love doing this podcast, to kind of talk to different people that have done it successfully and to get a little bit more out of them of how they actually did derive it with their companies. So let's back up a little bit. I read in Forbes that you grew pot to get through college, so that's on the air now, but it's also been in Forbes, so it's okay. That was back in Berkeley when you were a student. And then you pivoted into a fashion career at Diesel and Dolce Gabbana. It seems like Beboe is the direct result of equal parts fashion, design, branding, and cannabis. How did Beboe start? C Kwan: So when I was at Berkeley, I was actually studying corporate finance and decided to grow weed just because I really didn't have any money for tuition. So I met a really nice hippie who decided to teach me how to grow marijuana. I already loved gardening and have a green thumb, and this really presented itself as a wonderful opportunity to not only fulfill a passion but also to make money, which I needed. So I did that for about three and a half years, and then I actually became a tech M&A investment banker in the Silicon Valley from 2000 to 2001, which basically made me stop growing marijuana. But I have always had a passion for it, and I vowed to myself in 2000 when I stopped, that I would get back into it in one way, shape, or form. So after the tech market exploded, I decided to move to New York in late 2001, beginning of 2002, to get into the fashion world because I was raised by a single mother. My single mother took me shopping very, very frequently and asked me really insane questions like, "Does this color look good on me? What looks good on me? Does this fit well," et cetera, et cetera. So I sort of fell in love with fashion just because I was bonding with my mother. So tech market exploded, moved to New York and then first job was at Theory. Then went to Diesel. I helped do a repositioning of the brand for America. Then moved to Milan for seven years and took the license back for D&G or Dolce & Gabbana. And then I became the president of YOOX NET-A-PORTER, the biggest online luxury retailer on a global basis. So long story short, I had children in 2014, and I basically had to look myself in the mirror. Having done what I've done in both banking and fashion, I knew that my passion was marijuana. So after having a child, I was thinking to myself, "If my son asked me, 'What should I do when I grow up'," the wonderful romantic answer is, follow your passion. And I looked at myself in the mirror, and I'm like, "Wow, that's a wonderful thing to say, but if you don't do it, it's very disingenuous to say." So at that point, this is late 2014, I decided to really embrace that passion, not be ashamed of it. And sort of, the universe opened itself up. And I met Scott Campbell through Tom Kartsotis who founded Shinola and Fossil. We bonded over our love for marijuana, and then we decided to embark on a journey called Beboe. We didn't quite know what it was, but we did know that we wanted to build something that was aspirational, something more aesthetically pleasing, something lower dose. And we wanted to have two, I guess, different form factors, which is inhalable and ingestible, and we just incubated the idea. And that's literally the genesis of Beboe. It wasn't to say, "Let's build a luxury brand. Let's target women." We just have a genuine love for the plant and just so happened to have great experience building luxury brands and businesses. Scott Campbell has done a lot of work with Marc Jacobs, Mr. Arnault, Hennessy, all the brands in the LVMH stable. So we both come from that sort of pedigree and wanted to build something that was considerate, beautiful, and really for ourselves. So that's a very long answer to your question. F Geyrhalter: No, that's beautiful. And Scott, who's also a tattoo artist, right, and a tattoo artist of a certain pedigree. I think he tattooed everyone from Jennifer Aniston to Robert Downey, Jr. so very, very high end tattoo artist. But he created the intricate patterns that became such an important part of the brand language of Beboe. But I assume that at some point in that journey, you must've engaged a packaging design and branding firm, right? Can you walk us through that process a little bit? When did you start to actively invest in branding with the startup? C Kwan: We did everything in-house. F Geyrhalter: That's amazing. C Kwan: Scott has always assembled a wonderful internal team of packaging people, and he's also very hands on. So everything that is Beboe was done in-house. F Geyrhalter: Because you started with a team, right? C Kwan: We started with consultants and just friends. So yeah, we didn't have any focus groups. We didn't have any agencies. We didn't have anything really. We did everything internally. F Geyrhalter: And that's why it is authentic. And because of your combined background, again, the parts of design, fashion, brand, right, and cannabis, it feels like it is a brand that can happen intrinsically, not so with a lot of other founders who don't have any of that brand or design kind of background. Where did the brand name come from? C Kwan: Beboe is actually Scott's grandmother's name. So when we were in the course of thinking of a name for our company, we had so many different ideas and suggestions. And ultimately, what we were trying to do with Beboe is inject a little bit of fun, sexiness, and levity into the industry that was male dominated, very juvenile, very traditional, stereotypical stoner. So Scott told me a story about his grandmother, Be Boe, and how his mother, when he was from the ages of seven to 14, she battled cancer. And every week, the grandmother would come, Be Boe, and bring brownies, one, sort of, set for Scott and his sister and the other set for his mother. And during this entire time, he had no idea his mother was battling cancer because Be Boe injected levity into a very shitty situation because she was making marijuana brownies for his mother and normal brownies for Scott and his sister. So that story unto itself was both inspirational because she literally injected levity, fun, everything into really a bad situation. And we were like, "Wow, we should do the same with Beboe." Not that grave, but let's have Beboe inject a bit of sexiness, fun, and levity into the marijuana industry. And that's where Beboe came from. F Geyrhalter: And change the idea of what the industry stands for and who is actually the user of today's cannabis products, right? With that one simple story, which is so emotional, talking about emotions, right, you captured a lot of the spirit of the brand. I really, really like it. I love that you actually talk about this on your website as well. C Kwan: Fabian, sorry to interrupt, going back to the first question about what a brand is, this is what a brand is. So we have a genuine passion for marijuana, growing it, selling it, I mean, pretty much everything, right? There's Be Boe, and that's very emotional story of a grandmother, a person really just making a bad situation wonderful or very, very, tolerable, and then our experience. So I think it's this emotion and this sort of genuine passion that is injected into Beboe, and I think that's what makes a brand a brand. It's our personality. It's us. We couldn't even script it, right? We can't do a focus group. It's truly an extension of us.And he's covered in tattoos. I'm covered in tattoos, but yet Beboe is loved by women and really aspirational, fancy women. And we're like, "Wow, how did that happen?" But it comes back to, I was raised by a single mother. Scott had a very good relationship with his mother and grandmother. So there's a strong female presence and impression on us. F Geyrhalter: It's one layer after another, right? You keep adding these layers to the brand that are all authentic, that are all part of what you're trying to create. And then at some point, all of these layers together, this beautiful cake, right, and everyone can't resist, right? So it's kind of this idea of just adding one little piece at a time. Like you said, you can't script it. Even when I work with entrepreneurs who don't have this intrinsic idea of what the brand needs to be, they really know what they want their product to be, but they don't know what their brand needs to be. And I really, all I do is I just derive it out of them too. It's like, I can't create a story for them. I can just help tell their story in a better way and try to create authenticity that is already inside of them but just kind of get it out of them. It's really therapy. I mean, that's pretty much what it is. You mentioned you were also president of NET-A-PORTER, which you just don't even include in your bio because of everything you accomplished in your life. So congratulations, that's a pretty, pretty big deal, and it feels only natural to talk about another high end fashion powerhouse. So let's talk Barneys for a minute here. I used to be a Barneys fanatic, then I married a smart woman, and now I'm more of a Barneys three times a year kind of guy. But what a fabulous and inspiring institution Barney has always been to me and to most designers around the world. And before we talk about your current Beboe collaboration with Barneys, so totally between you and me and whoever's listening, what do you make of the Barneys bankruptcy? I mean, right after Dean & DeLuca, you mentioned you lived in New York for awhile, what is going on in the world of high end shopping? C Kwan: I don't even think it's just Barneys. It's pretty much the industry as a whole. Going back 10 years, there's a lot of money in the industry and not from a consumer perspective. It's from the institutional investors where private equity pours a lot of money into the industry, an industry that at certain echelons is very non-democratic. So all your luxury brands are now getting private equity money. Before the money came in, every distribution was very selective. It's about scarcity. It's about the consumer experience physically in the store. And post-money, obviously private equity has a horizon, right, three years, three, four years, and then exit. So a lot of pressure has been put in on the industry to get sales, make profits. But this is sort of the price of scarcity and distribution. So if you walk into any store, if you go onto any website, just look at the assortment of products on the sites or on the floor. It's the same thing. So it's because every brand is now selling to every store. Before it was, "Okay, I'm going to sell to Colette, Corso Como. I'm going to sell to a one department store in the U.K., one department store in America," and now, everything is everywhere, and it's accessible 24 hours a day, seven days a week on social media channels. And I think that the day of reckoning is sort of coming where I think there's too much accessibility, and I think there's going to be a pull back. And I think for whatever reason, Barney is going through another transformation or evolution, and then you're going to start seeing many others doing the same thing. So Barneys being a leader, taking the bandaid off and doing what they need to do. And a lot of it is predicated on rent hikes, especially on Madison Avenue. But I think it's a good idea for every retailer to look at what works, what doesn't, and really look for that point of view again, both online and offline. So why are people shopping on one site or store versus the other? Before Zara, Colette had a very distinctive point of view. Sozzani has a very distinctive point of view in Corso Como. And then you have, your Bergdorf Goodman has a very distinctive point of view. But I think there needs to be a refinement again, an evolution in the industry. F Geyrhalter: I love how you were able to spin this into something that can be seen as something pretty negative, but it's fertile ground, right? Something can happen, and something needs to happen. And I got my first first idea of that when I worked with Ron Herman of the Fred Segal empire, and then I saw how unique this was, what he was actually creating. And then obviously, it got sold, and now, it's at the airport, and now, it's everywhere, right? And so I think there's something that is happening currently with that accessibility that I totally agree with you. It ruins the pleasure of finding a certain curated shop and having an experience and finding something that you can find anywhere else. There used to be the time where you brought back something from your travels and it's kind of, it doesn't make sense anymore, right? What you get in a museum store in New York, you get in a museum store in Paris but interesting, interesting observation. And your brand has an actual store named The High End, which is a brilliant name by the way, within the physical Barneys Beverly Hills store. I think it's on the fifth floor. And within High End, the store within a store, you can pick up a $60 box of seven pre-rolled joints amongst many other gorgeous products of your brand. How did that amazing collaboration come about, and what did you learn about your first Barneys customers, who I assume would be very different from your customers before? But that's only assumption. And I also wonder, was that the time that you started to pivot the brand to cater mostly towards women? Or like you said before, it was kind of intrinsically that it was catering more towards women, but was that the time where you actually realized, "Oh, my God. Wealthy women love our aesthetic. They love our product." C Kwan: Ever since we launched, just due to the nature of the branding, the aesthetics, the form factor... I mean, it's a rose gold vaporizer. It's more expensive given our experience and background. I mean, if you look at it, Scott and I have sold dresses, purses, to women for a good 12 to 13 years. I think subconsciously, we only know how to market to women, but we just never articulated it other than building something like a Beboe. So we've always captured the very aspirational female consumer, not by design, but just by nature. I don't know. It just organically happened. The tagline for our brand is probably, my wife or my girlfriend loves Beboe. So yeah, we've always had that aspiration of consumer from 25 to 65, and it was predominantly female, and it just happened by chance. So when Barneys came around, it was just a natural fit, not only because they've known us for so long as Scott and Clement in our different iterations, but Scott also has a very dear relationship with Matthew Mazzucca , the creative director of Barneys. And from there, they wanted to do something in cannabis. We had a great idea on how to do it, and then we just had a great meeting of the minds. And eight months later, The High End was born. But it's not very difficult. It wasn't a stretch by any means because that customer that shopped at Barneys was already buying Beboe and/or had a friend that was using Beboe so very natural relationship. F Geyrhalter: On your website, on the Beboe website, at the very, very end, hidden within the about section, you are also offering brand consulting. What does that entail, and who do you work with, and how did it become part of the part of the Beboe brand? C Kwan: It's not something we really focus on too much, but it's there for humanitarian reasons, humanitarian in the sense- F Geyrhalter: Tell me more. C Kwan: Humanitarian for the industry. So we are extremely open people. What we've created wasn't done in a lab. The IP is us. And what we have realized was when we created Beboe four years ago, we created a product that was counter to what was happening in the market. What we realized was, being a grower myself and dabbling in, let's call it the gray market, there's a lot of people in this industry that have paid their dues, that have been in it for 20 years, that have paved the way, that have gone to prison. They're like the OGs of the industry. So what we did was, and I'll make this short, took this product, and I went to these OGs, and I said, "Guys, listen. In order for our industry to move forward, I respect everything that you do because I've done it. But in order for to really grow and evolve, give this product, which is bourgeois, more expensive, lower potency, and you've never seen anything like this, please help us support it and/or just don't hate on it. Because once this new consumer comes into the industry, they're not going to stop at just Beboe. They're going to try other brands, and then they're going to start asking local politicians and the industry as a whole for more information. And this is what's going to drive change." So having said that, we are where we are because they supported us. Now, there's a whole other generation of people and entrepreneurs trying to do what we've done, and instead of not helping, we want to make sure that the people with the right ideas and the right ethos and obviously, good people, are able to succeed because rising tides floats literally all boats. So let's just have consulting out there so that we can help people flesh through ideas, share with them the pain points that we've gone through, and just, let's help evolve this industry in the right way and be a thought leader and a leader as a whole. And that's what consulting is about. F Geyrhalter: As we come slowly to the end here, one of the questions I always love to ask founders is if you can describe your brand in one word, so I call it the brand DNA. So it's one or two words that are all encompassing of the Beboe brand. For instance, for my brand consultancy FINIEN, our brand DNA is clarity. And for Everlane, it would have to be transparency. What is Beboe's brand DNA? C Kwan: Empowered. It's empowered because I think every person who uses it feels empowered. Every woman that works for us is truly empowered. I mean, our entire team is built up of women, and they are the heart and soul of our brand, and it's not by design. So we cater to a female consumer, and we only have females working for us, which is, it's a beautiful thing. So the thing that we always preach is that, do not let an industry drive you. You drive an industry. Whatever problem you have, you have the authority and the initiative to get it done, fix the problem. You are empowered and financially empowered, everything empowered. And I think we just don't say it. It just happens. So yeah, I think even people who use our product feel empowered when they use it. They're able to discreetly use Beboe, and they feel great because they've empowered themselves to get high. It's mommy's little helper, so they're empowered to be better parents. I don't know. People feel empowered when they have our products in their hands, where they work with us, when they interact with us. Yeah, I think that's what we're really the most proud of. F Geyrhalter: It feels very, very right. And also when you look at the packaging, and you read some of these life lessons and wisdoms that are hidden within the packaging, it is about empowerment. Even though you say you don't mention it, you don't spell it out, it is subliminally spelled out throughout your entire brand. Do you have any other brand advice? And you have already given a lot for founders in any space, as a final takeaway, maybe a lesson you may have learned the hard way, something that can just empower, to use the word, fellow entrepreneurs that are not quite at your stage yet. C Kwan: Ultimately, and I think if I had a startup in the fashion world or something that was little bit more traditional, I would have a big fuck up or something like that to share. But I think we have been fortunate enough to build something in the wild, wild West where we charted our own course. I think the biggest lesson I've learned is that kindness goes a long way. And I hope that every entrepreneur that starts something is kind, not only to the people and the partners and the world as a whole, but kind to themselves, kind that there is no right answer to what you're doing. There are sometimes parameters, but you're going to mess up. You're going to definitely mess up. But it's just being kind to yourself and your mental health, your physical body, because ultimately, that's very, very important. F Geyrhalter: And talking about kindness, when I reached out to you, Clement, I read a Forbes, I think it was a two, three page article about Beboe, and I reached out to you completely blindly. I think it was via LinkedIn or maybe I found your email somewhere on the website. And very often I just pretend the emails go out, and I don't hear back. And the more high profile of a publication I read about someone that I invite on the show, the likelihood is slimmer that they actually get back to me. You got back to me saying, "Hey, Fabian. How are you? Sure," period. I think it was something like that. And I'm like, "That is kindness," right? The idea of the first thing you say is how are you, and there's this spirit that comes from you that is, obviously, shows across your entire brand. So really, really appreciate it. Listeners who live in a state where they can legally obtain cannabis, how can they get a taste of Beboe? C Kwan: You can find it in California, in Colorado, at your favorite dispensaries, and/or go to Barneys, and you can find it there. And then soon with a wonderful partner like GTI, we will be expanding into 10 to 11 other states in the course of the next 12 to 18 months. F Geyrhalter: That's amazing. That's fantastic. And thank you, Clement, for your time today. It was such a pleasure, and it was really fascinating to have you on Hitting The Mark. I really appreciate it. C Kwan: Thank you very much, Fabian. F Geyrhalter: And thanks to everyone for listening, and if you enjoy this sponsor-free podcast, please help keep it that way and become a sustaining member by hitting the support button on hittingthemarkpodcast.com or by going to patreon.com/hittingthemark. Our theme music was written and produced by Happiness Won. I will see you next time when we once again will be hitting the mark.

When I heard about a water brand called Liquid Death that comes in tallboys, reminiscent of beer cans, that behaves like a death metal band, that boosts insane (and insanely great) copy and imagery, and on top of it is 100% mountain water from the Austrian alps, I had to reach out to Co-Founder and CEO Mike Cessario to make some sense of it all, to the extent that is possible. By now I assume you have visited the Liquid Death web site and you got a taste of what you are in for. This is a story about a Creative who comes from the advertising and branding world, who spent his career creating brand stories for greats like Netflix and Gary Vee, and found that it was time to create his own story, his own brand. And it had to be authentic, good for the planet and crazy as hell. If you want your head blown (I do have to use some Liquid Death lingo here) and hear about how his idea was crafted, why people go crazy over it and how his waters help kill plastic bottles along the way, all while poking major fun at marketing, and, yes, branding, as a whole, give this episode a listen. If you like what you hear you can grab some Liquid Death waters on Amazon or you can jump back onto the Liquid Death web site and join their Country Club, but you will have to sell them your soul first. True story. ____Full Transcript: Fabian Geyrhalter: Welcome to Hitting The Mark. In our last episode, I talked with creative extraordinaire Michael Lastoria, who after selling his New York based agency to beauty powerhouse Shiseido in 2017, is now co founder of the counterculture pizza chain &pizza. A pizza joint that was named one of the world's 50 most innovative companies the second time in a row by Fast Company. Today we continue that mini series of advertising creatives turned into entrepreneurs using their background to flip the commodity type offerings into sought after cult brands. My guest today is Mike Cessario who founded Liquid Death, the first irreverent bottled water brand that can compete with the cool factor of unhealthy brands from beer to energy drinks. Inspired by the death metal and punk rock culture, Liquid Death takes an extreme approach to marketing in stark contrast to aspirational health and wellness brands. Prior to starting Liquid Death, Mike was an advertising creative director who worked on viral campaigns for clients like Organic Valley and Netflix. Some of his viral hits include Organic Valley's Save the Bros, which if you have not seen it, please head over to youtube right after this podcast and check it out for a good laugh. And he also did teasers for House of Cards, Narcos and the show you have all been binge watching over the past weeks, Stranger Things. Welcome to Hitting The Mark, Mike. M Cessario: Hey, how's it going? F Geyrhalter: Yeah, thanks for making it. So we chatted a little bit before. We're both graduates of Art Center College of Design. I know people in pretty much all of the agencies you worked at. We're both based in LA, yet I learned about you and your water company via the Los Angeles Business Journal, which is a strange way to connect. But when I read about Liquid Death, I knew it would make for a killer episode. See, it's so horribly easy to pull puns over puns with a death-themed brand, mainly because you'd think that those brands are all destined to die before birth. But tell us how you turned into kind of the arrogant bastard brand of water. It's a strange path to take. When did the idea come about? M Cessario: So it's interesting that you bring up arrogant bastard. I think one thing that I've always noticed is craft beer kind of gets to break almost all the rules of branding. And at the same time, it's one of the categories that people are insanely passionate about. Like people who like their craft beers, love their craft beers. You can find craft beers called Skull Crusher IPA or Arrogant Bastard Ale, because they know that there's a huge market for their audience that's at least 21 years old. So they don't have to really like pun-intended, water things down just to kind of please everyone. So there's always just this cool factor with craft beer that I felt was just kind of unmatched with everything else. And then that was sort of the inspiration for kind of the brand and packaging of Liquid Death. I grew up playing in punk rock and heavy metal bands outside of Philadelphia. And that scene is actually where I really got into health, believe it or not. And I think that's a thing that most of mainstream culture has not really seen or realized that in that world of heavy metal and punk rock and all that stuff, there's a lot of people who care a lot about health. We like to say there are probably more vegans at a heavily heavy metal show than a Taylor Swift show. Inside the world of metal and hardcore, there was this little subset called straight edge where they were very vocal about no drinking, no drugs. That's not exactly the market that we built this for. But it's just one example of how a lot of this culture does care about health and has so for 30 years. But you kind of look at the fact that the world is all moving towards healthier. Every new brand is all about health. All the unhealthy stuff soda has been in basically I think like a 13-year decline in sales. Beer has been in a decline of sales. There's all this data showing that GenZ and millennials no longer think it's cool to be drunk. They actually consider it pathetic and embarrassing. So all this stuff is kind of moving towards drinking less alcohol, being healthier, willing to spend a little more for healthier options, people being a little bit more aware of sustainability. It's getting broader and broader. But if you look at the health food industry, they only market their products in one tone of voice. They're kind of just going for what I think is like the cliche health food customer, and I think they're making big generalizations around what healthy people are into. Like, "Oh, you know, it's about yoga and it's about aspirational. So we're going to just show really good looking fitness models in our ads because that's why people are going to want to drink our product and be healthy because they want to look like this impossible person." And we just think that's kind of bullshit. And in reality, you look at what people are really into. Most people wouldn't know that the Walking Dead is, I think the number two or number three most popular show for women, a show about flesh-eating zombies. But you would never hear a healthy brand say, "Oh, our target is women. Let's do a whole campaign about zombies." It would never happen, even though there's proof that this is something that entertains this group of people and that they're into. So I think that's kind of what we're doing is sort of never taking ourselves too seriously. I think that's the biggest filter for our brand. If anything we do, I think we want people to realize like, "Oh okay, these guys don't actually think water is super tough." We're kind of making fun of 40 years of bad marketing. You know, it's like, and it still hasn't changed. It's like these big brands are still thinking about branding and marketing not much differently than they were thinking about it in the 1960s. And I kind of feel like the bar for branding and marketing is so low for how entertaining it has to be, how authentic it has to be, that people can do all this bad stuff and it seems like, "Oh, this is actually pretty good compared to this other really shitty thing that's out there." But if you really held it to the standard of entertainment, I know you have a book on how to make a brand. For us, I look at it like trying to make a book about how to make a great brand is almost like trying to make a book about how to make a hit TV show. It's like there's so much that goes into it that you almost can't reduce it to a formula, even though there's a lot of people to try. And because a lot of times the people, maybe they're not coming from the marketing background, you've got to figure out all these other things to run and operate the business. You don't have time to spend weeks and hours and days trying to get the nuance of brand and what's going to resonate with people. So I think that's ultimately at the core of our brand is we want to blur the lines between a brand and an entertainment company, and we want to hold everything we do up to the same standards as what you would hold a television show to or a movie. Because at the end of the day when you're putting stuff in people's social media feeds, you're not just competing against other water brands or other ads, you're competing against YouTube influencers that are making explosive, amazing engaging videos. You're competing against movie trailers. I think the bar is much higher to actually make people care about what you're doing than most brands can imagine really. F Geyrhalter: Totally. There was so much in what you just said and I'm kind of trying to rewind on some of those thoughts. One of the things that you said about not taking yourself too seriously, that is just this repeating threat that I see going on with all of, or a lot of my podcast guests where it's basically like I have a podcast about branding, but everyone talks about being the anti brand. And I think that's what's so interesting in today's age is that no, there is no formula. And even in my book I only basically talk about that your background story is bigger than your product, and that it's all about belief and cost and transparency and solidarity. And that is all exactly the formula that you took, just that you know it intrinsically because you came from the world of marketing and branding and advertising. But you do it in such an authentic way, and authenticity is such an overused word, especially by all the wrong marketers. But I mean that idea of not giving a shit and just being yourself and doing your thing and being out there to give value and entertainment to your tribe, I mean that's really what makes a brand. You mentioned the problem with all of these health and wellness, especially retail brands are looking at talking the same talk. A couple of episodes ago I had one of the early and main investors of Beyond Meat on this podcast. And they realized the same thing, that it's like, "No, our Veggie Burger should not be in the Veggie Vegan stamped compartment. This is a burger that real guys can flip on their grill." This is not about you having to be stamped into a certain kind of micro niche. But let's talk about that micro niche a little bit because I think it was fascinating when I read about Liquid Death. First, I was like appalled because it's totally not my lifestyle. And I'm like, "Oh my God, there're heads flying around and there's blood. And why is this water from Austria? That's where I'm from, this is totally not cool. I need to get this guy on." And then the more I read about it and the more I heard you talk about this street edge punk rock lifestyle, which I was totally not aware of, I'm a huge music buff, but I had no idea and it's actually a lifestyle that you already talked about a little bit. And people like band members of Metallica, Fugate, of Bad Religion and even J Mascis of Dinosaur Junior who I'm a big fan of, they're all part of this kind of like sub, sub, sub group. And I believe so much in that idea that if you go with a group that you understand really, really well, which you do, because it's the lifestyle that you come from, it sounds like. And you dive into that, that you can create a product that authentically will resonate with your audience. But how did the audience change over the past year or two years? Because you've been around for like a year or two years as a brand. And how do you ensure that that brand stays weird and out there and connecting with that particular lifestyle without feeling fake despite its success? M Cessario: That's a good question. I think that's a thing that most marketers or brands get wrong. Because I think as you know, like on the creative side, we think more emotionally and culturally. Whereas on the business side people then tend to think much more rationally and logically. What isn't necessarily a rational thing is if you can market and be very authentic to a very, very small audience, that does not mean that only that small audience is going to care. With Liquid Death, pretty much the filter that I've put every decision of the brand through is, "Would slayer think this is cool?" And even though that seems like a very, very narrow appeal, we have this huge halo effect of that. And we have a woman from the UK who is like, "I hate metal but I love this thing." That made me start thinking, okay, how do I quantify that? What is it? Why is it that I'm making like severed heads and blood flying, it's called Liquid Death, I'm being very authentic to heavy metal, but why are old ladies and people who have no care about metal in this world really resonating with it? And I think what I've come up with is, like you said, the word authenticity is kind of overused and people don't really know what it means or how to employ it effectively. But I think everyone knows that people are moving away from big food and big drink, and in favor of small and local and craft. That's just like a big thing, the shift that's been happening over the last decade and you're starting to see all the big brands kind of trying to appropriate this small hand-crafted look that people are willing to pay for and are more attracted to than they're like big mass produced kind of brands. So when McDonald's is now making things called artisan sandwiches that look like farmer's market kind of design, you kind of know that that old way of seeming small, from a look and feel standpoint, isn't really effective anymore. You can go to a grocery store now and find a bag of beef jerky that you don't know. Like, "Is this from a farmer's market or is this some massive corporate brand?" You don't really know anymore because the lines have been so blurred from that look and feel point of view. So my belief is that in 2019 when you have two to three seconds of someone looking at your product to make an opinion on it, the only way you can instantly communicate to someone, this is small, this is not big and corporate, is by doing and saying things that big brands would never do. You can't really just do it anymore from like, "Oh, I'm going to make it look like it's from a farmer's market and people are going to see it and say, 'Oh, that's small.'" No, because that's everywhere now. So now the bar has got even higher for how do you instantly signify that this isn't a massive, massive brand? I think that's really what people are connecting with. When people see a can of water that looks like beer, that's called Liquid Death with a skull on it, instantly they're like, "This is not coke, this is not Pepsi. There's real human beings behind this brand that maybe I'd want to have a beer with." So I think that's been, in terms of like an audience, how it's spread. It's like I just keep it very, very true to that small core and the halo just kind of keeps growing well beyond that because they respond to the authenticity and the uniqueness of this. It's something they've never really seen before in this kind of consumer packaged goods space. F Geyrhalter: And to play devil's advocate, it is extremely difficult, especially with the coolest looking microbrews to know that they are not part of the big conglomerates. Because they are changing hands day in, day out. It seems like it's a little silicon valley where it's constantly... the things are just being bought and being sold and being bid on. And I don't know if the cool craft beer with the skull on, if it's actually owned by one of the three big ones. And quite frankly, I will not know in two years from now if you actually sit in an island and you sold your soul to Coca-Cola and Liquid Thirst is now on the Coke. Because if there's money in the game, then they're going to put their skin in the game. It doesn't even matter what's on the bottle and what's on the can. So I think that is actually really important to defend the territory and to make sure people understand that. Because I as a consumer, I don't even know that anymore. That idea that just because there's a skull on it, it can't be owned by one of the big guys, I think it's changing. Because in the end money is what it's all about. M Cessario: Well I think that's why it's even beyond the skull. The fact that a brand is called Liquid Death, when someone tries to think about... Okay, maybe I can imagine a skull making its way through a corporate board room into a real product, but nobody believes that Liquid Death has made its way through a corporate board room into a real product. Now you're right, if it gets to a certain point where Liquid Death just becomes huge thing, of course all the big guys are going to be looking to cash in or make it a part of it. But I think one thing I've realized with Liquid Death since the beginning is we're always up against the fact that people think this isn't going to be the real deal. Right? So when I first came up with the idea, all right, I want to make a water brand that looks like beer because I want the healthiest thing you could possibly drink, which is water and most people don't drink enough of it. It's become this like utilitarian thing where it's like, "Okay, I drink water if I'm at the gym. Maybe I drink it in my cubicle sometimes." But it would never be common for someone to be like, "Oh, what do you drink when you go to the bar?" "Oh I drink bottled water." No it doesn't happen. Or, "What do you drink at a party?" "Oh I drink bottled water." It's become a utilitarian thing and it hasn't from a brand and occasion standpoint been accepted in this wide range of other usage occasions like soda is, or like beer is, or like alcohol is. So I think what we're really hoping to do is to change when people drink this thing, and like we know in bars, most people you're in bars to kind of meet people or interact with people. So there's data showing that the reason people walk around with a Guinness versus a Pabst Blue Ribbon versus some other kind of beer, they're trying to signal something about themselves in a social environment. They want something that's a conversation starter, they want to talk to people. And Liquid Death has been doing really well in bars and things like that because it's a complete conversation piece. People see this. Like, "What is that? Wait, that's water? What do you mean that's water?" It just kind of creates a conversation and people are attracted to that. But I think the Coca-Cola's of the world, it's going to take a lot for them to ever take that risk because they're just not built to understand or build really emerging brands. They are built to sustain brands that are already doing like half a billion dollars a year or a billion dollars a year. They can't make a decision without this old process of focus groups and testing. So when you start running Liquid Death through that old system of a focus group, it's never going to make it through. You ask people, "Oh, what do you think of this Liquid Death?" They'll be like, "Oh, this is stupid. Oh, this is dumb." And then it's not going to make it through because it's not actually allowing the market to really test it. So I think we would have a long road ahead of us in terms of massive, massive success before Coca Cola would probably ever take the leap. And at that point it's one of those things where we'd have to make the tough decision of do you have someone like this that helps basically spread it to more people? But with a brand like Liquid Death, it's pretty much all brand. So if they didn't truly get what made the brand special and didn't give creative control or power to kind of keep the brand what it is and they try to like "water it down", that could be the end of the brand like that. And it's happened before. It happened to Snapple. Do you remember the old Snapple ads? The original ones with the lady from Long Island? Yeah, it was shot with not great cameras, but it felt really authentic, like it was a real Long Island type person. And it became the fastest growing beverage brand ever, got bought by think Quaker for like three or four billion dollars. And then soon as it went to Quaker, they put that kind of great little brand through the corporate kind of system and they said, "Okay, this woman, she's not aspirational enough. Now that we're going to be a big brand, we need to get someone a little more aspirational because your small things aren't going to work anymore on the big scale. And you know what? We've got to shoot it with better cameras because your stuff, it just doesn't feel very professional. And they changed it all. They lost over $1 billion or $2 billion in market share in less than two years. So it's like that stuff happens and you just have to, you have to be aware of what you're getting into. F Geyrhalter: Yeah, no, totally. And I think what will most probably happen, and that's going to be a really great thing for you to see is when suddenly at a bar, there's another water in a beer can, right? That's what's going to happen. It's going to be that Coca-Cola's moving in and saying, "Well that makes sense. Kids want to drink beer in bars. And so now there's this guy doing these waters, so let's just do the same thing and have a cool brand for kids." And they have huge distribution, they've got huge power, but like you said, building that authentic brand that's near impossible for them. And I see them fail over and over and over again. And that's why what you're doing is so extremely genius because you realize that you can actually come in really, really strong and be unreasonably bold and altogether unreasonable, because you can, you have to, right? And a question for me is, how did you know that your audience... So here's the punk rockers going to the show and they're going to see that tallboy can of water. How did he know that they would not call BS on heavy metal-looking beer cans that sell us $2 water? I mean, since this easily could have gone two ways, right? And in your own words, you call marketing and branding BS on your site. How was that fine line of humor, sarcasm, and then yet the deep connection created? I mean, you must've been at least a little bit nervous at some point. M Cessario: To be honest, I never really was nervous about it because I think at the heart of... At least my understanding and the reason that I gravitated towards punk rock and metal and that world was the ability to kind of, for lack of a better word, fuck with people and kind of infiltrate something where it's not supposed to be. Punk rock wasn't punk rock really when the only people who sold it were 20 people in a room. It was like when Iggy Pop got on a mass stage and you're seeing this psycho losing his mind on stage and doing things that nobody's ever seen before and was selling it to the suburbs. Then there's this big outrage of like, "What is this music? This is the devil's music. This is bad." And that kind of tension of disrupting kind of like longstanding norms that tend to be very restricted. I think that is at the heart of what I think punk rock and counter culture really is. And I think I knew that Liquid Death, making it into an actual product, which is not easy, you know? F Geyrhalter: Oh yeah. M Cessario: There's not many... I feel like if you have a disruptive or unacceptable idea, what you're supposed to do is just make a band and then your product is selling albums. That's how you get your disruptive idea into the world. It's like, "Oh, you want to be crazy? Okay, make a band, make an album, sell that." Because anybody can really do that. You can find a recording studio fairly easily. You can record stuff. There's home recording equipment, you can put your idea out there. But if you want to make a disruptive idea in that same tone of voice into a consumer packaged good and you've got to figure out how are you going to get people to give you all the money it takes to make it, how are you going to actually figure out production in Austria to make this thing, then how are you going to actually sell it? Deal with the Amazon backend system of shipping people product and taxes. That requires a kind of thinking and resource that a lot of people with these disruptive punk-rock, fuck-you ideas don't always have access to. I think that that's sort of what I was trying to do, is like how do we get a brand through this gauntlet of bringing a packaged good brand to life that totally feels like it does not belong in this world? And I just knew that people would relate to that. It was like wow! Regardless of like... I think the other important thing was making it very clear that the sarcasm was very heavy, that we were not taking ourselves seriously. We weren't actually trying to brand water as heavy, what we're more trying to do is make fun of all the extreme youth marketing of energy drinks. At the end of the day, an energy drink is what, 95% water, some bubbles and like a little bit of sugar and caffeine. It's like all the same stuff that's in my grandma's breakfast tea. But you can call it Monster and put it in a can with a claw mark on it. And then they market it to kids and like, "Hey, it's all about action sports and extreme." They're not being sarcastic about it. They're being very serious of like, "This is going to appeal to the kids because it's extreme and that's what kids love." And we're kind of making fun of that. It's like, "Okay, we're going to beat you at your own game." If all marketing is essentially kind of like storytelling theatrics really around a product, we're going to take ours to the next level and be very clear that this is theatrics, it's professional wrestling. It's entertainment and people respect entertainment. Like you said, we always look at, we want to give value to people. If we're putting something in your Facebook feed, we want it to make you laugh. We want it to do something besides just say, "Hey, buy this." And I think entertainment is the easiest way to kind of paint the picture of what that is. It's like, okay, like we should be making people laugh to make this the funniest thing that they've seen all day every time we put something out there. F Geyrhalter: And on that note, on your site, you say, and I excuse the language, I'm just a messenger here. You say most products in the health and wellness space are all marketed with aspirational fitness models and airbrushed celebrities. Fuck that. Why should unhealthy products be the only brands with a permission to be loud, fun and weird? Besides our marketing and branding is bullshit. So we're going to take ours less seriously and have more fun with it. So yet, as we already discussed, branding is everything to Liquid Death. And that's where the sarcasm kind of fits in. It is the lifeline of the death brand. It's really the foundation of the entire brand. What does, after everything that you already shared with us, what does branding mean to you? Because branding has a horrible, horrible kind of like taste in your mouth, right? It feels fabricated, it feels big, it feels unreal, it doesn't feel authentic, yet in my eyes, branding today is a totally different word. It should actually be rebranded, that word because it's just so different now. I think it is about a lot of the things that you talk about, which you can apply your thinking quite frankly, to any brand. From a tech brand to a retail brand, to a health care brand, because the foundational elements of authenticity, of transparency, of understanding your niche audience and diving full in and creating a tribe, all of these things that can be applied to anything. So what does branding mean to you today? M Cessario: I think you make a really good point that branding needs to be rebranded, especially now because what brand meant when the practice was coined in like the 50s and 60s. Branding was more about when there was what? Three television channels and a couple billboards here and there. You had to have a consistency and brand just so that people would remember you. Because maybe they saw your commercial once on channel two and then they didn't come in contact with your brand again for another week maybe because there was one billboard they passed by. And you had to have the brand link the two things together so people knew, "Oh it's this brand. Oh it's this brand." But that's not the case anymore. With social media, I don't even know what the number is, like how many advertising messages we're exposed to a day. Like thousands and thousands…Branding is something totally different, and I always go back to using examples from the entertainment industry, like using television shows and movies. If you had to say, "What is Steven Spielberg's brand?" It becomes a lot more complicated. You don't want to reduce him to just a brand. It's like it's a vision. It's a type of story. It's a place in the world. It's a point of view of a human being that's behind something. The days of trying to just bullshit people in terms of like, okay, I want my brand to be something that is not at all what I am is I think harder and harder to pull off now. Your brand has to be the people who are behind it, and I think you know as much as like Steven Spielberg, you know he makes Steven Spielberg movies. If Steven Spielberg just tried to make, I don't know, like a soap opera TV show, it's like he can probably do it but it's not going to have the world-wide acclaim that him being him actually has. So I think for me branding is just about making it very clear who the people are behind the brand that you're giving your money to. And I think that's really what it is for us. It's like at the end of the day there might be four other can waters on the shelf next to us and one is Aquafina can water, which they already announced they're going to try to test next year. Super boring looking can, right? Aquafina. There might be a couple of other ones. At the end of the day, what we're hoping is that all the content we put out there, the messaging we put out there, what we do for people, how we talk, how we sound, what we communicate about ourselves, ultimately when there's four brands there, someone is like, "This is all water. I don't really believe that any of these waters are significantly better from a taste perspective than any of the others. So I kind of see it as a level playing field. I want to give my $1.85 to Liquid Death because I want to give my money to those guys more than I want to give it to this faceless kind of water over here or this one that's kind of trying something that I don't really get right here." M Cessario: I think that's ultimately we want to do, is we want to connect with people where they're like, "I want to support this company and these people. And it goes well beyond just the functional benefits of what the actual product is." Because in almost every product category, the differences between brands are basically trivial. If you had to have people blind taste test Monster versus RockStar versus Red Bull, most people probably couldn't even pick out the difference. At the end of the day, people would rather give their money to Red bull based on the things they do, versus some people they want to give their money to Monster or whatever. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. My wife and I in a spare moment of uninspiration we did a blind water taste test. And I think we had maybe like 12 waters from Evian to, the Trader Joes brand, to every single water. And in the end the one that won was like one of those in-store, private label, super cheap water brands, right? So, well let's talk a little bit more about the people behind the brand. Obviously, with you it's yourself, but there's also a lot of investment that came in. I think you gained investments totaling 2.3 million, if I'm correct, maybe it's more by now. But that alone is pretty astonishing, but it's even more remarkable when I look at the names of who actually invested in Liquid Death, from Michael Dubin of Dollar Shave Club fame to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to Gary Vee, who I, as a side note, refrained to talk to over the course of a 10 and a half hour flight to London despite him sitting, well mainly sleeping right next to me. And I'm very proud that I was able to not talk to him. But these are some serious heavyweights and they understand the power of story and virality. What made them invest in you? What was the reason that Gary Vee said, "Hey Mike, I get it. I'll invest in a water company called Liquid Death with heads being chopped off people and blood everywhere in its commercial. That makes a lot of sense to me. It'll be a hit"? And I know you worked for his company, but what was the decision of some of these people where they said, "No, this is exactly why I believe in it." M Cessario: I mean, part of it is me, which the fact that I worked for Gary and he knew me. He just was like, "I'm a fan of you, Mike, and I believe in this." But I think Gary for instance, he is one that has no emotion about what success means. I think he preaches that all the time. It's like don't let emotion get in the way of like, "Oh well this maybe offends me or this doesn't seem right because there is a really good chance that this would be a really, really good business." And I think Gary is also hyper aware that social media is the internet now. I think he even has a poster on the wall in the agency that says social media is just a slang term for the current state of the internet. F Geyrhalter: That's great. Yeah. M Cessario: Yeah. That's where people get all their news now. It's where they get their entertainment. It's where they learn about what's going on, and he just knows what it takes to succeed in this environment of internet culture. I mean, nothing is censored anymore, right? Kids now, they don't care about normal movie-star celebrities, it's about YouTube celebrities. These YouTubers, they're not censored, they can kind of do whatever they want. They don't have to fit certain formats or things like that. So the culture of entertainment and what's on social media is in a place now where it's going to take a certain level of entertainment to actually succeed in that world and compete against these new forms of media and entertainment. I think that's what he totally gets. Like he knew instantly that, oh, this is a brand that will absolutely be a hit on social media, which is at the crux of almost everything that we do as a culture now. So he just instantly got that. And then of course the fact that, and I think this goes along with most people, they've never seen weird, irreverent, crazy being used to actually do something really positive, which is getting more people to drink more water more often. And I think the pairing of those two things, I mean, that's really what our brand DNA is that if we were just Liquid Death and crazy and heads flying, and we were an energy drink, it would almost be expected. It'd be like, "Oh yeah, that makes sense." But the fact that it's all that and it's water, and it's promoting an alternative to single use plastic because cans are infinitely recyclable, and basically one of the most sustainable beverage containers by almost every measure. Plastic is a huge problem right now that everybody... it's becoming like the new tobacco really. So it's kind of like sustainability and health paired with just irreverence and weird and contemporary art and internet culture. That's I think what people respond to. They can kind of justify that, "Yes, I know this is crazy and it's viral, but what it's doing is actually really positive and we haven't really seen that before." F Geyrhalter: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's a kernel of truth in your brand that is super, super important. Once you actually start seeing the bigger picture and how it actually is a very positive thing that you're doing, it's fantastic. And let's talk about this for a second because I'm from Austria as I mentioned, your water is also from Austria. Let's talk about how that fits into the story. Because how should we as consumers feel about water being shipped from Fiji and Iceland or Austria, because as you mentioned, you're actually a rather environmentally conscious brand, right? Like you're counting on many vegans in your target audience and you use the cans instead of plastic, which as you mentioned with plastic pollution, that's a huge issue. How do you feel about shipping water from across the pond? M Cessario: The reason that we're bottling and sourcing in Austria is because when I first... it's starting to change a little bit now, but when I first was looking to produce the brand, there is not a single co-packer or bottler in North America who can put non-carbonated springwater in cans. It doesn't exist. F Geyrhalter: Oh wow. M Cessario: Crazy. Because basically the kind of equipment you need for canning when the product doesn't have carbonation and doesn't have a preservative in it is very different than 99.9% of canned products which either have carbonation or preservative. So most of these canning facilities, they weren't equipped to do this, and if you want to use spring water and not just use factory tap water, which most people don't realize, Smartwater, Aquafina, Dasani, Essentia, Lifewater, they're all just purified municipal water from the factory. F Geyrhalter: Right. It's mind blowing, right? Yeah. M Cessario: Yeah. So we kind of knew that as a premium brand, because cans are more expensive than plastic because it's metal, that's also the reason that cans are actually profitable to recycle because the recycled aluminum actually has good value to it that the recycling company can sell and make a profit on based on what it costs to recycle it. Plastic is not. Because recycled plastic is such low quality, they can't really sell it or make a profit on what it cost them to do. They used to sell it to China, but then now China are saying, "We don't want to buy your recycled garbage anymore." So what happens a lot of the time is plastic comes in to a recycling facility and rather than spending the money to grind it down and recycle it, they just have to send it to the landfill because they're not going to go out of business recycling something that's not profitable. So aluminum actually because of the high material value actually helps subsidize the recycling of cheap materials like plastic and glass, where the final recycled product almost has no value to resell. So that's become a long winded way of saying that the way that we got to Austria was we just kind of realized that if we wanted to do spring water and put it in cans, a, any source, if you bottle at the source, that's pretty much what you want to do because the expense of trying to truck tanker trucks of water from a source far away to some canner doesn't really make sense. So most springwater brands are bottled at the source. Any springwater source in the US, they definitely didn't have any canning capabilities. So we found this place in Austria, outside Salzburg and we flew out there, we met them. They own four of their own private mineral waters springs. They had all the canning capabilities. I've been to Apple's offices in Culver City and these bottlers' offices in Austria were nicer than Apple's offices. F Geyrhalter: So you had to say something nice about Austria. I was fishing for compliments. I'm like, well, because Austria has the best damn spring water in the world, but you're like, "Nope, they're the only ones who could pull it off." M Cessario: Yeah, I mean Austria is the most beautiful place I've ever been to. F Geyrhalter: All right. There we go. All right. You're allowed back on the podcast. M Cessario: So yeah, I mean it was kind of just a random... I just kept making phone calls to bottlers and they kept saying, "Oh yeah, no, we don't do that. Oh yeah, no, we don't do that. It can't be done." Had professionals from the industry doing research for us out there too. "Hey, no one can do it." So finally I found this place in Austria. I flew out there and met them. They could do it. We really liked them. Yeah, Austria is kind of cool too because it's like most people haven't had an Austrian water necessarily, and it's kind of a fun kind of interesting thing that could work with the brand. So yeah, let's do that. But we're actually going to be moving all of our water canning and production starting next month to British Columbia in Canada. So we don't have to ship water overseas. It's a much shorter journey. F Geyrhalter: That's awesome. Congrats. That's a big move and I love to hear that. I think it works really, really well what you're trying to do. But back to those curve balls, I mean, you would have never thought that bottling water in a freaking can would be one of those big curve balls in your entrepreneurial journey where you're like, "What? That can't happen. I have to go to Austria." I mean, those are the things that people don't think about when they start a business. It's like, "Well that seems like it makes a lot of sense. Let's do that." We have to slowly wrap up, but a big question that I'd like to ask everyone on my show is if you could describe your brand in one word, and I call it your brand DNA, what could that word be? I know it's not death. Don't tell me it's death. It's not death. M Cessario: No, it's murder. F Geyrhalter: There you go. Exactly. M Cessario: It's funny. We've been working with some friends of ours, like we're actually kind of partnering because now that the business is growing and I can't run the business and actually execute and do all the marketing at the same time, we're now working with a creative agency partner run by a friend of mine named Matt Heath. They're called Party Land, and we've kind of been working with them on that same exact thing where they're like, "Hey, if we had to distill the brand down to one word, what would it be?" We had a little talk about it, and right now where we're landing with it is mischief. That I think is really the DNA of the brand, is pushing the buttons and getting into things you're not supposed to get into but all rooted in kind of this fun, and doing stuff that's subversive. Trying to always avoid doing the traditional approach to something. Rather than, okay, if we want to be at this music festival, the music festival wants to charge you a sponsorship fee of $80,000. You pay them that money and now you have the right to sell them water that they're going to sell at the festival. Right? That's how every other brand has to do it. We're going to look at, okay, how do we like crow bar open the back door to get in there and have a presence? Do we actually go to the headlining band who we think would be into the product and they're really stoked on it and we get it to them and then they request that it's like in the green room and then all the other artists have access to. That's more mischief. How do you subvert? How do you go around just like the pay to play or the traditional way that most brands like Coca-Cola or these other brands have to do because they just don't have the fandom of a brand like ours that would actually have people go out of their way for you or let you in the back door or whatever. F Geyrhalter: Well, mischief is such a great ownable word too, right? And you can totally live up to it. In a way, it's a watered down version of punk rock, which I think works really well. All right, I have so many more questions, but we got to wrap it up. Listeners who fell in love with Liquid Death just now, is Amazon the place to go to, to get their taste of Liquid Death or should they sign up to your newsletter? Which by the way is one of my favorite pieces of your brand because for my listeners, the newsletter sign-up fine print, you know, that little thing that is underneath the big button saying sign me up. Instead of the GDPR blurb, which everyone freaked out about. "Oh my God, we have to be compliant." It actually says by selecting start selling my soul, which is the button to click to sign up. I agree I want to receive important info and offers from Liquid Death since they will own my soul for eternity. So I guess you can do that. You can start selling my soul on the website, hit that button. Or where else can they find your product right now? M Cessario: Yeah. So you can buy it on Amazon or you can buy it direct from our website at liquiddeath.com. In terms of selling your soul, I think that's an interesting... It's been one of our most popular things now, it's basically on our website. You can legally sell us your soul. There's an actual legal document that we had a real lawyer draft up. It'll automatically populate your name and everything in there, you click to sign it like a DocuSign digital thing. And that is the only way that you can join the Liquid Death Country Club, is by selling your soul. And then once you're a Country Club member on our website, you'll get a free VIP case added to your first order, if you're a country club member. F Geyrhalter: And since this is a legal document, do you also outline what you will be doing with the soul of your tribe members? M Cessario: No, it basically says we can do whatever we want with it. F Geyrhalter: That's pretty good. There's got to be a whole new podcast about what you have done with the soul once the deceased start appearing in your office. Well, Mike, this was a blast. I really appreciate taking the time out of a busy schedule at a time when your young brand is really taking off. So thank you so much for having been on the show. M Cessario: Yeah. I know. Thanks for having me. It was fun. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. And thanks to you for listening, for subscribing, for rating, and for reviewing this podcast. 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.

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.

Fabian sits down with Chris Kerr, the Chief Investment Officer at New Crop Capital, who has nearly 30 years of leadership experience with startups and venture capital investing. He has spent the last decade focused on impact investing with a concentration on the plant based foods sector. We recorded this episode the day after Beyond Meat hit the stock market. The brand is a poster child of Chris Kerr's investment portfolio, and it also is an industry daring darling. And what went well beyond the wildest expectations with stock trading at nearly triples from the original IPO price the day after, this episode is filled with enthusiasm and learnings that go well beyond one brand. An episode any entrepreneur should digest as we discuss the importance of naming, how you can build a company around a brand and how a startup needs to test, test, test, and then test again. You can learn more about Chris via the New Crop Capital site. ____Full Transcript: F Geyrhalter: Welcome to Hitting the Mark. Today, we go beyond meat. Yes, that was a brand hint. And not only do we go beyond beef, but also butter, cheese, chicken, ice cream, sea food, and yogurt. Today, we're diving into the future of food, for the development of replacements to animal protein products. I first read about Chris Kerr in the Good Business issue of Bloomberg Business Week way back in December, 2018, which dedicated four entire pages to his story. Which is quite an accomplishment. As sometimes is the case, good things take time. But today, he is on my show, and I couldn't be any more honored to have him here. Chris is the chief investment officer at New Crop Capital, and has nearly 30 years of leadership experience with startups and venture capital investing. He has spent the last decade focused on impact investing with a concentration on the plant based foods sector. As CIO, Chris manages the portfolio strategy and serves as a strategic advisor to most portfolio companies. Chris also serves as co-CEO and chair of Good Catch, managing member of TRELLIS NEW ENDEAVORS, director of Purple Carrot and Next Foods, and observes Miyoko's Kitchen. Additionally, Chris is a director at Unovis Partners, Sirabella's, Wicked Healthy, Math Garden, Pitcairn Financial Group, and Monarch Corporation. How does he do it all? I do not know. And how does he find time to talk branding with us here is less mystery than it is a testament to his dedication to the cause and to fellow entrepreneurs. With that being said, welcome, Chris. C Kerr: Thank you very much for having me. I'm looking forward to a lively conversation. F Geyrhalter: It's a pleasure. You say lively conversation because you and I chatted before, and I know you only got two hours of sleep. So first off, congratulations, what a day. We're recording this show on May 3rd, 2019, which happens to be the day after Beyond Meat went IPO. And what must have gone well beyond the wildest expectations with stock trading at nearly triples from the original IPO price. This also marks a first for a company making meat-like products from plants. So that's a pretty big thing, to hit the stock market. Chris, Beyond Meat is a poster child of your investment portfolio, and it also is an industry daring darling, I would say. What does this day mean to you? What does it mean to the industry as a whole? C Kerr: Well, my wife and I talked about this yesterday. My other business partner, Chad Sarna, who's a chef in this space, I would put this down as the single greatest day in the entire time I've been working in this space. I got into this area, and I'm an animal guy. I love animals, enough suffering in the world. I figured, let's try to take some of my abilities and work on putting them towards solutions to solving what we consider to be a crisis. When we started this effort, it was really around 2005. In 2007, I went to work for the Humane Society of the United States, trying to bring solutions to solve some of the things that they were working on. At the time, Beyond Meat was a little company called J Green Foods, the business plan was a very typical first business plan for a company, which if you're smart, a lot of founders will throw those away as quickly as possible. The company really evolved, from really this startup mode. But it was as time went, Silicon Valley was just starting to pay attention to this particular space. What we didn't know at the time was where this would go. So back in 2007, 2008, when I started this, really, it was very hard to get anybody to pay attention to what we were doing. The markets had collapsed, nobody really wanted to take any venture capital investments, let alone vegan food. Good lord, nobody thought that there was anything to do there. So to have this culminate from that, which was really kind of grabbing at straws, hoping something could evolve into a disruptive technology, to an IPO that then just outperformed everyone's expectations. And I've got to tell you, that was only one of three amazing things that happened yesterday. I can't talk too much about the other three. But I can just tell you that the world has completely shifted from the days of J Green Foods to what is now Beyond Meat's IPO and the fact that virtually, every major strategic food conglomerate out there is sitting up and paying really big attention to this space. I have to say, I'm delighted that I happened to have stuck it out this long. So it was really a [crosstalk 00:05:12] day. F Geyrhalter: And you played quite an integral part of this whole thing. Not only Beyond Meat, but of the entire, I guess we can call it now, of the movement. That really, like you said, just happened in the last couple of years, where it really started seeing an impact. So congratulations, it's really big stuff. C Kerr: Well thank you. Like I said, time, luck, circumstance, sometimes just being in the right place for long enough, something's going to hit you. What's the saying? Even a broken clock is right two times a day. So, [crosstalk 00:05:46]. F Geyrhalter: Very modest of you. So just the other week, I think it was last week actually, I listened to our local NPR station, here in Los Angeles, KCRW, and I caught Beyond Meat founder Ethan Brown taking us through a behind the scenes tour of the factory. It was really, really fascinating. I'm a big fan of the product and so are a lot of people all over the world. I think by now, their plant based burger patties are being sold in the meat section, which by itself, is such a huge accomplishment, in about 30,000 stores. It's in Burger King, it's in Carl's Jr, Del Taco, and I even spotted it at Dodger's Stadium here, in LA. So the startup was founded in 2009, that's when you were involved with them. The patties started hitting stores really in 2016, and I mean it's 2019 now. So this is now actually going to market has not been too long of a distance to IPO. I mean, that's pretty crazy. The brand also has some even higher profile investors than yourself. There's Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, and former McDonald's CEO Don Thompson. When I heard about this, this basically underlines what you just said, right? The world is changing. Just recently, they secured the CFO's of Coca-Cola and Twitter to be on the board of directors. So with Beyond Meat, when did the team start to actively invest either time or money into brand strategy? Or into defining the voice, or actually the design. Do you feel it was a conscious decision from day one? Or was it something that kind of happened over time? C Kerr: It happened over time. But a lot of these companies don't get it right right out of the gate. Like I said, the company was started as J Green Foods. It became Savage River Foods, which was the name of a river that ran through Ethan Brown's home property in Maryland. It had to evolve. So branding was really interesting, and positioning is really important, too. F Geyrhalter: Right. C Kerr: I'm not an expert in any of this, by the way. Usually, this type of thing happens way above my pay grade. In this case is no exception. What we look at in our investment portfolios, we focus on what I refer to as the food pact. You may have heard me talk about this in the past. But we make decisions on food based on the efficiency of four key levers, it's taste, awareness, convenience, and price. We looked at, even if you look at kind of the evolution of Beyond Meat, they came to market with a chicken. It was a pretty good chicken, it was gluten free. But arguably, it wasn't the best on the market. Gardein was out there, it was a great product, but it had wheat gluten in it. So Beyond Meat said, "Let's try something a little bit different with pea protein." Which really kind of changed the focus towards pea protein, that was the early adopter of it. So their positioning really tied to that brand, their branding tied to that positioning. Who were they going to and why? So when you look at your customer, first of all, I've just got to focus on this. Taste is the most important thing by far. F Geyrhalter: Right. C Kerr: We always start with chefs. So in every case, chefs have to play a role in that. So when we start, when New Crop looks at a company, we always say, "Look, if we can get the taste right, the other things will slowly start to fall in place." If you miss taste, the rest is irrelevant. So when you look at Beyond Meat, they didn't start off really with chefs in there. We put a chef in there, a guy named David Anderson, who's arguably one of the best plant based chefs on the planet. He really helped them kind of refine some of their products in the mid range there. About five, six years in, he started helping with that. The Beyond burger, it came later, right? That was really just ... I'll say this about food companies, there's no such thing as an overnight success with food. Most companies don't get it right right out of the gate. If you look at, a good example is Silk soy milk, which everybody now knows. But that's a 40 year old company, and it was 20 years in before it invented White Waves Silk. F Geyrhalter: Wow. C Kerr: So a lot of these companies take a lot of time. What looks like overnight successes was, in fact, a lot of trial and error ahead of that. I don't think Beyond Meat's really much of an exception to that. They had some good products early on, but not enough to be groundbreaking. It wasn't until the Beyond burger came out that it really hit that inflection point. That just takes time sometimes. What they really did do is they really changed who the consumer was of this product. So if you look at the branding, the branding was not tied towards your early adopter vegans. Early adopter vegans, they're very principled, they're very loud, they love to talk about their findings, they have enormous price elasticity. They're very forgiving around taste. As you move out of that very small niche, which like I said is really critical when launching these companies. But as you move outside of them, your branding has to reflect what that consumer wants. Beyond Meat really followed that path in a really good way, where they understood the early adopters. They absolutely never violated the principles of those early adopters, that's really critical, because they will turn on you if you do. So you respect the early adopter's principles, because they do a lot of work for you. And you build that in as the baseline to how you build from there on out. I think that Beyond Meat just did an exceptional job of that. They never violated those principles. They were questioned about them. I think if you bring on Tyson as an investor, or put on an ex McDonald's CEO in the mix, some of those people will question that. But Ethan was spot on in saying, "Look, if we really want to help the cause, whether health is your driver, environment, sustainability, animal protection, welfare, you name it, everybody gets served by this if it can hit the mass market. So we really shifted that focus to addressing kind of the meat reducers, the flexitarians. And that Beyond burger is a bullseye. Sorry for the pun, but it's a bullseye.If you look at that inflection point, I think going forward in history, you're going to see everybody's game just got stepped up quite a bit. Consumers are, by far, one of the biggest beneficiaries of that. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. I mean, I looked at how the company is currently using key opinion leaders, or influencers, and they are not at all the typically associated with the industry type influencers, right? As you mentioned, the company knew very quickly that in order to go mainstream America, they need to get mainstream America athletes and diverse people, like guys flipping a burger in the backyard, right? C Kerr: Right. F Geyrhalter: That's the kind of people that they want to get. Forming that narrative must have been such a huge, important part of changing customer behavior. So yeah, I mean, well done. I also think about the packaging design, right? Which is so crucial to any big box retail company brand. Beyond Meat did something that I believe, I do not know, but I believe, it must have played a big role in its success outside of having a great product with an equally convincing story is that it creating packaging that actually looked like typical burger patty packaging. It was shrink wrap, it was see through. And that was a far fetch from the typical green cardboard boxes associated with vegan products. C Kerr: Sure. F Geyrhalter: Which in itself, are already pretty off-putting. Were you part of that time already? Did you witness that part of their story? Where they said, "Let's just package it like meat, let's try to get into the meat section of the market." Was that already part of that? C Kerr: Well I think early on, they're not actually the first one to try to get into the meat section. Gardein did it early on, Kite Hill did it with their cheese in the dairy isle. The problem is, the early adopters don't walk into that. So those who are the most, I will say, the loudest, don't actually walk into those sections, right? That's your kind of vegan early adopters. So it didn't do great. When Beyond Meat came out, two important things happened. One was that the market had kind of shifted towards being a lot more open towards these types of products. But the other part is that this product was good enough to actually reside there. So once you hit that threshold of, you can actually stand next to a burger and it be darn close to parity on taste and price, then the convenience kind of falls into place and the awareness kicks in. I think Beyond Meat really had to hit that sweet spot there. Gardein was in the deli section of Whole Foods probably in 2008, yeah, 2008, 2009. It did okay, but not great. Kite Hill, their non-dairy cheese was buried in a very complex high-end cheese isle that was very hard to find. So when the vegans went looking for it, that wasn't an area that they went to. When Beyond Meat came along, like I said, there was enough awareness about the product that it was happening. Plenty of marketing dollars went into that, but the market advising was really critical and letting consumers know where to look mattered, it certainly mattered. So I think, Whole Foods, by the way, has just been really critical in helping shape the merchandising so the early adopters can transition into the mainstream. So what they will do is, they'll put you in what we might call the penalty box, which is where all the vegan food goes. But they'll also put you in the deli, they'll also put you in the prepared foods isle. In the case of Beyond Meat, they actually opened a burger stand right in the middle of Whole Foods in Boulder, Colorado, that served just the Beyond burger. And that was a guy named Derek Sarno, who's one of our partners, he's a chef who is the executive global chef for Whole Foods, that was his concept. It worked. It allowed people to try out the product, to demo it, to understand what it tastes like, how do you prepare it? Is it different than real meat? Most of these products ... We have a company called Good Catch, Good Catch makes tuna fish. There's two questions that are asked, right out of the gate. What does it taste like? And how do I use it? Price isn't asked, nutrient value isn't asked. People are curious about it, but those are the first two things they want to know. So when it comes to positioning and merchandising, you solve those two first things. And sometimes, you need someone to demonstrate it to you. That's, quite frankly, where Whole Foods has just been outstanding in helping not just Beyond Meat, but all sorts of products, helped to do that. F Geyrhalter: It seems like it's the good old Costco trick, right? You show them how it's made right there, then people get to taste it. C Kerr: Yeah, merchandising's expensive. We vegans walk by tons of tasting stands, because we just assume that we can't eat it. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. C Kerr: Let me tell a story about Just Mayo. Just Mayo was doing demos in stores, and people would walk up and they'd say, "Well what are you serving?" And they would say, "This is vegan mayo." And the answer was, "I'm not vegan, no thank you." As though only vegans could eat this mayonnaise. Of course, Fritos are vegan, and we don't ask whether or not they're vegan, anybody can eat a Frito. So I think that merchandising is really critical in getting consumers to understand where they fit in the equation. If it's somebody who's lactose intolerant, yeah, you're going to want to try the newest nondairy milk. If it's somebody who's got allergens to soy, yeah, you might want to try a meat that isn't made out of ... meat analog that's not made out of wheat. That type of stuff is quite relevant, and I think those demos are really important. F Geyrhalter: Right, no, absolutely. I think, Chris, one of the most insightful things I learned when I read the Bloomberg Business article about you was that you have nine cats. I think some of them are starting to want to participate in this story, too. They said, "I don't only want to be in Bloomberg, I want to be here, too." C Kerr: Yeah, actually the cat that was in Bloomberg is the one that trying to get out the door, so yeah. F Geyrhalter: I think it's because of the name that you have given the cat. It's Claire de Lune or something like that? It's a very French name. C Kerr: Yeah, she normally sits on my desk here. F Geyrhalter: It's her business day has started. It's like, "Hey, it's 9:00am, what's going on?" Excellent. C Kerr: Sorry. F Geyrhalter: No, no, no, that's great. Hey so looking back at the success of Beyond Meat, and there's no better day than today, on May 3rd, to talk about this. We already touched on a couple of these. But when did you think, when did you know that this is going to turn from a startup into a brand? When did you feel that ... Not when you tasted it, or when you said, "This is going to be insanely good, people are going to love this." But from a marketing perspective, when did you feel like, okay, something right now just shifted, and this is going to be a brand? C Kerr: Quite frankly, when they settled on the name Beyond Meat. That was when the real marketing push came, and it had to do with how they were positioning it to the consumer base that went well outside of our vegan world. That shift really kind of said to the early adopters, thank you for your service, you've been phenomenal, let's take it to the next level. That happened actually pretty early on. The company started, when we started working on it in 2008, 2009. It was probably around 2012 that that name was adopted and then put into play. Prior to that, they were really focusing on food service and the name Savage River wasn't something that they were doing much with. I think by the time they came up with Beyond Meat they thought, okay, now we have something to rally around. That's pretty critical. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. And that name was created by an agency with help? Or was that internally crafted? C Kerr: I believe it was internally crated. Beyond Eggs was out at the time, they were just getting started. So Hampton Creek had come up with the idea of using something along the lines of Beyond. Beyond Meat at the same time. Hampton Creek moved over, well they created Hampton Creek, and then Just. Beyond Meat was, I guess a good fit for them. F Geyrhalter: That's extremely refreshing to hear that a name was kind of that propeller into that next phase of the company. And where you felt like now it's a brand. But vegan is, as a whole, as a brand, changed tremendously. From not to tasty to incredibly cool. In fact, it also turned quite important given climate change, right? Which is one of the big reasons you're in this business. And yes, it also morphed into a very tasty food option. But most of the brands in your portfolio are also extremely design focused, I realized. The dairy free butter brand Fora, which I can't wait to get my hands on. But also your other investment firm, Unovis Partners, it seems like branding and design is always top of mind for you in many of your brands. What does branding mean to you? Either personally or to your industry as a whole? I mean obviously, with Beyond Meat we get a pretty good sense of what it can do. C Kerr: Yeah, honestly, it's absolutely critical. You think about it, it's communication, right? At the end of the day, you want to very quickly communicate to a consumer what it is you do. If you can get that in a brand, I think plenty of people overthink or they try to be creative with brands, and it just can kind of flop. A really good brand matters, because it really is that flash point around decision making. Again, you go back to the food pact. Awareness is critical. I use this example, if you are in a desert dying of thirst, crawling along the sand, and there's a body of water over a hill, if you don't know it's there, you're still going to die of thirst. Awareness is really around what is it that a brand or a company's trying to convey to you? So you need to know where it is, what to look for, then be able to make a rather quick decision around why you might want to buy it. So clearly, there's an industry around that. That's no surprise there. I think when you have an innovative product that's new to the sector, that's novel, disruptive, and consumers don't quite know what to do with it, you better get that brand right. You can't be too cheeky. Too many plays on words, that kind of stuff. You don't want to confuse the consumer in the process. So I think Beyond Meat really hit a good stride there. There's a couple other ones that did a good job. They didn't have a lot of professional help, but Daiya is another company that people kind of knew what it was right out of the gate. It was dairy but not quite dairy. Silk, perfect example, Silk soy milk. A grand slam, people pretty much knew, it's soy milk. You think about that when it comes to identity. For the consumer, there's not a lot of confusion for the consumer. Ultimately, I think that, when it comes time to make kind of very quick decisions, impulse decisions, the difference between a good brand and a bad brand is going to be the difference between a sale or a pass. The ones that are successful, they know how to really run with it. F Geyrhalter: So at what time in that startup journey with your portfolio companies is what time do you advise those companies to actually invest in branding? C Kerr: Day one, day one. Good Catch is a great example. We knew that we could get a formula ... We didn't know what we were going to do in seafood, we just knew that we were going to get into the seafood space. We had started the company from scratch, we worked with a branding agency. The brand is what we built the company around. So coming up with the name Good Catch really set in motion exactly what that company was going to do and why. With that, we can fill in the blanks pretty much in any direction we want. Now if we had come up with something that was cheeky or confusing, a rebrand is incredibly expensive. F Geyrhalter: Yep. C Kerr: Nobody wants to go through that. So to spend an extra 25 to $50,000 on an early brand saves you upwards of several million later in the game, not to mention a failed start, which is the worst possible outcome. So I recommend, by all means, don't just come up with a name between you and your founders and think that it's great. Test it, put it in front of groups. There's great organizations that will actually do concept testing for you, and New Hope is one of them that's in the natural products space. For very little amount of money, you can test a couple concepts and see how it resonates with consumers. Spend that money. To nickel and dime that early stage is arguably a death nail for a company, if you get it wrong. F Geyrhalter: Amen. It was a very tough pill to swallow for a lot of bootstrap, early stage founders. C Kerr: Yeah. F Geyrhalter: But in the food industry, you basically cannot be too bootstrapped in order to make it to the market, so. C Kerr: Well also, I really encourage people to not fall in love with their own branding. It's easy to do, you feel like it becomes part of your own personal identity. You came up with it, or your family did. It really is important to relay a message to the consumer, not to your sister. I think at the end of the day, a good brand will reach a really wide swath of the world and tell them exactly what it is you're doing. That's pretty critical. F Geyrhalter: Chris, this is how I started pretty much every speech to entrepreneurs. I tell them, everything you do right now is not about you. It's about them, right? C Kerr: Well said, well said. Ego can really get in the way of these. One of the things that we do with the companies that we start up with, our job is commercialization. Part of that commercialization is an education around the branding side of it. So if you look at the New Crop team, we're actually made up of a whole bunch of entrepreneurs, people who have started companies before. One of our guys, Dan Altschuler, used to run a branding agency, it's what he did. We have another woman, Laura Zane, who helps us put together the decks. Because quite frankly, selling investors on it is very similar to selling a product. You need to sell them on the concept, and they need to be able to understand it quickly. So that starts the design phase, by the time you're hitting the shelves, at that point, it's too late. So absolutely, you need to think of it from the ground up. F Geyrhalter: Any piece of brand advice and founders as a final takeaway? I know you already dropped a lot of them. Anything that you didn't share with us yet, as we come to a close? C Kerr: Test, test, test, and then test again. And by the way, the world isn't static. When we launched Good Catch, we did testing on words for our packaging, and two years later, the entire market shifted and we need to test it again. So by all means, the consumer changes, consumer perception changes, the markets change. Don't be afraid to change with them. Your job there is to get consumers to understand what you're doing. The other part of it is, test your products. Try new things. At the end of the day, don't be a believer in your own stuff. You need to actually rely on the broader community to help you with that. The good news is, they are delighted to help. Particularly the early adopter world where I come from. Vegans love to try new food, and when they find something great, they are incredibly loud about it. Be partners with them in that, and allow them to test as well. I think everybody can have fun with it when you're testing new things, so it's not a challenge, it's a joy. I think if you look at it from that perspective, everybody gets to have fun with it. F Geyrhalter: Fantastic advise. What's still untapped in the plant based market? I mean, is there something you're excited about that you'd love to see a team create, or something you'd be excited to invest in next? Or is this all beyond ... Not Beyond Meat, but beyond closed doors? C Kerr: So we've now hit pretty much every area out there. We're working on, pork still hasn't been done well, and that's a massive market, as you can imagine. F Geyrhalter: Right. C Kerr: We're working on some things there. F Geyrhalter: It's a huge necessity too, right now, I suppose. C Kerr: I'm sorry, say that again? F Geyrhalter: Pork is in huge demand, and there's lots of issues surrounding pork. And there's a shortage, and God knows what, right? So there's a huge need for it, too. C Kerr: China alone, I mean, it's just not ... F Geyrhalter: Right. C Kerr: So here's what's both sad and exciting. The meat, dairy, eggs, and seafood market's over a trillion dollars, and we are just, just, just getting in there. We're a rounding error in that. So the opportunities are global, they are massive, and they are urgent. You put those things together and create a little bit of R&D around that, these are going to be exciting times. Give us another decade. Look at what happened with the Beyond burger and the Impossible burger just in the last two years. They just got onto the map on an industry that's a couple million years old at this point. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. C Kerr: Since we started eating animals. This is going to be a very, very exciting ride. I would say collectively, if you ignore the marketing side, collectively, R&D and the plant based meat world, and dairy, I would argue, is less than $100 million in the history of it, that they've actually put into the R&D side of it. The more money that flows into that, you're going to see some absolutely phenomenal outcomes. I would imagine that the next decade is going to be spectacular for consumers, for animals, for the environment. Everybody's going to win, and it's going to be a fun time. F Geyrhalter: I think on that note, I want to thank you, Chris. It was impeccable for you to make it onto Hitting the Mark the day after the big IPO, I so appreciate the time you took away from doing press or simply celebrating on this huge day. C Kerr: Thank you. F Geyrhalter: It's a huge day for you, your company, and Beyond Meat. So absolutely, thanks for being here. C Kerr: Well, and thank you to the Beyond Meat, they're a spectacular team. They did all of the work. I got to sit back and watch the ride. But thank you for having me on, I really appreciate it. F Geyrhalter: Thanks to everyone for listening, and please hit the subscribe button and give this show a quick rating. I'm seeing way too little TLC from you out there, I know how many of you are listening. So if you have a split second and enjoy the show, please give it a quick rating. This podcast is brought to you by FINIEN, the 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 at FINIEN.com. The Hitting the Mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness One, I will see you next time when we once again will be Hitting the Mark.

Fabian talks with Mark Wallace for whom skiing has always been the driving force in his life. It took him from Saddleback to Park City and then all over the world as he lived the dream as a semi-pro ski racer. Mark learned the nuances of ski building during a job at a Boston construction firm, dedicating countless hours during nights and weekends. He started Parlor with two friends in an abandoned funeral parlor in Cambridge, honing the science and art of ski building. We discuss his company's focus and dedication to the sport and its tribe, how far the brand is able to take the important brand traits of customization and personalization and how Parlor leads with authenticity. If you are, just like me, into skiing or snowboarding, this episode is a must. If you like to learn more about connecting with your tribe or honing in the art of customization, this is a must-listen for you as well. You can learn more about Parlor via parlorskis.com, or as Mark showcased his approachability, you can just call him up, "anytime" at 413-884-4747. ________________Full Transcript: F Geyrhalter:               Welcome to Hitting The Mark, which is now a regular show coming to you every second Friday, so be on the lookout. Today is all about personalization, so much so that this episode is catered to one of my favorite things to do when I am not busy running my brand consultancy: And that is snowboarding. In fact, I just came back from beautiful Mammoth Mountain here in California where they - as of February 25th - received a whopping 562 inches of snow (that's more than 46 feet or, for our many international listeners, it is over 14 meters of snow). But I am just as happy to be back at the office since today I am joined by Mark Wallace, Co-Founder of Parlor, a custom ski brand from New England. From the first time his mother carried him down the bunny slope, skiing has been the driving force in Mark's life. It took him from Saddleback to Park City and then all over the world as he lived the dream as a semi-pro ski racer. Mark learned the nuances of ski building during a job at a Boston construction firm, dedicating countless hours during nights and weekends. He started Parlor with two friends in an abandoned funeral parlor in Cambridge, hence the name! Over years and many late nights honing the science and art of ski building, fueled by desire, beverages, and the most delicious pizza in all of Boston, Parlor Skis was born. Welcome to the show, Mark! M Wallace:                   Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely, it just occurred to me that even though we are only 11 episodes into Hitting the Mark, you're the second Mark I'm having on the show. I totally don't believe that this is by accident. Just like there's an unusual amount of dentists called Denis, women named Louise that are more likely to move to Louisiana and running my consultancy FINIEN with a name like Fabian. It seems like naming has a bigger subliminal impact than we thought. But sorry about my detour, I'm very happy to have another Mark on Hitting the Mark. Tell us a little bit about Parlor Skis, how it started, why you love what you do, and more importantly, why do your customers love what you do? M Wallace:                   Absolutely. You hit on something in the bio, but we started building skis in 2009, and we incorporated the business in 2013. We really saw that there was an unmet need, especially in New England, for both a brand that focused on a high-quality laminate construction, so a race style ski, but with a little bit more of an all mountain flair. That's how we started building and designing skis. We very quickly realized that personalization was core to delivering the best product for people. So, in order to, you need to understand the skier in order to build them the correct ski and be able to personalize it with graphics. So really the only way to do that is to build all the skis in house. M Wallace:                   So we set out with the goal of delivering the best ski and the best product to people possible, and we built a factory and a system around building custom skis in order to meet that need. F Geyrhalter:                 So, last year, I published a book titled Bigger Than This, in which I lay out eight traits that I saw startups embody in the way to turn into brands that people love. One of those traits is individuality. I talk about how customization is the best way to make a brand personable and to deeply connect with your audience. And even further, I discuss the idea of blending personalization and customization to create limited and often complete one-off products, and how it works magic for any brand. Your brand's tagline is custom to the core. In what ways do you customize your clients' skis? I mean, how far do you actually go? M Wallace:                   Well, it depends a little bit on the level, right? So we have three main product lines. We have our limited edition skis, which are sort of off the rack, ready to go, and you get all the sort of quality and design that goes into a Parlor, but without the personalization. Then we have two levels of custom ski. Our most popular ski is a custom graphics ski, which it allows you to change the outline, camber, construction and graphics of the ski sort of within a set parameters designs that we use a lot that we know work well. Then we also offer our raven series of black label, which is a full custom experience. With that, you get to control every detail of the ski. Outline, camber profile, construction, side cut, length, graphics, materials, sort of the whole nine yards. So it depends a lot on the needs of the skier and what they're looking for, but all of our skis are done through a personalized fit, so myself or my partner talks to the [inaudible 00:04:51] of our clients to make sure that they have a ski that's both personalizing and customized for their style and aesthetic. F Geyrhalter:                 So really, each ski is built to order at Parlor. How do you keep prices to a still affordable manner while growing your brand? M Wallace:                   I mean, it's been really ... there's a lot of pricing pressure in the hard goods market, especially retail. We felt that there are some custom builders that are much more expensive than we are. We've really worked hard to stay direct to consumer to provide that level of personalization and to keep our skis as affordable as possible. I mean, they're not inexpensive, right, but we feel we build with a higher quality and certainly more attention to detail. We provide a really good value on our skis. F Geyrhalter:                 For sure. I mean, it's truly amazing, because you let people like me come in for two straight to actually build my dream skis that are exactly to my very own specs, where I will build the basis, and cores, and all the way to printing my custom designed top sheets to sanding and then finishing the sidewalls. It's actually rather affordable, right, that entire experience is around the 1,500 bucks, where most top tier off the mill skis will run you around a grand. It's really the same price plus 500 for the two day of schooling, which to me sounds a such unique experience building your own skis hands on. When did you have that epiphany to push customization so far to actually let your customers take over the shop? Is that one of your biggest differentiators from other boutique ski makers? It seems very different. M Wallace:                   Yeah. I mean, we have the largest ski building class, if you will, in the country by quite a bit. It was a, like a lot of things here, one of the key elements to Parlor is the community that exists around it, which is largely based off our clients, but also just sort of people who have a passion about the sport, who're involved in ... we took a page out of Grain Surfboards playbook, we know the owners up there pretty well, it's a handmade wooden surfboard company in Maine where they offer class. They kind of urged into it, and we resisted for a while, because we didn't know how we do it. Then we had a group, a small group of people who really hounded us and wanted to come build skis. M Wallace:                   So we let them do it, and came up with a system and a program, and they had such an amazing experience that we decided to roll it out as a product. So it was really driven by our clients' and communities' desire to delve deeper into understand how skis go together, and create that sense of ownership and pride in that. It did allowed us to develop that product. F Geyrhalter:                 You hit in something super important, community, it seems to me with your events, you have one event called shop night, and you actually invite people over just to watch you build skis. And they can sip whiskey, and have a beer. Is it that community that you built over the years that spread the word organically with Parlor, like through those events? Or was it actually with the help of a PR agency? What was that big breakthrough moment? Was it all organic or was it like a big article or something that really pushed Parlor? M Wallace:                   No, it comes ... we love skiing here, we love talking about skiing- F Geyrhalter:                 You better. M Wallace:                   ... right. We do, and I think that a lot of that sort of grassroots and organic growth came from being very open and inviting to people and sharing that love and passion for the sport. We sort of, we act as a resource for a lot of our clients, we also provide a little bit of ski culture in Boston, you can come here and it smells like wax, and there are ski videos on, you can drink beer and tell lies about skiing. That's a big piece that draws that community together. It's a huge amount of our business is repeat and referral right now, and we're very grateful for that, but I think it really comes from just wanting to really focusing on providing good client service, building relationships with people and providing them with something that's different. Nobody wants to go back and buy a pair of Volkls after they've been to the shop, it's just not ... there's no reason to do that. So, that message has gotten out there, and it's slow and it's hard work, but we believe that if you care about what you're doing and you talk about that honestly the word is going to spread. F Geyrhalter:                 It's about authenticity. You guys do it for the love of doing it, and you have that background, so people can sense that and they can shoot the shit with you and just share that stoke and be the real ... hanging with buddies basically, that happen to build your skis. That's pretty cool for anyone who's a real dedicated skier. M Wallace:                   Right. F Geyrhalter:                 So, from a branding perspective, obviously with skiing and snowboarding, brand recognition is huge. You want everyone in the slopes to know what you're riding. Parlor is a little bit different, it's obviously extremely unique, but you want it to be a talking point when you're in the chairlift, right. From a branding design perspective, which elements actually stay unchanged on Parlor Skis so that I immediately recognize that those are a pair of Parlors, even though you let people completely customize the skis. Is there some consistency from one pair to another? M Wallace:                   All of our skis have a red base inlay that says Parlor on them, black bases, which are the highest quality base with the red inlay, it's sort of one of our signatures. We don't require that our logo is on top of all the skis, we really rely on the sort of word of mouth, again and the people wanting to talk about their product. And answering the, "What are those? Where did you get those?" And having that sense of pride I think, from the imagery standpoint, certainly the word Parlor in our logo font is our most recognizable mark, that's what's on all of our hats and merchandise and stuff like that. That's what lives on the base of the ski as well. M Wallace:                   Those are the things that we use. We also, for people who are into the details, all of our skis have a hardwood sidewall, which is pretty unique in the market, we use a maple sidewall. If you see a unique pair of skis, we also have a pretty standard design aesthetic in regards to the shape and the line of the tip and tails of the ski, although they change a little bit. So people who are familiar with the brand will recognize this short of shape and feel of a Parlor ski certainly if they're close by it. F Geyrhalter:                 It's very cool. How hard is it, how difficult is it for you to keep owning those details and those shapes? Isn't like every season the big guys are coming out with something that might look similar? Or do you pretty much own this kind of style? M Wallace:                   I mean, I think yeah, I mean, the big guys, they move around a lot with shapes and designs. A lot of that is just there's a lot of pressure to move new products, and introduce new products and a lot of that is just marketing stuff. We really believe that if you use the highest quality materials and you customize the fit, you don't need a lot of [inaudible 00:12:47] to sell good skis and to make really high-quality skis. We just have a different sort of set of priorities. I would argue that most of the big retail machine does not have the end consumers' best interest always in mind. Not that they're anti-consumer, but the pressures that are on them to control their material cost, and to move more units, and to refresh their product line, don't necessarily serve the need of providing the best, most consistent product to the customer. F Geyrhalter:                 For sure. For sure. With Parlor, is actually you and the co-founder, are you guys still hands-on creating skis? Do you still, are you still going to the shop on a daily basis? M Wallace:                   I'm in the factory every day. I fill in when I need to. I think it surprises some of the guys sometimes that I actually know how to do all the stuff. But I teach a lot, Tyler, my partner, and I teach all the classes. So one of us is always around for the class. It's hands-on for that. I certainly fill in when there's help. I do most of my role now is sales, and marketing related, as well as sort of the day-to-day operations. Tyler runs the shop, we've got a couple of people that help in the office, graphic design, PR, digital, et cetera. So, most of my work is doing that, but oftentimes I'm down in the shop grinding skis or making sure process is working right or fixing a machine. We're very involved in the business. It's a hands on company. F Geyrhalter:                 Multitasking. Yeah. For sure. You have only been around for seven years, I believe, right? M Wallace:                   It seems like a long time, but when you say it that way I guess it's only seven. F Geyrhalter:                 So what are your growth goals if any? Will you expand, or will you even franchise in the future? How far will Parlor as a brand go? How far do you guys actually want to go? Because bigger does not necessarily always mean better as we know. M Wallace:                   Yeah. We're very opportunity focused. But our goal, we've been growing about 30% to 40% year over year for most of those seven years. F Geyrhalter:                 It's great. Yeah. M Wallace:                   We started small. We've cash flow finance the whole business, so that's a very intentional decision on our part. We want to continue to grow to the scale where we can provide the quality and the service that we currently do to our clientele, and maintain the community. So we are building this business to run it, we love what we're doing. We're not sort of ... there are a lot of things we could do to sell more skis, and that's not necessarily our focus, we want to sell to the right people and we want to provide the right product. We are going to continue to grow. We'd like to continue to scale, but we don't have plans for bringing any huge amount of investment and making sure there are Parlors everywhere. The world doesn't need another Volkl, or Rossignol, or K2 in our opinion, but they do need more specialized, personalized companies like Parlor. F Geyrhalter:                 Amen. On your website it says, "Our skis enable you to go beyond your own expectations. We craft confidence, confidence to go a little faster, and a little further." You really use language to bond and to create that stoke to talk skiers language, which for you comes completely organic. Do you write all of the copy? Because you said that you're kind of like put on more the marketing hat these days, and do you have a set of rules? Is it really just you guys changing it up whenever you feel like it needs a little pizzazz? M Wallace:                   Yeah. I do some of the copywriting, we've been really lucky to work with some good consultants over the years. Some of our digital marketing guys are very talented in that front. So, again, you work ... a lot of that is just authenticity. I would say we don't have like ... I mean, we do have brand guidelines, but not in the way that a lot of companies do. We sit down as a group a couple of times a year, and we talk about who we are as a brand right now, are all of our [inaudible 00:17:20] supporting that? What do we want to be doing? What do we care about? What's refreshing? A lot of times, you know, this esteems a passion for this work and quality engineering and delivering a better product and experience to our client sort of always come up. So when you look at language like crafting confidence, or pushing people to go further. If you have the right product, you will have a better day on the snow. It's like, it's the difference between pants that fit and pants that don't fit. If your pants are too tight, you're going to have a bad day. You might not necessarily know that's why you're having a bad day, but you are. So what we do is we sort of sit at that intersection between design and delivery of the product, which gives us a huge advantage. Because the people we're designing skis for the big companies are not connected to their consumers the same way we are, they get a design brief and they have to design a ski for this condition and this market segment, or this person. Every ski we build is tailored for that individual, which just kind of puts our priorities in a totally different alignment. F Geyrhalter:                 Well, it's impossible for any company to be closer to its audience than you are, because you literally create every ski customized, in one way or the other, or to order. So absolutely. I'm actually very positively surprised that a brand like yours, that is trying to stay small, and is trying to really focus on that one product, that you guys meet every year, every two years, and actually talk about what your brand stands for, and really the values of the brand. I think that's really refreshing. Because I keep using the word organic, right, like all of this is just kind of falling into place. But it isn't. And I love that you kind of stop at times and go back to like what's the big Simon Sinek's why? What's the why behind this company? I think it's really refreshing to see you guys do that. What does branding mean to you? We're kind of in midst of that conversation now, but what does it mean to you? M Wallace:                   I mean, branding is sort of the ... it's the way that people view what you're doing. It's the way that your activities and your products are sort of viewed by the world. I think that's an important distinction and something to think about especially for marketers or younger marketers out there. You have an image of what, or most founders right, or people who're deeply involved in a company, an image of what they're doing and what it looks like. It's very difficult sometimes to flip that around and say, "Okay, what are people actually seeing? How is this perceived?" You know, those two things align. I think that there are two challenges, one is sort of finding your vision, and being true to that, and also being able to adapt that based on what people want to see and how they want to perceive a brand. I think that's how I would define it. F Geyrhalter:                 No. It's great. It's the idea of also stepping outside and looking back in, that's really, really the difficult part and you hit that nicely. I've got a question that is a little bit about brand expansion, but it's actually more of a personal question because of my fascination with the sport. I started snowboarding a long, long, long, long, long time ago. I actually built my own snowboard at the time because I couldn't afford buying one because they had maybe 100 of them in Austria. It was like a long, long time ago, I was like six years old or something. So in the first 10 years, there was this friction, skiers versus snowboarders. Snowboarders are kind of like the young punks and the skateboarders in the slopes, and they're just not good for the mountain. They're the bad guys on the mountain. The troublemakers. Now, Parlor just recently, I guess, empowered one of your guys to like start building snowboards. I think you guys are doing that now pretty officially. So, do you see any friction in your community? Because you guys, your community is hardcore skiers. A lot of them, I'm sure, at the price point, are not like 20-year-old somethings and a lot of them most probably have been around when snowboarding and skiing was kind of like very separated. Did you find any of that when you started introducing snowboards? Or is that so long gone and we're all kind of like getting along these days? M Wallace:                   No, I mean there's still a tension. You got to remember, the thing that unites Parlor customers is their love for sliding on snow, and also being outdoors, and being with their friends and family. Those things are sort of universal. I mean, there is a little bit of tension still between the communities, but I think it's become very sort of lighthearted at this point, certainly within our shop there's some banter about it. But I really view Parlor in a lot of ways as a carving company. We make long boards, we make skis, we make snowboards, we've certainly play around with surfboards, kiteboarding is sort of exploding right now. Anything where we can add value and create a better product, I think sort of falls under the Parlor umbrella. As we're sort of expanding the brand, and we were always looking at these different options and opportunities, I mean, snowboarding was the obvious next step, and we've been really successful. Again, we don't build park skis, and we don't build park snowboards. Our snowboard design is very inspired by surfing, it's sort of a throwback in the earlier day in the sport, it's about how you interact with the mountain and creating tools that allow you to do that more efficiently and in more creative ways. Again, there are lots of companies that make great park skis, and great park boards, but that's not really where we sit in the market. Also, I mean, there are a lot of jerks who are skiers too. F Geyrhalter:                 Oh yeah. M Wallace:                   Not anymore than the jerk snowboarders. Again, we felt that those people don't really gravitate towards our brand, so we don't have to worry about it. F Geyrhalter:                 Yeah. Yeah. It's on the mountain, off the mountain, there are jerks and there are others. You build the community around the others. So, I have a lot of investors and a lot of entrepreneurs listening to this, especially a lot of like young entrepreneurs, meaning not age, but the age of the company. They're just getting into it. They're playing the startup game, which you and I both played at some point. Do you have a piece of brand advice for any founders as a takeaway of like how they should create their brand and what should be important for them in the first maybe couple months or year? M Wallace:                   I think this applies to all business ventures, and I talk about it a lot, especially I'm doing mentoring or anything like that. You do not be paralyzed by not having all the pieces. My sort of word of advice is just always be doing something. And don't over-commit until you know it's going to work. So, my favorite example of this is there was an executive at TripAdvisor several years ago who if somebody came and wanted to develop them a product for their website, he would give them the button but not the product. If they got enough clicks on the button, he'd allowed them to build the product. I think that is just like I remember learning that in business school and being like, "That makes total sense." Who cares if you piss off 25 people who click on your button and you tell them they got to wait? It's a much bigger deal to build a ski, or build a product line, or develop a whole company around something that nobody cares about without ... you know, you can put up a website right now in like two days for 100 bucks. If you have an idea, put it out there, put a buy button on it, and just tell people you're sold out after they click on it. If a bunch of people click on it, you got an idea, and go run with it. You don't have to raise 10 million bucks to figure out if you have a good idea or not. Just start doing stuff. Don't quit your job, learn, fail fast, and then be able to be fluid enough to make adaptations along the way. F Geyrhalter:                 Yeah. That's really great advice. It's interesting because I'm sure that you guys do the same thing with just shaping your skis and trying different things and just like putting it out in the slopes and seeing if sticks. If it sticks with enough people, maybe it's a new line. So, listeners who like the idea of owning a pair of Parlor skis, and really who wouldn't, where should they head to learn more? M Wallace:                   The website, ParlorSkis.com. We're also on Instagram and Facebook, we're @parlorskis, and anybody is welcome to call me at 413-884-4747, anytime or put an inquiry into the website. Those are definitely the best places, but I'm happy to talk to anyone any time about skiing, obviously. F Geyrhalter:                 That's awesome. M Wallace:                   We're very accessible here, so reach out. F Geyrhalter:                 Yes, you are. Because ... thank you for accepting my call to outreach via LinkedIn to be on my show. It was such a guilty pleasure to have you here. I think I might have to book a weekend to build my own board in New England with you soon. You also do boards during those hands-on sessions, right? M Wallace:                   That's correct. We're offering build your own boards and split boards this year. So, we've got a couple slots left. The classes are pretty full. We have been sold out with the class for the last three years. So we have a couple slots open in August, and if you're around, reach out and we're happy to slot you in. F Geyrhalter:                 Awesome. Very cool. Thanks everyone for listening. I appreciate it, and I hope you enjoyed the Parlor story and got some inspiration out of it. I sure have and I'm thanking you, Mark, for being here, really appreciate it. M Wallace:                   Thanks for having me, it was a pleasure. F Geyrhalter:                 Cool. If you guys enjoyed this show, please hit the subscribe button and give this show a quick rating. This podcast was brought to you by PocketNote, a new site that helps founders and entrepreneurs find thoughtful, succinct answers to their startup questions. You can learn more, read through the topics, or submit your own question at PocketNote.co, the Hitting the Mark theme music was written and produced by the one and only Happiness Won. I will see you in two weeks, when we'll once again will be hitting the mark.

In this episode, we talk with Frank Demmler, who can take credit for 500 companies, some 10,000 jobs, and $1 billion of investment capital. For over 30 years he has been an investor, advisor, and educator in Pittsburgh's technology-based entrepreneurial community, which hardly existed when he first started but has grown to be one of the most active and desirable entrepreneurship hubs today. We dive into two of the companies he assisted, Automated Healthcare, which deploys robots in hospital pharmacies and has been acquired by McKesson for $65 million, and clothing brand Modcloth. He shares Modcloth's startup story from college sweethearts to putting a few clothes online for sale to turning into a beloved brand that innovated especially through the power of crowdsourcing. Much to absorb in this episode, especially if you are interested in leveraging the power of your tribe. You can connect with Frank via LinkedIn. ________________Full, Unedited, Transcript: F Geyrhalter:                 Welcome to Hitting The Mark. We had so many founders on the show lately that it was definitely time to bring on an investor to once again hear from the other side of the table. Not just any investor. Today, we have the pleasure to pick the brain of a man who Income Magazine described as Pittsburgh's startup whisperer. Taking credit for 500 companies, some 10,000 jobs, and $1 billion of investment capital. Today, we welcome the one and only Frank Demmler, who, for over 30 years has been an investor, advisor, and educator in Pittsburgh's technology based entrepreneurial community, which hardly existed when he first started, but has grown to be one of the most active and desirable entrepreneurship hubs today. Frank has also been an adjunct professor for entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University for over 30 years. With that being said, welcome Frank. F Demmler:                   Thank you Fabian. Looking forward to it. I want to make one correction. I don't take credit for all of those things. The entrepreneurs who created the businesses and raised the money, they're the ones who did it. I just helped. F Geyrhalter:                 I absolutely love that. You know, that kind of already sums up the type of person that I believe you are, so I'm so excited to finally have you on the show. Let's talk a little bit about those companies that you invested in. It's a pretty large number, and it's hard to pick one or two brands to dive into today, but I was intrigued by two specifically. One of which, he actually picked. Let's start with that one, because it's a rather peculiar one. Automated Healthcare, which deploys robots in hospital pharmacies and has been acquired by McKesson for $65 million. Okay, so, if that did not get my listeners excited to have you on the show, I am not sure what would. Tell us a bit about Automated Healthcare, when and how you got involved, and how you saw it shape into a brand that is worth that amount of money. F Demmler:                   It was a situation where I had worked with the founders of the company in a variety of capacities; as an advisor, educator. One of the co-founders was a former of student of mine. Learned about, they had applied to an economic development organization in Pennsylvania called The Ben Franklin Technology Partnership, and they had been rejected for their grant. I was adamantly opposed to that decision, so I went and advocated on their behalf, and they were able to get, at that time, an $88,000 grant to purchase a robot so they could do the proof of concept of putting a robot in a hospital and having it be able to pick medications off a pegboard with reliability. With that introduction and interaction, when it came time for the company to raise money, I was a general partner of the Pittsburgh Seed Fund, and it was just a natural extension of what we'd been doing to make the investment in the company and help it move forward. F Geyrhalter:                 How do you feel that Automated Healthcare, like, what role did branding or the idea of branding play for Automated Healthcare? Because, obviously, they're a B2B robotics brand in the healthcare space, so it feels, like, really far removed, but it seems like it still played a role. F Demmler:                   Oh, very definitely. I hate to admit it, but the initial investment was in 1990, so I don't know if your listeners were even born then, but ... F Geyrhalter:                 I think it's okay Frank, because I said over the last 30 years twice in my intro, so I kind of already gave away that there's a huge amount of knowledge in you, let's put it that way. F Demmler:                   Back in 1990, the healthcare system was undergoing major revolutions that continue to this day. One area of particular concern was that the error rate of medications leaving a hospital pharmacy and being delivered to a patient had an error rate between one and 10%, with an average of 1-3/4%. Most of those errors were things like 100mg of Tylenol instead of 15, or whatever, but some of them could be fatal. This appeared to be a great opportunity for the application of robotic technology, because in fact, the process of picking those pills was repetitive and could be programmed in such a way that a robot could do it, and that would replace an army of white-frocked young people running around the pharmacy doing hand picking, which was the way it was done back there. By saying Automated Healthcare, it positioned the company as one that was using advanced technology. It was resonating in an industry that was only beginning to appreciate that there were technologies that ultimately could be adopted by hospitals to improve patient care and improve financial performance. F Geyrhalter:                 It was really branding a new segment, like, disrupting with a new definition of what a business can do within the healthcare space. F Demmler:                   Exactly. It literally revolutionized how hospitals would manage and distribute their drugs. One of the benefits of that is, prior to Automated Healthcare, the professional pharmacist played more a role of a grocery store checkout person who would review the medications once they'd been picked and try to make sure that they were the right thing for the right patient. You had a highly compensated professional who really wasn't able to do his or her professional job of working with the patients, working with the nurses, but was sitting there checking out sets of pills. F Geyrhalter:                 Well, and obviously, I think those are a lot of the jobs that are going to be replaced in the future and a lot of people are afraid of that, but the way that you put it and the way that I see it too, those are individuals that actually are not utilizing the full capacity of their intellect doing the work that they're currently doing. It is actually a very positive movement, and it seems to me that Automated Healthcare and your investment in them or your mentoring them actually, they were pretty much on the forefront of what now is becoming a really widely discussed topic. F Demmler:                   Yeah, and I believe that Automated Healthcare was the first time a hospital had introduced barcodes into its information system. Because, it was basically, the barcodes enabled the ability of, the medications were put in individual packages with barcodes on them, and then the arm of the robot would scan that barcode, confirm that it is what it is, pull it off, and do that. It was a very elegant but self contained application because the patient's bed or nightstand would have a barcode confirming that it's the patient. The nurse would have a barcoded wristband, and then the medication. What you had was a closed loop of information of how the pills have been distributed, or the medications. F Geyrhalter:                 Fascinating. Let's move over to another brand that you helped shape over the years: ModCloth, which is a vintage inspired clothing brand for young women, and they had quite a great founding story. Tell us how you got involved with them and at what stage of the company's foundation did they step in. Were they students of yours? F Demmler:                   Yes, well, the male was a student. I have to correct what I sent you. Koger is the last name, so Susan and Eric Koger are the founders of ModCloth. They had been high school sweethearts. They came to Carnegie Mellon University as students, and got married somewhere along the line. The thing was that Susan loved vintage clothing, so that whenever she and Eric were going to different towns, her first stop would be into the consignment stores and other sources of used or historical garments. She would buy probably a lot of stuff from those places, and it got to the point where their apartment was overflowing with her vintage clothing, and obviously she can't wear all that often, and so ultimately they came up with the idea of, let's sell Susan's purchases over the internet. This is back in 2004, I believe. At that time, the internet, stores were beginning to emerge on the internet. Eric, who was a joint computer science and business major designed the website and got them up and going. Lo and behold, the reaction to Susan's inventory was very positive, very strong. Susan came up with the concept of finding young designers who designed with vintage inspired concepts applied. They borrowed, I believe, on the order of $50,000 from an uncle, like, in October of 2004, so they could buy some inventory and get the designs made. Again, lo and behold, the designs were being gobbled up as soon as they hit the website. They actually used that to their advantage during the very earliest stages in that, because cash was tight, she would order whatever clothing she could based upon financial ability, put it on the site, and typically within one to three hours the inventory would sell out. That, then, caused the fans of the site to log in multiple times a day in order to not miss a new item coming on. That was probably one of the first social marketing tactics that I had seen that had been successful. That success got them into low six digit sales, slightly more than $100,000, which wasn't chump change at that time, either. F Geyrhalter:                 Right. F Demmler:                   But, by the same token, because of the customer adoption and because of the brand that they had created, and branded Susan Koger as a thought leader or probably today would be called an influencer, she and the designs of the product line all became a brand and a product and a lifestyle that distinguished it from other such clothing providers. That got the attention of a number of very high profile angel investors, Jeff Fleur from StubHub, Mike Maples, Josh Kopelman among others. They put in a super angel round, I guess it would be called, and that's what allowed the company to transition from a two person selling out of their apartment into a company. That success then led to institutional investors and over time, the brand grew from zero to over $150 million of annual revenues, and ultimately, it was acquired by Jet.com, which itself had been acquired by Walmart, because Walmart wanted to create some branded strategies rather than being viewed as a commodity/low price cheap provider. That was sort of the cycle of the business. It still exists as an independent brand, you can find it on the internet, but that's sort of the history. F Geyrhalter:                 What a fascinating story. I mean, there's a woman in college and she buys too much vintage clothing, and at some point the boyfriend says, "Look, let's start selling that. Instead of using eBay, let me just create a website where we can sell your stuff." That went from an $18,000 in income to $15 million in income in only four years. I mean those stories are amazing, and today if you go to the ModCloth website, it has Halsey and Awkwafina as models and, you know, and obviously it was just acquired by Walmart at the same time that I guess Bonobos was acquired by Walmart, so obviously to boost the Walmart brand for a younger audience. It's such a success story and I believe that one of the big pieces to that brand's success, and you hinted at it within your story about the brand, is crowdsourcing, because ModCloth actually became the first retailer, I read, to supplement an existing business model with crowdsourcing efforts. You know, as you mentioned, Susan started that, I guess she called it the B to buyer program, where she got her designs, post them on the site soliciting customers to vote for which design to produce, which then of course created a huge buzz and made the customer feel like they had a voice, but in turn, they pretty much presold product almost instantaneously, and I guess the genius moving crowdsourcing actually must have come out of a complete necessity at the time for her, because she just had to do it this way in order to sustain. F Demmler:                   Yes. I mean, she did. Exactly as you said, they didn't have the cashflow that they could afford to invest in inventory and hope somebody bought it. She was able to basically create what were ultimately auctions of, "Here are five designs that we identified. Which one would you buy," among the users. They would vote. Lo and behold, whoever won, that one would be purchased and the buyers were already predetermined, and so they would sell out pretty quickly. F Geyrhalter:                 Right, exactly. Just to give our listeners some more insight into all the different ways that she actually, well, ModCloth as a brand, is actually using crowdsourcing, here are three of them that I want to share that I read about. The first one is style gallery, which is a user generated image gallery where customers send in photos of themselves modeling in ModCloth designs, and then of course, you know, other people see how the clothing actually looks on real people. Then, there's fit for me, which is a feature on the ModCloth app which allows you to see suggestions for clothing that will fit their exact body shape based on other user's reviews. Then, last but not least, and I think this is such a cool thought, they ran a contest in 2012 called Make The Cut. What they did is, ModCloth created products based on consumer ideas. Suddenly, the consumer became an artist, and the contest winners had their drawings, their sketches of clothing, adapted into real clothes for the spring line, with each Make The Cut garment product then featuring the artist's name printed on the label. You suddenly had your name on the back of a piece of clothing from a brand that you already love. F Geyrhalter:                 Obviously, they used some nifty brand strategies and they were also very in tune with the current site guys, because they were taking a stance on the topic of body image when it was rarely discussed in the media. Do you know with this particular startup investment of yours or nurturing of yours, mentoring of yours, when did the team actually started to actively invest time or money into brand strategy voice or design? I think a lot of it came very organic, but at some point they must have said, "Let's hire an agency. Let's do this the real way." Do you know that transition or how a lot of these amazing brand thoughts came about with ModCloth? F Demmler:                   As you noted, some of them were organic. For example, the one where people would take pictures of themselves in outfits and share that, they'd also created a discussion board where people would be able to explain that they're using a dress from one source and a blouse from another and a scarf from another and a pair of shoes. Then people would talk about, "Hey, have you tried such and such?" It was really part and parcel of the company. Once we had the super angels on board who did have consumer marketing backgrounds, they were able to help us in terms of identifying the right agencies. That would have been two to three years into the company, but 12 to 18 months after getting the super angel investment that they were able to do a full professional shift into the crowdsourcing and customer engagement. F Geyrhalter:                 When do you advise your companies, typically, to invest in branding? Does it vary by startup focus? Does it vary by B2B, B2C, you know, tack, you know, apps, etc? F Demmler:                   Yeah. Well, as an investor, what I want to do is mitigate risk. F Geyrhalter:                 Right. F Demmler:                   Certainly, with any B2C company, creating a brand that customers will resonate with is an essential part of that process. If the company's vision, theme, culture, and brand aren't all aligned, you end up with dissonance and very poor customer pickup. It really is essential that you put all of those things together on a branded basis in order to capture the customers. F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely. With B2C companies, it sounds like you push them towards turning into that brand rather sooner than later, and with B2B companies you must probably take a little bit of a stance back. F Demmler:                   Yeah. I mean, for example, Automated Healthcare made great use of its brand, but the other technique that the founders did was, among their first 10 customers were four of the past five presidents of the American Hospital Pharmacy Association. Not only did the brand get established, but it got established and linked to thought leaders within their industry. You have everything sort of working in sync, reinforcing each bit. F Geyrhalter:                 Right, right. That creates that holistic brand, absolutely. How much of your time do you spend mentoring? It seems like you pretty much dedicated yourself to helping entrepreneurs thrive. Often, people hear the word investor and they immediately conjure up a stereotype which is not always positive. Right? But, it can in fact be a very nurturing and extremely satisfying line of work. F Demmler:                   Yeah, absolutely. I've been doing this since 1984, and every day is a new challenge with the opportunity to learn new technologies, to meet people who have dreams and aspirations, and to be able to help those people go from being a wannabe entrepreneur to an entrepreneur. Yeah, I spend my time very much on the early stage. Well over half my time is more in the nurturing and working with the companies. Then, when they get to a certain scale, either the investment mechanism that I've got where I will help them determine what investors might be appropriate to help them at what time. F Geyrhalter:                 Do you only work with startups within the Pittsburgh system, and they're usually all part of incubators and accelerators, or the university that you work with? F Demmler:                   I work primarily in Pittsburgh. It's where my network is and where I've got history and all of that. But, I also have worked with companies throughout North America, I guess. I did a webinar for the Technology Transfer Tactics, which is a industry Bible for university tech transfer offices. I talked about a variety of things that were germane to them, for example. The key thing I worked on there was splitting the founder's pie. It had to do with university spin outs, how do you take 100% and divide it appropriately among whoever the founder group is. That's a tangential. Yeah, working with the company and helping it figure out the ways of success, I mean, one way that I look at it is, if you put entrepreneurship on a scale of zero to 10, where zero is somebody who ought to keep a job, stay in a job, and not even think about being an entrepreneur, and then at 10 you've got your Mark Zuckerberg or that ilk, most of the people that I work with are sort of in the zero to three range. They typically will have one or two key strengths that are relevant. University spin outs, obviously, it's going to be the technology and the ownership in the technology. My goal is to help those people get into the range of six-plus. What I mean by that is, they will understand the vocabulary of what they've gotten into. They will understand why a bank is not going to fund them on the first day, and understand how investors will be looking at them. I've spent a lot of my time doing that, and for the ones that can move to that level, then getting them funded. Here at Pittsburgh, we've had the Innovation Works, which I was with for 13 years, founded Alpha Lab as one of the first incubators in the country, founded back in 2008. It has created, typically it'll have 12 to 15 new companies a year divided into two cycles. We also have Alpha Lab Gear, which is a hardware-oriented accelerator. They are adding to the mix of companies. They don't dominate it because quite often, well, accelerator companies are often pretty fragile, even when they go through the process. Working with them to make them investment ready sometimes takes more than what the accelerator program provides. F Geyrhalter:                 Oh, for sure, yeah. I mean, you've been doing this since 1984. What is a big piece of brand advice that you can share with our founders as a takeaway from this podcast session? F Demmler:                   Today the thought is, customer discovery is the bellwether of being an entrepreneur. Unlike when I first started this business, where it might cost a half a million dollars to develop a software product, you know, in today's world, it's $25,000 or $50,000. You actually do have the ability to go to customers and get their direct feedback on what it is you're trying to do, and as you do that, you listen to what your customers tell you, and quite often, you'll find out that the business you thought you were in isn't that at all, but what you're providing to the customers has a different value. Once you've sort of hit on that, the core value of the offering, then branding that and using that as a way to create identity and growth is essential. F Geyrhalter:                 In the end, it is about empathy with your customer. Right? Really, really, putting yourself into their shoes and listening to them and understanding what they actually ache for, despite what you offer, and then moving your product more into their sphere. F Demmler:                   Exactly. F Geyrhalter:                 Thank you Frank. I think it took us quite a bit of back and forth to finally make this happen, but I'm so grateful that you were able to take this 20 minutes of your time from your many duties as the startup whisperer to educate my listeners. I really appreciate it. F Demmler:                   Happy to do it Fabian. Feel free to call me in the future if you'd like. F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely, and thank you all for listening. Please take a few seconds right now to hit that subscribe button and give the show a quick rating. It is the only currency I take from you in return for putting together this show every two weeks, from finding interesting guests like Frank to getting them booked, prepping, recording, and doing the post. It is definitely a time consuming labor of love. This podcast is brought to you by FINIEN, a brand consultancy creating strategic verbal and visual brand clarity. You can learn more about FINIEN, which I also happen to run, and explore my books on brand building at FINIEN.com. The Hitting The Mark music was written and produced by Happiness Won. I will see you next time, when we once again will be Hitting The Mark

In this episode, we dive into influencer marketing with Colin Szopa, who created a brand for fitness influencers to connect in deeper ways with their tribes. We debunk the myth that influencers are Prima Donnas to work with, learn about how personal brands support each other versus compete with each other on the same digital platform as well as the art and science of crafting a meaningful and descriptive name for the app store. You can find Plankk Studio in the app store if you are ready to sweat it out with some of the biggest names in fitness. ________________Full Transcript: F Geyrhalter:                 Welcome to Episode eight of Hitting the Mark. Today I'm joined by the founder of a brand that enables other brands and in this case of Plankk Studio those brands are personal brands. Today we enter a world of personal trainers and influencers and the man that helps them monetize their audience. Colin Szopa is the founder and CEO of Plankk an only two year old technology and content company that partners with fitness influencers to create custom fitness apps that help them monetize their audiences. The company recently released Plankk Studio a new on demand streaming service that lets fitness enthusiasts sweat it out with on the go workouts alongside their favorite fitness influencers. You can have on the go workouts with the world's most elite fitness trainers from any screen. And thank God you don't have to stare at a mirror the whole time while doing so. Okay. That was potentially marketing another brand that's been in the news recently, but enough of my monologue. F Geyrhalter:                 Welcome Colin. C Szopa:                       Yes, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Thank you. F Geyrhalter:                 Oh absolutely. So Plankk Studio. This is exciting. So it's described as the Netflix of health and fitness. It is a crowded space, obviously, that is not lacking in innovation. But the way you approached it was from a very different angle. You first created apps for influencers basically helping them build their brands. And now in a way the tables have turned and you are building your own brand, your own app Plankk Studio based on their personal brands. Tell us a bit about how the brand, how this the app of all apps came about? C Szopa:                       Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's really an extension of the vision that Plankks always had, which is how do you connect the influencer, these fitness creators that have a massive community and following, you know, on their social media channels already. How do you connect them and bring them closer to that to their audience there and kind of humanize that relationship? So what Plankk Studio is doing is it's extending these personalized training apps that we've been able to build for each one of our influencer partners and bringing that relationship a little bit closer through this live streaming experience. So if you were to think about, attending a workout class somewhere and on the go, whether that's at your house or at a hotel room, if you're traveling and you do want to do it at a gym, you're able to actually work out right alongside this influencer through a curated livestream experience for that particular class that you like. F Geyrhalter:                 That's very cool. And you have some of the world's fitness elite using the platform. There's Valentina Lequer alone who has I think 1.4 million followers just by herself and you creating a big new Plankk Studio community, the Plankk tribe, as you have referred to them, out of these elite fitness trainers own communities. So how hard was that upsell, if it even was an upsell, for these influences to basically share their communities with all the other trainers that are now on one and the same app? What is your value prop to them? C Szopa:                       Yeah, absolutely. And I think what's really interesting about it is that, you know, you still have the engaged experience through these individual apps that each one of these trainers do have with their communities. But what Plankk Studio is doing is it's bringing it under that one umbrella where people are able to, like I said, not only work out alongside them in a livestream, but they can share their progress inside the Plankk tribe community inside of the app. There's a more engaged kind of experience where you can communicate directly with the influencer on your before and after photos and your progress pics and just get coaching you along if you will, to hit those fitness goals. So that's really the intention of it is the influencers are able to kind of get one step closer to their community through the Plankk Studio platform, whether that's through the live streaming or if people want to attend it on demand class as well. F Geyrhalter:                 And so they don't seem to be concerned that people are gonna flip around to other influencers on that on that same app destination. C Szopa:                       You know, what's really interesting, it's a good question is that at this point we're at 58 total influencer partners that Plankk's working within, you know, the two and a half years we've been around. And what's really interesting about it is we're noticing that as social media continues to grow, there's a new social media user that gets created every 15 seconds in the world. You have this rising tide lifting all boats of people coming on to this social, online experience for maybe even the first time when you think about developing countries around the world and you're really starting to push these influencers higher and higher of how big their communities are. C Szopa:                       But what's really interesting about it is we're not seeing any overlap, whether that's through our existing apps that we build. We haven't seen one user that's used two of our apps that we've built. And then even inside of the Plankk Studio platform, we're noticing that people tend to really liken themselves to particular influencer or creator. So we've tried to bring the world's top creators on to Plankk Studio that offer a differentiating fitness experience, if you will. So whether it's Valentino who has a very engaged, strong community of women and we have Ashley Kaltwasser who is a three time, you know, Miss Bikini Olympia. So we have somebody that's maybe looking more for a gym experience. Particular workouts for maybe if you wanted to build your lower body or if you're looking for more hit or training. We also have males on the platform. So really I think people kind of come to the platform, almost as if you were watching like your favorite television show on Netflix. You kind of have your favorite one or two that you follow. And that's curated in that same way. F Geyrhalter:                 That's really interesting. So basically either you come in because you are ready, you'll really have one favorite influencer and trainer and you just want to see him or her doing the workouts. Or you actually come to Plankk studio and you start realizing, oh, this is the channel I want to go into. And then you just get sucked into it like a Netflix binge, just you just keep in to it. C Szopa:                       Yeah, and that is exactly what's happening. Right? So it's a certain training style that may be somebody coming in or maybe they really like to use resistance bands, right? And we've got a curated workout experience for influencers particular for that equipment piece. F Geyrhalter:                 Absolutely. And so you talking about this idea of humanizing influencers, right, that they can formulate a better connection with their audience. What is some ways that you found made that possible within your app? C Szopa:                       Yeah, absolutely. So we have a community feed inside of the app that allows you to engage directly with the influencer and other app users. So there you are able to post words of motivation, how your progress is going, different pictures that you've taken along the way in your fitness journey. And you can comment on that directly with each one of these users and follow them. It's really interesting because that also allows you to see who's attending other livestream classes that you want to attend. So it kind of creates this, you know, almost of a challenge if you will and you can see how other people are doing inside of the app. And then again, feel that connection a bit closer to the influencers that are engaged with you. During the live stream experience, we have the ability for you to chat directly with the influencers. So if you have questions during the warm up or the cool down when you're stretching, maybe in between circuits, you can actually ask a question directly to the influencer via the livestream chat module and then the influencer creators going to be able to give you an answer. Um, you know, in between those reps or sets. F Geyrhalter:                 that's fantastic because it doesn't put any burden on the influence. It's not that much more work, but it's got its really high touch and it's going to change that conversation completely so very ... C Szopa:                       And they wait, too. Yeah, you're bang on. Like the influencers do love that because they want to be helping their community. Right. They want to feel a little bit closer to them as well. So that's really what those live streaming experience is doing is it's bringing them one step closer. F Geyrhalter:                 It's taking it off of social media, which is the only one of the key places they currently play. Right. So it kind of opens it up for them. C Szopa:                       Exactly. F Geyrhalter:                 I'm totally putting you on the spot here, but let's talk about naming an app, just for a second entertain me here. Because you know, we as a consultancy, we do a lot of naming and naming for the app stores is very complex as you have a lot more check marks to check off then simply naming a company. Not the naming a company is simple. But can you tell us about the journey for, not even specifically this app, because this one most probably came a little easier based on the background of your company name, but apps you launched in the past. What are some of the hurdles and tests you go through to ensure that your app floats to the top and that the name helps stand out rather than hurts it by floating to the bottom. Are there any tricks you can share? C Szopa:                       That's a great question because you know, there really are so many health and fitness apps already in the app store as it is. Right. And as you probably know, you can't have the same app naming. It's reserved in Apple's database to just one particular way of spelling. And you can't copy that. F Geyrhalter:                 And it wouldn't be smart would it? C Szopa:                       No, no. But in Google it's interesting. You can see the overlap. It's a little bit different how they use their metatags to differentiate it. Whereas Apple, that just the core name for the app can't be the same. So, we are, the majority for our company I think is at 85% IOS users. So obviously we have to make sure that it coincides with what Apple accepts for naming. And first and foremost, we always start by asking where's the brand stand right now that we're trying to represent inside of the app store with the naming of this app, you know, whether it's our white label apps that we've built with each one of our influencer partners or with Plankk Studio. And the intention there is just how do we bring that brand to life a little bit. So if the app is a little bit more focused on maybe a gym program, for example, we'll come up with a name like Lift with Cass. And so Cass Martin is an influencer we work with. That was a name that she really liked and we saw how that made sense from a gym program perspective. And so we wanted to make sure that that was representative. The name, we'll have some other ones that are a little bit more focused on maybe a hit style training or at home. We have another influencer by the name of Sean Booth, so we kind of got a little creative with him and use his last name to create Booth Camp. We're just trying to bring a little bit of uniqueness to it. So it's not always just fitness with so and so. Right. We try to bring a little bit of creativity to it that represents their brand and the program that they're offering inside of that app. F Geyrhalter:                 And it helps sort it. Yeah. Which is great. C Szopa:                       Yeah. And helps boost it. And then with Plankk studio, really the intention there is we're bringing this boutique fitness experience into the comfort of your home. So it really is, if you can't make it to a studio to attend one of these classes, why don't we bring that to you wherever it's accessible. And at the same time, we're bringing the power of the world's top fitness trainers with you. And so that's really the intention between behind the naming of Plankk Studio. F Geyrhalter:                 And it was kind of a brand extension of your own rights so it made a lot of sense. C Szopa:                       Yep. And you can do keyword searching and all that. I mean Apple has their own database of how you can enter in all of the different metadata for getting your app name to rise up in the different search results when people are folded around the app store. F Geyrhalter:                 Right, right. Exactly. So that, thank you. I appreciate it. You going off off subject a little bit, but it all goes back to the idea of branding an app. A lot of listeners, something that I'm really curious about is, they toy with the idea of working with influencers themselves to promote their own brand and what are some learnings you could share, some red flags or big epiphanies you had on how to create a win win I guess situations for the brand, the influencer and the follower. And be honest here. Is it difficult to work with some of these top notch influencers? I mean, I had my fair share of working with Hollywood in my earlier years and I have to say, besides a few very rare exceptions, celebrities can be very tough to manage. And now you have an entire brand built, based on this new wave of celebrities. How do you work them or do I give them a bad rap for no reason? C Szopa:                       Yeah, I mean I won't go into too many examples, but the interesting thing is where influencers differentiate from the celebrity group if you want to tag it as that, is they're really just more relatable, authentic people that in a lot of times have just kind of stumbled into this, right? So they haven't come from a big, whether that's a TV or movie contract or if they're sports celebrity, some notoriety in that space where they've got these teams behind them and large brand endorsement deals already in place. They're really coming more from one or two man shows where they've come into this from, whether that could have been a reality TV show to modeling, to even just becoming a little more Instagram famous through trending in the discover feed. Right. So to build on that a little bit, and I think what's really interesting when you see the influencers that are successful versus the ones that aren't, at least the longterm, is they've started to figure out why they got that attention in the first place and who their target demographic is. And so if you start to hone in on that more and more, what becomes really important for the integral, I guess almost you could say for their success, is to make sure that they're not associating with too many brands and confusing their audience. Because if you start going too many different directions and you're taking affiliate marketing deals here and pay per post here and you know, appearance fees left, right, and center and even just how they, what type of content that they're putting out there on a weekly basis. If there's a lack of consistency there, it's going to end up turning into a lot of churn with their weekly plus minus on how many people are following them because people aren't really sure what to get from them. So you almost have to figure out what your shtick is and what people are really enjoying. And a lot of influencers know this and they start to figure it out relatively quickly. But then you have to make sure that you're making the right decisions with which brands and companies you choose to associate with. And if you go too far down that rabbit hole in 20 different directions, you're gonna end up confusing your audience and then you're gonna have a hard time converting them into a product that you are trying to endorse or a brand that you want to hook up with and that's becomes a problem because then you don't have as much value to these companies that are looking to partner with you in the first place. F Geyrhalter:                 Oh absolutely. I think that was really, really important to say because in a way it's like any other brand, it's all about clarity of who they are and then focus on that and only that, right? Like we exist to do A, B and c. And so as a personal trainer, you exist to do A, B, and C. This is your tribe. These your people. This is you as a personal brand and only associate yourself with a couple of other brands. Don't overdo it. Be authentic. And I think you touched on something really interesting that I naively did not immediately see, the idea that celebrities and Hollywood celebrities and the typical A list and B list celebrities are very different from influencer celebrities because they basically just, they had to hustle to get there, but different than in Hollywood where they just basically it happened suddenly overnight and they know exactly who to thank for, which is not one source that pushed them up there or one movie that they get into. But it's actually hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people. It's their tribe. So I think they are grateful. And so I think that that's the difference that you must probably really enjoy working with influencers because they know that you're adding a lot of value to them and you're pushing them further out. C Szopa:                       Absolutely, no, you hit the nail on the head. We really do enjoy it because of that reason is they feel, they just feel more approachable. They feel like if just, another one of us, if we're working alongside them as a full suite partner that we are, we're a team. And so it very much feels like a partnership and not like a client relationship in that way. F Geyrhalter:                 Vendor. C Szopa:                       Yeah. A vendor relationship. Thank you. So that's really where Plankk kinda was born from, to be honest, is influencers are recognizing that they have an opportunity to build a business here, to go and do something with the clout that they have in the market. They're seeing that there's more and more people that are catching on to them and following them as they kind of hone in on that value offering that we were talking about before. And then they realize, okay, well, where do we go with this? And really that's what Plankk has set out to do in the offering the platform that we have is, okay, we'll partner with you and not only help you with the custom design and development of your app and the photo shoot that goes along with that. And then all of the launch marketing, branding as we're obviously talking about today, growth strategy, even social media strategy. We'll help out with each one of our partners into how we actually get a little bit more conversion coming into their app and even just helping to grow their following. We've really become a full suite partner to them to ensuring that as they grow and their brand becomes more successful on social media, that in turn it's relating to the products that we're working with them on to help them monetize. And to grow a successful program around that. F Geyrhalter:                 And obviously since it's the trainers are so invested, like when you actually created Plankk Studio as an app, I'm sure you get continuous feedback from them and from the actual potential users. Right. I'm sure there was a lot of that back and forth work. Did you ever go against what they believe the app needed to do or did you add a feature you or your team obsessed over and they were just not sure if this is going to work? C Szopa:                       Yeah, no, it's a great question because I mean part of being in technology is to your point, you always want to be getting that customer feedback and figuring out, what does that next thing that maybe the users asking for or doesn't know yet and we'll end up becoming addicted to, and wanting to tell their friends and ultimately result in the success of the apps. So I'd say the biggest thing for us that we took a bit of a gamble on with that would have been live streaming. There really hasn't been, obviously Instagram and Instagram Live and what they've rolled out with Facebook Live and across all their platforms has become the household name as far as a live stream experience goes. But there really hasn't been anybody that's come into the health and wellness space and built this and curated this live streaming experience around fitness. And so we wanted to take our influencer partners and their audience and also add more people to the community so that people can find our influencers on Plankk Studio, and build this curated livestream experience that really was world class and like nothing else out there. And obviously there's a couple now that people know with some of the competitors in the market, but we really feel like Plankk Studio's taken it to the next level. And that was a risk that we had to take, in assuming that the users would like that. F Geyrhalter:                 Yeah, no, absolutely. So here's the million dollar question. No one receives money doing an exchange. But what does branding mean to you? You know, it's such a nasty word. I mean it gets such a bad rep, but what does, I guess like influencers, right? That those are all words that are so mistaken, but what does branding mean to you, now that you worked on, on establishing so many other brands in one way or the other. C Szopa:                       Yeah, no, I think the biggest thing is just making sure that you're aligned with what people think about your company and what you actually do as a company, what you actually offer them. Because the last thing you'd want as is some sort of false belief there for what people are hoping to come in and have an experience and walk away with something completely different. So for us, when we think about what's that like to come onto a live stream experience with my favorite fitness creator in the world, we want to make sure that you feel like that live stream was better than just pressing play on a YouTube video. We want to make sure that you feel like the livestream on Plankk Studio is bringing you closer to Valentino or Ingrid, Romero or Whitney Johns, inside of the Plankk Studio ecosystem because you couldn't quite make it down to LA to work out with them at their gym or wherever you are around the world. So it's making sure that there's alignment between what you're representing as a brand and then what the consumer is feeling as a result. F Geyrhalter:                 That's great. Yeah. And marketing and product, right. How do the two relate and how do they walk the same walk and talk the same talk. What is one piece of brand advice besides maybe that has been it, because that was great brand advice for founders of apps, or founders in general as one last takeaway. Do you have anything where you can think of, well that's something that we screwed up in the beginning or that's something that I learned that it's so important or is it really that idea of you know, of product, that marketing kind of like being in the same ... C Szopa:                       Well, I mean, Fabian, to further build on what you're getting at there with the product and marketing side of it is when you're first starting out, that's really is what matters. A lot of people felt guilty to okay, we have to go and find a brand and then build around that to be successful. But it's really the opposite. You're going to build, if you go and you build a strong product and you have some strong marketing and people you surround yourself with. Like for us, we actually started off with a different name and it was really just meant to be a working title because we knew that the brand would come later. And it wasn't until our first product hit the market and was out there, and we had our first app that had the screens that said everywhere, Powered by Plankk, that we really had that turning point as a company where our brand was out there and it was going to be trusted. And that's kind of what matters, is in the early stages, people end up fretting so much about the logo and the name and this different little things that just get them down rabbit holes as opposed to just focusing on a strong product and what the actual opportunity is and then how to get the right first customer or people working alongside you so that you can get that product to market and then have it be successful. And at that point you should be thinking about what the brand is evolving into and where you want to be. And that's really what happened with us is when our first app did hit the market, you know the Powered by Plankk branding that was everywhere, then started to give confidence to these other people that we had talked to that were like, you know what maybe I should be doing an app with Plankk and people started to come to us. C Szopa:                       So I think people, just to circle back to your question, often fret too early and too much about branding right out of the gate, as opposed to just kind of taking that next step in the right direction of the company. F Geyrhalter:                 Create trust first and once you have trust, there will be income and once there's income, you can focus on the brand. C Szopa:                       Yep. That's a good way of putting it. F Geyrhalter:                 You can basically go for growth. I think it's great. I think that's one of many different ways of doing it. But that is the way where you really know you've got product market fit and then afterwards you can start investing. C Szopa:                       Yeah. And sometimes it might not necessarily mean you know, income. Income can Be defined in different ways, right? Whether that's users, not everybody's looking for revenue rate out of the gate, even product market fit can still be a little further down the road, but at least knowing that you're on that track and your customer facing now and you've done the right research and you've got the pilot or feedback loop in place so that you're able to say, yeah, like we can see where this is evolving, where this is going to, let's make sure we're making the right steps as a company on our brand for the decisions we're making, who we're working with and why. And that's really, when we came up with the name Plankk at that point was we wanted to make sure that it was something that was going to be a strong name that represented our product and represented the platform that we have between, connecting an influencer of their community. And then as well as just making sure that it had some sort of fitness connotation to it. So you know, that's where Plankk really was born from is when we were client facing, we wanted to make sure it was representing where we saw the company going. F Geyrhalter:                 Where can anyone find and use your app? I guess I have an answer. I have a feeling I know where but hey, maybe you're hiding apps well outside the app stores. C Szopa:                       Yeah, no, I mean it's definitely easy to find. Yeah, we're available on Plankk Studio is available on the Apple Store and the Google Play Store and yeah, I mean that's probably the best place to go and to check out this kind of higher quality experience that we're offering with live streams and on demand and you can also access it online as well. And Plankkstudio.com is the place to find us. F Geyrhalter:                 Thank you, Colin. This was really insightful and it was tons of fun. C Szopa:                       Yeah, I had a great time. Thanks for having me F Geyrhalter:                 And thanks to everyone for listening and please hit that subscribe button and give this show a quick rating. This is a brand new show and it needs ratings, ratings, many ratings. S'il vous plaît. Bitte. Please. Por favor. This podcast is brought to you by FINIEN, a brand consultancy, creating strategic, verbal and visual brand clarity. You can learn about FINIEN at finien.com. The Hitting the Mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness One. I will see you next time when we, once again, we'll 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!  

Maxwell created his company while in college as a requirement from his parents. Fast forward and he appeared on Shark Tank and flopped. Today Maxwell is successfully running an array of disposable bed sheet brands that are available internationally. He shares how changing the brand name was a game changer for his startup, why the .com still reigns supreme, how carefully crafted words will lead to sales, and how he learned to persevere regardless of how often you hear the word 'no' along the journey – "Just get to that word quicker." You can learn more about his products at Peelaways.com or reach out to him directly via LinkedIn. ________________Transcript: Fabian Geyrhalter: Welcome to episode number five of Hitting the Mark. It's only number five, which completely blows my mind. It feels like we've been on this journey for a lot longer than that. If you're new to Hitting the Mark, a special welcome to you. Today we talk with a founder, who knows how to not take himself too seriously, while taking his venture extremely seriously. I was contacted by his PR folks, and when I read his bio, I was sold on having him on Hitting the Mark. Here it goes. Maxwell Cohen is the founder and CEO of Peel Away Labs, the innovative startup company that developed Peelaways, the bedding industry's first multilayered, disposable, waterproof fitted sheet designed for the home, industrial, and healthcare markets. Maxwell created his company, while in college, as a requirement from his parents. After appearing on Shark Tank, in which he flopped, he didn't give up. Peel Away Labs was launched in January 2017, and Peelaways Crib-A-Peel, Dorm-A-Peel, and Peelaways Health are now available at major retailers and distributors worldwide, including consumer retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Bed, Bath, and Beyond, etc., etc. And also a hospital distributors like Cardinal Health, and McKesson. With that being said, welcome Maxwell. M Cohen: Hey. Thanks so much for the intro. I appreciate it. F Geyrhalter: Hey. Totally! Absolutely! So listen, I owe to my listeners why this bio, which by the way I've piecemealed from different bios of yours convinced me to immediately book you for my podcast. So, first of all you created the company as a requirement from your parents first, and second you flopped on Shark Tank, and you actually highlight that, and I'm so impressed by that. So, tell us about the parental requirement to start a company. It's super intriguing, and I'm sure you get that asked a lot. M Cohen: Yeah. I come from a family of serious entrepreneurs where my family we were pushed to start businesses before we turn 27, and that was based off of the experience, and knowledge, and wisdom that you get building something from the ground up. Something from idea stage to actual product stage, and then having customers and selling. So, all the experience you learn whether you fail or not starting a business is a fantastic for any future growth, and for any future employers of course. And if you didn't fail, you're onto something at a young age, and when you're this young you really don't have much to lose. I don't have a wife, kids, a mortgage, and so it's a perfect time to try, and start, and execute on a dream of starting a business that could potentially make people's lives better. F Geyrhalter: I absolutely love that, and usually it's the lemonade stand when you're five years old, but I love the idea that this happens while you're in college, right? That's the requirement that during college you don't just slack off, but you actually do something, and try to create an actual product or service. M Cohen: Yeah. I mean when I was in college I noticed my friends they never wash their sheets when I came home from college. I noticed that my elderly grandmother had trouble washing her sheets on more than a daily basis. So, that was an impetus on starting a business. I'm an environmental water resource economics major, so water is math is a big concern to me. So, a product like this helps many countries around the world that suffer from drought and water shortages will always have clean, sanitary sheets. F Geyrhalter: So, tell me a little bit about that because this is fascinating to me because your brand narrative as we call it in the industry, it seemed to have changed over the years, right? So, in the beginning, it was more of the benefit of convenience, which was based on college students slacking off, and them being lazy, and then today it goes much, much deeper into that environmental angle, which is usually surprising to anyone that hears about a product that's disposable. But you actually have really great claims behind it, and it sounds like it was always intrinsically part of your brand thinking that you can actually save water by doing that. So, explain to us a little bit how the sheets work, and how that narrative changed over the years. M Cohen: Yeah. I just want to make it clear on how simple this product is. It's the fitted bed sheet that we're all familiar with, with the elastic at the bottom, we use 100% latex free elastics since we sell to healthcare, and then it has five layers on top. Each layer could be slept on for seven to 10 days, and then you simply peel that layer off to instantly reveal a brand new layer beneath. Each layer is incredibly soft, and each layer is 100% waterproof. The impetus behind the product was to go around the laundering process, which uses up to 50 gallons of precious water, bleach detergents, which is a chemical pollutant, time, electricity, and money. M Cohen: So, that was the original plan of a product like this, and then once you start using it and learning who your customers are, it actually is the other way around where it started off as saving water, and then it actually turned out to be the ultimate convenience for people that need a product like ours. When you're starting a business, you want to refine who your customer is. This is a bed sheet. This is a product that everyone you've ever met could use. There's people that you believe should use it. When you're starting a business you go for the people who you believe they need a product yours. M Cohen: So, our product in my eyes if we had to describe it is the ultimate convenience when it comes to the bedding industry, and having to change your sheets. The traditional way is a hassle. It could take up to 15 minutes of changing sheets. With ours, you instantly have a brand new sheet no matter what happens. F Geyrhalter:  It's a convenience with a sight benefit of actually doing better to the environment. It's super interesting, and as you mention, as you got to know your target audience, and as you started to segment them based on your learnings, you actually created several brands. So, there's Peelaways, then there's Peelaways Health, but you also have Crib-A-Peel, Camp-A-Peel, and Dorm-A-Peel. So, I had to ask what was the appeal if I may ask, to create this brand architecture, and was separating the brands our like that by audience was it effective? M Cohen: Yeah. So, this is a very unique business where to mention again that so many people could benefit from a product like ours. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. M Cohen: So, we've created brand specific to our end customer that allows them to understand our product sooner rather than later. F Geyrhalter: Sure. M Cohen: If it's on a retail shelf, you have six seconds to get the message across. So, our branding is to make it very obvious what we do. The main product we sell is called Peelaways. Peelaways comes in all sizes from twin up to king. So, we use that, that's our best seller, and it's very obvious what the product is once you look at it after 60 seconds because the name is very simple. F Geyrhalter: Right. M Cohen: And obvious. And then we broke out into the clever branding with the appeal. So, we thought it was clever. We have three brands that utilize the appeal, which is Crib-A-Peel, Dorm-A-Peel, and Camp-A-Peel. As we thought it was very relatable for a product like ours. So, when you're selling to customers you have to know who your audience is. You have to know the right lingo, you have to know the right verbiage. So, you mentioned we have a product called Peelaways Health, and we do that because we allow that insert and a website that's built around Peelaways Health to be catered to the healthcare industry. So, a brand like ours has many different brands because we have to cater the message to the specific industry we're going after. M Cohen: So, we're lucky enough to have many industries that really enjoy the benefits of our products, but it also creates a little bit of a challenge because you have to brand everything separately, and branding is incredibly important because it has to get your end customer to believe what I believe as the CEO of the company. The reason I created this product, I had to get you to portray that this is something that you need, and getting the branding right off the bat is an incredibly smart, fast way of getting people to believe what you believe. F Geyrhalter: Amen. Amen. And very often with a product that is the same product that it just caters to different audiences, you keep the main name. So, you would have done Peelaways Crib, Peelaways Camp, but the way that you actually moved it into something that is much more amicable, but yet it's descriptive, and I see it on your packaging you have Crib-A-Peel, and then you say ... You use the words Peel Away right there on the package. So, there's absolutely still the association with Peelaways, it is just very specific to the target audience, and I think you guys did fantastic, and I love the names. I think they're hilarious, but they're so descriptive, and you need to be descriptive of your product because it's so unique, it's so different. So, people very quickly understand the idea, and I think you've done a fantastic job with that. I really like it. M Cohen: Yeah. And in the 21st century, branding is very unique. It's very unique, and what do I mean by that? It's all about the dotcom that you can buy. The URL, the domain of your business. I know many companies that don't name their business the original name is because they couldn't get the URL or even the dotco of their business. So, when you are starting a business, having a website that is the name of your business is also pretty crucial because are looking for you. It helps your SEO branding, it helps people find you on the internet of course. F Geyrhalter: Right. M Cohen: So, one of the first things we did was find a website, and see if peelaways.com was available, and that was available for 10, $13. But the funny part was if you got rid of the S, if you just did peelaway.com, to buy the website was over $150,000. F Geyrhalter: And I don't think any of your customers now would confuse the URL. They would never go to Peel Away because those are Peelaways. It is already ... The product is plural because having the sheets, and the large amount of sheets that you could just Peel Away, it's already intrinsically embedded. That was a pun I guess. Embedded into it. So, I think it works really well. That was not luck. I think there's a lot of brand strategy that was behind the scenes in you creating that. I'm wondering are the products actually any different? The Crib-A-Peel, the Camp-A-Peel, and Dorm-A-Peel, or is it based on pretty much the same product, and it's more marketing angle? M Cohen: Each product is pretty much identical depending, and the only thing that really differs is the size. For the healthcare industry, we have a few extra iterations that allow it to be better for the industry, and one of those big iterations was the latex free elastic. So, each market does have a unique brand to it, but essentially the product is the same, but just different sizes from crib all the way up to king. F Geyrhalter: That makes a lot of sense, and that's what I thought it would be. So, I had to listen to the quick snippet of your Shark Tank episode, and in there you mention ... I believe you mention that you started having those sheets in ambulances in Africa. Is it true like when you try to see if it would work in the healthcare environment, how did you start getting into that? Tell me a little bit about that journey because it's fascinating to any entrepreneur listening. M Cohen: Yeah, of course. I originally went after people and markets that I understood, and that I was familiar with. So, I originally was selling to college students, and to summer camps. Summer camps really loved the product because the one we sell to them, Camp-A-Peel has seven layers, and most summer camps are seven weeks long. So, it would be one layer per week. So, they saw the benefits there. The product ... When I was on Shark Tank, the name of the business was different. I've changed the name of the business because branding is just so important. The original name of the business was AFRSHEET. A-F-R-S-H-E-E-T. And I originally came up with it. I thought it was incredibly clever. M Cohen: But then I combined the SH from fresh and sheet together, it was my first branding, my first marketing moment. I thought it was great, but once you get to the customer they were having trouble pronouncing it. They were not even understanding what the product was, and it didn't help. So, branding is a crucial part of is that I needed ... I realized that I don't want to have any trouble with anybody understanding what the product is. Let's try and make it as obvious as possible. So, I changed the name of the company to Peel Away Labs, which then we started naming our products Peelaways, and Appeal as that was something that allowed our customers to understand the business quicker and faster. M Cohen: And since we don't sell something that is sexy, it does take time to educate the consumer about the benefits of the product. And if they see the benefits of the product in the name of the product, that is something that is incredibly powerful, and it allows you to get the customer's eye, and then hopefully get them to close and buy the product. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. Absolutely. And back to the healthcare space, how did you try that out? I mean it's a difficult space to get into, right? There's lots of regulations. How did you start to get your feet wet in that space? M Cohen: Yeah. As I mentioned in the beginning, when I was starting the business I came home from college and noticed that my elderly grandmother, who was bedridden. She felt she was embarrassed. She felt like she was a burden on the family because her sheets had to be changed- F Geyrhalter: Right. M Cohen: And it wasn't her fault. It was the medication she was on. So, once we put the product on her bed, we recognized that this is a market that is going to benefit from others like ours. The home care market, if you're taking care of somebody at home, this product is a tremendous benefit for everyone. For the caregiver as well as the person on top of the bed and sleeping on the bed. Our sheets are proven to be 32% softer than traditional healthcare bedding, each layer of our product is 100% waterproof, and one of the most beneficial is there's somebody that is bedridden, we can change sheets within one minute or less. So, there's better patient comfort, and it allows you to allocate your time more wisely. M Cohen: So, that's how we got into the healthcare market, and then once we started focusing more of our time on going to trade shows, we started feeling the feedback. Cardinal Health, McKesson wanted to sign us up as vendors. So, we knew there's validation for a product like this in the healthcare market. F Geyrhalter: And that was pretty much it. It was doing trade shows where you got direct contact with the healthcare industry like that, and they immediately gravitated towards your product? M Cohen: Yeah. Trade shows are incredibly important when it comes to an old school business. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. M Cohen: Healthcare is an old school business. Doing things the old school way, not the millennial way. I'm the millennial of the team, and going to trade shows, walking around on my feet for eight, 10 hours it sounds old, and it sounds like the old way of doing business. But that has been our most successful business up to date is doing trade shows, finding the buyers, and talking to the gatekeepers that could help us get into the industry. F Geyrhalter: That's refreshing to hear because a business like yours you would think it would just have tons of landing pages, and SEO, and all that, and I'm sure it does. But on top of that having to do that old grind with trade shows, and having the personal ... Forming this personal relationships, it's good to hear that that is still super important. Looking back, what was the one big breakthrough moment that propelled your little idea that turned into a real brand? What was that breakthrough moment? Was it Shark Tank despite it not going quite as wished, or was there something else that really like was that big moment for you? M Cohen: I mean when you're starting a business, you want more than one big moment, and to me changing the name of the company was incredibly crucial. Telling somebody, "I'm the CEO of AfreShseet." They go, "A what?" And it gets very frustrating. So, when you could translate what you could do more smoothly, "I'm the CEO and Founder of Peel Away Labs." And so you get more of an understanding of what I'm doing immediately just by the name of by business. F Geyrhalter: Mm-hmm (affirmative). M Cohen: And a big crucial part is changing the name of the business as well from AfreShseet to Peel Away Labs, and AfreSheet seemed to only limit us to bedding when really my paddings encompassed all things that could be potentially multilayered in Peel Away. So, it doesn't just limit us to sheets. F Geyrhalter: That's super interesting. That's really interesting. So, talking back about Shark Tank because I think it's fascinating because a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this are like, "Oh my god, Shark Tank," that's like, "I want to be there. That's the holy grail." Everyone hears about once you're on Shark Tank, you're going to blow up. With you, I mean you didn't do as well on Shark Tank as you wanted to do, but it didn't seem to make you think twice. I mean you instead pushed forward with the same idea, and rightfully so. I mean the phones are ringing literally, right for you and things are going really, really well, and you kept pushing even hard. F Geyrhalter: But how were those days and weeks after you flopped? I mean everyone talks about failure is so important, and it's being celebrated in a way. But I mean was it super tough or did you immediately just say, "Look, sales are spiking, and I don't care. I'm going to keep pushing." How were those days afterwards? M Cohen: Yeah. When I went on Shark Tank, I was young and the company was even younger. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. M Cohen: We only had a few beta testing products, beta products, and we had just the test market to summer camps and college students. So, looking back of course as you can imagine when somebody looks at you and says, "Your product is a dog of a product. Shoot it, get rid of it, and do something else with your time." F Geyrhalter: Literally, right? Yeah. M Cohen: Your theme I think that is motivation. I take that as, "I need to be here and prove you wrong. I know the product has validation, I know there's a market for it. But I'm young, the company is even younger." So, there's no real hurt feelings as you can imagine. Of course, just natural frustration, which is inevitable, but to me I took it as motivation. I got in the product into Walmart without the help of the Sharks. We're vendors with Buy Buy Baby as well as Bed, Bath and Beyond without the Sharks. And actually we see the largest purchase order QBC has ever given for a new product in February. F Geyrhalter: Oh congratulations. M Cohen: Even without the blessing of Lori, to be honest I think she didn't like me the most out of all the Sharks, I believe we'll have incredibly successful campaign on QBC regardless of her backing or input on our product. So, we used it as motivation, persistence is key. I know that I was onto something whether they see it or not. It's totally cool. And now that you look back, I didn't really have a business. There was nothing really to invest in anyway. So, you recognize that Shark Tank is not for pre-revenue businesses, it's for revenue-generating businesses. It's really growth capital. M Cohen: So, the experience itself was fantastic. It made me smarter, faster, wiser. It allowed me to have thick skin, but it wasn't the Oprah Effect that everybody expected. My product and business wasn't ready for Shark Tank to air. If I went back now I guarantee they would love the business that I have built in the market that they'll be impressed. F Geyrhalter: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right. Exactly. Too bad you won't be back. You're not doing them that favor, but listen I think that's an amazing character trait that you showed after those weeks, and that for you looking at it in that way I think that's something that most entrepreneurs need to learn. I think we read a lot about it, but it's really hard for people to actually embody that and say, "No, this was a great lesson. Let's move on. There are 50,000 more mountains that I can conquer, and this was just one of them." Really, really great insight on how to see that, and how to go through that. M Cohen:  Yeah. And think of your listeners in the perspective of your real life investing. I pitch ... It's the same stories you hear all over the place. I pitch 68 investors before I got my first commitment. So, even if you get burned on Shark Tank, you have to realize you're going to get burned in real life. And to me when I talk to investors or talk to people that I want to work with, I said, "Do you mind getting to the answer no as soon as possible please?" F Geyrhalter: Yeah. M Cohen: "So, I could move onto the next thing?" F Geyrhalter: Yeah. I think leaving the ego out the door, and just making the business transaction, and just saying, "Look, there's so many more." And it takes a lot, I think. I think it takes a lot, especially a lot of younger startup entrepreneurs at your age and younger when you started. For them that's their life, right? And it's a huge ... I mean your ego is huge during that time because you think you just nailed it. You just came up with the next big thing, and to be like that, and to actually let go, and to take these answers not too seriously because you know there's going to be a yes around the corner. It takes a lot, and I think it's great that you're sharing that with everyone. M Cohen: Yeah. I mean as you mentioned in the beginning, you could tell that I have a sense of humor. I laugh at myself, I laugh at things that are worthy of laughing at. Things are going to go wrong, people are going to dislike you, dislike your product. It's just the name of the game we're in, and it's really just this name of the game called life. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. M Cohen: So, you have to have thick skin to be an entrepreneur because there's days that are great, there's days that are terrible, there's people that are mean, there's people that are incredibly helpful. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. M Cohen: So, having equilibrium, and understanding this is one of the first steps to really building business. F Geyrhalter: I think that's great. I would have asked you as my final question of what's one final piece of brand advice for founders as a takeaway, and I think you just gave us one. But- M Cohen: Have a sense of humor. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. M Cohen: We're in the business of ... I like to joke around. We're in the business of losing. 98% of companies, startups fail in the first two years. 99% of startups don't receive their initial funding. So, once you realize the odds are against you, it allows you to push even hard, and it allows you to execute even better. F Geyrhalter: Glorious. Exactly. Absolutely. Maxwell, listeners who got curious about Peelaways, which by now should be every single person listening, where can they go to get themselves a few sheets? M Cohen: Yeah. Our products are sold in Walmart under a brand called Camp-A-Peel in the camping section, which is one of those funny, ironic branding things that worked. It worked, and I don't believe they would have put us in the camping section if the product was called Peelaways. So, having the brand Camp-A-Peel because I sold to summer camps was incredibly beneficial. F Geyrhalter: Yeah. M Cohen: You could find our products on Bed, Bath and Beyond, BuyBuyBaby.com, Amazon.com. If you want to get in contact with me, feel free to LinkedIn me. Maxwell Cohen. Or feel free to reach out to our contact page on Peelaways.com. I'm happy to help anybody out. If there's anybody out there that's in the healthcare industry, and feels and sees the benefits of this product, and wants to make some more introductions on our behalf, that would be absolutely highly beneficial, and highly appreciated. F Geyrhalter: Never stop hustling. Thank you, Maxwell. This was tons of fun. I really appreciate it. M Cohen: Yeah. I'm so glad to be part of your fifth podcast, and I look forward to listening to the rest of the ones you build out. F Geyrhalter: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone for listening, and yes I have to say it again. Please hit the subscribe button, and give the show a quick rating because as we discussed, this is a brand new podcast, and it needs all the TLC it can get. This podcast is brought to you by FINIEN, the brand consultancy creating strategic, verbal, and visual brand clarity. A consultancy which I happen to run. 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.

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.

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

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.

"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.  

Bud Caddell - Founding Member at NOBL CollectiveDJ Skee - Founder & CEO of Dash RadioYola Robert - Founder & CEO of Klozet AppLisa Song Sutton - Contributing Writer to Forbes MagazineJeb Dasteel - SVP & Chief Customer Officer at OracleCatherine An - Founder & CEO of Tiato Restaurant & An CateringFabian Geyrhalter - Founder of FINIEN

Bud Caddell - Founding Member at NOBL CollectiveDJ Skee - Founder & CEO of Dash RadioYola Robert - Founder & CEO of Klozet AppLisa Song Sutton - Contributing Writer to Forbes MagazineJeb Dasteel - SVP & Chief Customer Officer at OracleCatherine An - Founder & CEO of Tiato Restaurant & An CateringFabian Geyrhalter - Founder of FINIEN