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

Filmemacher Nikolaus Geyrhalter konfrontiert uns in seiner neuen Dokumentation „Matter Out Of Place“ eindringlich mit unserem Müllproblem. In schönen Bildern zeigt er, dass Mülltrennung und Recycling nicht die Lösung sind.Nikolaus Geyrhalter im Gespräch mit Patrick Wellinskiwww.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, VollbildDirekter Link zur Audiodatei

Learn more about Outer AisleSupport the show-------->Fabian Geyrhalter:Welcome to the show, Jeanne and Vasa.Jeanne David:Thanks for having us, looking forward to chatting with you.Fabian Geyrhalter:Oh, absolutely. It's such a pleasure to have both of you here. So Jeanne first, congratulations, Outer Aisle ranked 63, I think on the overall Inc 5000 list. And it is the second fastest-growing privately held foods company in all of America with a two-year revenue growth of I don't know, like close to 2,000%. So amazing success. Congrats on that, love having you here because of that, but let's hit rewind here for a second, because you have a fascinating story. You quit your position as an executive director of the Arthritis Foundation, when you were around 50. Not to put an age on anyone but that was about the year. And you wanted to do something both impactful and meaningful after the tenure.And now fast forward to 2020 and I see an article in Inc Magazine with the fantastic headline, The Matriarch, hovering above a large portrait of you. So you successfully employed your entire family at this point from your husband to all four of your sons with a brand that creates cauliflower bread. How did this come out? Give us a quick history here before we jump in.Jeanne David:Yeah, it really is interesting. So not that I wasn't, obviously before 50, not that I wasn't doing anything meaningful. So I mean my tenure at the Arthritis Foundation was very meaningful. I was helping people and changing lives through what we do and really impactful. It's just that all of my life before that my career had been taking a job and keeping a job because I had to raise four kids and put them through college. So I had to be contributing in that manner. So I had never had the luxury of sitting down and figuring out what I wanted to do. So I just knew after Arthritis Foundation, it was time for something new. I had been there six years. I had done what they hired me to do. It was a part of a whole change in Southern California and region and I was part of that team. And it was very powerful what we did in those six years.So I hit 50 and I just was like, what do I want my next career to look like? And I was given the extreme luxury by my husband by saying, "You know what? I really want you to take your time. Our boys were all in their 20s." And I didn't need to be so busy earning a salary for the first time, because everybody was out of college and we weren't actively funding them at that point. So it was very much of a gift. And he is like really take your time and just figure out what the best fit is for you. So I was working with a headhunter who looked at me one day and said, "If you could have any job you wanted in the whole world, what would it be?" And I could not believe how paralyzed that was for me, like, "Oh, my gosh, I said, I have no idea." And he goes, "Well, I'm not going to work with you until you answer that question."And he said, it's a really important question and it was very interesting. It really kind of just started me on really thinking about those things. So I was really trying to take a job that or I actually was, I'm a natural born entrepreneur, but I was really looking at the kind of, I had hung that hat a few years ago and said, it's okay, working for a company is great. So anyway, I really just was looking at what gifts do I have uniquely that I only, that kind of from the premise of we're all created very uniquely. And we each have gifts and talents that we bring to the world and when we focus on what those unique gifts and talents are, we're the best the people around us are the best and the world is a better place. Because we're bringing what I believe we were all uniquely created to do and bring to this world.So that's really the journey that began and then it came out of our own journey of transforming our health by taking out basically all of the empty processed carbs and sugar out of our diet which totally transformed our health and being committed to that lifestyle. So it's a bit of a long journey, and I don't want to get bogged down in that, but that's how I then Cauliflower Pizza Crust is being seen on Pinterest to give you the idea of where we were. Facebook and Instagram were not the big thing. Pinterest was that moment. And cauliflower pizza crust was there. So we had taken bread out of our diets. Certainly we're not eating pizza, no pasta, none of the empty, high carb foods. So we had really shifted to veggies to substitute for those high carb foods. So I saw a cauliflower pizza crust, I was like, "Wow, if I could get this, that would be amazing. But if I could get it at [inaudible 00:05:39] form, that would be even more impactful, because it's quite cumbersome to eat, to a little bit of protein and vegetables, and we were eating a little bit of fruit not much at all.So our day consisted of I mean vegetables and protein. So that was a bit cumbersome. So it was really out of our own need, and what we believed would be the wave of the future because of diabetes and everything else that was becoming very preeminent and inflammation based diseases. And again, it kind of gets, I can get very deep on all of those things. So I don't want to get into the weeds right now but it was our own journey that basically created the product line. Then I naturally thought, within a week, I had the whole product line in my head and I couldn't turn it off. And our youngest son said, "Come on, let's bring this to market." I was like, "No, no, no, I'm not bringing a product to market.-- No, I'm not going to do it."And at the end of the week, I kind of relented and because I believe that it was such a great product that had the ability to transform health and create this shift out there, which I believe is pretty basic to our health and to the diet that we find ourselves in today as American. So anyway, we decided to do it and make it a family project. I often talk about it, the file is still called family project on my computer.Fabian Geyrhalter:It's a bigger family now.Jeanne David:Yeah, we felt like it was a great thing to bring our kids who are now in their 20s while they watched me do different businesses when they were small. At this age, they could see what it took to bring a product from concept to market. And we felt that that was a valuable education for them to all be involved in. So we set up Thursday conference calls every Thursday, and we'd all weigh in. So anyway, that's the family part of it, we gave them each a little bit of interest in it and the youngest joined us in operations. Once we got our first region of wholefoods, he was in his career path, all of them were in their career path. So we'd never intended for them to come work for the company full time. We really were big into independent, and then being independent and finding their own way in their 20s, which I think is pretty critical.So it's just now that they found their own way a few of them have wanted to join in, which is then they all play a role. Two of them actually worked for the company, a third one does all of our commercial insurance and he's been involved in our insurance from day one as a risk manager and now he actually underwrites it all and oversees it all and that's huge. So he doesn't actually work for the company but that's the component he handles. And then we have another son who's an M&A and he just helps advisors, and is actively involved on the finance component.Fabian Geyrhalter:That's so great. That's so wonderful. So you're growing a brand based on six family members, how do you hire? How do you create a company culture that others feel invited to? This must be quite challenging, right, especially for the first couple of hires when you did those. I mean, I ask this because I feel brand and culture are always so very related and they really go hand in hand.Jeanne David:Yeah, I would say and Vasa will have some input on this because he's known us from the beginning. So we're a family and so that kind of lends itself to a culture right? Because your employees, really we do love family and we do encourage family. We constantly see that it's... I talk with our employees every day, we do gratitudes every day. I pop in their office and we really do see it very much as a family. It has that feel. So Vasa, can you... So I would say that's very much part of our DNA and then it also lends itself to the brand and the love and the kindness and building upon that. Vasa, I'd love your input here as well, because as someone coming into that.Fabian Geyrhalter:Vasa, can confirm or deny this.Vasa Martinez:Yes, as it pertains to hiring and culture, the family thing is more of a positive than a negative. It's more inclusive than exclusive. There's no sort of like rites of passage or any sort of things, I'm the youngest of eight, and when I came in, there's a clear warmth. And it was much different as we've seen the growth over the past two and a half years, that warmth has remained. It's not as though, when you grow the culture is one of the things that's probably the first kind of dissipate. It's not one of the things with Outer Aisle. And that's why I think that family is a huge component of the branding the hiring process. I mean, when you're hired, you're kind of like, it feels as though like when we were all children, we went over to our friend's houses, after school, it kind of feels like that, but with a very intentional way of going about business. Everyone's there for a reason to play their part, to do the best they can, to be the best they can be as an individual. And for a team and for me, that's one of the biggest things that has strengthened and been the backbone of our aisle is that the family is it is the heart, it's everything.Fabian Geyrhalter:I think that's super interesting because it could go both ways. And this is it makes so much sense that if a brand is grown that way, that that will be one of the big pillars behind the brand, culture makes a lot of sense. So your brand is grown and made in Santa Barbara. I know that that's where you reside, but that adds a tremendous layer not only of authenticity and of beauty to your brand story, but it's also a layer of complexity. Is that sustainable as you grow?Jeanne David:Yeah, we've fought hard to stay here and remain here. I mean, when it came time to build our facility we looked elsewhere. And for a lot of the reasons people do and then we said, we love Santa Barbara, this is where we live, why would we choose to leave where we love to live, to go work? So we said, "No, we're going to do what it takes to spend the expensive it is," because that's what it is, it just cost more to do business here. And that, that was worth it, as opposed to moving to Nevada, let's say because of the employee pool, the real estate there, the amount of big buildings you can find there. So we've been very fortunate, we found a great manufacturing facility in Ventura. So our first facility was in Galena, right outside of Santa Barbara, North and then we went south this time, because Santa Barbara certainly doesn't have the kind of space we need. So we're just 20 minutes outside [crosstalk 00:13:34] way.Fabian Geyrhalter:I mean, for those of us like myself who know the area very well, it is definitely, it is the green zone. I mean, this is really where farming happens and it's just a little bit south from Santa Barbara. And as a consumer if I see Santa Barbara or if I see even Ventura on the packaging, it rings true. It feels very authentic, rather than...Jeanne David:Right. It evokes a certain and Barbara especially, it evokes a certain [crosstalk 00:14:03].Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah. Absolutely.Jeanne David:So yeah, definitelyFabian Geyrhalter:How did the name Outer Aisle come about? I'm super intrigued by that.Jeanne David:Yeah, so the name Outer Aisle is a really unique thing. We kept trying to, my husband's an attorney so he was definitely set on making sure that whatever the name we chose for this company was trademarkable. So we had all kinds of names. Everything in the food space is really taken. We're not a tech company and we can call ourselves Zulu or Hulu or something like that.Fabian Geyrhalter:Right.Jeanne David:So you really have to be kind of conscious and meaningful in the space. So we were at deadline. We had set a hard deadline for a final confirmation on our names. Most everything we chose had been already trademarked and this one popped in at deadline that day. We ran it through the USPTO and it had not been trademarked. We were able to grab it. And as many people know, at that time, it was just beginning to be out there that if you're shopping healthy, shop the Outer Aisle of the grocery store.So it was becoming known but it we had to explain it a lot in the beginning of our name, but that was the evolvement or the evokements that we wanted to have with the name. We wanted it to evoke a healthy thought in your mind. So the Outer Aisle when you shop, the Outer Aisle of the grocery store, you're shopping the healthy product. So for us that's what it was.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah, it sets you up for world domination too, because you can basically take the entire Outer Aisle of the grocery store in the future. This is all you.Jeanne David:Exactly. That's critical. That's a critical thing. We knew that we were going to be more than cauliflower. And remember, now when we started, cauliflower was not cool. So we started a veggie sandwich since because the cauliflower craze had not hit yet. So we were the first to market with cauliflower but we knew that we did not want to limit ourselves to one kind of vegetable.So then our competitors came out and we were criticized for that early on, very interesting and then applauded for it two years later.Fabian Geyrhalter:That's how it works. That's how it works.Jeanne David:Yeah, exactly.Fabian Geyrhalter:I always advise my startup clients to not pigeonhole themselves, because either they will pivot, meaning they had a bad idea and it's going to change but they're still running with the company name, or they will expand into different categories and they just don't know. So if you have a super descriptive name, it's just not made for growth. And you don't want to exclude that.Jeanne David:Yeah, and for us, we knew we were going to expand beyond cauliflower. So when our competitors hit market and were branding themselves, specifically cauliflower [inaudible 00:17:28] to cauliflower. So we were criticised by a broker that was like, wow, you didn't name yours, like people don't know immediately by your name and then go forward two more years, you're like, wow, you were right, [inaudible 00:17:42]. So it was kind of funny. But we knew all along what our long play is.Fabian Geyrhalter:And your positioning currently is very much to revolutionize the bread industry. How did this idea come to fruition in store talking about Outer Aisle, right? I mean, can you find your product next to fresh loaves of baguette say, is it in a very different area?Jeanne David:Well, it's interesting. So what we're seeing out there in the market, and what was happening when we came in for these brands, it's all about disrupting the old distribution channel that has our product roll. It's so much chemicals and crap that we really want to revolutionize food and you're watching that. So what's happening as we look at bread, the bread aisle is shrinking and the ambient bread aisle is shrinking. And what we're seeing is a refrigerated set that is beginning to come into play. So there's a gluten-free like if you walk into Sprouts today, there's a gluten-free bread set that's a coffer that has just refrigerated breads in it. In whole Foods there's a whole case that is the gluten-free breads or the better for you bread.So that's the trend we began to ushering in because we were the first to market, we were first in our category. So I was working with the whole foods forger to talk about where you're going to go and we really wanted to be in the Outer Aisle, we did not want to be in the bread aisle ever. We would never have an Ambien product. We wanted to be refrigerated on the outside of the perimeter of the store. So yeah, so that's that and that's what they were beginning to do and that we began seeing that happen.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah, no makes a lot of sense. And I just talked recently, to Cole of Alpha Foods in an episode and he told me about the growth of his company, during this pandemic, since people are now growing old of eating the same old food at home day in, day out, and they're looking for fast, easy, and hopefully at this point also healthy alternatives. Did your brand experience the same upswing during the last couple of months?Jeanne David:Yeah, I would say, he did, he already had a huge online component and Vasa can probably speak to this, because this is the way he manages that. That's his wheelhouse. So Vasa you want to take this?Vasa Martinez:Yeah, for sure. So early on, during the pandemic, we saw definitely a huge upswing both on Amazon and Dotcom. And as this progressed, you see more and more people preparing for e-commerce, a lot of folks who were more retail driven have pivoted and started building out their internal teams are working externally, with agencies or consultants to build out that platform. So it has gotten more competitive over the past few months, but there was an upswing early on, and we've been able to sustain that and work on our retention efforts to keep things going smoothly. But there sure was an uptick early on, particularly for I'm sure the shelf stable pantry items. But for us, we definitely saw one as well being a perishable, refrigerated and frozen item.Fabian Geyrhalter:And while I, this is going to be a good conversation for both Jeanne and Vasa. When did you start to actively invest in branding? Since packaging is key for a product like yours. I mean, first its packaging, people must fall in love with the package. And then later on, it goes into Instagram, social, e-commerce, all of that. But for brands like yours, the package is so important. Did you go through a lot of iterations in the beginning? Was it literally, was it just created by the family? How did you start off? How did it evolve?Jeanne David:In the beginning, it really, I look back and I cringe at what we had on the shelf before Vasa came on. We did hire a graphic designer early on, and thought it was good at the time. And obviously, we thought it was good because we went to market with it. But right around that time, five years ago, I would say was the beginning five, yeah, about five years ago was really this explosion in food and brands. And you began to see really a lot of morphed in branding. So we went through when Vasa joined us, I would say that was kind of the beginning of our branding and we did a hard rebrand, launched that. He joined us in April of 2018. That year, we did, we began a brand, a new branding, and then launched [inaudible 00:23:12] app store by March of 2019. But I would say all of the end of 2018 was when we were working on it-Fabian Geyrhalter:So very recently.Jeanne David:... creating it.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah. And copy is also extremely important for branding, your copy is wonderfully crafted. Just to give my listeners a quick taste, no pun, but we're officially over bread, but we're definitely not over pizza, sandwiches, hamburgers and tacos. We're Outer Aisle, we're going beyond the grain who's coming with us? So when and how did you define the brand personality and the tone of voice? Obviously, I know when now because that was just a few years ago. But how did you actually define that personality in the tone of voice as you started going into the different social channels, social being extremely important to a brand right now, especially you give me your Instagram following. How was that determined? Is that something that when Vasa came in, he was like, this is our brand personality? And it was a team exercise, or was it more intrinsic?Jeanne David:I think I'll answer a little bit and then I'll hand it off to Vasa to finish my sentences. But I would say part of it is who we are, who we want to be. We want to be family. We want to be approachable. We wanted to be fun. So you go through all of those exercises, but it very much was our values, our authenticity. So it was very much in line with our values. We wanted to always be transparent. Our ingredient list is clean. It's very transparent. So we wanted to be a little tongue in cheek, approachable, never elite or proud or, Vasa you can speak a little bit better to that. And it was a process we went through, but it was very much organically developed.Vasa Martinez:Yeah. So the back half of 2018, we had engaged with a couple resources to basically bring the new visual and voice elements to the brand. During that time, I was still mainly focused on organic and paid social. But from a very high level, we wanted to make sure that things were very authentic and relatable. The North Star for Outer Aisles, as long as it feels as though, Jeanne would say it. For me, at least, it makes sense and going back a little bit deeper on this. For me branding isn't necessarily what's on the package. Prior to the rebrand or refresh, the package was nothing to write home about, but it still did its job. Because for me what branding is, is really reputation and what that means is the integrity, the ethics, the transparency, the relatability. All of these things add up to that, and the brand, the packaging is just more like a business card, at least in my opinion.And with all of those things that we addressed early on with organic social and how we treated customers, every time they reached out that one to one relationship, every single time they asked a question where they could buy, how do I get this crispy? Whether it's email or comments on organic or paid anything like that. I think that's what really defined it and that reputation has sustained us along the way. The package has improved, and it will continue to evolve. But for the most part, it's the personality and the heart of the brand, which is that family element, to me that really is the branding.Fabian Geyrhalter:Makes a lot of sense and what does branding mean to you, Jeanne, I mean, you've been through a lot with this brand. Now that you've done all of this, what is the essence of a brand to you? What does branding mean to you?Jeanne David:Yeah, I mean to me it's truly the essence of who we are. So our packaging just displays what we stand for, like we're beginning to now be able to truly differentiate ourselves as a lot of brands come out. And while they have cauliflower in their ingredient list, it's dried cauliflower. So from the beginning, our brand would always be fresh vegetables. We would never do dehydrated that ground into a flower kind of vegetables, to just make it feel like you were getting vegetables, [inaudible 00:27:59] and it was a very specific thing we were doing. And that was so key to get across to our customers that they knew they were actually getting a product made with fresh vegetables, which has a whole different impact in your system and in your body. So always from the beginning of that knowing, wow, you're getting a really great quality, clean label product, that you would be happy to feed your families that you would be so proud to be eating.I mean, we wanted this product because we wanted to buy it ourselves and there was nothing on the market, any anything like it on the market. And we knew like we don't want words you can't pronounce in our products. We eat very clean and it's really usually just one ingredient. And if we eat something that's already made, then we want to be able to know what every single ingredient in that product is and not have anything else in it. So we just felt like that was the revolution we really wanted to be a part of and so that was the brand represents that. It represents that authenticity and that transparency. Yeah, and it's fun and it's lively. We're a lively bunch. Vasa can attest to that. I think it really, we just really continued to stay true to who we are and make sure that the brand was truly representative of who we are.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah. Authenticity [crosstalk 00:29:48].Jeanne David:Vasa, do you have any other?Vasa Martinez:No, I think both of those really address it.Fabian Geyrhalter:And looking back, when was that moment where you felt like your product could turn into a brand. Like where in the beginning, obviously you launch the product and you were just hoping for the best. But what was that moment? And that might be linked to sales figures? Maybe not. But when was that moment where you just came home and you said, "You know what? I think we're turning into a brand. I think this is it. We just made it to that point."Jeanne David:Yeah, I would say, as Vasa joined us, and really began... April of 2018, a lot of things began to really change. I describe it as it was, like gasoline on a fire. In 2018, we grew 25% month over month. So that means the product began, our velocities at shelf were really, really high. So that meant that the consumer was really loving what we were doing. So I would say Vasa, that to me, that's when we're like, "Okay, we've got market acceptance. We've got concept acceptance" Because again, we were the first one to market, so nobody was eating cauliflower bread, and it was even too offensive to call it cauliflower bread in the beginning. So to really know that the wave was, and the trend that we were really hoping to set with that, and then I would say the branding along with that was really the moment. Vasa, would you agree?Vasa Martinez:Yeah. So I came on board the end of April, early May we started doing our first posting, and it's not very often you immediately see traction. And during that time, yeah, IG was a little bit different, Facebook was a bit different. There's certain conditions that were maybe more favorable than the now, but either way, the traction was something where I was like, whoa, there's something here. Aside from the product solving a huge problem, I believe that there's a correlation between the how big the problem solves, and when you solve a bread problem and make it low carbon actually tastes good and have good texture. It made sense to me when we started seeing people with product that the sentiment was nearly 100% positive. So everything was tracking in the right direction, and I would say, as a few months progressed summer 2018 hit. I would say that's pretty accurate as when I realized all right, there's really something here and we started gearing up for it.Fabian Geyrhalter:That's fantastic. And I always like to come from the high notes to feels like especially with packaged goods like that. I mean, so much can go wrong. I mean, from the manufacturing from the plant all the way to the market, the packaging, how the copy was there [inaudible 00:33:22] enormous brand fail that you look back to and you're like, Oh, my God, I wish that they would have never happened. Which is something happened with your branding, where you felt like, "Okay, this is something that we will never do again."Jeanne David:Vasa, I'll let you speak to that.Fabian Geyrhalter:That's the easy way out Jeanne.Jeanne David:You have better insight than I.Vasa Martinez:Man, I'm really on the spot here.Fabian Geyrhalter:If there's nothing there's nothing, I-t's totally fine.Vasa Martinez:Yeah, I'm probably going to take the fifth on this one.Fabian Geyrhalter:Yeah, no worries. Usually with packaging, there are all of these horror stories about that one, I talked to Stacy of Stacy's Pita Chips. And she had like, okay, how long do you have? Because there's so many things that can always go wrong. So I always like to highlight something like that. But if there's nothing on top of your mind, then it's totally fine.Vasa Martinez:No, I don't think there's anything on top of my mind [crosstalk 00:34:29].Fabian Geyrhalter:Okay, cool.Vasa Martinez:Normal growing things, but definitely taking the fifth.Fabian Geyrhalter:Okay, perfect. Something that I always like to do with my clients. At the end of our brands workshops, we really like to define the brand in one word or two words, really kind of like crystallizing. If you would describe what that brand stands for, and I call it the brand DNA. Like what would that be just in one word, what would Outer Aisle be? Do you have any thoughts on that? If it's one or two words that basically describe the essence of your brand?Vasa Martinez:Jeanne, do want to go first on this one?Jeanne David:Yeah, the essence of our brand, I would say pure, clean. Yeah, those are the two words that come to me, but those aren't [inaudible 00:35:27]... I think more of the product quality in that probably not as much on the brand. Vasa, what would you say?Vasa Martinez:If I just choose one word, for Outer Aisle, I'm going to stick with a running theme that I've gone with, and that's family. I think that's the one that's the common thread throughout all from the inner weavings of how the organs set up and the departments and how people are treated so great and the love and respect. And even on the packaging below the allergens, it says, love and kindness added. I think for me, when I look at Outer Aisle, when I read about the brand story, when I observe how Outer Aisle operates when I'm looking from the inside and outside, objectively, family is that word.Fabian Geyrhalter:Family and health most probably right? Yeah, a combination of the two. Jeanne, do you have a piece of brand advice for founders as a takeaway, now that you went through, starting a company in your 50s, which it's not easy to actually start doing a consumer product from scratch. But definitely, at this point in your life, just to push for this and to say, this is really what I want to do, which is so inspirational. How did you like, are there any things you learned where you say, you know what this is something that I would like to share with other founders, as a takeaway?Jeanne David:I would say, I discounted how important the whole branding piece was. And I would say it was huge, and I probably should have paid attention to it sooner. But we were kind of bootstrapping it, you don't have money to spend on marketing much less the kind of money experts really charge for that. But I would say we decided to just, to do it and it was the best thing we ever did. The other thing is we had a group which I liked. We had someone who was kind of best in class on voice and they were the ones that really helped us with the voice how do we translate who we are and what is that voice. And so we had someone work on voice, someone work on design, Vasa was working on social media and integrating that component. So it was a group effort and it was a very focused effort for about six months and that was probably the most important thing we did for the company and the brand.Fabian Geyrhalter:Surrounding yourself with a couple of experts in the niche and then and then working together on creating something great as a brand that's fantastic. I think that's super super important. And I guess not just one person instead of hiring just one person but actually finding the best guy in voice, the best guy with this and it was an agency. So Vasa Would you say that was true that that was an important time for us?Vasa Martinez:Yeah, definitely. Voice is definitely important, got to be consistent with it after it's identified. That was definitely a strong investment and always is a strong investment is to invest in that visual branding and voice branding as much as it is any other part.Fabian Geyrhalter:And it immediately stood out to me that's why I quoted the website copied because it comes through really, really naturally and organically no pun intended. But as we slowly need to wrap up, listeners who fell in love with your brand just now, where can you get a slice of your non bread? Is it all over the US? Is it only in California? Where can people pick it up?Jeanne David:Vasa, would we say Store Locator is the best way to go but it is national we're in, should be in every whole food. We've just gone through a little bit of a hiccup there but should be back on shelf. We had a UPC switch that caused quite some issues out there. But I think we're pretty much back on shelf there at every wholefoods in the country. So hopefully this is our big national account. But we've got a store locator that should get you to, lots of independent natural stores. So yeah.Fabian Geyrhalter:Fantastic.Vasa Martinez:You can find us-Jeanne David:And online.Vasa Martinez:... online at outeraislegourmet.com. If you click Find a store, anywhere that's scanning Outer Aisle, you can filter by product, whatever you're interested in. You can also find this on Amazon by searching Outer Aisle or Outer Aisle Gourmet. And then if you're in Canada, we actually serve as DTC orders or e-commerce orders in Canada through Sweet & Sprouted, our Canadian partner there. So Google Sweet & Sprouted or find at Sweet & Sprouted on Instagram, and you can order our product and they'll deliver to you anywhere in Canada.Fabian Geyrhalter:Fantastic. Very, very good. Well, thank you both for having been on the show. We really appreciate your time and your insights. This is really great.Jeanne David:Thank you, Fabian, enjoyed being on the show.Vasa Martinez:Thanks so much.

The cinemas are closed, but Austrian directors are busy working on their next films. The outstandig documentarian und producer Nikolaus Geyrhalter has shown us the world in his movies until now: He has taken us to completely abandoned places in Japan as well as into the Bosnian mountains. He has spoken to men who literally move mountains for his latest documentary "Earth" and he’s been a guest of indigenous people on their homelands far, far away. Now, Nikolaus Geyrhalter is at home in Austria, working on a film about the corona crisis: “Stillstand” is the working title of the movie. In an interview with Maria Motter, Nikolaus Geyrhalter explains, that he originally had planned to do something completely different, far away from Austria.

Learn more about JulySupport the show and get on monthly mentorship calls with Fabian. Join here.-------->F Geyrhalter:Welcome to the show, Muhammad and Eric.M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Thank you very much. Yeah. Good to be here.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. So we're taping this just a few days into August and I have to say, when are you launching July, if not in July?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Well, actually we did launch July in July, which was a great start to the company. This is Muhammad speaking. We had a great release in the first of the three of our units, to actual customers in the month of July...F Geyrhalter:Oh fantastic.M Saigol and E Rauterkus:... which was very timely and fitting for our brand and actually also our journey. We started this company last July. So it's a very significant path for us. But it's a hot summer and we've been continuing deliveries through July into August and into September as well.F Geyrhalter:So currently people can pre-order it, but you're already delivering, which is amazing. That's great.M Saigol and E Rauterkus:That's right. So the way that we structured it is we allowed people to start joining the wait list and then beginning pre-orders. The demand has been phenomenal. So we actually have several different shipments of units coming in and we kept selling out of them. So it's still been on pre-order now till September. But we have already delivered those customers for the July slots and then the August slots.But we've just been so humbled and frankly overwhelmed by the tremendous reception that we received. People willing to put that money down for a product that the subject will receive after 30 days or even more than 30 days. And we're just so excited to bring July to all these different homes.F Geyrhalter:How in the world did you pull this off in 12 months? I mean, we're not talking about some technology company that writes code, we're talking about an actual... We're talking about R&D, we're talking about product, manufacturing, staffing, the whole shebang. How did you pull it off?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah, that's a great question. And I think in a part of our approach that was seen as so important for us as we were starting off. Muhammad and I actually, we met... we worked together prior to this in a software setting. So I think we learned a lot there, and then to some extent, we took some of the learning there and really tried to take it into this space.I mean, it involved hardware, it involved manufacturing. I mean, where we can build a product quickly, get it out into the market quickly, learn a lot quickly. It launched relatively quickly, and we kind of used that as a foundation. So it's been a great journey, and we think we took a lot of the approaches from software that hadn't been evolved into the hardware yet, to get the products to market.I think, for us, the key was to just be really focused. Focused on what the goal was, that we wanted to launch this product for the summer of 2020. And then be really focused on what we were building. I mean, really, a laser focus kind of tunnel vision on what were the pain points that we wanted to solve in this space. And then how do we solve it. You know what I mean? We could talk about the process that we went through, but I think it was that focus and setting those goals early on, that really enabled us to stay on track.And in the year timeline, but also even within the midst of, what is it I'm looking for, a more unusual year than anything, than most years. So we're really excited that we were able to launch this product, within that one year period, and we are super excited to grow it here as well.And you know, one thing I'll add to that as well, when we got started on this journey, we had so many ideas of what we could do with the window air conditioner, how we could change it, what we could improve. But what we wanted to do is not just go away into a black box and think about what Eric and Muhammad want the window AC to be, but we wanted to learn what actual customers want from their window AC.So in the summer of 2019, as I mentioned, we started this company, July. We actually quit our jobs. We'd been working together before. And we put up a really quick website and we started reselling regular window ACs, that you can buy on the market today, but we'd sold them with our service model so that we could get into customer's homes so that we could speak to customers, understand their purchase journeys, understand what frustrated them about the existing ACs. So we took all of those learnings. Eric and I actually installed over a hundred ACs ourselves.F Geyrhalter:That's what I was wondering. It sounds like you were actually going home to home, in a hot summer in New York, installing air conditioning units. Well, your former coworkers must have been so proud of your journey. They're like, "You really made it guys. Good job."M Saigol and E Rauterkus:It was a lot of fun, honestly, it was so much fun. We got to interact with so many customers in a way that you wouldn't normally get the opportunity to see them in their lifestyles. Being in their home, getting this moment, while you're doing the installation, to talk to them and speak to them in a kind of casual setting. And then of course, learning about the product itself, with these installations. Eric and I had so many difficult situations because the product today is not really built out for the consumer that it's serving.So we took all these learnings, both from the customer, from the experience of the installation, and we said, "Okay, what are the key things that we need to do? And how can we achieve that in a 12 months' cycle?" And that's really how we did it. We mentioned that we focused and that was so critical to us because frankly, if we had just kind of gone down an endless pathway of thinking of new things, we wouldn't have been able to come to market in such a rapid period of time.F Geyrhalter:And you kind of hinted at that, but not only did you pull the whole thing off in 12 months, but there was the virus and still is. And I know with manufacturing founders, that is a huge disruptance. I mean, even for the ones that already have the entire chain completely figured out, for you guys, that must've been a huge disruptor. On the flip side, I'm sure that consumer demand must've been skyrocketing because everyone's suddenly stuck at home.I know that I purchased an AC unit for my back studio at home where I'm now, which is a quote unquote studio. It's literally a small little studio because I had to move out of my office, right? So suddenly ACS became something that were important for people where they never even thought they would actually put in a wall unit. How did that affect you positively and negatively?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah, no, I think there are words inside to that point. 100%. The work from home situation, it did help us here from the demand side, but on the supply chain side, there were disruptions. We had a global supply chain, from day one. We knew that was a focus of Muhammad and myself, just how could we source the best in class pieces of this product from wherever they were.So there was no question, there was a lot of disruption, as we got started, but luckily, things that we were able to continue progressing. There were a few situations where the vendor was really shut down and where we didn't really see that vendor coming back online, so we had to pivot to a new vendor. Luckily, we had a couple of other vendors in the back of the line, and lined up, as we were doing the initial processes, when we were finding who we were going to partner with.So we were able to make some kind of key pivots early on. As the crisis unfolded, we were trying to shut down initially, then they were reopening, as the US was shutting down. And we were able to kind of squeeze our way through that. There was no question, there were some delays, but I think that was a big learning for us as we go forward too, is that we need to set up an organization that has some supply chain durability and flexibility, so that as whatever crisis converges, we are to where we can set up to pivot things around as needed.Then there's no question on the other side too. Yeah, exactly what you were saying, consumers, and some consumers that we've sold to this summer, we've noticed, they've never bought this product before, and that's quite interesting for us. There's a few different dynamics that drive that particular question, that one of them is exactly what you were describing. People who have managed to go without AC in the past because they only needed it for a few days and were mostly at work. And now, they're all stuck in their homes.And that's what's driven Muhammad and me, because earlier, with our presales introduction, we wanted to get out into the market, start selling these units quite early on, in the summer, while we were top of mind with people and then obviously delivering them as rapidly as we could, given the challenges that were on the supply chain side. So we were quite fortunate that we were still able to get everything moving this summer, butwe'll look back on it, I'm sure, in 10 years, and chuckle that this was the year that we started it.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's something really interesting happening in the last couple of years when it comes to consumer trust, and you alluded to this prior. I know that your product design actually came from the same people who were involved with the luggage company, Away. And with Away, it was the same problem where they weren't able to deliver on time. And that kind of became their big brand story.People fell in love with the brand instead of the actual product. Like they wanted the product really badly, don't get me wrong, but then they had this weird time where they had to wait for, I remember, quite a long time, and the ladies at Away were really smart in figuring out, "Okay, if we don't have the product to touch people's hearts, how can we touch people's hearts?" And that's when they really started to think about brand and that's when they created this photo book that they sent out, instead of the actual product, blah, blah, blah, right?So I'm sure that for you too, a little bit of those pivots, must have been brand pivots where you suddenly thought, "Okay, well, we can't quite deliver, maybe as we promised. We know we will and people are eager, but now we actually need to start thinking about communications and how does the brand actually communicate?" And I think that's a huge opportunity today. Actually, it's interesting how that happens.M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah, absolutely, and for us, the branding is such a critical part of the story, and really two aspects of it that are so important. Number one, it's the feeling that this brand invites to the customers, in a way that the customers today or potential future customers, but also the authenticity and the transparency. So from day one, when we knew these disruptions were coming up, we wanted to be very clear with all of the people, as they joined our wait list, that we didn't have an exact date for them yet. We didn't take any money from customers till we knew when these units were going to be arriving, because we didn't want to put them in a situation where they've paid and it's going to be delayed.So, beyond just the brand itself, which we love and we think it's so important to customers today, and therefore it should be important to all brands, is being open, honest and transparent, every step of the way. Customers know that this is a strange time. Everybody is experiencing it. If you try to hide the fact or if you try to pretend, it's never going to develop a strong relationship with the customer. So that's really one aspect of it.And then you have the other side, in terms of what we created with July, we're so proud of and we think it's so important. Yes, it's the design of the product, yes, it's the features and functionality, the environmental aspects of the product as well. But it is also, the fact that there hasn't been a fresh brand in the appliance space in decades. I mean, if you think back to the 1950s and the 1960s and even onwards, some of the biggest, strongest brands in America were the appliance brands. GE Appliances meant something. It was a mark of distinction in the home. You see all the old adverts of families proudly displaying their appliances. They had a lot of meaning for the family, for the home, in those earlier decades.Over time, that has shifted. These brands no longer mean what they do in some of their most traditional categories. 70% of customers who own a window air conditioner, do not know which brand it is, even though it's sitting right there in their window and they're looking at it so frequently. And this is because of the lack of differentiation in the space. Both visually, but also in terms of the brand.So for us, it's a very important admission and a very key critical component is, we want to bring back that life into branding the space and really create July as that 21st century branded appliance feel that actually means something to customers. That they're excited about, that they know we'll be honest with them, that they know we'll try and do right by the environment and that they know we'll give them a service and an experience that is unmatched.F Geyrhalter:Well, and I think it's interesting because you lead very much with kind of like mid-century modern design. Very simple, very clean design, right? There's not much to it and that's exactly what's to it, right? Because usually, there's too much chunk, right? You just cleaned it up. You have this magnet piece that you kind of clip on on the top and that's it, right?? It's the cleanest thing ever.Which makes me, by the way, wonder if that magnet couldn't be used for a July logo magnet? But that's a different story. But The Wall Street Journal actually calls it, summer's unlikeliest status symbol. So that's pretty amazing. I mean, it's exactly where you wanted to be, right? That people actually talk about their appliance brand again. Which they haven't for so long?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah, no, for sure. And I think that's a great example of something that came out of our process that we went through last summer, where we'd gone into the customers' homes. Muhammad described it earlier, but we were selling kind of just normal units you could buy at Best Buy. We're on bestbuy.com. That gave us that right to get into people's homes. What really jumped out to us was, people didn't want an appliance-looking thing in their window. They didn't want the lines and the dots. They didn't even want a nice looking appliance in their window.I remember, one quote from a customer was, "Why does it look like I put a washing machine in my window?" We would ask, "Would you love to have this in a drawer?" They wanted it to dine outwards, especially where you look at the window air conditioner unit, where in the markets that it's in and in the homes that it's in, like the market, the urban, America's oldest and populated cities. These beautiful old buildings, the window space is quite valuable and quite small.F Geyrhalter:Yeah.M Saigol and E Rauterkus:People are taking them so much, and then there's this thing that looks like a washing machine.F Geyrhalter:Yeah.M Saigol and E Rauterkus:So that just came from that experience of getting into there, giving ourselves a right to be organically in our customers' homes, talking to them. They want a design piece. Then they want to feel that it's their space. So we went around that summer and did those hundreds of installations and deliveries, and no two spaces are the same, and no two aesthetics are the same. Some people want to have a more cozier home, other people more industrial. The list goes on and on.So we wanted it to be a really clean... We approached it as being a really clean design piece, that could sit in anyone's home. It had this kind of platform for infinite customization, for anyone's home. That's when it really came together for us, and that we're really excited about.We launched this year with three covers, as you described. It gave us a really unique opportunity to explore materials that haven't been explored in appliances in really ever, or in quite a long time. We have done in wood and ash, we did a panel, we also did a really awesome fabric. My personal favorite is a gray fabric panel. We explored these interesting materials you don't expect with the clients, you expect more with the furniture, or a speaker, a very nice speaker, something of that nature.For us, it's just this opportunity to grow and kind of build this platform and we want to have many, many more of these kinds of front panels, collaborations, et cetera. We can express our brands in a way that really works in an individual customer's home. So yeah, it's exactly what you're saying, we want that product moving into a home, so it sits naturally there. If it sits naturally there in a beautiful way.So honestly, at the time, and currently, it is definitely a conversation piece, I think, in our customer's home, but hopefully over time as more and more people get their July, we can just be these really beautiful actually longterm panels.F Geyrhalter:Totally. I assume July is targeting first and second time apartment renters who have no AC, but I do have to say July the brand, not the window unit, has, how shall I say, an over the top hipster look, right? So now I hope I will not offend you, but this was within the big reason why I so badly wanted to have you on this very brand-centric show, because it is super intriguing.How did the graphic design look come about and what was the idea behind it? Because it very much begs to be hip, but the design language is kind of borderline, how shall I say, it's peculiar. It's interesting. There's an orange ticker band that scrolls and says hot indefinitely. And a dingbat color with its harsh radiant gradation. So overall, it feels like aspects could have been designed by, I don't know, Microsoft Clippy, but it appears to be making fun of itself or even that super hipster brand look of today, right? So, was it irony or was it not, or how did this come about?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah, absolutely. So maybe, I'll start with kind of what we envisioned for the brand and then we can talk about its visual transformation as well. So for us, what you usually see in this space is your traditional ads of an air conditioner as almost someone who's wearing a winter coat inside because they're so cold and it's keeping them warm.We wanted to kind of turn that on the head. Summer is the time when you need window AC and what we wanted to do is instead of depicting summer as this thing you want to hide inside your home and prepare a winter coat, we realize we love summer. Summer is one of the most wonderful times of the year. You get to go outside, you get to the beach, you get to be free and outside, and you're not cooped up in your home like in the winter time.So with July, we wanted to embrace that magic of summer, that feeling of joy, that feeling of carefreeness because we want our customers of course, to remember July when they're thinking about their summer plans or what they're doing about the summer. So for us, it was, instead of taking that kind of negative summer, where it's too hot and too sticky, it's that summer is a wonderful time and July will help you enjoy it even more then maybe previously.In terms of the visual direction, so a lot of that filter through, you'll see, we use a lot of summery iconography. The hot, hot, hot décor. Again, something similar to summer. But what we also wanted to do was, there have been some great new brands in the past few years and it comes to be that there are ways that an aesthetic is established. We wanted to be a little bit different then that. We wanted to push the envelope in terms of what the visual design would be, and make sure that it fits with our brand, which is very fun, which is very lively, which is very joyous. So we wanted to have a little fun with it.We've created a website that you've seen in all of our materials, where there are these fun elements. There are different colors. They are bright colors because we wanted this to feel different. We didn't want people to say, "Oh, this looks just like those other six brands, and other six categories that I've seen." But it's something really fresh, something that's unique to us and that really fits and resonates with our brand. And that's really how we came to July.F Geyrhalter:How did you decide on the brand name, July?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:The name, July, really stems from the brand that we wanted to build around summer, around the season. We wanted to make sure that customers knew, when they thought about summer, when they thought about the season, they would also think about us as a brand. July has both, it's about that fun, it's getting out there, it's enjoying yourself, but you also know it's going to be hot. So we want people, as the heat starts to sink in, as they start to talk about the month of July, that they also think about the brand that will help them stay cool in their home, in a beautiful way.We did, we struggled with the brand name. We wanted to find the right name that would encapsulate this identity. And what we love about July is that it's immediately recognizable. It's distinct from other brands as well, and it really relates to this feeling of summer, which is still critical to what we do.F Geyrhalter:And it makes tons of sense, right? Your domain name is july.ac. Your Instagram handle is, @feelslike.july. It seems like there were a couple of corners that you had to cut, in order to be able to call yourself July, obviously, because there's lots of Julys out there, not only the month, but people with the name July, et cetera. Does it really matter or does it not matter, because people just look for July air conditioning and they'll find you?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:So we thought a tremendous amount about the name in terms of how it will present itself to the world. We looked at SEO, we looked at the availability of various handles, like the Instagram handle, et cetera. And July is common. There's no two ways about that. But what we really look at, at ads, is there any other brand competing in this space for the board of knowledge around July, and the answer was none. Other than the fact that it was a summer month, there wasn't really any other brand.So what we've seen is that people are looking for us. They're coming and searching for us. You search July air conditioner, or July AC, we'll be right there at the top. So as a lesson to all the brands, I think it's less about the name itself and how common that is and more about how are people looking for your brand and how will they find it? Is there anybody else that they might come across by mistake instead of you if they're searching for something? And really, we haven't seen any adverse impacts of that, so we're very happy with where we landed and how it's going.F Geyrhalter:That's fantastic. That's what I thought and that's what I hoped. And you, Muhammad, you come from a product manager background, which included a stint at the New York Times, and you both met at Boston Consulting Group's Digital Ventures where you gained experience in launching innovative new businesses in a lot of industries, right? Med Tech, Elder Care. Now that you've gone through this journey yourself, for a year, now it's more difficult, now you're actually in it, what does branding mean to you? The idea of branding. What does it mean to you guys?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah, so branding is so critical in all these different respects, but what I think the most important thing, regardless of what industry you're in, regardless of what company we're talking about, it is about the relationship that you have with your customer. It is how they think about you, how they feel about you and perhaps most importantly, how much they trust you to deliver for them and to do the right thing, more broadly.M Saigol and E Rauterkus:So, brand is not just branding. It's not just the visual identity. Of course, that's one piece of it, but it's much deeper than that. It is, what is the connection? What is the emotional connection that you have with a customer that makes them not only want to come to purchase from you, but want to tell their friends about you, that want to share it with the world and spread it, and then come back of course, again and again.I don't think you can be surface level with the brand. You can't just say the right things and have winning copy and have beautiful images. You have to walk the walk if you want to really survive. Customers are smart, customers, they can smell lies and dishonesty, and by the way, the important thing, even more important to me than branding, it's actually taking actions to deliver against the promises that you make to your customers.F Geyrhalter:And you are smack deep inside of that right now. As their delivery truck's pulling in and I know Eric had to put himself on mute for a second to get some product in. And I love that. I mean, we were right in that right now. So it's an exciting time.But you guys have actually much bigger goals, I heard, namely to become the 21st century consumer appliance brand. So are you planning to be a house of brands as we call it? So starting with July, on the AC, and then moving into different categories within the appliance arena? Each new brand being one on its own, or an audience or name or a marketing campaign?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah, that's a great question, and I'm back, and I apologize about the truck there.F Geyrhalter:No worries.M Saigol and E Rauterkus:But no, and I think that the way Muhammad and I always look at it is, it's always an evolving kind of question, looking at where do we want to go, et cetera, and how we want to structure it. But I think what you've hit on is exactly right. What we see is such an interesting opportunity to be this 21st century appliance company, especially in this large appliance space. And for us, the window AC was that perfect starting point.And it's exactly what Muhammad hit at earlier. It's that these appliance brands of the 1950s and the 1960s, they meant something to the consumer. And they meant something from a product perspective, from a design perspective and from a functionality perspective in that right to own this product and then to kind of embrace that in your kitchen, and your home. But then they also meant something from a brand and a service perspective. You know the Maytag Man, a kind of a classic example from a bygone era. But it was quality and it was trust, and that kind of has fallen away.We especially think for the consumers, and in my generation and the generation above us and the generation behind us, these people who will be the majority of homeowners in the next 10, 15, 20 years. They're looking for a brand in this space that does really high-quality products that fits into their style. But in addition to that, brings a modern service smile to them, in a way that you can get these products, in the way that you buy these products, and then the way that you maintain and engage with these products.So that's where we see that it is such an awesome kind of opportunity for our brand to grow into. The reality is these brands that kind of dominate the space in terms of market share, they have lost really all connections and relationships with the customers, from a product design perspective, and also from a sales and a customer communication perspective. So, our goal is to be laser focused on the window AC here, and the AC space in general, as we roll out this product, but we think a lot of these same dynamics kind of take hold and cross over.F Geyrhalter:This may be a little bit too early to ask, but any idea of what your next brand may be tackling?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:So, we've been investigating across the spectrum and we've seen so many opportunities in different categories. Right now, we haven't made that decision yet as to what the next phase will be, that we'll be tackling. But it will be an appliance that people are craving new design at an affordable price point and they're just looking for a hassle free way to get it into their home, with a brand that will have fantastic customer service, that will do the right thing for the environment, and then will deliver them a delightful experience. So, more to come from us. We're going to see tomorrow the future. We'll let you know.F Geyrhalter:Awesome. And on your site, you're saying that in addition to implementing this technology, and I'm quoting you here, "We, as a company, are trying to do our part in mitigating the impact of cooling on our planet. July will be offsetting the emissions of every AC we sell with a partnership with carbonfund.org and dispose of customers' old Acs in an ecologically friendly way, avoiding refrigerant leakage that is harmful to the planet. We are and will continue to invest in technologies that create a more sustainable future of cooling." I mean, this makes so much sense, right? So, is the idea of cooling people in a new, a different and definitely a hotter world, the big drive? And will you focus mainly on that aspect of appliances or could it go anywhere?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah so, it is certainly our focus. It is very important. We think there is great opportunity. That's why we started here, to build a better product, that are better for the environment, and that you can get them in a more easy manner. There is a lot of opportunity in this space.But the cooling space is just one way to go about that mindset. You know, the way that we approach it is, whatever we do, we want to make sure we do it right and we do it well and we deliver for our customers. So we'll never be in a situation where we've spread ourselves over so many different verticals, just doing one product here and one product there. So right now, I guess, there are many more products in this space that have a lot of the same issues and customer frustrations that we want to solve, but then our ambition comes from the outcome. But, we'll always take it and pace it out to the right level, to make sure that whatever we are doing is really delivering on our promise.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. Now, edutain me, as we come slowly to an end here, edutain me with this AC naïve question of mine, but it's been on my mind. I feel one of the utmost important aspects of installing an AC unit has been left out of pretty much all online installation videos. The parts are not even included in the unit to do that and it seems to potentially be the same with July, which was surprising and likely means that my assumptions are all incorrect.So here you go. I'm talking about how to ensure that no thieves can just open the window, right? Usually people after they install the unit or get the unit installed usually, right, because most units are not as easily installable as yours, but usually people end up cutting a piece of wood and blocking the window that way, which seems like a perfect, additional eyesore that begs for innovation, surprise and delight. Are you guys tackling that or does it not even need to be tackled and I'm missing something?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:That's a great question. There are a lot of kind of other things around, whether we see, add-ons, if you will, but I think, we'll slowly be tackling them as we come across things like that.Exactly as you said, this was another great example of a learning that we learned on our journey last summer, which is our easy installation frame, and it just boggles the mind that no-one else is learning about this. That was one of the worst parts, people around you doing other installs, 100-plus installs, where you were up in these high-rises in New York dangling out of a back-heavy box. There are these kind of spokes, these metal elements on the back, cutting your hands, and you're sweating because it's hot and you're trying not to drop it.So we focused a lot on this installation system, that we designed and developed, and we're super excited about that. And yes, exactly to your point, it locks itself into place so you can actually mount it to a window. So that makes it so that window can't come open, around the top of that installation frame. It prevents that risk. But there is a lot of different things.Like you said, there are some sort of quick-lock locking seams, and a safe install, like a locking system that you can secure with a window. One thing we did this year is we rolled out these custom filters and we sold them in our unit, that really are the first kind of filters for a window AC that actually does something, that purifies the air. So we see a lot of other opportunities to improve on this space.But we're really excited about new learning solutions that appear, that gives the customers a safe, easy, reliable way to take it in and out of the equipment, which is all as safely as we could, to try to not lose your window all year round. It's very, very safe.F Geyrhalter:So even if it's just a "fix this with three screws on the top", you can't possibly pull the window up from the outside because the unit is too heavy, I assume?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Right, that's exactly it.F Geyrhalter:Okay. And that's what got me. Perfect. Thank you for educating me. I appreciate it. So what I always like to finish off with is if you would be able to describe your brand in one word. So July, right. With Coca Cola, it used to be happiness. Maybe it still is and no one knows. Most people don't care. With Everlane, it's definitely radical transparency, right? Zappos has customer service. What is one word that could describe your brand? If you're able to just put it all, the entire brand into one?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah, I'll give you three words. That is dealing, and you know for us it's about capturing the joys of being outside. The freshness and the vibrancy of color and life that blossoms into summer. Being able to go to the beach, sitting out, dining outside on your rooftop in New York. Just getting out there and being free and taking a road trip, or whatever it might be. So for us, what we're trying to do with July is capture that feeling of summer, and actually bring those delightful moments even into your home.F Geyrhalter:Which in my eyes, despite your smart product, is one of the smartest moves you've done, from a brand perspective. To actually celebrate what people fight against when they put this in their house. I think it's really brilliant. Do you have a final piece of advice, maybe brand advice, but also maybe just product advice for product founders who are struggling right now during this pandemic to bring their own ideas to realization? Do you have any advice for them as you look back at your one year journey? You already talked about focus and I already checked that off as one big takeaway, but is there anything else where you say, "Look, here's something that we learned that we just really wish everyone would do."M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah. I'm sure we do. I have one, I'm sure Muhammad, you have something like that. Yeah. I'm sure we have many. I'll let you go first. Feel free to jump in. You know, 100%, the thing that I have learned here in this process is, how can you find really clever ways to test concepts, particularly in a low cost manner, early on? That's been so important, from the first Muhammad and I have been taking. I think it's the reason why we had a lot of opportunity, by getting over a lot of the problems that went ahead.You know what I mean? You can come into this summer, with the pandemic here, et cetera, and because we found some clever ways to test things. The last summer example, it was a great one. Those went into brand too because we actually had a test brand that we were using last summer, and we evolved. We made some changes to it because we were likely to make some changes as well, as we launched the brand.So we just challenged ourselves to look at this place and see what would be good. It was pretty standard to say, "Oh, we don't have a real product, we're going to sell ACs now." So we got a developer on the project, telling him we were selling AC systems. We said, "No, we actually need to sell ACs today that are not our own product, and that's worth doing and we can learn a ton from that. And then we can design and develop our own product beyond that."So that's been my biggest learning and what I'll take, and what we'll continue to do over the course of this company and into the future. It's just finding clever ways to get real products out there, real brands out there, even if they're test brands, to real people who would actually think about and engage with your product and your brand. And then do it in a low cost way and then take it from there and build on it.Things don't have to be perfect. You know that's the best kind of learning as well. You don't have to have the perfect brand. On day one, as you start to test things and everything. You don't have to have everything locked and loaded. There can be a lot of open questions, but you answer a lot of those questions within the process.So that's my biggest thing that I tell everyone, is just think of a creative way to get out in the market and do something with your idea. And that will ignite the entire process. So something we did and something we'll continue to do for sure.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. Muhammad? M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Yeah, absolutely, that's one of my biggest take-aways as well, just as Eric said it. It couldn't be more important than overemphasize. And then on the branding side, what I could say is, be willing to take a little bit of a risk with the brand. Don't just fit it into exactly what you're kind of seeing out there.Have your own perspective on aesthetic, have your own perspective on design, make sure that it actually relates to the brand promises that you have developed and what you're delivering for your customers. But customers will respond to something that looks fresh and looks different, that makes them smile, that they haven't seen before. So put your own perspective, put your own brand interpretation of the current general aesthetics and don't be afraid to do that. It will pay dividends.F Geyrhalter:And what you just said is exactly why I wanted to have you on the show. So thank you. That was fantastic. You got me back nicely too, which I was begging for. So I do appreciate it. So this will most probably air at the end of October, but still listeners who fell in love with July and they're already, they're either still sweating it, or they're already sweating and thinking about the next summer, how can they get their hands on it?M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Exactly, exactly. So around October, you can always come to our website at july.ac, where we have these really awesome programs heading to the fall and into the holiday season, where you can reserve, you can lock in your July for February, for the end of the spring, early summer, according to when you want it to be. Just make sure, you have your unit reserved for delivery on that first hot day.So you'll be able to cover when, say, pick what unit you want, the size that's right for your home, the front panel that speaks to you, and you'll be able to lock in your delivery date for spring of 2021. So you'll stop on over and we're always there to answer questions as well. So please chat on our website, call us directly or email us with any of your questions and we can get your unit right as the season starts next year.F Geyrhalter:That's awesome. Thank you both for having been on the show so early on, with your brand. This was a big delight, to use your words, to have you on. And it was a blast and also, it was extremely insightful. So thank you so much for your time, and best of luck for the next month, to get through the hot summer with your brand and then for your brand extensions in the years to come.M Saigol and E Rauterkus:Thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah, for sure.

Learn more about LIVSupport the show and get on monthly mentorship calls with Fabian. Join here.Full Transcript:F Geyrhalter:Welcome to the show, Esti.E Chazanow:Hi. Thank you for having me.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. Thank you for making it especially during these times right now. I was so intrigued when I first read about your company, LIV, a Miami-based brand that offers Swiss-made high-quality watches at a fraction of the price we all got used to seeing. We're talking a couple hundred dollars versus thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. And for all of you listening, go to livwatches.com to get a visual of their impeccable design.So you and your husband are both co-founders but he is the official watch expert, I would say, the brand as a person as we call it, yet I chose to have you on the show because you're also the brand manager. And the big question, just to start this off, how does one set out to break this carefully crafted and, I can only assume, well-guarded system that is the Swiss watch monopoly? How did you get into that? Because you're the underdog coming in, and you're stirring it up quite a bit. How did this all start?E Chazanow:Well, that's a good question. Let me just gather my thoughts for a second. I would say, as you said, my husband is really the watch guy. My husband had been obsessed with watches as a young child and he turned his obsession into a passion slowly through the years. And then as he got older, he wanted to work within the watch industry and he got his first job in a packing room for a Swiss watch brand. And when ecommerce came along, he set up his own website to trade watches online. He was one of the first ecommerce websites for high-end watches. And then after we got married, there was a huge shift in advertising, how the consumer behaves. So we thought that it would be a good time to launch our own brand together, a direct to consumer, no store, online only, super high-quality watches at an accessible price with a focus on what we call the fan, not the customer, but the fan experience. And I can talk a bit more about that in detail later. But I think that because we started with that totally different mindset, we were playing by different rules than them ...F Geyrhalter:Right.E Chazanow:So that took us to an advantage.F Geyrhalter:And so playing by different rules is usually seen-E Chazanow:It's like David and Goliath.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. No, totally. And I just, really, the way that I see it as an outsider, and I lived close to Geneva for a couple of years and so I [inaudible 00:03:01] the entire Swiss watch monopoly, it feels like. It must be extremely difficult to come in with, in the beginning, your watches were a couple hundred dollars. Now you have some that are a little pricier, but to be A, taken seriously, and to even be invited in. I mean, would you or have you even shown up with LIV at one of those snooty international watch fairs to stand your ground? Do you choose not to go down that path at all?E Chazanow:That's a great question. First of all, the funny thing is that we started getting emails from Baselworld the past few years inviting us to come, but we were never interested in going there because that's not our model. It doesn't make sense for us. Besides the fact that I didn't even know where they're up to now. I know at one point ... Well, they obviously canceled for this year. They're having problems of their own and that's part of the huge shift of going down our route. Anyway ...F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. Yeah, you're definitely well-positioned for that right now.E Chazanow:But when you talk about respect, to us, that's really what branding is, because you're talking about how do you get respect? Forget about being in the watch industry, in any industry, to me, that's what branding is, it's about getting respect, being respected as a brand in the industry. Like think about what Apple did. Now, how do you get there is by having a very cohesive brand image. Visuals, communication, product, experience, people respecting the pricing that you set, people seeing the value in the product. Once you have all those pieces together, then you get the respect, and that respect will come within the industry itself as well. Over the years, we've spoken to major watch publications where in the past they would ... We were able to gain that respect because I think we did everything in a very authentic and real way that eventually we actually became a player, in a sense.F Geyrhalter:Right, right. An outlier, but a player in the game. And I really like the idea of respect, because especially for your brand, that was everything. If you didn't gain respect, your brand would have not flourished. So I totally can see that.E Chazanow:And that's actually why when we talk about branding internally, we always are thinking of everything in terms of relationships. just like in a relationship with a spouse, people need to respect each other, People are not going to invest in a brand that they don't respect. Mercedes, Rolex, whatever they did, they did in order to get respect and they did it successfully. We're doing it in a very different way, but that's really our goal.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. And we talked a little bit about the pandemic offline when we did our personal introduction and you talked about watch events and how it changed. Obviously, the pandemic changed so much of our daily routines. I, for instance, have not worn my beautiful TAG Heuer Chronograph ever since I came home from my last flight back from Europe where I was working on some workshops and when I entered the quarantine. So on the one hand, I would think that this unprecedented situation to be followed by a recession might hugely impact any retailer that flirts with anything that's aspirational, like a watch like yours. But on the other hand, LIV may be very well situated, as you hinted at, with being a lower price point, being ecommerce first. How is the brand being affected right now?E Chazanow:Okay. First of all, when you mentioned and we were talking about ... You just mentioned your TAG Heuer Chronograph, and we were talking before about coming up against the big boys. It's so funny, because the other day I was on one of our Amazon products, that's another whole story, Amazon, but we do have some product on Amazon. And I was just scrolling down the page and I noticed, and I immediately sent my husband a screenshot, I noticed that they had now the algorithm had somehow done, how does this product compare to other products, you know how they sometimes have that, that chart?F Geyrhalter:Yeah.E Chazanow:And they had the LIV Swiss watch compared to a TAG Heuer and a Tissot. And I'm like, "Wow."F Geyrhalter:That is amazing.E Chazanow:I'm like, "This is amazing. I cannot believe it."F Geyrhalter:That's your proof point, that's all you needed, right?E Chazanow:Exactly. And in that respect, I would trust Amazon because it's completely based on data that them putting that up there is based on data.F Geyrhalter:Right.E Chazanow:It's not some affiliate putting it up there, it's real. They put it up there because they know.F Geyrhalter:Right. That's pretty amazing.E Chazanow:Yeah. I just had to say that because I thought that was so cool. And to answer your question about the pandemic, we're trying to continue to have a positive outlook. We are situated in a good place in terms of where we are in our brand, in our brand timeline. Just forget about what's going on in the rest of the world. A few years ago, we didn't have so many product offerings. Over time, all the reviews have built up online, the press has built up online, we have a strong online presence. We've done everything online from the beginning, but I'm saying in terms of third-party websites and so on and so forth. So by third-party, I mean press, review websites, and so on. So we were perfectly situated within our brand timeline, we had everything set so that if people are home more, they have more time to do research, there's a lot of information out there about us. So in that respect, it's positive.Uncertainty isn't good for anybody, but at the same time, we are, as you said, much more affordably priced. Well, we like to say accessibly priced. So if someone, for example, wanted to buy a new watch and would normally spend $10,000 on a watch, maybe now they have time to do some research and realize that we might actually be a good investment for a $1500 watch. So there's a lot of different parts, I don't have any data on it, because I haven't done any surveys or anything like that. Some of this is my gut, some of it is talking to fans, and some of it is just knowing where we are as a company and connecting the dots.F Geyrhalter:No. And that's wonderful to hear. And talking about-E Chazanow:And sorry, one other thing is that we're very lucky. In a way, when we first started, I'm not going to lie, I had this dream of getting into Neiman Marcus just because, and still now people are like, now not so much because of what's going on in the world, but even up to right before the pandemic, it's like, "Oh, are you in the department stores?" People were still asking us that.F Geyrhalter:Right.E Chazanow:And I secretly dreamed that I could say yes and now I'm so happy that I can just say, "We're so [inaudible 00:11:39]." And at a certain point I was in touch with buyers at Nordstrom thinking about getting in there but at the time that I was trying to get our product in, we didn't have enough product offering so they weren't interested. And I never tried to go back once we had more product offering because at that point we realized that it made no sense for us.F Geyrhalter:Well, the price point obviously is one of the big differentiators. Of course, the design, too, and the brand story, everything. But every LIV watch is being touched by, I think, 55 hands in the process of being made. These are all Swiss watchmakers. So you are D2C and you forego a ton of advertising spend because of it, but there's still a lot of marketing you have to do, right? You have to create quality content ... You offer free shipping to any country in the world, which is amazing. You're talking on your site that you have fanatical service, et cetera. So how does that financial model work? I know this is all about branding, but I think everyone is intrigued, how can you offer a product of such quality, with kind of the same hands being involved in the process as there may be for a TAG Heuer or for a Rolex or for any other really large brand, how do you cut the fat out of the price for the consumer?E Chazanow:Well, maybe as many hands are touching in the construction and design process, but no hands are touching it once it gets to us, once we're ready to ship. So there's no distribution, no one needs to get a cut all the way down the line. By the time you get that Rolex, think about how many people needed to get a cut for that. So we don't have that. We're going direct to the consumer.F Geyrhalter:It's as simple as that, huh?E Chazanow:It's just direct, and we've cut out everything so we can focus all our resources on, A, making a beautiful product, and B, that relationship with the customer. Well, we don't call them customer, we call them fans. But that's really what we can do. So all that fat is stripped away, and [inaudible 00:14:00] down, and there's no distortion of the brand voice, image, nothing. It's real and authentic.F Geyrhalter:Exactly. It's a beautiful, authentic story, and by you cutting all of these middle man and these distributors and God knows what, all the fancy advertising in Vogue or all of those magazines, and by you not being in Neiman Marcus, those are also stories that real diehard watch collectors actually ache for, because they knew the entire time that they are being screwed over, in a way, so they come with open arms, I'm sure.Let's talk about Kickstarter for a second, because that's a big story for your brand. So you raised, the last time I checked, and I know those numbers must be off now, they must be much higher, but you raised $2.9 million via Kickstarter. Your latest watch on the platform, the P-51 Pilot Titanium Automatic Chronograph, will be at a much higher price point, it's actually a $2000 watch. The campaign had a $30,000 goal, and when I checked last week or so, I'm sure, again, the actual numbers you can correct me on, but it was four days away from ending the campaign, and it had over $1.6 million pledged.This is unheard of. I mean, this is unbelievable. Why is Kickstarter working so insanely well for your brand, and do you have any tips for other entrepreneurs listening on how to fully take advantage of the platform like you guys did?E Chazanow:Yeah, okay, so the platform that the P-51 on which it is currently is our own internal system, but it's the same concept as Kickstarter, and that's where we initially launch everything, that's correct.F Geyrhalter:I see.E Chazanow:So I think, just going back, why do we go to Kickstarter? So the first thing that's really important to understand is that we don't just go because of the funding. There's much more to it than just the funding. The funding is a really great piece, but that's not the only reason. So number one, it forces us to articulate and present this new brand concept and collection, Kickstarter forces you to define it. When you launch on Kickstarter, you have to actually sit down and say ... With our first Kickstarter we had to say, "Why does our brand even need to exist?" And then with every collection, why does this collection need to exist? It sounds so basic, but sometimes you get carried away and you don't stop and think, and Kickstarter forces you to do that as part of the steps in creating a project, so that's number one, which I think is incredible.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely.E Chazanow:Then, the second reason is because if you're able to prove your concept, it enables you to understand what people really want. You're presenting a concept and then you're getting the feedback, and then you're using the feedback to go into production, so you might have had an idea and said, "I'm going to produce this dial in five different colors," but then you go live on Kickstarter and you realize that people actually only like three of the colors, they don't want the other two, so you're not even going to bother producing.F Geyrhalter:It's a focus group, yeah.E Chazanow:Yeah, exactly. And by the way, connecting back to what we talked about with the big brands, think about it. They just go to production, they have no idea. There's no data, they just go to production, and then they might have a huge amount of inventory leftover from a certain production that they just need to get rid of and they need to discount it, so we never bump into those issues, we end up selling every single piece we create, because we go the Kickstarter route.Then, of course, the third reason, going back to why the Kickstarter piece, the third reason of course, I would put it as number three is the funding, and the fourth reason, which is really what we're all about is just being able to start a relationship with people. Many of the people that we started with in the very first Kickstarter continued on our journey, they buy every single watch we come out with. They're our fans, they continue to be a part of our journey. So it's an amazing relationship-builder. But you have to do it right.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. So many things I want to comment on, but I'm going to restrict myself. So first off, the idea that Kickstarter makes a startup that is not even a brand at that point, that is just an idea, right? If someone goes to Kickstarter and start ... It actually makes you the all-important question to why does this product exist? I think that is so crucial. I mean, that's the work that I do with my client, and they pay me a lot of money and fly me around the world just to answer the question why does it exist and why would people care? Which is so hilarious, in a way, because everyone should know it if they put something out there.But it is, like you said, it is the most difficult question to answer, because this is when we're talking about purpose, this is when we go deeper, this is when we go into what do we really put out in the world? And especially when you have a watch company and you've got, I don't know, like 10, 20, 30, 50 SKUs, why does each one of those exist? I think it is tremendously important to create value in the eyes of the person purchasing it.And I also think it's extremely interesting that you went Kickstarter, because it seems to me that one of the big brand advantages of LIV is that you're really going for the limited edition runs, right? Is every single watch limited?E Chazanow:Now, yes. Well, we do not mass produce anything, that's just not our model. But everything is absolutely limited production, and everything is now, at the beginning we didn't, but now everything is also limited edition.F Geyrhalter:Which is so whip smart to do.E Chazanow:Yeah.F Geyrhalter:And that's why you have your super fans, which I can't believe that statement, that is so amazing, that people literally buy every single model that comes out, and the limited nature, that must be a huge component of why they would want to, because they're collectors. A lot of them must flirt with the idea of potentially reselling at some point.E Chazanow:Yeah, and we notice some of our watches on eBay, and to us, that's so ... And not heavily discounted or anything, like there's already a third market for it, which is awesome. Probably a collector reselling, but people see the value in it, absolutely.F Geyrhalter:That is amazing, right, and that was not something that you initially, most probably thought would happen, but it's a logical progression. And that also makes me wonder, is LIV, which again, for our listeners, it's the same type of watch with the same quality, it's just at a very different price point. But is a LIV, like a Rolex, a LIV, is it turning into a well-regarded status symbol, for many? Because for many, they want to say, "Oh, it's a Rolex," when someone asks. And of course, for your brand, that must have been a little bit of a brand pain point in the beginning, of figuring out, well, how do we not come across as, "Oh, it's a cheap or an inexpensive watch from the internet," right?But right now it is happening, with all of your stories that you're telling online and with really showing how much impeccable work goes into these pieces, and that it is really one to one as far as craftsmanship goes, is it now turning into kind of like a status symbol, are people excited about the outlier in their watch collection, and they actually like to show off, like, "No, this is actually a LIV."E Chazanow:So I think our brand focus, when you say, "You're wearing a LIV," right?F Geyrhalter:Yeah.E Chazanow:When I want someone to say ... What do you think of when you say Rolex? When I say Rolex to you, what do you think of?F Geyrhalter:Well, I mean, I think high quality-E Chazanow:One word.F Geyrhalter:... I think status, I think Swiss-made.E Chazanow:So yeah. I think most people would probably say status. Because you asked me about status, that's why I asked that back to you. But when we want people to think of LIV, we want them to think authentic. We want them to think, "This is authentic, this is real," and that is what we strive for. We're not striving for status, we're striving for authenticity. Because we think that today, in today's world, you can't fool anybody, everybody wants brands to be real with them. People want to invest their money and emotions into something that's authentic.F Geyrhalter:Yeah.E Chazanow:So rather than using the word status, I would use the word authentic. I would say we're not striving for status. If you are authentic, you can get there, and if you have a really beautiful product, that will be a byproduct, but that in itself is not what we're trying to achieve.F Geyrhalter:So maybe status turns into pride, right?it's pride of ownership, I think people have pride of ownership when they have a Rolex, but they can also have pride of ownership when they have a LIV, because they feel smarter. I mean, I think that must be a huge conversation, if you wear a LIV and someone next to you wears a TAG Heuer, like me, like the Austrian jerk who spent the money, and I'm sure it's an interesting conversation of like, "Well how much did you spend on this? Well did you know that my watch," and then they can rattle off all the details of how it is made and how precise it is, and I think it must be a really interesting conversation, and I'm sure that's happening online all the time now.E Chazanow:I really like how you said that, exactly. They're proud, they are. They're proud, and they're on a journey with us, and they're proud to be part of that journey. And again, it comes down to authenticity, because we really do have an authentic relationship, and they grew with us as a family. The brand grew, and as we grew our family as well. At ne point it was just my husband and myself working in the office, and we hd just done a Kickstarter, and I was due to have our third child, and the baby came three months early and we were not prepared, because I was doing all the responses to the fans, I was the one managing the whole fan experience, we didn't have anyone working for us at the time. So I actually had to write a message to all of them, and say, "I just want to let you know, I just had a preemie." Thank Gd, he's totally fine right now, and it was hard to write that email, because it's a very personal thing, but it felt natural, because these people were part of our lives, and they still are.And I cannot even tell you how many messages I got back and say, "Don't worry, my son is a preemie, I was a preemie," and it just helped ferment that relationship and it made it feel so real, and until this day I feel that relationship with our fans, even though maybe I'm not responding to every single message now, I'm still very involved, but obviously you have to scale and grow. But yeah, that's, I don't know how I got to that point [crosstalk 00:26:37].F Geyrhalter:Well, it's an important point, because I think we were talking a little bit about the brand's growth. But I think, to me, that is so crucial, because a lot of people that I interview, especially female founders and female co-founders, I talked to Jeni of Jeni's Ice Cream, I talked to Christina Stembel of Farmgirl Flowers, and all of them, it is, in the beginning, it is their determination, obviously, as a founder, because it takes a lot of that, and a lot of the grit and hustle, but a lot of it is just being 100% you, right? And sharing the journey and sharing not only the hits but also the misses, and I think that is such a huge change, and that's why a lot of people, when they ask me, "Oh, you're working with startups and corporations on branding and marketing, and isn't it all fake and stuff?" And I'm like, "Absolutely not."The way that corporations are being built now and brands are being built now is so much different than it used to be, and sending out this email talking about something that I don't believe anything can be much more personal than that. From the get-go it creates that sense of realness, something that every other big brand wants to be, right? Coca-Cola and all these big, kind of legacy brands, they all want to be your friend, they want to have a spot on your Instagram and Facebook, but we rarely allow them to because it doesn't feel authentic. But when a brand like yours pops up and people know the story and people know the founder's names, especially in the beginning, it's huge, money can't buy that. That just completely changed with D2C brands and with the startup movement of the last 10, 15 years, and I'm just so happy to hear that every time someone says that.E Chazanow:Yeah, it really is an incredible time for creativity, for quality, just for producing something real, I think it is an incredible time. There's a lot of fluff out there as well, but if you're real, then it's an incredible time. And then to the point of what some of the legacy brands are trying to do, I don't know, is it Alpina or Alpina, the watch company?F Geyrhalter:I do not know how you pronounce it either, but I saw it, I have the visual in front of me, yeah.E Chazanow:They went on Kickstarter after us.F Geyrhalter:Wow.E Chazanow:Yeah. When we saw them on Kickstarter, we were like, "What?" But I guess they saw the value in it. I'm not sure if it worked as ... It would be hard to integrate that model once you're already a legacy brand.F Geyrhalter:That's what I think, too. And talking about authenticity, that might not feel authentic at that point, because you've already gone a certain path.E Chazanow:Yeah, exactly. And people often ask us, "With your Kickstarter campaign, did you do it yourself or did you hire a company to do it?" And I always say, "Even if I would've had all the money in the world, I wouldn't pay someone to do that. You've got to do it on your own, you've got to be authentic." And especially when we first launched, the whole concept of fan experience, where the person's not just a customer doing a transaction but actually a fan, it was not very prevalent. People didn't even understand the language and concept, and as we grow we want to continue to be authentic, and so that's why we continue to do it on our own. We're not going to outsource that. We want to keep our watches affordable, agencies take a lot of money, so we'll continue to do that on our own, often people are asking us that.So I'm sure that the Alpina or Alpina, however you pronounce it, how could you ever be as authentic if it's just not like that? It's just ...F Geyrhalter:So how big is your micro brand now? You must've grown, how bit is the team?E Chazanow:It's very lean. We have a couple people in our office in Miami. I always thank them every year as we grow larger and larger, I say, "Thank God you guys are here, because if it was still my husband and I in that tiny office, one of us would have killed the other one." So yeah, thank God we've grown, for many reasons. And then we just very smart about everything. Often when you hear founders talking, especially some of the bigger companies, you listen to some of those podcasts, they talk about skill stack, and I think that my husband and I are really lucky to be working together, and we just have a really good combined ... As people alone, I don't know we would have enough of a skill stack to do this, but as a combined unit, we're really able to do a lot of things on our own and keep a really lean team, so we're able to continue to do the pricing that we're doing, because we're able to do a lot of things. He's always been really good at the production side of things, at the marketing piece, the messaging.And my background had nothing to do with watches, I came from an education nonprofit, organizational management background. Very, very different, but from the very beginning we've really made a focus on education, education, education. So we focus a lot on our stories, on our blog, and on our emails on just educating people. So I think together, and that's why we figured we'd be able to do this, is that together we were able to have the skill stack to keep a lean team and keep the pricing accessible, and just do things, we really try to do everything smartly and creatively.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. And I do feel that with a brand like yours, branding, you and I can both agree because we're both in the field, but branding must've been extremely important, because you're a younger, bolder, version of some of those big brand alternatives, but yet you're the incumbent, so you first had to create a little bit of the same expected Swiss watch aura of precision and exploration with the detailed watch charts and the aspirational models wearing them, but then you kind of pivoted. How did you create the brand's look and feel and the tonality? I mean it seems like a lot of it was very, talking about authenticity in a small team, very much, must have been very organic and natural, but you also received a lot of feedback through Kickstarter, through your fans. How did you shape your brand's look? Was it all internal? How did you do that?E Chazanow:That's a good question. So the initial logo, we had a designer that we knew, and the initial logo we had, we kind of developed, my husband and myself and this one designer. But that was literally just a logo and a name, that was it. It was nothing. And then once we had the concept, as I said, we like to do things smartly and creatively, and I always say my husband has really ... He's very creative, he has really good ideas. And then I call myself the chief implementation officer, because I'm better on the implementation side. So he had this idea of, why not create something called the LIV Design Challenge, and invite designers to ... We created a design brief, we have this concept, but we want to create this brand and we want the brand to be bold, and some of the things that you just mentioned, and we want to create a watch, and our first watch we want to have this movement in it. We gave details, because my husband knew the production side, obviously, and then we went on these portfolio websites and just invited designers to participate.We handpicked hundreds of people who we saw had designed precision items, product designers, and we invited them to partake in a challenge, and that's how we got our watch designs.F Geyrhalter:Wow.E Chazanow:We rewarded them, obviously.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. That is amazing. So it's pretty crowdsourced. So the initial watch designs were crowdsourced.E Chazanow:And even ones that we launched a few years later, not just the initial ones, but they were also, basically any new watch design that we have that's not from the ... So so far we have the GX collection and the Rebel collection, those were both winning designs, and then we kind of created multiple versions of those original designs, and we work with, some of the time we work with the original designer who had won the contest to develop the collections.F Geyrhalter:That is unbelievable. I mean, try that with a traditional watch company, right?E Chazanow:Yeah. And that itself is a huge job. Again, you can have the concept, but then you've got to have the skill stack to be able to implement that.F Geyrhalter:Oh, absolutely. Yeah. How did the name come about, was it the same? Or was the name already always there and you thought about the idea of living your life and being bold and LIV, I assume that's where it would come from.E Chazanow:Yeah, we had a concept that we wanted to create this direct to fan experience, brand, we wanted to have direct relationships with people, we wanted it to be something built around the concept of living life to the fullest. So when I envision the brand, and when I had listened to ... I had read up a bit, because my background was not in branding, so I kind of had to self-learn it. I realized that if we were going to do this successfully, we needed to build it around a persona, and I wanted that persona to be my husband, because he's a very adventurous, he loves quality items, he really represents someone who would appreciate the watch. So we built it around his persona. A lot of the imagery is with him, actually. He also makes an okay model.F Geyrhalter:Good for you.E Chazanow:We can add that to his skillset, and that helps keep the costs down. Yeah, so we built it around his personality, really.F Geyrhalter:That makes it so much easier in the beginning, right?E Chazanow:Yeah, absolutely. It makes it easier, you're able to keep the concept very defined, and like I said, you can use him as a model as well, so that helped.F Geyrhalter:And it's family pride, right? So when I prepped for our interview, and I have to bring this up, I went through LIV's Instagram account to get a sense of the brand, because that's what you do today. These days, it's not going to the website. You first go to Instagram, you get a really good idea of what's now, what's happening. And I was just about to call the interview off when I saw your line of LIV wall clocks. Wall clocks, okay, which literally are the wristwatches hung on the wall, just the watch, not the strap, they looked horrendous. And sure enough, I realized it was posted on April Fool's, and I was so relieved. I looked at it and I'm like, "Oh my God, what are these people doing?" It was just so hilarious.E Chazanow:Oh, that's funny.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, that was so good. And Swatch was able to pull that off in the '80s, do you remember that? The big Swatch watches, they go like for $500 now online, which is pretty funny.E Chazanow:I need to tell that to my team.F Geyrhalter:I'm like, "I don't know if I want to have these people on my show." Well, but was there, even though you're pretty religious about data and customer feedback, and even crowdsourcing and letting people's voice be heard within your product and how you offer it, was there some brand fail that you went through where you felt like, "Oh my God, we just totally missed." It wasn't the wall clock, obviously, that was an April Fool's, but was there something that you did where afterwards you felt like, "You know what? That goes into a chapter where we failed forwards, for sure."E Chazanow:That's a really good question. We did make a lot of small mistakes, we corrected them. I think the key to any brand's success is to realize your mistakes early enough, obviously, to be able to make the changes. But I think a brand like ours can never afford to make an enormous mistake. If we would've made an enormous mistake, we would not exist now. So you have to get it right. You're not going to get it right every time, because then you're not going to take any risk, but you can't make an enormous mistake.Now, I've got to say, there is an element of luck involved. How would you know that the first design, we thought it was beautiful, but how would we know that $200,000 worth of funding would think it was beautiful? So I do think there's an element of luck in it, I really do. But the element of luck is built upon you having the right mindset, the right goals, the authenticity piece, all of that together, yep.F Geyrhalter:Well, and luck goes hand in hand with a lot of really, really hard work.This is the big question. What does branding mean to you?E Chazanow:It's really what I mentioned before, the cohesion of the brand image. It's a lot of different pieces being cohesive, and then ... So the brand image, the visuals, the communication, the product, the experience, the cohesion of all of that, and then people being able to just respect that, whatever messaging that is, that is cohesive and consistent.F Geyrhalter:And I love that you brought up the respect part again, because that is a very unusual way of seeing the role of branding, and I think it is really, really great that you crystallized it. This is a question that I ask every single founder on my show. If you take every single piece of communication and every single piece of your brand's purpose and your vision and your mission, and you would be able to just put it in a funnel and out comes one word or two words, what would that word be for your brand, if you would have to describe it in one word? I know we heard things like boldness and authenticity. Is that what it would be, authenticity, or is there something else?E Chazanow:Authentic, yeah.F Geyrhalter:See, I did my espionage.E Chazanow:Well done.F Geyrhalter:I knew that's what it would be.E Chazanow:Absolutely. Well, then we're doing a good job, if you could figure that out.F Geyrhalter:We are, right? We're making progress. Do you have any final piece of brand advice for founders? You've just been through an extremely amazing journey building a Swiss watch brand out of the US that is competing with a lot of the big names now and is striving, is there anything that you learned where you just figured, "That's one thing that I definitely need every entrepreneur to hear."E Chazanow:Okay, so I know this is going to sound extremely cliché, but when everyone tells you that you cannot do something, you know that you're doing the right thing.F Geyrhalter:I love that. I hear it over and over again, and it's so important.E Chazanow:[crosstalk 00:44:51] and it's true.F Geyrhalter:It is so important to hear it over again, right? That determination and that grit and that hustle, really, that's what makes a founder a founder, a succeeding founder, absolutely. So listeners who fell in love with your brand just now and they just found out about it here, where can they find LIV online?E Chazanow:Yep, they can go to livewatches.com, L-I-Vwatches.com. We're also, as you said, on I guess, Facebook, @livwatches. Yeah, come join our journey, check out what we're doing. We do find that a lot of people who follow us are small business owners, entrepreneurs, people who really appreciate the time and effort that's going into it, we see that so much. So if you're one of those people, I think you'll really appreciate what we have to offer.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. I can start hearing that your kids are getting a little more antsy in the background, so we will let you go now. But thank you, Esti, for having been on the show. We so appreciate your time and your insights.E Chazanow:Thank you, thank you, thank you. It was really nice chatting. Thank you for the opportunity, it was really an interesting conversation for me as well. 

Learn more about RegrainedSupport the show and get on monthly mentorship calls with Fabian. Join here.Full Transcript:F Geyrhalter:Welcome to the show, Dan.D Kurzrock:Hey, thanks so much for having me here.F Geyrhalter:Yeah, absolutely. We talked about this a little bit before we hit record, but today's June 1st. We're still in a pandemic but as of this past weekend, the majority of cities in the US is taken over by rightful necessary protests, but also by looters and riots. And we see our cities on fire. I had a very late night monitoring downtown Long Beach, which is where my office is located which has been an epicenter of violence and looting last night. Jessie, our creative lead, is already out there helping the community in the clean up. You Dan are based in San Francisco and the company is in Berkeley and that is another hotspot up in San Francisco in Oakland. And I was even debating if given the circumstances, we should postpone our interview, but we both decided early this morning to power through despite the lack of sleep and the craziness unfolding in front of our eyes. How was your night North? Are the ReGrained plant and offices, is everything still intact?D Kurzrock:Yeah. I mean, like a lot of folks, time are troubling in general. Physically been in pretty insulated from this whole thing with shelter in place. And actually my grandma basically lives with us right now, so I've been really careful about going out, but it's very troubling. I don't have a lot of words for it, but still situation wasn't... This is kind of the culmination of a lot of complicated factors leading up to it, so I hope we are taking an opportunity to wake up. And I hope we can emerge from this in a better place than it feels like we are right now, but still glad to be here with you.It's good to have distractions and good to keep moving the positive things forward that we can in the world. I always try to focus on what I can control and even within this business that we're building, but it doesn't always feel like we can control everything within that even. So really looking forward to taking some time and chatting with you about brand and about purpose and take an action.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely and that's why I'm so glad to have you on today too because you crafted a brand that actually creates positive change in this world. And there's always time to talk about that. It's my personal passion and that's why I'm doing what I'm doing because I for one believe that business as a whole will change fundamentally over the next decades for the better. And you guys are part of that change in your own small ways as you said and they can become rather big in a snowball effect. So you guys used to brew your own beer, which is a strange beginning to someone who's changing the world. So you used to brew your own beer, even under age I heard, but we're not going to talk about that.D Kurzrock:Yeah. A lot of good ideas... A lot of good ideas start over a beer.In our case... Just for everyone listening, my name is Dan Kurzrock, I'm the co-founder, CEO of a food recycling company called ReGrained. What we do is we tackle food waste, so we identify overlooked, undervalued ingredients that are kind of hiding in plain sight. The food system closed the loop on those. So what we do is primarily right now, we take the grain from the beer brewing process. To make beer you use a lot of malt, just basically like sprouted barley and you take the sugars from that. You extract them as a liquid, that's what ferments and becomes beer. Can spoil [inaudible 00:05:06]. And there's another part of the process there.But as it relates to the barley itself, once the sugars have been extracted from it, there's still the physical grain. It's soaking wet, but it's got a lot of fiber, it's got a lot of protein, it's got prebiotics. There's a lot of really good stuff in there that currently goes to lower use. And so what we've done is built the business around applying this new processing technology. We actually have a patent on it and we can create a flour or a powder and be able to think about it that can be incorporated into new food product development. And so what we're doing is the solution that helps the food system do more with less.It reduces waste on one end and feeds people on the other end. And through R&D, we actually discovered that our process doesn't just work for the billions of pounds of grain from the beer industry, but can also be used to apply for other streams. Like think pressings from juice or the leftovers from milking of almonds or oats and there's a lot of opportunity that is being left off the table. And so we've built this business to be a platform to close that loop. And we have a consumer brand, which I imagine we'll spend some time speaking about here. And then there's also a B2B side of what we do, where we actually partner with other brands. We sell them the ingredients and we help educate and activate the world, the market to reduce waste, which is one of the most pressing solutions to climate change out there.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely and let's talk about the actual consumer brand for a second. So ReGrained you started coming up with this process and you applied it I assume to a lot of different foods to see... No pun intended, but what sticks? Where it actually works the best and you came up with these bars in the beginning. And how did this evolve? How did that start? How did it turn from two guys in a kitchen exploring how to utilize what you just realized, to actually being carried in stores?D Kurzrock:Yeah. It's how do you go from idea to product? So for us, actually the first thing that we ever made was bread. And so I was making beer every week as a college student and I'd have actually about a pound of grain for every six packs. So if you can visualize it, we were brewing five gallons of beer at a time, it's a third of a keg. We'd do 20 to 30 pounds of grain every time we made a batch of beer and then I would turn around and take that grain and use it to make loaves of bread and then sell those loaves of bread in order to buy more ingredients to brew more beer. That was really the origin of this that they got us asking the bigger questions.Then realized there's this huge opportunity here not just with our own brewing operation, but with all the other breweries that are out there. This is 2010, 2011 right when the craft beer boom was starting to happen. I think it was last year, more than two new breweries on average opened per day in the US and a lot of them were opening in cities. And so we thought what if we came up with a way to basically take the supply at scale and do something more with it. And the problem was when we knew we wanted to do ingredients, but we figured we couldn't get other companies probably to buy our ingredients before we proved that people would buy products that were made with them.And so the bread was great, but it takes a long time to make. And the shelf life is very short. And again remember we were 20 years old at the time working in a home kitchen and we had a lot of bars. And we figured we can make these by hand. We can cut them into pretty even rectangles, we can package them. The first packaging was literally Ziploc bags. I was like a [inaudible 00:09:09] dealer. The second packaging was hand sealed compostable packaging and it was just a way to commercialize the idea.I don't think of it as a Trojan horse for what we were actually trying to work towards. And it's funny because if I could go back, just want to clear on that. And I'll tell you about, I'd love to say about our other products that we just launched because it was the absolute opposite way of developing products that the bar was. We brought these to the market because we could do it pretty quickly and we could generate revenue in the short term. And it was something that enabled us to actually take action on our idea and the bars are great, but the bar category as we later learned is highly competitive and we didn't know.We've had some success in getting it to stores. We're in about 2000 stores now, but we've also now launched a new product which is this puff chip. It's a salty snack and that product, what we did is actually took a huge step back and applied everything that we knew about our ingredient, how it could be used and really tried to I guess bridge that gap between what can we do and what should we do. And developed a product for a need in the market, whereas the first line, these bars was really just the first commercialization of a concept if that makes sense.F Geyrhalter:It was a proof of concept. Totally. This is interesting, but it sounded to me like the bigger vision has always been to turn ReGrained into a platform to use your ReGrained super grain as an ingredient that can be used in all kinds of other products from all kinds of other brands. But now you're still pivoting your consumer brands as well. So you're doing both parallel right now.D Kurzrock:Yeah. So the consumer brand... That's correct about the big vision and part of that is if we were to do even like 100 million sales with our consumer brand, we'd still only work with a handful of breweries. There's just so much supply that's out there. So to make the impact that we want to make and to address the market opportunity in the most meaningful way possible, we have a very clear strategic vision for how this thing scales. And a lot of really active partnerships in development with leading in some cases, multinational food companies that are in development with us on different things.But the consumer brand is something that allows us to not only generate cash in the short term. Sales cycles for ingredients are very long, but also the test messaging, which gets to your point about the branding. So we continue to evolve our consumer brand because it helps us in real time better understand how the market responds to this new idea about recycling. Early on for example, we put the tagline, eat beer on everything.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. I think I remember that because I did some research on some of the past interviews with you and that was still a thing. And I think even naming wise, not only the tagline, but naming wise, I think you used beer type names for each one of the bars. Which was most probably confusing because it didn't taste like beer.D Kurzrock:Yeah. It actually ended up confusing, but we learned. It did a really good job though by getting attention. It created this cognitive dissonance that kind of made people go, "What? Eat beer?" And we then could earn the opportunity to explain what we're actually doing. We later learned through testing that while it was catchy and made for a great t-shirt, it confused people and we've obviously had a lot of opportunities like that to use our brand as a way to test different approaches that we can then pass on as learning to our platform partners.F Geyrhalter:So let's talk about this a little bit more because when we met, I thinks it's been... I believe it's been over a year ago, we tried our best to keep scheduling this and then we finally made it, but your brand was still in that specific weird zone where it was a little bit rough around the edges where you try to get attention to basically do an elevator pitch rather than do the big consumer push. When did you start actively investing in branding and would you do it earlier or later with your next start up?D Kurzrock:Well, we have always invested a lot of time at least in branding, although we were young and relatively inexperienced at first. I mean the first labels we made ourselves using PowerPoint or Publisher or something like that. And then we did engage a kind of a pretty common actually because of how young we were and we started. We had talented friends and so the first few versions of the product that I worked with a graphic designer friend who did it just for the portfolio and out of generosity. And then when we made the jump from eat beer to this super grand plus somewhat of a nutritional, the pluses by the way I know it's a mouthful, but it enables us on the nutrition facts panel to use the plus like you use an asterisk for organic, for up cycled.So we can say, "Hey, these ingredients are upcycled actually on the ingredient panel." So there's a layer of branding thought that went into that, but it was very iterative I guess and that each change for several years was incremental really. And what you're referring to now is if you go compared to when we met to what we look like now, I mean the whole brand got that was a revolution, not an evolution and that was definitely more of an investment in both time and financial capital to do. And we still I mean, we do everything super lean.I think really depending on the goals of the company, like what my next company is to your point, if there is a next company a lot depends on what the model and the goals are, but I do really believe that branding is something that's really important because it's the way that you are able to earn the opportunity to tell everybody about what you're doing. And so with our rebrand this revolution that we're discussing, we incorporated all of our learnings leading up to that.One of the big thematic ones is that while sustainability is arguably our biggest value proposition for what we're doing. It's one of the most important things to us at least from a values perspective. We don't believe that sustainability is necessarily a reason for purchase as much as a reason for loyalty. And so what we did is we nodded to it with our logo, it has an arrow which is for ReGrained inside and also for upcycling. The new tagline is eat up, which has a few layers and meaning including eat upcycled, but is a very vibrant, fun packaging that is really flavor forward and lifestyle forward. And we also developed a logo for upcycling.It is on the front of the pack and it's in the center of the package, but it's at the bottom. And so what we did here is try to create a brand that would be compelling on its own if there wasn't anything else there to talk about from a sustainability perspective. And then to use that as hook for the things that we really believe will make people loyal in a long term around upcycling and things like that. So we've put a lot of... We put a lot of thought into it and it's super fun. For those of you who are listening, please check us out, regrained.com would be a good place to see the branding. It's very different than what else is out there and we're proud of it and hope that it does harness enough that opportunity to have those meaningful conversations with consumers about impact and about the choices that we all make every day and what those can can net for society and the planet.F Geyrhalter:And it's really nice to have seen that change over the last year. I wonder as a consumer who might've been loyal to ReGrained the bars, and now they see this huge shift in what the company, how the company looks, how the brand voice has evolved, how the product is suddenly a very different product. Are you keeping tabs on your consumers that you had for a couple of years and are they evolving with you? What is your feedback? I'm always curious about that when a brand pivots so much like yours has.D Kurzrock:Yeah. I mean, we were still early enough in our journey that our loyal group of consumers they've definitely stayed with us. And if anything we've widened the tent and made what we're doing more appealing to more people. I also think it's worth talking about that. One of the reasons why we did such a... I always wanted to do this radical rebrand. Not always, but it had been something that I realized that every time we're doing packaging stuff, we were just kind of making incremental changes and it's scary to make a huge overhaul like we did. And in our case, it was triggered or catalyzed depending on how you look at it, by a need to reintroduce the product because we actually had a failure.We were commercializing a compostable package. So plastic packaging, let's say we can have a whole podcast episode about this. That's a huge issue, single use, it's petroleum based, landfill bounds, non-recyclable because of its multiple layers of multiple materials that can't be separated and if they could be, most of them aren't recyclable anyways. And so we were trying to do something from the beginning we were using planet friendly plastic packaging, which for flexible films, compostable is the best way to go. But our product was actually going stale in the distribution trucks before it even got to the store. And so we basically had to do its called a voluntary product fall. We don't use the R word recall because it wasn't a recall, but it was a huge challenge.And we believe that we needed to reintroduce the product as well because there were people that they didn't have an unsafe experience, but they had a bad experience essentially because obviously we were just trying to do the right thing. We made a values based choice to try and do that, but we also realized,... We ultimately realized we were trying to do too much at the same time. We kind of had to slow down the speed up. Again, it's not going to be its own podcast, but that's another. It's relevant to the branding discussion because there was this. It definitely helps us feel more comfortable making such a big jump because we also wanted to reintroduce the product.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. And it's a huge part of a lot of rebrands and I actually prefer if a client comes to me for a rebrand when they have a huge change. May that be a huge change in direction of the company, a huge change in the product. It pivots and may there have been something negative happening and they want to change that rather than saying we want a new logo because we look stale. I'd rather have the product go stale and you pivot than only the visual change because I mean it needs to have, there needs to be a bigger message behind a rebrand so that the consumer feels like there is something changing and I can feel it, I can read it, I can sense it rather than just I'm confused why is it suddenly looking so different.I'm sure that your brand story and what you're doing as a company is affecting your company culture and if I may call it HR because I know there are people actually working. I mean this is not happening out of nowhere when you're actually producing a product. Does it make it easy to hire people if they understand how you would use waste? Is that a big magnet for you? Especially in San Francisco right where hiring is difficult even though you're not necessarily a tech company. So you're hiring very different kind of people, but does that become a big magnet for the company?D Kurzrock:Yeah. It always has been both for talent and also for press if I'm being honest. The fact that what we're doing is different in so many ways and it's got this cool hook that everyone can feel good about. And I think the most important thing of it is that our mission is very understandable and approachable. No one is in favor of food waste and also even just look at our beer angle. Beer is one of the world's oldest beverages, it's one of the most popular in the world. It's consumed in massive quantities everywhere and a lot of people don't think about the fact that beer is an agricultural product, but it uses a lot of grain to produce it. And it's something that's really, I guess quick and easy to educate someone.Like you know beer, do you know beer only has four ingredients? Do you know that the biggest ingredient used by volume is the grain and that only the sugars from that grain end up in the beer? Well, we take everything that's left and we put it the best use. We create really innovative ingredients and products and we're trying to do this thing that is really easy to get behind I think and that's part of what energizes me too. It's like I know that what we're working on is real. I know that it's good. Fundamentally it's just simple idea but it is pretty universally attractive I think. And I just of course hope that we can pull it off and bringing in the right people is the way to do that because that's...F Geyrhalter:Absolutely.D Kurzrock:Personal note.F Geyrhalter:And I guess the next question would be why are you located in San Francisco?D Kurzrock:I'm from here.F Geyrhalter:That's how easy it is?D Kurzrock:Yeah. It happens to be a great place for startups and innovation, but not so much for food [crosstalk 00:25:13]. Help you with very low margin business. It's a very expensive place to live. Now, it's not like I moved here to start this. This is my hometown. This is my community.F Geyrhalter:Makes a lot of sense.D Kurzrock:[crosstalk 00:25:25] my co-founder and that's why we're here.F Geyrhalter:And I'm super interested seeing how after this pandemic there has been this talk about Silicon Valley and San Francisco now that everyone can work from home, how does this going to change the city? Because people start to actually leave because they have amazingly paid salaries and they might just buy a ranch in Montana and happily worked for Google. So I'm super interested to see how that's going to change San Francisco and the whole landscape. It's totally off topic but it's very interesting.D Kurzrock:Maybe it'll make it... Maybe it'll make it affordable to possibly buy a home here someday. We'll see.F Geyrhalter:How about that. You stay behind and you should be the role model for that. You know what you just said before, we talked a little bit about your mission, which is deeply ingrained in your company and you don't have to write out your mission, you don't have to write out your vision, you don't need to say, "Here are our core values." Because everything is so deeply-D Kurzrock:Yeah. We do that anyways because its good exercise, but I get your point.F Geyrhalter:... good. And I'm glad to hear that you still do that, but it is fantastic because it so much part of what you're actually offering. There are two numbers that I want to voice to our listeners because I think it's so amazing. In your TEDx talk, you said that we humans waste 40% of all edible food and that to me is just mind blowing. And that only 60% of what we eat actually goes into the human body and 40% goes somewhere else. And the other step, if I want to call that is and I heard that somewhere else and I think it was you who said that too, that only 10% of the ingredients used in the beer making process actually end up in any pint of beer. I hope I didn't misquote you on both of those, but that is amazing.D Kurzrock:Yeah. And all these statistics they're obviously documented, but they're ultimate... I think they're most useful when they're seeing this as like here is sticks and as a way to think about the issue in a more macro sense. So with food waste, ReFED is one of the best resources to look this up. R-E-F-E-D. They did a massive economic and environmental quantification of the food waste problem and that's where that 40% statistic comes from. What's kind of crazy about that is not only the fact that it's like leaving the grocery store with five bags and dropping two in the parking lot on the way to your car. It's that measure actually underestimates the total opportunity as it relates to upcycle because just like with anything that is measured, there has to be a definition, parameters for what is being measured as food waste and food loss.And what upcycling is doing is we're challenging that very definition by saying so what if we're counting wheat that's grown in the field, why are we not counting barley just because it's already been used to brew beer? There's still nutrition that is there. It just requires some innovations and processing and also on the culinary product development side too. And so we actually co-founded an organization called the Upcycled Food Association. It's a nonprofit dedicated to the upcycling piece of the food waste, the food waste movement. And food waste I hinted at this earlier is...So there's another great report that has come out called Project Drawdown and it's a solution focused report that's basically takes a look at all the different potential solutions to achieve and dry down in the atmosphere and reduce just mitigate, but actually reverse the climate change and it's effects. And it ranks through solutions in terms of what's most effective in pressing and food waste is this is right at the top of the list along with... When you combine it with having a more plant based diet, it's not only one of the most impactful solutions against climate change, but it's also something that is in our direct control as consumers.Not all of it. Of course there's systemic issues that drive a lot of these things, but one thing that we all do universally as humans every day is we eat. And we make choices about what we eat and how we eat it and that's something that we really try to champion. ReGrained is bringing another level of consciousness to those choices and to the impact that we can make with them. And so that's part of what we're doing. And the thing is when you're trying to communicate, when you're trying to educate the world, not all of this stuff is going to sit on a package and it's also hard to visualize.So what does 40% of all food look like? What does that mean? 10% of the ingredients used to grow end up in beer? And we also worked at communicating this using other [inaudible 00:31:21] if you also felt like for example, to produce one six pack of beer, just the grain in it takes the equivalent of over 300 gallons of water, which is about... Which is about a two hour shower.F Geyrhalter:Yeah. Mind blowing.D Kurzrock:For one six pack and that grain is just being used today for its poured sugars. And so what we do by sharing things that as I was trying to say, well, isn't it common sense that we should try and rescue that what's left from going to lower uses and put it to its best use at the top of the food recovery hierarchy and feed people.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely and this brings me back to the idea of the platform. So how are... You're basically running two companies in parallel, plus a nonprofit, right?D Kurzrock:Well...F Geyrhalter:Unless that overwhelms you.D Kurzrock:I mean [inaudible 00:32:25] we co-founded a nonprofit. I'm on the board. There's a CEO for that, I'm not [crosstalk 00:32:32]. So the Upcycled Food association. And then ReGrained as platform I mean that you could argue that it's maybe three companies in one, but the strategy is so integrated that it doesn't feel that way. Everything that we're doing affects the whole platform, but I get what you're saying. I mean, it's hard enough to start a consumer packaged goods brand.It's hard enough to try and start an ingredient company or to develop processing technology and the way that we've been able to do a lot of those is also through strategic partnerships pretty early on. We've worked with the USDA to develop our technology for example. We've got a really cool group over there that's focused on healthy processed foods and there's an old story in there about how we met up with USDA and the work that we did together. And that's the reason why we have technology is because of the product of that relationship, not because we're PhDs because we worked with experts.And so we're really trying to do a lot, but it's all very both complicated and simple [crosstalk 00:33:45]. What we're trying to do is do more, we're trying to do more with less. We're trying to help run a system whose system does more with less. Our mission statement you brought that up earlier, is to better align the food we eat with the planet we love and everything really fits under that call to action.F Geyrhalter:And first of all, that's a great statement and it totally connects the brands. So the problem if you would run three different brands to do slightly different things, then it becomes problematic. But if all three brands are perfectly aligned around the same vision and maybe not the same vision, but well the overarching vision for sure, but the underlying mission then certainly everything is much more connected and easier to run because there's no confusion if anyone sees any of the other brands or companies that you're running.Looking back on ReGrained as a consumer product, what was the one big breakthrough moment where you felt like now we're actually a brand, now we actually did it. I don't know which store you would have been in the beginning, maybe whole foods or wherever it was. Was there a moment that you remember where you just sat back with your co-founder and you're like, "I think that's it. I think we're actually making it into a real brand right now."D Kurzrock:No, I can't pinpoint one moment like that. I mean it's has just been almost 10 years since this first entered my brain. We've been building a thing and a lot of times it feels like we've gone through periods where it feels like we're taking two steps forward, one step back. There's periods where it feels like we're taking one step forward, two steps back. You know those periods where it feels we're taking one step forward and one step back and just staying in the same place and that's a tough one. I think most recently though, with the launch of this last product because we actually launched it in March right when the pandemic was... Or at least the lockdown from the pandemic was starting to take hold, which affected retailers.We're still not on the shelves of any stores because they're all still focused on keeping up and not putting new products on the shelf. That'll come later in the year hopefully and so we had to pivot to direct consumer channel. I was super nervous we'd be sitting on a warehouse of product that we couldn't sell because our retail entries are going to go out. And instead we sold through two production runs in a very short amount of time. And I'm seeing really exciting growth on that and part of that experiences is, a huge part of that experience has been enormously stressful and a lot of fun, but it's also been great like we're doing something here, something's working. We're creating a product that people want and that feels good.F Geyrhalter:And if you can point to one thing that made that work, I mean, obviously that's a huge struggle. You thought you had your sales channel all figured out, you have the product ready to be basically shipped and suddenly you have to... Suddenly everything goes online, you're turning into an e-commerce brand. You need to unload this product quickly and make people aware of the product at the same time. What made it work? How did you do that?D Kurzrock:Well, I think it's about building for resiliency from the beginning. And so even though e-commerce wasn't our biggest channel, we had the infrastructure for e-commerce in place and not just e-commerce, but direct to consumer [inaudible 00:37:43]. One of our best partners is a company called Imperfect Foods. They do grocery delivery, also very mission aligned. Incredible company for anyone listening, Imperfect Foods, go look them up. They deliver nationally. We were able to just put more emphasis on these channels that were already, that already existed as opposed to having the world fall apart and saying, "Oh, crap, got to build a website that can take orders now. Got to find a marketing partner."So I think the choices actually has to happen really early on when you say how do I build a resilient business? And part of that, a big part of that is having diversified revenue streams. Another way that we thought about this relatively earlier on is the food service channel was something and especially being in the Bay Area, being able to sell products to tech companies that stock their break rooms with snacks. It's an incredible sales channel, a great way to diversify against retail.Guess what right now doesn't exist. May as well not exist. And so if we were over-indexed as a business towards those channels, that would be also very... So we tried to set up diversified revenue streams from the beginning and I think that is what enabled us to respond. I wouldn't say proactively because it was still catalyzed by this outside force, but we were able to respond with resilience. And not even head start and I don't know if we'll totally get into this, but our capital strategy as well has followed a similar philosophy.F Geyrhalter:Well, I think it's the age old wisdom that myself actually did not know when I started my company and I failed miserably because of that too, is not to put all eggs into a basket. I mean, we had one very large client and we moved very quickly forward with that client. I grew tremendously the company and then something happened and the client left. There was a dispute, there was someone that I fired that they hired and it was really ugly. And suddenly that client was gone and it's this lesson that I think all of us learn in the first years of our business. For me sadly, it was in my first decade of my business. To diversify, to make sure that what you offer, that you offered in very different ways, in different channels to make sure if anything happens, you can pivot to another channel, so it's a big-D Kurzrock:I'm sorry. I'm sorry to hear that you went through that, but I'm sure it helped [crosstalk 00:40:45] get to where you are.F Geyrhalter:... that's how it works. That's how it always works. In business, you have to like you said, it's the two steps back. There was definitely 10 steps back at some point which was really exciting in the pivot and I'm in such a good place now because of that. We're coming slowly to an end. A couple of more questions that I do have on my mind. The first one I always believe that it's important for a company to understand what their DNA is. And when I work with my clients, I try to define it more and more so that at the end of our session and that sometimes a full day session, that we can actually describe the entire brand in a single word.Like Everlane, for instance, is all about transparency, Zappos might all be about service, but if an entire company can just focus on this one word that they themselves feel like they can own within their own space, what would it be for ReGrained and the conglomerate of companies of ReGrained? What could be one word that could describe the brand?D Kurzrock:Well, kind of two words, but it's the same word twice. One thing that comes to mind is just win-win. What we're doing is creating solutions that solve for multiple things at the same time and create shared value. What I almost said was just upcycling, but that's a little too I think on the nose for the question and [inaudible 00:42:39] requires. I recognize that, but that's [inaudible 00:42:46] just off cuff [crosstalk 00:42:48] question.F Geyrhalter:I liked that especially because you know I've done this show for a while now. I'm up to 50 guests or so, and they are a lot of words that keep coming up. Rightfully so like empathy or things like that and win-win is at first. Even though a lot of companies do similar endeavors like yours where it is for the greater good and there's definitely more people winning than only one. Lastly, what is exciting you the most about the future of ReGrained? What are some things that you're doing right now that you can talk about that really get you excited?D Kurzrock:Yeah. There's a lot of really exciting things fortunately. One of the phrases that's been said a lot right now with everything that's going on, I think it has its roots in politics and I don't know who said it first. It's definitely overset right now, but there's this idea of never wasting a good crisis. And as a food system, this pandemic I think was about a wake up call in a lot of ways, and it's also created some fundamental shifts in buying behavior. And I really believe that it creates this opportunity for us to decide together how to emerge stronger from this whole thing.I think upcycling and food waste is really high on the list of concepts that should take off. I mean, there's could have been a lot of ways this whole thing it's been a super acute shock to the system. And it's also kind of a dress rehearsal for some of the impacts of climate change like disruptions in supply chain and so on. And so I'm really excited by some of the work that we're doing with our partners and the products that we're developing, one of them is going to hit the market later this year. That is kind of powered by ReGrained concept and we are very excited for those things now, for essentially the market.The other thing that I'm really excited about it as the Upcycled Food Association right now. We just released the first official definition of food upcycling or edible upcycling as we call it as ReGrained. And then the next step that I'm just so pumped about is a process for defining standards against which to certify products as Upcycled. And that type of well, the branding exercise too. And then as a way of communicating values to the market, I think that there's first to pull the thing off in the way that we wanted that this is a really important milestone. It's a [inaudible 00:45:58] thing that's going to happen this year too and I'm very much excited about that.F Geyrhalter:That is amazing. And that actually ties in nicely into my last question where people can go to regrained.com I assume. That's where they can find you, that's where they can look at your products with your story, learn more about upcycling etc. But what are some ways that you feel people could upcycle more in their own lives when it relates to food, but maybe overall. I think what you said was really poignant. I think it was really important and I do think that there's going to be a huge shift now. And you are kind of at the forefront of the all of this. Besides your product, what are other ways that people can easily start shifting their mindset?D Kurzrock:Yeah. And just be clear, we also really hope that our products are actually just a way to get people's attention, to get them to also start asking those questions themselves. The fact that you got there, with this questions is great. We actually on our website, we have a blog called the upcyclist and on it there's some recipes and things like that. One of the things that I've been saying a lot recently is that I really feel that this new environment for food consumption that we're in with shelter in place and with more people ordering online and eating in and things like that.It's actually a really good opportunity for people to waste less food at home. And to look at it because it's a pain to go to the grocery store right now and it's also a risk. And there's the perception of the risk versus the actual risks and ways to mitigate and things like that too, but the net is that you want to go to the store less right now. And so how do you stretch things longer? And it's a lot of ancient wisdom, these aren't new ideas. It's like if you kind of [inaudible 00:48:06] chicken and you roast it, you have roasted chicken one night and then maybe the next night you used the...F Geyrhalter:Chicken soup.D Kurzrock:The leftovers to make... Soup would be the third thing, the second thing could be like tacos or enchiladas or something and then soup. So how you do the most with what you have when you're trimming vegetables and things like that for stir fries whatever. Can you save the scraps and make something. You can make stock, or there's different way, lots of little tips and tricks that you can do at home. One of my favorite tips for wasting less food at home, it's just an extra simply just two organizational points. One is meal plan. Again, if you want to go to the store less, that's helpful anyways. Plan out your meals, you're less likely to waste when you have a plan. Have a plan and stick with it.For two [inaudible 00:49:01] and so in the fridge, if you could just have one drawer that is a use first drawer and for things that are starting to go bad, put them in that drawer, and then you know when you get there instead of saying what do I want for dinner? The question is what do I have for dinner? What can I make with what I have? And just kind of little shifts like that can have a really big impact in food waste. Put the half of the problem actually happens at home. So if we want to take action on food waste, it's not just about eating upcycle and facilitating food donations and things like that. Also let's be smarter and more efficient with our own purchasing and consumption. Let's get creative, it's fun, it's food, it [crosstalk 00:49:46] can be delicious.F Geyrhalter:And I mean what you just said, a lot of people right now I mean we're moving from the pandemic I guess via riots now into a depression. I mean, yay all us, but we're in a place right now where there is a ginormous amount of Americans at least that are deep in poverty or that they suddenly have to be extremely frugal. So on the one hand, that is definitely something that they are now forced to do and on the other hand, all of us should wake up to that. And I think what you said is exactly true.People are waking up now because they don't want to go out more and they start seeing, "Oh my God, how much do we actually waste?" And a lot of people hoard it. So they've got a full fridge for a family of 10, but they are only two people living in an apartment and they are [crosstalk 00:50:37].D Kurzrock:Yeah. And that's the other side of it. It's how do we also not waste more? And this and so now I've got all kinds of plastic concerns and things like that, but I just hope we do take the opportunity to emerge stronger from this and a lot of this is just common sense. Vegetables are also cheaper than meat and wasting less food, waste less money. And so that's just like there is alignment here between what's good for people and what's good for the planet and I hope that we really lean into that.F Geyrhalter:We're all slowly waking up. It takes a lot I guess for all of us to wake up, but here we are one step at a time. Dan, thank you so much for your time to talk about ReGrained, to talk about the platform that you're building, the nonprofit that you are building, about upcycling altogether and about your entrepreneurial journey. I think it was inspirational on many more levels than just the brand story. So we really appreciate you taking the time on a crazy Monday morning.D Kurzrock:Yeah. My pleasure man. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me on. It was an energizing conversation.F Geyrhalter:Absolutely. Thanks for being here. I appreciate it. We talk soon then. 

Dave and Alonso just keep streaming in a week with some cool imports and docs as well as so-so action. Subscribe (and review us) at Apple Podcasts, follow us @linoleumcast on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, let me hear some action from the back section. Join our club, won't you? Dave's streaming pick of the week: THE FIRST TRAVELING SALESLADY Alonso's streaming pick of the week: HIGH TIDE

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!

There are 782 minutes of combined insights and inspiring journeys we had to edit down to arrive at this 32-minute special, which hones in on 5 key areas:Brands challenging the normThe importance of people – Your tribe and your cultureInvestors' viewpoints on brand thinkingBrand DNA - your brand in one wordAnd to finish it off, not-to-be-missed brand advice from these successful entrepreneurs and investors that we needed to bring back up front and center.Show your support for Hitting The Mark, and if you have been listening and have not rated the show yet, please do so wherever you listen to podcasts.Thank you, and enjoy!_______________________________________________Here is who you will be hearing from on this episode:BRANDS CHALLENGING THE NORM:3:15 - 5:35 = Liquid Death (Mike Cessario)5:35 - 7:13 = Wilkmazz (Sam Mazzeo)7:13 - 8:59 = Antis Roofing (Charles Antis)8:59 - 10:21 = &Pizza (Michael Lastoria)10:21 - 13:02 = Charity Water (Scott Harrison)THE IMPORTANCE OF PEOPLE – YOUR TRIBE AND YOUR CULTURE:13:37 - 14:11 = The Futur (Chris Do)14:11 - 14:30 = Double Dutch (Raissa & Joyce de Hass)14:30 - 14:36 = Journey Meditation (Stephen Sokoler)14:36 - 15:36 = Parlor Skis (Mark Wallace)15:36 - 15:49 = Journey Meditation (Stephen Sokoler)15:49 - 18:18 = &Pizza (Michael Lastoria)INVESTOR'S VIEWPOINT ON BRANDING:18:47 - 19:35 = Angel Investor (Frank Demmler)19:35 - 21:18 = Dormitus Brands (Mark Thomann)21:18 - 22:26 = New Crop Capital (Chris Kerr)BRAND DNA – YOUR BRAND IN A SINGLE WORD:23:23 - 23:29 = The Futur (Chris Do)23:29 - 23:31 = Rogue Brands (Raaja Nemani)23:31 - 23:32 = 4th & Heart (Raquel Tavares)23:32 - 23:34 = Bureo (Ben Kneppers)23:34 -23:35 = Journey Meditation (Stephen Sokoler)23:35 - 23:37 = Antis Roofing (Charles Antis)23:37 - 23:38 = Beboe (Clement Kwan)23:38 - 23:39 = Idagio (Till Janczukowicz)23:38 - 23:39 = Charity Water (Scott Harrison)23:39 - 23:40 = Liquid Death (Mike Cessario)23:40 - 23:43 = &Pizza (Michael Lastoria)23:43 - 24:04 = Bureo (Ben Kneppers)24:04 - 24:35 = Charity Water (Scott Harrison)24:35 - 25:01 = Idagio (Till Janczukowicz)25:01 - 25:28 = Beboe (Clement Kwan)25:28 - 25:53 = Rogue Brands (Raaja Nemani)NOT-TO-BE-MISSED BRAND ADVICE:26:26 - 26:46 = Rogue Brands (Raaja Nemani)26:46 - 27:02 = The Futur (Chris Do)27:02 - 27:20 = Barrel Bourbon Foods (Matt Jamie)27:20 - 28:10 = Cameo (Devon Townsend)28:10 - 28:22 = Tiny Beans (Eddie Geller)28:23 - 29:23 = Double Dutch (Raissa & Joyce de Hass) 

If you think of a roofing company, you think of small businesses that have a hard time staying in business. Lots of competition in a tough service environment with high employee turnover rates and low customer retention. One thing you would not think of is branding. This is where Charles Antis comes in, who founded his namesake company Antis Roofing & Waterproofing in 1984 and soon thereafter started to inject it with personality and the stigma that it needed to be bigger than just the service offering he provided. Charles himself turned into a conscious capitalist, who has donated every single roof installation of every single home built by Habitat Orange County since 2009 and was honored with the American Red Cross Corporate Hero Award. This is the story of a roofer who turned into a leader in corporate social responsibility and who sees himself as a futurist. Charles shares with us how leading with cause will shape an amazing corporate culture (Antis has a 93% employee retention rate) and drive new business, all while giving real meaning to what you do. ____Full Transcript: F Geyrhalter: Welcome to Hitting The Mark. Every two weeks, I sit down right here with you and with a contagiously inspiring founder, just like today, or a shockingly transparent investor to talk about the art and the heart of a brand. It all started as an experiment, and once listeners like yourself started tuning in, it soon turned into this biweekly labor of love that, in return, requires a lot of time from researching future guests and curating the flow to reaching out and dealing with the logistics of the scheduling the podcast, the editing the show, creating assets, pushing it on social, et cetera, et cetera. You know how it goes. Good things take time. If Hitting The Mark provides you with inspiration, and you're slowly but surely forming an addictive habit of listening to it every two weeks, please show your support to offset some of the cost so I do not have to bring on interruptive sponsorship messages because I really, really would not like to do that, and I don't think you'd enjoy it, either. Instead, I want to thank you on the air, connect with you on monthly group calls, have you submit questions for guests upfront, and simply have this be 100% community-supported. This marks the beginning of a new community-enabled and community-driven era of Hitting The Mark. I'd love for you to check out the brand new Patreon site, which I link to in the notes or simply go to hittingthemarkpodcast.com and hit the support button to learn more about the different levels and perks that come with your support. Now without further ado, I welcome a founder who has been at it for 30 years. It is not a new brand, nor one that is shockingly innovative or disruptive at all at it relates to the services it provides, but Charles Antis, founder and CEO of Antis Roofing and Waterproofing has built a brand on the power of good, a long time before it became a mainstream business etiquette and, to an extent, most can only aspire to. Charles began his career as a roofing professional in 1984. Since then, he has become an inspirational business leader championing social corporate responsibility. While Antis is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year or, as Charles would say, "For 30 years, we've been keeping families safe and dry." Charles is a member of the board of directors of Orange County Habitat for Humanity, for which Antis has donated every single roof installation of every single home built by Habitat OC since 2009. That's over $1 million in in-kind donations. Charles inspires others into doing well by doing good, and was honored with the American Red Cross Corporate Hero Award. Despite me having a rule of not inviting former clients or people I know prior to having them on as a guest, I did meet Charles ever so briefly while I was presenting a United To End Homelessness brand campaign to the executive council of the Orange County United Way Chapter. Charles was one of the guys I presented it to. We quickly knew we were aligned when it comes to messaging and branding, and following him on LinkedIn and seeing his great social responsibility efforts on a weekly basis, I decided to reach out and, voila, here we are. Welcome to Hitting The Mark, Charles. C Antis: Thanks, Fabian. I'm excited to be here. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely, so Antis is going back 30 years, not to date you here, but it's been a while and roofing is a commodity and it is, frankly, a tough business to stay in business, let alone thrive. How did you start the company and when and how did you begin injecting it with personality and the stigma that it needed to be bigger than just a service offering you provided, or you yourself turning into a conscious capitalist, as you call it? C Antis: That's a lot there, and I'll give you my best answer. When I started my business, I did not have a business plan. I didn't know what marketing was. I couldn't distinguish marketing from sales, nor would I for many years. I had an instinct of a couple of things that helped me survive. One was one that I would later call customer care. It seemed to me instinctively that the first, most simple, form of marketing, was I need a good word of mouth, that I needed to take care of a client in a deep way. I became very good, unable to facilitate re-roofs, being small and having limited skills, I figured out that if I could tell people that I'll solve that leak from rain, that leak in their home or in their business from rain that no one else can solve, I'll do it for free. It seemed to me then they might believe me to pay me. That was all I had, and I followed that through with great customer care. That's how I got work initially and that was my first ray of a brand that was put out there. Another component happened that led me to the reason we're talking today, and that was, in that moment of needing every call just to pay the bills, my work one week was weatherproofing a door that was a home bedroom converted into an office, so when a client might call, that they wouldn't hear my daughter crying. That was my work one week, because I only got about two calls a week when I first started my business. One of those calls I got was a women who had leaks in her home in every room. That sounded pretty good. I was going to get some money for leak repairs. I didn't have an excess then. I had a mortgage payment to make in a couple of weeks, I didn't even have the funds for that yet. I'm driving out to this home on the next day and I'm noticing as I'm getting closer that the homes are getting smaller, more disheveled, until finally I turn on the street where the home would be and I just see it, like dead grass and four walls. I remember thinking, I hope that's not the house because it had one of those one-half the numbers on it. I went up and knocked on it, and then the next three things just changed everything for me. A middle-aged woman answered the home with this tired expression on her face. Before I could say anything, I was hit with this mildew like I'd never smelled before, that just pulled me back and sent a shock in me that I was figuring out how I was going to leave. I remember before I could say anything, this third thing happened. I felt a tug at my finger and I looked down and there was this little girl with the biggest smile I can still see in my eyes, with tow-blond hair. She couldn't smell what I smelled. She just had a visitor and she just pulled me in on my finger. I went in through this little crowded living room into a tiny under-sized hallway, until finally she turned to her right and into her room. I knew she slept there because she points to this My Little Pony poster on the wall. As she points to that poster, my eyes look down and I see four mattresses with disheveled and moldy bedding. I realized that's where she sleeps, that's where she and her siblings sleep. I was sitting there in shock. It's a good story now, but it wasn't a good story right then. I was in this state of shock, fight or flight, because this was a threat to me. I couldn't help it. It sounds horrible but it didn't feel good yet. As cute as that little girl was and as the moment was there, because I was this professional, I could do something, it didn't hit me until the mother came in again with that look on her face. Something in me stirred that didn't stir just with the child, but I looked at that mother and I don't know where it came from, but it was my doctor on an airplane moment and I just said, "I'm going to take care of your roof." I went up there on the roof, hoping they just needed some patches, and I saw a completely dilapidated roof. They needed a brand new roof. I followed through. I followed through. I didn't have any employees yet so I got six volunteers. We showed up there on Saturday and I got some inexpensive but dry roofing material, and we gooped that roof and we put rolled material on that roof and it was dry and that family stayed in that home. That was a crazy moment because it didn't hit me in any which way. It was just what I had to do and it as kind of like my doctor on an airplane moment. If you're a doctor on the airplane and somebody has a heart attack, I think that most of us believe that the doctor raises his hand and says, "Yes, I'll help." I also believe that when a doctor raises his hand and helps that person on an aircraft who had a heart attack, I highly doubt the doctor sends a bill. I feel like that's what happened to me. It just happened to me and my profession was different than medicine. Who could help that family more than me? That was a magic moment. I didn't know it was magic until months later. I'd run into one of the siblings. There were five other kids and I'd run into one of the siblings. They would be like, "Hey!" We high-fived and I noticed I had a pretty good day that day. Or I'd run into one of the volunteers on the next Sunday and they'd be like, "Hey!" There was this story that we did together that I had no idea that it was changing everything in the trajectory at Antis Roofing. This story became our culture. This story held us together even though it took me years to recognize that this story was part of the reason we were strong. I think for our techs and for our people, it felt good, like we're not just profiting off this trade, we're giving back. It wasn't something we talked about because it was not okay to talk about it where we grew up. I grew up where you don't talk about the good that you're doing. In fact, there were things that were quoted to me as a child, like don't let the left hand know what the right hand's doing because then God can't reward you. I'm paraphrasing what I heard, maybe not what was said, but what I heard, so it felt wrong to talk about it. The reason I did it, it was more like, what am I going to do? It wasn't, in the beginning, Oh, my God, I have this opportunity to give back. It feels that way sometimes now, but even sometimes now it feels like it did then, like, Oh my God, how can somebody ask for that? How can I possibly do it? In that figuring it out, in that not saying no, in those magic moments of going to bed on the possibility of doing something really noble, there's where something happens that I don't know how to describe. I'm just here to tell you, story after story, that it happened. That developed who we were. We eventually learned to talk about it after our giving became more formal, after we became involved with Habitat for Humanity in Orange County. Sorry, I went on a long tangent there, Fabian. I warned you. F Geyrhalter: No, this is, first of all, this is an amazing story and I would react very differently if I had not heard it last night on a keynote. I was so taken by that story. I was hoping that you would tell it. It was really, that was the moment where you found purpose and then the purpose was contagious and it actually created the culture, and through all of it, authenticity and empathy. You started creating a brand, really. To me, that's beautiful. On your website, you state, "The more we give, the more we grow." I'm a big believer that doing good is good business. Expand a little bit on that thought, perhaps even with some data points that made you make that statement so confidently on the website, because now your brand has been walking that walk year after year for a few decades. How is doing good, good business and how can you actually tell everyone with certainty that it is? C Antis: It was honestly in the moment. I love that statement, "The more we give, the more we grow." I've just got to be honest about it. It's one that we kind of said, let's not say that, really, much right now. I love it. I'm going to tell you why, because we said that, and it worked three years ago, because we do have this really big desire to make impact in the community. We want to draw attention to it because we want to show other businesses that they can do it. Sometimes our statements are scary. Three or four years ago I started saying also, "We err on the side of generosity with all of our stakeholders." That basically says we're not going to get over on anybody. When you make that statement, there's a little bit of a mind check where you go, oh. I used to always have my angle that we got away. We did better than other people here. How can I be generous? In thinking that way, magic happens. That's what we discovered. In thinking that way, it started to happen. The more we give, the more we grow. Let me tell you about that one. We said that three years ago and we had this amazing growth year. We grew like 40 percent. Then, what happened in California, as a roofing contractor, it didn't rain. When you go from a lot of rain, the biggest rain in 10 years to no rain the next year, our sales went down 20 percent, so our profit went way down. F Geyrhalter: Of course. C Antis: Ironically, though, ironically there were some things that happened. That's when I started, why are we saying that? That's really not responsible. We say it to make a claim in the direction that we're going so we get people's attention, so we can share the success in what we're doing. What we ended up talking about, and I did some big talks that year that our sales dropped 20 percent, and we still talked about that because we are growing. Our giving grew last year. I don't know how fiscally responsible some people think this is, but in a year, in 2018 where our profits went down tremendously, our giving went up. Some people would say, in fact, our giving, we gave almost a million dollars in grants and in foundation stuff and roof sponsorships. That might have been irresponsible, but we did grow. How did we grow from that giving? We all grew in our capacity to understand how to message cause marketing. We grew in our capacity to understand this important deep value that runs through our employees and extends out into the community. I wouldn't have gone down that path, but I love messaging. I think if you're true to messaging today, this takes me into a point, that I'm so authentic in the moment, trying to get the message right, and I'll admit that I'm going to miss it sometimes. When we miss it, we're all going to learn from when we just missed it. I'm not saying we missed it by "The more we give, the more we grow." I'm saying that that was the right message to say three years ago and now I'm questioning it, if that's how I'm going to lead. Sometimes I will talk in that vein, but I think that it grew the impact through why we had it at the time. We were authentic in the moment three years ago trying to nail what it is that we do for people, what it is that we do for the trade associations that we belong to and how that extends from our people out through the associations and to all the stakeholders. That's why I wanted to get into that. I had to talk around that because we talked about it, I wanted to talk about how authentic message is going, but I still have answered your question, so can you, after that little side note I went on, give me the question again? This time, I'll dive right in. F Geyrhalter: I actually think you pretty much answered it. I think the idea that even if there's a year where revenue goes down a little bit just based on external reasons, really, which in your business was simply the weather, to actually give back during that year and to give back more than you did the year previous- C Antis: That was crazy. F Geyrhalter: But it's not crazy. It's not crazy. To me, Charles, this is good- C Antis: I mean crazy, crazy in radical. It's radically different- F Geyrhalter: Right. C Antis: And I love that. My point is, is being radically different in a social, generous way, in an inside-out way of the community, through your people and the community, it's never been a better time to error there. By having this intent to grow, give more, having the intent to be able to give more as we grow and to have the intent to be generous, it really pays off today. It keeps people in your company and it keeps people so much more productive because if you're authentic in the moment and if you have that cause that's tied to your brand and you're practicing talking about it in the front of your company and you have a brand-holder in your company -- which, it's more convenient if it's the founder or CEO, it can be your director of cause, it can be somebody else in your company -- but if you have this today, you have such an advantage in business. When I go to sell a client today, we sell HOA's and we service more HOA's than anybody, that's our niche in the roofing business, but when I go to sell a client today, I used to walk into that room and, just because I was a roofing contractor and guilty by some association from a past experience they had, I would go into this and I would be accused of things that we'd never do. We would be accused of kick-backs and of purposely not doing the work that we intended to perform, and we learned and had to take it. When I go to a board meeting today, that doesn't happen. What happens is the opposite. There is maybe one person in the room that, instead of one person chiseling us and accusing us, there's one person that's looking at me and smiling, male or female, looking down, touching their hair, like is that person flirting with me? I start asking questions, "How're we doing?" "Great." "Why? What are we doing great?" I'll get answers like, the one that really hit me when I knew this brand was working six years ago, this board member from this association looked at me and says, "I don't know, Charles. We just feel good when we think about you guys." That was something I'd never heard before. That's when I knew that I'm on the right track. Yeah, last year we gave more away than we put in the bank. Is that responsible? F Geyrhalter: Mm-hmm (affirmative). C Antis: I think, yes. Do I need to look at it and make sure that we have a trajectory that fits? Yes. There's always running the right balance, but the balance has shifted and it's a time today, whatever your spend is on your people, you're on top of spend for HR and your people and the community, all that together, it's going to drastically increase. If it was already high, it probably needs to double. If it was low, it might need to go ten times. That's a scary number, but if you can keep your people- in the new world it's all about being empathetic and being adaptive and being a critical thinker and having high emotional intelligence. This is going to keep the people there that will allow you to do that. It's all about being adaptive, and you can keep your people if you have cause. That's what great CSR, we didn't do it for the outside value gain. I think I really started on the wrong side. I was so focused on the customer that I often, and as much as I love my people, I'm so focused on the good we can do in the community, sometimes I overlook my people. I often joke that I was like Will Ferrell in Old School when he's all alone on the street and he's running and his wife comes up and he's drunk and he's running, and he's like, "Hey, Honey!" She's like, "Honey, you're naked. Get in the car." He goes, "No, come on, Honey. Everybody's doing it." That's my enthusiasm when it's just outside focus, but when you work through your people, then you keep your people, they become the ones that help you adapt in this super-changing world. In the roofing industry, it's going to change so much in the next decade. It's going to change for the better but, if you're not adaptive, good luck. F Geyrhalter: Oh, yeah. C Antis: Good luck in your business. F Geyrhalter: Any business, really, today. Back to culture, I think today Antis has a 93-percent employee retention rate or something that's really, really outrageously high for the industry. "Culture is everything" is a headline on your website. I just could not agree more. I say this on the air, a great culture kicks even a great branding spot. I'll say that again and again because it all comes from within. Going a little bit back in history with your company, and I ran an agency for a long time, I had that same problem. You talked about in one of your keynotes how you had Founder's Syndrome in the early years of running a firm. You compared it, this is hilarious, you compared it to a seagull flapping and flapping around while pooping on everyone, which is… C Antis: A seagull boss. Someone who flaps those wings, squawking and shitting all over everybody. I think that describes what a founder ends up doing, even when he doesn't realize he's doing it, based on his behavior. Even if you're not being a little bit loud, because you are the founder, everybody knows you've done their job before and you ask a question like, "Why are you doing it that way?" It comes out like, "Why are you doing it that way!" That's how you hear it. Founder's Syndrome is really all of the things that founders did to get it started often will be what's going to get it to the multi-ten-million range. Founders must be self-aware, lest they will keep stabbing their tires. Founders Syndrome is something that, it's for everybody that's a founder. It is so healthy. In fact, I just learned this. As I was describing Founder's Syndrome to somebody else, I actually looked at the Wikipedia page and it's grown from where it was a few years ago. Founder's Syndrome also occurs to division heads, people that are project managers, that bring in new things in companies that are so protective of the baby that they brought in, and they crush innovation. Founder's Syndrome is our worst enemy for all of us that have start-ups. We both have tendencies that made us, that were great to get us where we were, that will hurt us if we're not careful as we hire people. F Geyrhalter: How were you able to shake Founder's Syndrome so that other entrepreneurs can learn from it, at least the way that you did it? What was it? What was that moment? C Antis: First of all, I really believe in Vistage-type groups, that's CEO-type groups- F Geyrhalter: Yep. C Antis: Where you go and you just learn to be honest with another group of CEO's one day a month. That is where I heard the term, that's where people helped me pause to see it. I think being adaptive, it goes deeper. I'm very adaptive, I think. It took me a long time to realize it, but I'm a young 57-year-old. I'm very millennial-like thinking, but I think I'm adaptive through my path. I was raised in a religion, in my parents' religion. I'm no longer part of that religion. It's a strong culture religion, Mormonism. I think when you leave a strong culture religion, it's very difficult because that becomes your community. I think that you can do two things, you can go, and for me, it was like I had to redefine myself. In that redefining myself, I had to be self-critical sometimes to learn and grow. I had a couple of times like that where I had to redefine myself in life. I think that moving from the country to the city, how am I going to survive here? those life experiences. If we go back and re-frame our lives, we've all been very adaptive, but I think we have to embrace that today. When you get that Founder's Syndromitis, when you realize, oh, my God, I have this, this is funny and you forgive yourself. The way you get that is doing self-assessments. I'm a big fan of self-assessments. When I did my disk and I found out that I had a high eye on a disk scale, my Vistage group pointed at me and laughed and they said, oh, you want to be the center of attention. I quickly said, no, I don't. But hopefully, by later on that day, I admitted, well, yes I do, and thank you for telling me that's who I am and I'm not doing something wrong. Now I can forgive myself and realize that it's not a weakness, it's a strength. I'm great in sales, I'm great at speaking, I'm great in marketing, I'm great in customer care because I have a high eye. When you learn about yourself, the more you're willing to- do the emotional intelligence test. If you just try to grab the concept of emotional intelligence, it is the greatest gift. You will get Founder's Syndrome because it is just your survival mode, because we all operate in animal mode even though we think we're so smart. That's basically what emotional intelligence tells me. Self-assessment is really how I've grown, but I've also been forced to grow a few times. I think that sometimes when things hit our lives, if we can flip our brain to only believe in positive outcomes, we can realize that some of these things that we used to see as tragedy -- I'm not saying there's not tragedies -- but a lot of things we would used to see as something bad, we can flip in this new mindset. Failing is the greatest gift. Fail, fail, fail, I've failed being a contractor. You can fail and still survive. I've failed on so many jobs in the past, and we're really good at what we do and what we design and how we perform today because we've failed so much to get here. F Geyrhalter: Right. C Antis: That's one of the things, is failing is how I learn. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely. I think you said so many things. I know you accused me of asking a question that had five questions in it. You do the same with the answers, which is fantastic, because there were so many gold nuggets in there. I really appreciate it. I want to go back to culture for a second because I'm sure that a lot of listeners getting to know your brand, getting to know you and the way that you embody marketing and empathy and purpose, you've built a strong culture. Do you as a brand actually have written-down, formulated core values, or is it different? How do you deal with core values and how are they being embodied day to day? C Antis: I love that. I'm not a formalize, I'm a visionary, which means I loosely define. I know that if I grab things too tight, I've learned then I steer them into the ground. If you're a visionary and you have ideas, you learn to bring in doers around you. I have a great story around that. We were working with a neuroscientist to build our new values. If you want to be heard in marketing, you want to simplify, simplify, simplify. You want to simplify colors, position of your graphics, also you want to simplify the words. I really was wanting to bake down what we do. We spent a lot of time with Dr. Moren, this amazing guy that works with brands like Southwest Airlines. We worked with him for a long time to come up with the one word. The word we came up with is, "be," B-E. If I had to describe the word, "be," because we're giving it new context, I can't. It comes out different every day. Really, what "be" is to us, is it's much like what Simon Sinek did when he asked us, what's your "why?" Some days I can answer that question, some days it hits be funny. When we talk about what we value at Antis, the "be" values is what we've come up with. F Geyrhalter: Interesting. C Antis: The core part is, is Dr. Moren helped us get to the word, "be." We came up with this "be safe, be good, be dry." That's how we were going to market to our people to show them that we can keep them safe in our communities. What happened is, we did our external strategy session and we had some amazing people that came in, like Michelle Jordan, who I strongly recommend using. She came in and helped us with our strategy. Our team, not me, not marketing, but our team, 20 of us, baked and we surveyed and we came up with what we value. This was actually, an expanded team beyond that. We came down to the five things that we value. This is what they are: Be good, be accountable, be generous, be a leader and be passionate. What we found is we had turned our value statement into 11 words with a lot of repetition there in this really branded, good way that when we donate our space to nonprofits, and we have a lot of nonprofits come in here, they see that and we hear things like, "Can we borrow that?" "Yes! Yes! Please take it!" What happened is, I turned to my team and I said I know that we've spent a lot of money to be this, "Be safe, be dry, be good," but who we really are, are these values, "Be good, be accountable, be generous, be a leader and be passionate," slightly different context in the word, "be." What happened is this became who we were. I was giving a big keynote, in fact, it was the one you referenced. It was the one last year at the Legends and Leaders. It was a big crowd and the last slide that I decided to show was this internal thing. We're an inside-out company. We share what's working so others can do it. We discovered that these values were resonating. I went up there and I talked and I finished this talk. After I spoke, another writer and a good friend of mine, Steve Cherm, he commented on social media about how Charles ended his message with be good and be accountable. The funny thing was that I called Steve later and said, "Steve, I never said that. That was the slide and that was the value. We've had that and we use that slide for impact moments because it says so much in so few words. F Geyrhalter: It was holistically, right? I love the idea that it started with an exercise of external brand messaging and it turned into, a variation of it turned into the internal values and how you want to operate and who you want to be as a company. I think it's extremely, extremely powerful. I love that people just feel that intrinsically after the talk. Going from all of these "be" words, be this, be that, do you think that as a brand, if you think about the essence of your brand in its entirety, could you sum it up in a few characters, in one word or a two-word phrase that can describe your brand's DNA? To think about it, it's like Harley Davidson could be freedom, Coke could be happiness. What is Antis? Could you think of Antis in a single word or in two words? It must be difficult, based on our conversation today. C Antis: It's difficult for me, but I'm going to have to answer it two ways. To really understand what we discovered and what we sell and what we sell inside and out the company, it comes down to two words, and it's for your brand and it's for everybody that are your stakeholders, and that is fulfillment and impact. That's the intersection of life trajectory, of seeing yourself in a higher light. It's that point where you're having impact in people or people's lives, or animal's lives, or that it's you're having impact in the environment, whatever it is, but you're also finding that fulfillment. Those two words are critical to want to discuss how to get to a real cause marketing brand. I want to use the word, "be" because I'm experimenting with this word and I have been for the last year. I think the one that I spend most of my time is the "be good." It's simple but it's like that's all I really wanted to do. I didn't know what it was. I had to define in my life what good was. My dad just always taught me to leave it better than I found it. I'd learned that in Scouts, too. It's a simple thing, leave it better than you found it. I think that the best way I can get there is, I want to be my best self. I want to be my best self and I don't compare myself to you anymore and I don't want my people to compare themselves to me. I want you and I want me to compare ourselves to ourselves and I want to be good being my best self. I think that's my definition of being good, is seeing yourself higher and therefore you're able to see everything and everyone else higher. Then you become a real asset to the world and you have impact and you have this magical place of fulfillment, which is where I get to every day. I wake up in fear. I have good months and bad months in business like everybody else, but I wake up and I put on this outlook that only sees good things coming. If something hit today that's other than that, I go, wow, this is really going to be good. I literally can see the other side of that and see the value in this growing experience that's coming. I think that's the greatest thing, so be good. F Geyrhalter: That's beautiful. Going from that macro level all the way to looking at the word branding, obviously you are a marketer within your space, one of the many hats that you wear within the company. What does branding mean to someone like you, who has been in an industry for 30 years and you've been pushing the boundaries within the industry? You really were a game-changer and a visionary within an industry that is known for exactly the opposite. What does branding mean to you? C Antis: Branding is an action word that, if you don't try to grab it today, you're going to be left and you're going to be lost. Branding is, it's always been who you were but now, with this craving that everyone has for authenticity, branding, real authentic present-day branding, is what everybody seeks. It's the most important thing. I have to talk about branding but I've got to go into this little weird worm hole about, we hear about these currencies. Facebook is trying to create a currency I hear the Trump Administration doesn't like. In China they have a currency for social good that they've come up with that where if you're in their version of communism, social good in China, you'll get to the front of the line, get a bigger house. We have the same thing happening here in Silicon Valley. Those of us that know people that are trying to build algorithms that can root out fakeness because there's so much fake stuff coming at us from all sides, so branding is critical today. It's like when somebody goes to prison, they'll tell you if they don't join a gang, they're going to die, because you're a threat to everybody in prison until they know by which gang you reside. Then it all puts it into an order. That is a fish tank, so we can study that and poke at it. The same thing is in our society today. We don't know who we are and people are craving to know who you are. If you kind of know who somebody is, it's not enough like it was 10 years ago. You look for the gang that you reside with so people that care about families being close to their sick kids, they trust me more because I'm on the board of Ronald McDonald House and we do a lot of roof donations there. People that think everybody has a decent place to live, they trust me and my company more because we donate all the roofs for Habitat and we have in Orange County for the last 10 years. It's suddenly all about this currency of social good. It's literally like, I'm not telling you I think this is coming, I've been talking about this with some other people and I'm watching it happen. It literally is going to mean money in ways that our brains can't contextualize yet, much like you're trying to wrap your head around cryptocurrency. I see things very visually, so just imagine you're looking at your PC screen and you're seeing all these little eraser head LinkedIn-sized photos of each other, like we see on LinkedIn, darting like shooting stars across the scene. Oh, is that Fabian? Is that Charles? Who is that? We're all craving to be seen, and this is my visual interpretation of the currency of social good. If you are doing something good, giving back, best practices, are you giving back in your community? Now algorithms are being built to bring you to the front of the line. If you're giving back in your community, what happens is, you're not an eraser head shooting star whipping across the PC, you become the saucer, 8-inch saucer, that's floating up in its own trajectory, ever so slightly, that everyone can see. That is the new currency. I can't explain it better than that because it's not really invented yet, but we're moving in this super-adaptive world and if you want to survive and be adaptable, then dive in to cause. Dive in to mixing your branding with your cause, who you authentically are. It should be something that lines up well, that people think is good. There's some nonprofits that may not serve you to line up with, but even if they didn't serve you, you'd still be better off than not having the alignment. People need to know who you are. If you're in business just to make money in the next 10 years, good luck staying in business. It's all about who you are, who you align with and you better expect that you're going to be telling that story. It's all about telling the story, too. In every nonprofit board I'm on, when we go to the board meetings, it's always like, ha, how do we get our story heard? We all realize now that people remember the stories. That's what they remember. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely, absolutely. Those were some powerful words, and you described the idea of branding, how it is and, really, how it will be in the next half-decade or so. It's going to happen very, very quickly. C Antis: Yes, I'm obsessed. I don't mean to be a futurist, but I can't help but see where things are going. You're so right, and it's really healthy to spend a little bit of time and have a Disney-type plan. Disney, they have strategy for three completely different directions at any given time. They have it if things are great, if things turn bad and then if the world goes really crazy. They have three different strategies they build out every year instead of one. That's the new world. It's going to be a way more adaptive world. Instead of being afraid of it, just embrace it. Keep your people, then you'll be able to adapt to it. F Geyrhalter: Absolutely love that. Listeners who live in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, they should obviously reach out to Antis to get a new roof if they need one. Who better to handle your new roof than a futurist? They can find you at antisroofing.com, but since the majority of our U.S. listeners are not in the region and more than half of our listeners are not even located in the U.S., how can they follow you to learn more about your insights into company culture and philanthropy and a lot of other things, as the CEO of your brand? C Antis: That's a great question. I find that what fulfills me is awakening others to that impact, their fulfillment thing, so I love speaking. I do a lot of talking, do a lot of podcasts, so I'll share Hitting The Mark, Fabian, on my LinkedIn. I only manage one account, I manage my own LinkedIn, but I love stuff like this. This is where I'm known and this is where I like to talk. I'll do keynotes across the country this year and I'll share those on social media. You can also follow us on our Facebook, antisroofing/facebook. I just don't personally do that. You can follow us on our Antis Roofing four or five social media channels that we have. On my LinkedIn, I'll post on stuff that I have going. F Geyrhalter: That's great and I would highly recommend everyone to do follow Antis Roofing as a company, actually, because it is amazing what a roofing company that is fairly local, it is a big region that you cover, but how a roofing company can leave that mark, it can create this community and culture. It is really amazing. Thank you, Charles. It was so great to have you on the show. C Antis: I am super-excited. I can't wait to hear it. F Geyrhalter: Awesome, and thanks to everyone for listening. Let me again invite you to become a supporter of this show. I just launched this program, so I'm overly excited about making it happen. Go to hittingthemarkpodcast.com, hit the support button. A very special thanks go to Roxie Valez from Berlin, Germany and Freddie Teague from Branson, Missouri, who just joined on the Brandster level, which means they will get to hang out with me on next month's group call. Thank you both for being part of the tribe and for becoming sustaining members. The Hitting The Mark theme music was written and produced by Happiness Won, and if you're intrigued to find out who is behind that moniker, head on over to the support side and you will be in for a little surprise. I will see you next time, when we once again will be Hitting The Mark.

Mehrere Milliarden Tonnen Erde werden durch Menschen jährlich bewegt - mit Schaufeln, Baggern oder Dynamit. Nikolaus Geyrhalter beobachtet in Minen, Steinbrüchen, Großbaustellen Menschen bei ihrem ständigen Kampf, sich den Planeten anzueignen. Der österreichische Filmemacher zeigt in seinem Dokumentarfilm "Erde", wie genau der Mensch die Erde an der Oberfläche bewegt und verändert. / Eine Glosse zum Tag der Autobahnkirchen und die UNESCO-Entscheidung in Baku über die Welterbe Anerkennung des Augsburger Wassermanagementsystem

Seit den frühen 90er-Jahren geht der Wiener Dokumentarfilmer Nikolaus Geyrhalter mit seiner Kamera an Orte, die man sonst nicht sieht oder leicht übersieht. Was und wen er dort findet, zeigt er in gewaltigen Bildern und ohne wertenden Kommentar. Seine Dokumentarfilme werden von der Kritik geliebt und bei großen Festivals regelmäßig ausgezeichnet. In Art Beat spricht Geyrhalter über sein neues Werk "Erde" (Filmstart: 17.Mai 2019).  Foto: © Philipp Horak

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

"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

Im ambitionierten Filmprojekt Über die Jahre haben Nikolaus Geyrhalter und Wolfgang Widerhofer über 10 Jahre hinweg die ehemaligen Arbeiter einer in Konkurs gegangenen Textilfabrik besucht. Die Doku gewann den Preis auf der diesjährigen Diagonale und wurde von unserem Michael im letzten Podcast ebenfalls mit unglaublich viel Lob überschüttet. Nun hat sich Michael mit Regisseur Nikolaus Geyrhalter zusammengesetzt, um den Film zu besprechen. Im Anschluss haben wir noch einmal Michaels Kritik hinzugefügt, um aus diesem Interview einen "Über die Jahre Special Podcast" zu machen.