Peter Fisk

Beijing Bytedance Technology Co., Ltd. is a tech company underpinned by AI and mobile Internet. Its flagship app “Toutiao”(which means “headline” in Chinese), one of the fastest growing mobile products in China, initiated personalized information flow, thereby creating a new way to connect people with information through massive information gathering, in-depth data mining and user behavior analysis. In addition, Bytedance continuously strides in video, Q&A, image and other fields, powered by a range of products including “Tik Tok/Douyin”, “Hypstar/Huoshan”, “Xigua Video”, “Neihan Duanzi”, “Wukong Q&A” and “Tuchong”. With impetus from robust technology and continuous innovation in the team, Bytedance products keep a leading position in all areas involved and are still growing rapidly.

By October 2017, Toutiao serves over 100 million daily active users, average use time per day sits at 76 minutes and on average each user starts the app nine times per day, ranking top among Chinese Internet enterprises in use time and traffic volume. As Bytedance consolidates its China market, it also adopts the strategy of globalization through self-construction plus investment. “TopBuzz”, the overseas version of Toutiao’s news app, and “TopBuzz Video” have made a foray into Japan, the US, Brazil and other countries. Toutiao also acquired US popular video app Flipagram and invested in information products in emerging markets such as India and Southeast Asia.

A big step was its acquisition of video app make Musical.ly which has more than 215 million users (or “Musers” as it calls them) for its lip-syncing and short-video app, skewing toward teen girls. It also has a sister app, Live.ly, for live-streaming video. There’s also a collaboration with Chinese mobile-app developer Cheetah Mobile to provide $50 million in funding to Live.me, a top live-streaming app majority-owned by Cheetah, which has a community of about 40 million users.

Besides Musical.ly’s passionate user base, Bytedance will get inroads into Hollywood with the acquisition: through deals with NBC, Viacom and others, which have developed short-form shows for the video platform. Media execs will be keeping an eye on how those partnerships evolve under Bytedance’s well-funded auspices.

There’s no revenue associated with original content on Musical.ly at this point, but clearly the app has different paths toward monetization. “With Musical.ly, we are able to bring a new form of entertainment and a host of new video content to the millions of teens who engage with the app each day,” Brian Madden, VP of audience at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, said when the pact was announced this summer.

The Musical.ly and Live.me deals will give Bytedance, which has more than 4,000 employees, an expanding portfolio to push further into mobile video, including in the growing live-streaming space. Under the terms of Bytedance’s Live.me investment, Live.me will have priority to provide live-streaming services to Bytedance in overseas markets. Live.me broadcasters create 350,000 hours of unique content daily, while viewers spend an average of 40 minutes each viewing live broadcasts, according to the company.

Here’s how Zhang Yiming, Bytedance’s founder and CEO, explained the rationale for the Musical.ly deal: By “integrating Musical.ly’s global reach with Bytedance’s massive user base in China and key Asian markets, we are creating a significant global platform for our content creators and brands to engage with new markets,” he said in a statement.

How Bytedance brings together its assets to bear in catering to audiences in America, Europe and elsewhere remains to be seen.

But artificial-intelligence technology will certainly come into play. Bytedance last year formed an R&D division, called the Toutiao AI Lab, headed by Ma Wei-Ying, formerly Microsoft Research Asia’s assistant managing director. The lab’s mission is to develop machine-learning algorithms for personalized content recommendations.

According to Musical.ly co-founder Alex Zhu, “Bytedance’s leading AI technologies and top-notch AI developers can empower us to innovate faster and roll out new user offerings unlike anything users have experienced before.”

For now, users shouldn’t expect any huge changes for Musical.ly. The company’s co-founders, Alex Zhu and Louis Yang, are joining Bytedance and will continue to run Musical.ly. The startup had raised $147 million to date from investors including GGV Capital, GX Capital, Qiming Venture Partners and Susquehanna International Group. Also worth noting is that Cheetah was an early investor in Musical.ly, in which Cheetah held a 17.4% stake of the end of 2016.

Meanwhile Bytedance also made another acquisition this week, to augment its flagship Toutiao service (officially called Jinri Toutiao — which means”Today’s Headlines”): It’s buying New Republic a global mobile news aggregation service based in Bordeaux, France, from Cheetah Mobile for $86.6 million.

News Republic, according to Bytedance’s Zhang, will give the company “access to high-quality content from thousands of high-profile media partners around the world, making an exciting step forward in our international expansion strategy.”

Alia Adi is founder of Basmaty, an Arabic website featuring Middle Eastern recipes. Born and raised in Switzerland, the Syrian noticed a gap in the market for online food recipes in Arabic and launched Basmaty (‘my smile’ in Arabic) in Damascus in 2011.

Her four-strong team used to produce around 100 Arabic-language cooking videos a month from their studio in Damascus. In the civil war causing her to flee Syria, Adi spent a year in London, being trained in video production at YouTube, before coming to Dubai to establish her company (for the second time).

Here is an extract from a profile in Gulf News, 2017:

Alia Adi has a soft voice brimming with determination. The founder and CEO of basmaty.com, a portal that offers Middle Eastern recipes in Arabic, says a typical day begins with her waking up at 6.30am and checking her social media accounts before planning the hours ahead. These moments may be stuffed with recipe collection, shooting, production work or social media promotion but also they are infused with Adi’s love for food.

The name the Syrian chose for her platform, Basmaty, is a glimpse into the thought behind it. “In Arabic, basma means smile and basmaty means my smile. So the idea behind this [platform] was for me, food is something that you can put a smile on someone’s face [with], and it is something that really make your senses smile,” she says. And that’s what she’s passionate about.

The Swiss born and bred Adi says food is an old flame. “I discovered food with my mother as a kid and I’ve always loved being with her in the kitchen. So I got my passion of food from a really young age,” she says.

“From what I remember, she [Adi] always liked trying new stuff and new recipe[s]… she did also [attend] a dessert school in London for one year, so since then we have been enjoying very good meals,” says her older brother Omar.

However, the route to making her hobby her day job took a while. After university, Adi — the middle and only female sibling — moved to Syria where her older brother was handling the family business, an olive oil production company. There, she handled the marketing of their product through various channels, one of which was using the oil in various recipes.

“For four years I worked with my brother in the field. And I realised very quickly by searching for online content about recipes in Arabic [that] there was a gap in terms of what was available online. So the idea of launching my own platform emerged at that time. The Middle East has such a strong food culture, and I [wondered], ‘How come there are not more platforms that are providing content in Arabic?’ And I decided to launch Basmaty… to target the Arab world,” Adi says.

The idea of Basmaty proved an opportune investment. She launched the website in 2011 in July and hired a team, including a chef, and started producing videos — she says it made sense financially too as the costs incurred to hire qualified people in Syria were much lower than they would have been anywhere else in the Middle East.

The ensuing civil war however made things difficult. Adi had to relocate the next year and between moving to Dubai, where her target audience is and Europe — her parents moved back to Switzerland — she found herself torn. What made things worse was the fact that others in her team would find themselves similarly untethered soon.

“So I came to Dubai for a little bit and then I went to London. I was still managing my team [in Syria] from here and from London. And I was hesitating between going back to Europe or establishing my company here, which was a big step for me because the cost involved was much more than when I was in Syria. So I had to make a decision. So for two years, I was still managing my team online,” she says.

Then, when her team left the country, she decided to go it alone. She learnt slapdash ways to put her videos together, to post and promote the segments.

But seeing her platform doing well on YouTube — “my platform quickly grew to generating a million views on YouTube” — she didn’t want to give it up. “I just told myself you have to teach yourself these things you know and keep going.”

“I moved to London as I have [my team] at YouTube in London, and I thought let’s give it a shot… So I went for a year, got a lot of training from YouTube, a lot of support from them and eventually, after one year, if I wanted to take my business to the next level… I really need to raise funds and [being] in London isn’t really a possibility for me because my market is here.”

She returned to Dubai and established her company through a training programme and entrepreneur incubator called In5.

However, there were hiccups. First, with funding and then with the technical promotion of her website. This is where Ayman Al Barbary came in. Al Barbary, who worked as a website developer in Syria and when he came to Dubai nine years ago went into digital marketing too, explained the importance of subtle tweaks when trying to garner online hits. “I was introduced to Alia and Basmaty almost three years ago. And actually Alia approached me at the time to take care of the marketing of the website, where she actually struggled to get too much traction and traffic from the market and through digital channels such as search engines, through social media and all that.”

After doing an analysis, Al Barbary found “she’s missing a lot of opportunities… we did quick fixes for the website and the traffic spiked: I think we have almost double the traffic in a few months. And that all came organic from Google.”

Going through the ups and downs of starting a business, Adi felt a need to evolve her business into a platform. “[I] actually evolved it into a network that is involved in identifying and promoting, and assisting food talent in the region,” she explains, “So basically, through my collaboration with YouTube I met a lot of content creators and I identified those who are consistent with what they are doing and the struggles they have — and a lot of them are women; about 90 per cent. And I’m helping them to produce, to strategise their content, to sell and reach and monetise their content. So that’s the direction I’m going in with my platform.”

Adi’s steely determination becomes apparent when she talks of Syria and wanting to do something for her country. “Everyone I know from Syria wants to go back to Syria, including me. I’m thinking how can I later on be an asset for my country as well. And every Syrian I know thinks about what they can do to rebuild the country. As soon as I see there’s some sort of stability I want to reopen production in Syria.”

Until then Adi’s focused on dishing up smiles, one recipe at a time.

HelloFresh supplies everything you need to prepare quality, delicious, home-cooked meals that require no planning, no shopping and no hassle.

Every ingredient needed for our thousands of exclusive recipes is carefully planned, locally sourced and delivered to your door when it’s most convenient for you.

Founded in 2010 by Dominik Richter, the Berlin-based company aims to provide each and every household in its 9 markets with the opportunity to enjoy wholesome home-cooked meals with no planning, no shopping and no hassle required.

Take a look at the mission statement:

Everything required for weeknight meals, carefully planned, locally sourced and delivered to your door at the most convenient time for each subscriber.

Behind the scenes, a huge data driven technology platform puts us in the prime position for disrupting the food supply chain and for fundamentally changing the way consumers shop for food.

The soft subscription model business enables us to leverage our weekly subscriber touch points to consistently manage supply chains and demand, and to optimise the customer experience as well as our business economics.

HelloFresh is at the forefront of disrupting a multi trillion dollar industry at the very beginning of its online transition.

James Jebbia, the man who, in 1994 founded and to this day runs the SoHo-based company that has been making clothing and skateboards and a lot of other things that the people who love it absolutely have to have, doesn’t think of Supreme the way most people in fashion might—as a brand that started out in a small  store on Lafayette Street, and has since inched its way to global status.

He thinks of Supreme more as a space.

When Jebbia was a teenager in Crawley, West Sussex, in the eighties, working at a Duracell factory, listening to T. Rex and Bowie on breaks and spending his spare cash on trips to London to buy clothes, it was always in a certain elusive kind of store, one that became the model for Supreme.

“The cool, cool shop,” says Jebbia, who is 54 and dressed in jeans and a plain dark-blue T-shirt, label-free and low-key, with closely cropped hair and deep blue eyes. “The shop that carries the cool stuff that everybody was wearing—no big brands or anything.”

Jebbia’s office a few blocks west of the Supreme store is adorned with a skateboard designed by Raymond Pettibon; some drawings by Jebbia’s kids, age 8 and 10; and a larger-than-life-size portrait of James Brown—whom Jebbia, crucially, sees as not just the hardest-working man in showbiz but as a guy who never played down to his audience. Jebbia is, likewise, ever-mindful of his customer, who is generally aged eighteen to 25 and wants simply to buy cool stuff—and who will pay for it, assuming it’s worth it.

“My thing has always been that the clothing we make is kind of like music,” Jebbia says. “There are always critics that don’t understand that young people can be into Bob Dylan but also into the Wu-Tang Clan and Coltrane and Social Distortion. Young people—and skaters—are very, very open-minded . . . to music, to art, to many things, and that allowed us to make things with an open mind.”

Recently the fashion world has been waking up to Supreme. In the past decade, the company has opened stores in Tokyo, London, and Paris, while the passionate devotion of their customers has brought it into the conversation with both teenagers at skateboard parks and the front rows of high fashion—with Paris in particular swooning over Supreme’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton. Jebbia loved working with Kim Jones, Vuitton’s menswear designer, to make skateboard trunks and backpacks, bandannas and gloves, shirts and jackets. The feeling was mutual.

“When you see the lines for Supreme in New York or London,” says Jones, “you see so many different types of people, and they are people you can relate to—they understand high-low, they’re smart, they’re intelligent, and they’re humorous. They know what they want, and they are very loyal—and a customer who is loyal is a real aspiration for anybody with a brand.”

The Vuitton collaboration was also, for many in fashion, their first glimpse into the secretive world of Supreme, which has become a kind of shorthand for authenticity, immediacy, speed, and deftness in its way of doing business. More than just selling sweats and tees and hats, the brand brings out a new collection two times a year, like any fashion company—generally, an online look-book, followed by a few pieces dropped every Thursday, each item available both online and in the stores. A Supreme drop is a big event.

“We can have a leather jacket for $1,500, and if it’s a good value, young people will understand that,” Jebbia says. “But we also want to have the feeling that this won’t be here in a month. When I grew up, I think everybody felt that way. It’s like, If I love this, it may not be here, so I should buy it.”

Rather than try to give an insight into the brand myself, I turned to millennial social media analyst Sumo, to explore why and how Supreme reigns in the world of streetwear.

You can see from the Google Trends report below that worldwide interest has steadily rose over time for the Supreme brand:

The best part? Supreme has grown — and continues to grow — WITHOUT spending insane amounts of money on advertising or marketing. This means you can do it for your ecommerce business, too.

TRAFFIC SOURCES SUPREME USED TO BUILD IT’S CULT-LIKE FOLLOWING

Supreme is a streetwear brand that started as a skateboarding shop in New York City in April of 1994.

The brand produces clothing centered around their ‘red box logo’ which is shockingly simple, has transcended its skateboarding roots, and is fueled by the brands ability to create desire.

Here’s how Supreme gets most of their web traffic.

With a cult like following, and a focus on exclusivity, it makes sense Supreme relies on direct and search traffic as their main traffic drivers.

Supreme is the most sellable clothing brand in the world. The stuff they make is statistically more likely to skyrocket in value than the merchandise of pretty much any other consumer company in the world.

To increase your own following, product demand, and direct traffic, here are nine ecommerce marketing tips you can apply in your business.

THE LIMITED SUPPLY METHOD TO CREATING VIRAL CONTENT AROUND YOUR BRAND WITHOUT A BLOG

Supreme product drops are powerful, and the user generated content around the brand has been enough to allow Supreme to remain in a mostly ‘underground’ status in terms of marketing with almost no paid search investment.

Here’s just one of the online communities that create viral content for Supreme without them having to do a thing:

Supreme Talk UK/EU (aka SupTalk) is Europe’s largest Supreme fan group. It’s also one of Supreme’s biggest Facebook reselling groups.

The group started in 2012 when founding members Adam Rose and Peter Mitchell were frustrated at the lack of a UK secondary market for Supreme compared to the USA. So they started SupTalk for Supreme fans to buy, sell and trade Supreme products without having to pay obscene shipping costs.

Supreme have been able to get groups like SupTalk and major news sites with millions of followers like Hypebeast and Highsnobiety to promote their products by limiting supply of their product. Every week dozens of articles are published around how/when and who is involved in the resale of Supreme products, like this one:

When you look at Supreme’s top backlink, you can see the enormous amount of shares it has received, and traffic it provided:

Actually, Hypebeast alone have generated over 113 content pieces around Supreme with total shares over 200,000 in the last year. Again, just one example of content and momentum created outside Supreme itself.

But even though now more people than ever want Supreme, they’ve always kept supply controlled and never released a ton of pieces. This means demand gets higher as supply stays the same, manifesting an overblown hype that creates a secondary resale market for when Supreme release new products.

To get this level of virality and organic user generated content around your brand, it means you need to be very disciplined. When a Supreme product sells well, they never make it again. That’s what creates the hype and insane resell prices that get as high as 1200% or more, like this:

When you make things in smaller quantities, it makes people:

• Feel special
• Want to have it even more
• Increase the value for the buyer

While many businesses are trying to use “Limited Edition” as a selling point, with Supreme if you don’t get it you may never have the chance to get it again.

Supreme is the only company who sells it (they only have one retail distributor called Dover Street Market) and they only sell product through their online store and limited retail locations around the world.

• USA: New York City, Brooklyn, Los Angeles
• Europe: London, Paris
• Japan: Tokyo (Shibuya), Tokyo (Harajuku), Tokyo (Daikanyama), Nagoya, Osaka, Fukuoka

Supreme do weekly product drops every Thursday where they release a fresh batch of streetwear via its online store and international retail locations (with Japan getting it two days later on Saturdays). However they never say what’s coming.

This allows Supreme to gain brand momentum and organic traffic to their site every week through viral communities like SupTalk and major news sites like Hypebeast, because their fans want to know what’s coming next.

Supreme’s limited supply strategy created a demand frenzy that got so big once that when the “Supreme Foams” were released at Supreme’s New York Store they were forced to not sell it by NYPD due to concern for public safety.

The takeaway: Intentionally release every product in limited quantities to ensure sellout and engineer viral content around your brand (Supreme does this by limiting the quantity of every product they sell and varies the number available depending on the product and collaborators.)

THE MOST UNUSUAL HOME PAGE LAYOUT IN THE WORLD THAT GETS ALL THE BOYS AND GIRLS CHASING YOU  

Supreme’s homepage is largely different from most retailers homepage. You’ll notice that Supreme uses a ‘stripped down’ website theme that combines a minimalist approach with a ‘too cool for school’ feel, leaving visitors wanting to know more vs. bombarding them with information.

The brand’s stripped down homepage contains:

• Zero call to actions
• A stripped down minimalist design
• Only one graphic → Their logo

When compared to other big name brand homepages Supreme’s homepage is strikingly different, and relays a different message. Just take a quick look at Nike’s homepage for example:

It’s clear what message Supreme wants it’s visitors to understand: you need to chase them, they won’t chase you.

Supreme has been described as being: “the girls that gives you her number but never answers wen you call.”

The takeaway: Will this homepage approach work for everybody? Absolutely not; however, if you are looking to create a high-end, luxury brand, it’s something you should look into (Supreme does this with a site design that hasn’t changed since it launched in 2006 to stay elusive and on brand with 1 logo, 9 page links, 2 social links and 1 link to their mobile app).

THE EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY THAT MAKES YOUR CUSTOMERS CONSTANTLY CHECK THEIR SPAM FOLDERS

Supreme’s mailing list sign up is not plastered all over their website.  There is a very modest link to their mailing list page in two places:

1. The bottom of their homepage
2. Their ‘shop’ page for a few months before their next collection releases

 

When you sign up for the Supreme Email List you get… nothing!

Crickets actually start chirping as you wait for any sort of email from Supreme.

SUPREME’S EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY ACTUALLY MAKES CUSTOMERS IMPATIENT FOR THEIR NEXT EMAIL. 

It’s no surprise that Supreme uses their email newsletter in a different way than most retailers. Following suite with everything else they produce, Supreme’s email sign up is not the norm.

In an age where consumers are bombarded with emails highlighting specials, sales, and content — Supreme uses their email list as another tool to portray the message that ‘you chase us’ in their marketing.

Supreme uses their email list for two main purposes:

1) To update consumers on their weekly ‘drops’

“Each week you will be notified of a location where you can go and sign up for your spot on Thursday’s line. Once you receive the email you can proceed directly to the location given.” – Supreme Reddit Forum

Supreme has been known to send messages and updates to a select group of customers. The way they come up with this list is a mystery.

Supreme’s email tactic is such a mystery that sometimes they do not even send order confirmation receipts. There are dozens of conversations online regarding order confirmations:

The takeaway: Do not follow the crowds. Just because 90% of retailers spam people with emails and push for sign ups does not mean it is the best tactic for your email list. Make sure your email marketing strategy is in line with your branding (Supreme does this by only sending emails when their products drop and “mystery” customer-only emails).

THE ECOMMERCE “LOOKBOOK” CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGY YOU CAN USE 3 DAYS BEFORE LAUNCHING YOUR NEW COLLECTION

Three days before their new collections are available for public sale, Supreme launch something called a “lookbook” on their website. Supreme doesn’t have a blog on their website; however, their “lookbooks” provide customers with rich visual engagement with the brand, like this:

When the “lookbook” goes live on Supreme’s site, you can look through and see what Supreme is going to drop over the next few months, but you don’t know when those items are going to drop. You can basically see all the items Supreme are going to come out with in the coming season, except for collab drops and surprise drops.

Here is one of Supreme’s lookbooks for their Fall/Winter collection (they release two per year):

By releasing the lookbook before the product is available for sale, it creates a massive amount of buzz across social media and major news sites like Vogue, Highsnobiety, Complex and Hypebeast:

Fans get so hyped about the lookbooks that they make videos on YouTube reviewing the whole season’s collection (pictured above). You can see some of these videos are so popular that they get over 100,000 YouTube views.

Outside of seasonal lookbooks, Supreme do collab lookbooks. These are based on collab drops with other high end fashion and clothing brands. Here is a Louis Vuitton/Supreme lookbook from a collab drop Supreme did with Louis Vuitton:

Supreme use their “lookbooks” to further convey the exclusiveness and allure of their brand.

Notice how the images portray a sort of ‘clique’ that further motivate customers to try to be a part of the brand culture by purchasing their products.

The takeaway: Use “lookbooks” as part of your content marketing strategy so you can build up hype and social buzz around your brand before your new products drop (Supreme does this through their biannual Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer lookbooks which they release three days before you can buy their products.)

THE ONLY GUARANTEED WAY TO GROWTH HACK REDDIT WITHOUT BEING TROLLED

Here’s a look at Supreme’s top social traffic sources:

To get traffic from Reddit Supreme get one of the moderators of the subreddit to post a “super thread” under the News post flair category with links that go straight to Supreme’s website with their newest lookbook:

If you tried to do a post like this by yourself in Reddit, you would get 762 Reddit trolls swearing at you for shameless self-promotion. But by getting the moderator of the subreddit to post, Supreme got 762 comments discussing their new lookbook collection.

Here is a full list of all the moderators for the Supreme subreddit:

Every subreddit has a page like this, all you need to do is type the below URL in your browser window (then replace “supremeclothing” with the name of the subreddit you want to find a moderator in):

reddit.com/r/supremeclothing/about/moderators

Once you click on a moderator’s name, on the top right of the page you will see a text link you can click on to send the moderator a private message:

The takeaway: When you have a big product launch incentivise Reddit moderators in your chosen subreddit to share your product launch so you can drive massive traffic from Reddit to your ecommerce website (Supreme does this by getting moderators in the r/supremeclothing subreddit to post their newest lookbooks.)

CELEBRITY INFLUENCER MARKETING: HOW TO GET COLLABS WITH LADY GAGA, KANYE WEST, DRAKE AND KATE MOSS 

Supreme has built their brand and boosted exposure by getting the attention of celebrities. Dozens of celebrities are captured wearing Supreme’s class box logo tee.

Their clothing can be seen on high profile celebrities such as:

• Lady Gaga
• Kanye West
• Drake
• Kate Moss

Kate Moss in her Box Logo Supreme Tee

Lady Gaga sporting the Box Logo Supreme TeeSo how does one go about getting a celebrity to endorse a product?

One word. Authentically.

Supreme’s celebrity endorsement actually started with their collaboration with music artists. In the 1990’s Supreme began collaborating with different music artists to inspire their collections. Supreme authentically created relationships with music artists to gain momentum and establish collabs.

Here is the first ever artist collaboration Supreme did (with late graffiti artist Rammellzee when they opened their New York City store in 1994):

The hand-painted Supreme trucker caps with neon clouds Rammellzee helped create are amongst the rarest of Supreme products.

After the trucker cap collab with Rammellzee, Supreme created dozens of celebrity inspired t-shirts, hoodies and caps over the next three decades. When a music artist works closely with Supreme to create a piece of clothing inspired by them, there is a bond that is formed.

Celebrities who work with Supreme can feel the authenticity oozing out of everything released by Supreme, and are likely to wear the products themselves.

Supreme’s key influencer marketing tactics for getting collabs with major celebrities and brands are:

• Authentically create real relationships with brands/influencers that you want to collab with. You do this by helping them with things they are involved with (attending events where they are, connecting via social media, etc.)
• Do things that allow your collabs to actively participate in the collab with you. Create a product together.
• Outline the benefits of working with you (massive exposure, tapping into a new market, etc)
• Ensure that the brands/collabs you are trying to reach out to are in line with your morals, values, and overall ‘culture’ you are creating with your brand

If you do these four things right, then leverage the success of your first collab to get your second and third, you can get celebrity influencers promoting your product for you.

The takeaway: Look at the influencers your target market admires then brainstorm ways to help them with what they’re working on in order to authentically gain their trust and collaborate with them (Supreme does this through collaborating with top names like Lady Gaga, Kanye West, Drake and Kate Moss – all artists who their target market admire).

USE THIS INSTAGRAM GROWTH HACK TO GROW YOUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT TO 6 MILLION FOLLOWERS

Supreme’s instagram posts average over 100,000 likes, and over 700 comments:

To maintain brand consistency, exclusivity, and mystery for each of their Instagram posts, Supreme uses simplicity and celebrity endorsements/collabs to gain followers.

They posted their first Instagram post in March of 2013, and use the social media platform to post images from their lookbooks and highlight their collabs.

Their top hashtag is related to their collab with Louis Vuitton — #LVxSUPREME

The brand has collaborated with brands and influencers such as Vans (pictured below), Nike, Fila, Levi, and dozens of well known brands.

• Nike
• Fila
• Levi
• Vans (pictured below)

Supreme has nailed doing collabs with well-known brands and then promoting that collaboration on their Instagram. By focusing on growing one social media channel (ie: Instagram growth) Supreme are able to show collab partners they are able to promote the collab to their over six million Instagram followers, creating a flywheel for more collab opportunities and more Instagram account growth.

The takeaway: You can’t win on every social media channel. Focus on growing one social media channel and finding the types of posts that work best for your business. I saw a marketing company called HubSpot doing the same thing, but instead focusing on Facebook growth by using Facebook video posts (Supreme does this by collaborating on products with major brands like Vans then using that as social proof to hack their Instagram follower growth).

THE POSTER ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN YOU CAN RUN TO BUILD INSANE HYPE

Instead of the standard PPC advertising campaigns most clothing brands do, Supreme instead chooses to do periodic celebrity poster campaigns to stay true to their brand exclusivity.

When a campaign runs, Supreme will glue posters of celebrities rocking the brand’s signature box logo design on walls, scaffolding, and mailboxes around New York City and other cities where they have retail stores, like this one with Kate Moss:

Supreme will then make a photo t-shirt (based on the poster) available for sale to Supreme fans in future months. These t-shirts are some of the most desired pieces in Supreme’s collection.

Here are some of the most famous poster ad campaigns Supreme have run over the years:

• Raekwon & Elmo, 2005
• Dipset’s Jim Jones & Juelz Santana, 2006
• Mike Tyson, 2007
• Kermit the Frog, 2008
• Lou Reed, 2009
• Lady Gaga, 2011
• Prodigy of Mobb Deep, 2011
• Three 6 Mafia, 2012
• Kate Moss, 2012
• Neil Young, 2015

Other than the photo tee and poster campaigns, the closest Supreme comes to advertising is through their behind-the-scenes videos that you can find on the “random” link on their website. Here’s what it looks like:

The takeaway: When you find an advertising campaign that works, keep doing it (Supreme stay true to their brand identity and have been doing photo tee and poster campaigns since 2005.)

TURN YOUR CUSTOMERS INTO MILLIONAIRES BY FOLLOWING THESE 2 ECOMMERCE MARKETING RULES 

Every Thursday entrepreneurs (and hypebeasts) line up at Supreme stores to get the latest drop. The online web store sells out so fast that two guys built an ecommerce bot called “The Supreme Saint” that people can buy the option to use for sixty minutes every Thursday at 9am on their website.

From 9am to 10am on Thursday you can pay anywhere from $10 to $100 to get these guys to buy Supreme for you. Then at 11am when the Supreme online store opens, their bot will connect to Supreme’s servers with your shopping list and credit card number, and complete the checkout for you before other ordinary online shoppers can.

One time these guys made $20,000 in five seconds, by selling 200 pairs of Nike/Supreme Air Jordan 5 sneakers for $100 (that’s not the price of the Air Jordan’s, that’s the price people paid to use The Supreme Saint bot to get a crack at spending another $200 on Air Jordan’s.)^[*]

Another bot maker called EasyCop Bot sells a Supreme app-based bot for $595 that people can use on their own. By mid-2016, more than 500 people had purchased it raking them in nearly $300,000:

The reason add-to-cart bot services like this exist, and why so many resellers line up for Supreme is because founder James Jebbia follows two simple ecommerce marketing rules:

1. Scarcity: every product is sold in limited quantities
2. Consistency: new products go online only on Thursdays, and only at 11am

By following these two rules Supreme have created a culture where customers know when to come back and know that they will find something new every time. This strategy has been so successful that Supreme’s website got almost one billion pageviews in 2016 when a box logo hoodie dropped (data I found in a deleted tweet from Supreme’s web agency.)

Obviously a lot of that is from bot traffic, but the bots are actually helping Supreme sell out quicker and make more money. They work so well that items are selling out quicker every week (between 19 seconds and 173 seconds.)

The resellers then flip and profit.

Supreme is trying to reduce bots so customers who want to wear the clothing can buy (and not just attract resellers), but their two rule strategy has worked so well that the resale market has become insanely lucrative.

Wealthsimple, an investment company in New York found that if you flip 149 Supreme items at an average profit of $67 per item, you would make $10,000 profit per year. If you then invest that $10,000 every year and the market goes up by an average of 5.5% per year, in 35 years you will be a millionaire.

Most ecommerce companies can’t replicate this sort of math for their customers because they’re missing scarcity and consistency from their business model.

And just look at the math on this business model for Supreme (this Redditor said it best):

Supreme make this money in under 10 minutes every Thursday too, like damn 😉

The takeaway: If you want a predictable ecommerce business model where you sell out of stock every week and do massive sales volume in a short time period of time, limit your supply and drop your new product at the same time and day every week/month/year (Supreme does it by limiting supply and dropping new products every Thursday at 11am.)

9 TAKEAWAYS FROM SUPREME STREETWEAR’S INSANE SUCCESS

Supreme Streetwear has a marketing strategy so legendary, so mysterious, and so successful that entire documentaries have been created around it’s ‘marketing strategy’.

Supreme without a doubt displays the same characteristics of exclusive couture brands; however, their products are fairly simple.

Here are the nine key takeaways:

1. Intentionally limit the quantity of every product you sell. This is how you can build a demand frenzy around your brand and get people in internet groups and major news sites promoting your product for you.
2. Match your homepage design with your brand image. If you’re trying to go high-end luxury, keep your website simple and stylish.
3. Rethink your email marketing strategy. Are your customers replying to your emails excited to get the next one, or do you send out so many they just ignore you? Just because 90% of retailers spam people with emails and push for sales does not mean it is the best tactic for your email list.
4. Release content your target customers want. Just because everyone is writing blog posts, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right marketing tool for you. Supreme use “lookbooks” that get the attention of their fans and the media. Think outside the box for what content your buyers want to engage with, and how often.
5. Find moderators inside subreddits of Reddit to promote posts for you. This is the only guaranteed way of getting links to your business promoted in Reddit without being self-promotional.
6. Get collabs with celebrities. You do this by helping them researching them and helping them hit the goal they are working on right now, building your product with them and showing them how you will promote them to your audience.
7. Focus on growing one social media channel. You can’t win on every social channel, but you can double down on one like Supreme did with Instagram by finding what type of posts your audience most like to engage with.
8. Double down on advertising campaigns that work. Supreme have being doing photo tee and poster ads for over a decade. They haven’t jumped around between different marketing channels, they just do what’s worked in the past. Look at what’s worked best for your business in the past and double down on it today.
9. Use these two ecommerce marketing rules together: Scarcity and Consistency. By limiting the quantity of product you sell and releasing product at a consistent time and day every week/month/year you can sell out of product consistently.

Credit: Sumo.com

AeroFarms is on a mission to transform agriculture by building and operating environmentally responsible farms throughout the world to enable local production at scale and nourish our communities with safe, nutritious, and delicious food.

Founded in 2004, AeroFarms is led by CEO David Rosenberg who has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as one of the “Transformational Leaders in Agriculture”.

The New Jersey-based company has been charting a course toward a new standard for totally-controlled agriculture since 2004. They disrupt traditional supply chains by building farms on major distribution routes and near population centers. They defy traditional growing seasons by enabling local farming at commercial scale all-year round. They set a new standard for traceability by managing our greens from seed to package. And they do it all while using 95% less water than field farmed-food and with yields 390 times higher per square foot annually.

Aerofarms passion is great tasting food and sharing our harvest with the world. They recently began growing at our ninth farm — the world’s largest indoor vertical farm and our new global headquarters in Newark, NJ (pictured). There has been tremendous demand for our locally grown, delicious, produce, and they have farms in development in multiple US states and on four continents. There has never been a greater need for safe, dependable, nutritious food, and they are scaling quickly to transform agriculture around the world.

AeroFarms was profiled by Bloomberg TV for their annual program Year Ahead 2015 highlighting companies that are poised to disrupt business. AeroFarms is also the past Winner of Red Herring’s Top 100 Global for Innovative Companies, Winner of World Technology Awards for the EnvironmentFinalist for Silicon Valley’s TiE50 Awards for Energy/CleanTech, and Finalist for CleanEquity Monaco for Technology. AeroFarms is building in Newark, NJ our new corporate headquarters and what will be the world’s largest indoor vertical farm with partners Goldman Sachs and Prudential. We have an extensive pipeline of other farms in development all over the world, and we are actively scaling our team and making key hires.

On was born in the Swiss Alps with one goal: to revolutionize the sensation of running.

It’s not just a love of running that former top athlete Olivier Bernhard and his friends David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti share. They’re all also dedicated to developing a perfect product. And this is what has turned a revolutionary idea into a new running shoe that began by amazing the sporting scene and has since helped numerous top athletes to new personal bests at World Championship events.

After retiring from professional competition, three-times World Duathlon Champion and multiple Ironman Winner Olivier Bernhard devoted himself to finding a running shoe that would give him the perfect running sensation. In doing so he crossed paths with a like-minded Swiss engineer who had an idea for a new kind of running shoe. And it was this ideal symbiosis of running experience and engineering expertise that allowed this original idea to be steadily refined over the following years.

Cupboardfuls of prototypes were developed; but the basic concept – cushioned landing, firm take off – remained paramount throughout. It was this unique running sensation that convinced Caspar Coppetti and David Allemann to come aboard too. Together with Bernhard they formally established the On company in Zurich in January 2010 to develop a product range fully engineered in Switzerland using the latest technology.

After that, things started to move swiftly. In February the prototypes won the ISPO Brandnew Award, one of the most important prizes for innovation in sports. Test runners were enthusiastic and spoke of running on clouds. In July 2010 the first running stores had the On on their shelves.

Eleven years after market launch, On delivers industry-disrupting innovation in premium footwear, apparel, and accessories for high-performance running, outdoor, and all-day activities. Fueled by customer recommendation, On’s award-winning CloudTec innovation, purposeful design, and groundbreaking strides in sportswear’s circular economy have attracted a fast-growing global fan base — inspiring humans to explore, discover and dream on.

“Cyclon” is On’s groundbreaking circularity program. On’s Cloudneo is a fully recyclable running shoe made from castor beans. Lightweight, agile and super responsive, it’s engineered to perform. And you’ll never own it, because it’s only available via subscription.

Today, most products are designed within a linear lifecycle. That means one straight line to the trash. “Make-Use-Dispose.” When apparel and footwear have a predetermined destiny to become waste, that results in harmful effects on our planet. But we think there’s a better way. It’s called circularity.

How do you engineer a shoe from castor beans? It might seem like magic, but really it’s just science. A two-time ISPO award recipient, the Cyclon running shoe will feature a 100% bio-based upper. Made from just a single cut of fabric, so there’s zero waste and zero dyeing. Just pure material and pure performance.

Once you’re part of the Cyclon subscription, On sends your first pair of recyclable running shoes to you. After six months, you might be feeling the need to replace your well-worn and loved shoes. Not a problem. Hop back online and let On know to send a new pair to you. If your shoes haven’t gone the distance yet, you can replace them later.

In addition to its European headquarters in Zurich, On has now opened a second head office in the USA in Portland, Oregon.

Because you are unique, On is breaking the norm.

How many times have you been told to fit in, to adhere to the norm, to continue how things have been done in the past, to buy into the one best way? After half a century of running axioms that have failed to produce a significant drop in running injuries, On suggests
 to simply run how you are meant to run. Forget about motion control, minimalism and maximalism or the proper way to land or to lift for that matter. Instead, let your individual running personality shine. What feels best to you is best for you. Interestingly, this is also the conclusion of the latest biomechanical research.

On Core Belief 1

From focus on correction to focus on experience and comfort…

Running should be fun and not an exercise in self-control. Instead of correcting your movement, On lets you run how you are meant to run: The result is unmatched comfort and a more fun running experience. How it works? On’s patented CloudTec® cushioning cleverly takes the first heavy blow off the street and then lets you transition naturally to the forefoot, where the Cloud elements become firm for a stable stance and a powerful push-off. In other words: the On provides cushioning only when you need it and helps you delay fatigue, keep up your individual stride and not give in to the street.

On Core Belief 2

From one best way to run to billions of ways to run…

On shoes do not passively control your running motion with a rigid sole. Instead, a whole team of Cloud elements at the sole of the On shoe actively reacts to your individual running motion. They can act in unison or individually cushion your landing – however you need it. In fact, they have no predefined rolling line but empower each runner to run how he is meant to run. This means freedom for your feet, putting you back in control.

On Core Belief 3

From a look at the ankle to a look at the whole body…

Your running shoe should not stop you when landing but transform your motion into forward momentum. We take a holistic look at the running movement of your whole body, not just your feet. This is why On puts the landing sweet spot towards the midfoot stance, naturally centered under your body. Upon landing, your are immediately ready for takeoff – good running form in action.

On Core Belief 4

From a diagnosis for life to an evolution over time…

Running is a sport, not an illness. And as in other sports, you can train away your weakness to become a star performer. Flat feet and other deficiencies are not static but can be improved through training. Infants for example typically have flat feet and develop an arch through natural training in childhood. Neither is your individual running motion a diagnosis for life but can evolve with training. On provides a range of footwear that adapts to your individual stage of running and supports your training to propel you to the next level. Start with the On Cloudster, finish in the On Cloudracer.

 

Dry and Eikmeier founded Vinomofo with less than $25,000 and, while the business did hit the $1 million revenue mark in the first six months, Eikmeirer says this period wasn’t without its challenges.

“Not only does it make it difficult to plan or invest in anything medium or long-term, as you’re making decisions just to stay afloat week by week, but it puts tremendous financial pressure on you personally as founders,” he says.

“It took us four years before we started making enough revenue to sustain ourselves and our business, and start to grow.”

Another lesson came after a capital raising exercise saw Eikmeier and Dry partner with large online retail group, The Catch Group, which meant giving up a majority stake in the business.

“We ended up finding a way to buy the company back and that was been the best decision we ever made,” he says.

Eikmeier says Vinomofo has recently brought in a “world-class leadership team” to its organisational structure and has plans to scale from 75 to 150 people on the ground in Melbourne in the next year.

For Eikmeier, Vinomofo’s next big move is likely to involve heavy investments in local and global markets.

“We’re investing $10m in marketing in our Australian market, with a 300% growth target,” he says. “We’ve just hired two Asia leads and we’re setting up in Shanghai to launch Vinomofo into China. This marks the beginning of a global expansion.”

Eikmeier says the strategy will also see the online retailer growing its Vino Direct “marketplace” channel.

Discussing tricks for tapping into self-belief at the Melbourne launch of startup documentary The New Hustle, Dry told the crowd about a strategy he learned at a conference.

“If you pretend you’re wearing a superhero cape, you walk differently. You kind of walk shoulders back and tall, and it helps,” he says.

That’s not where the visualisations stopped, either: when it came to the more difficult moments of the business, Dry motivated himself by imagining potential outcomes while looking in the mirror.

He would imagine what his life would look like if the startup didn’t end up working, and asked himself what that would look like over one, three, five and 10 years.

“If you do that in front of a mirror, you start like, leaning forward, and you start kind of getting smaller and feeling shit,” he explained.

“If you kind of reverse it and go, ‘no fuck it, I’m going to change it and I’m going to continue to believe and I’m going to have an even bigger picture that I want to achieve’ — if you start going one, three, five years [for that outcome], you start standing taller. I used to do that a lot.

“I used to stand in front of the mirror and just believe in yourself.”

Dry and co-founder Andre Eikmeier faced several precarious moments in building up Vinomofo, which they discuss in The New Hustle, and Eikmeier is also open about the potential implications of failure on his loved ones.

Saying he spent “four or five years building into pressure points” while getting Vinomofo off the ground, Eikmeier said he appreciates just how important it was for the business to succeed.

“Had Vinomofo not worked it would have been pretty dire for my family financially,” Eikmeier explained.