“A few years back I was in Kenya on a business trip. I extended my stay over the weekend to go on a safari. While at the Maasai Mara Reserve, I asked my driver if he could take me to a Maasai village. He told me it would cost $20, and I thought, sure, let’s help the local community. Once there, I was curious to find out how far the $20 would go in sustaining them and what they would spend it on.
Sadly, a Maasai responded, ‘Sir, we do not get the $20. We only get $2. All the rest goes to the driver.’ Apparently, if he did not do so, the driver would simply take tourists to another village.” That inspired me to do something about it, to help local communities to truly benefit from tourism, and this led to my journey with BeMyGuest.”
$47 billion of luxury fashion accessories are sold each year, yet over half of all luxury consumers say that they want products that are personalised to their own preferences. Some leading brands like Burberry, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton have tried to make customisation work, but found it hard to do it on a global scale.
Yet to the consumer, in a world where luxury brands have become ubiquitous, and their value diminished, it is personalisation that has value. Indeed personalisation is the new luxury.
Now, a New York City startup is redefining bespoke fashion for the digital age, combining old-fashioned craftsmanship and modern technology in ways that could signal the future of customisation. 1Atelier believes it has found a solution to creating bespoke handbags, allowing consumers to design and receive their perfect bag within 21 days.
1Atelier’s CEO is Stephanie Sarka, a seasoned entrepreneur with deep experience in building businesses and brands. Initially following the traditional path to Goldman Sachs, she quickly realized that she is a builder, not a banker. So she went to Paris to work for a year at International Flavors & Fragrances. After getting her MBA at Harvard, she worked for Lew Frankfort at Coach for seven years, where she earned her stripes as a “merchant” and an “operator” and held numerous leadership positions; she also led the successful re-launch of Mark Cross, the American luxury goods brand.
Sarka is supported by her creative director Frank Zambrelli who has an extensive background in product design, branding and production technology for luxury leathergoods. Headed for medical school, an unexpected trip to the European fashion shows radically altered his plans. He instead went to the Fashion Institute of Technology and graduated with a dream job at Chanel, working between Paris and New York, during the brand’s renaissance under Karl Lagerfeld. At Cole Haan, under the guidance of John Varvatos, he further developed his craft in European factories. Frank subsequently went to Coach where he led the successful launch of the venerable firm’s foray into footwear.
Here is an extract from Fast Company’s recent article about 1Atelier:
When you walk into 1Atelier’s studio in the Garment District, tables are strewn with large bolts of premium leather, from full-grain cowhide to more exotic varieties of snake and crocodile. You can watch a master craftsman put the finishing touches on satchels, clutches, and hobos, each designed to the exact specifications of the customer. One saddle bag is made of champagne-colored python skin with a contrasting pink trim; a colorful tote comes in fuchsia, orange, and blue. There’s a little machine that stamps the owner’s name in gold lettering onto a label inside the bag.
Tables are strewn with large bolts of premium leather, from full-grain cowhide to more exotic varieties of snake and crocodile.
In the past, a client would need to visit a workshop to order a customized bag, but at 1Atelier, she can do everything online. The company’s website allows customers to pick a style, then play with different colors and textures until they’ve dreamed up their perfect sack. The end product costs between $295 and $8,400, which puts the brand at the lower end of the luxury bag spectrum.
But unlike Chanel or Céline, which requires six months or longer to ship a bespoke order, 1Atelier products are delivered to the customer in 21 days. That’s all thanks to technology, from the snazzy customization tool on 1Atelier’s website to the company’s backend systems that make the supply chain and manufacturing models of efficiency. “Technology is the lever that allows us to transform the entire luxury experience,” says Sarka. Even the brand’s logo reflects how deeply 1Atelier’s mission is intertwined with tech: the number one surrounded by a circle resembles the power-on symbol.
Sarka believes that there’s a massive market opportunity to bring customization to the luxury accessories sector. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal from last year, 56% of luxury consumers say customization is increasingly important to them—an uptick that reflects a broader trend in consumer behavior. Deloitte research revealed that 36% of people want personalized goods and services in their everyday shopping experiences. “This makes sense,” says Zambrelli, who worked at Chanel, Coach, and Judith Leiber before cofounding 1Atelier and becoming its creative director. “We’re now surrounded by a culture in which we are encouraged to customize everything from our Facebook profile to the color of our smartphone. It was inevitable that this mind-set would enter the luxury industry.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wBhZUlEmYw
Major design houses have taken note. You can now monogram your Louis Vuitton bag or add your own combination of graphics—bees, tigers, flowers—to your Gucci bag, jacket, or shoes. You can choose the heel, color, and fabric on Manolo Blahnik’s classic BB stiletto. Jimmy Choo offers a collection of clip-ons and buttons to adorn your heels or clutch. For the 35th anniversary of Ferragamo’s iconic Vara and Varina shoes, you could customize these styles to your taste. And at the Opening Ceremony SoHo location, there’s an embroidery station where you can add the imprint of your choice to a shirt or jacket.
But as Zambrelli points out, these are personalized details on a few products from a collection. “These are condiments on an entrée, rather than a handcrafted meal,” he says.
Offering a more complete customization experience, where the customer has a hand in the entire design process, presents a logistical challenge for big brands, whose supply chain and manufacturing networks usually span multiple countries. In 2011, for instance, Burberry offered a bespoke service that allowed customers to alter every aspect of its iconic trench coat, from the cut to the fabric to the color, for between $1,800 and $8,800. But when the service failed to be profitable, Burberry quietly shut it down in 2015 and launched a simpler alternative, the Scarf Bar, where shoppers can monogram their initials onto scarves for $475 to $995.
Sarka and Zambrelli kept these case studies in mind when they built 1Atelier. “It’s hard to customize at scale unless you’re uniquely dedicated to it,” Sarka says. “We’ve been building our systems and infrastructure, thinking about how we can scale everything from the production to the user experience.”
Hence, the crucial role of technology.
Over three hundred years ago, The East India Company’s pioneering merchants were the leading traders of luxury goods of their time, forging trade routes across the tumultuous oceans between the East and the West and trading a range of products including tea, coffee, spices, gold, silver and porcelain.
At the height of its power, the company controlled large parts of India with its own armed forces. But it was disbanded after soldiers of the company’s own army rose in revolt against the British in 1857. A tiny rump of the company lived on, however, consisting of its trading name and a small tea and coffee concern. This shadow of what was once a global trading power was acquired in 2005 by Sanjiv Mehta.
Now, the Indian entrepreneur has relaunched the famous brand, starting with a range of fine foods (and also gold coins!), available online and from the company’s stores in London, and in other global cities.
The East India Company seeks to stand again for quality and innovation in each and every area of trade. It scours the best of manufacturers from all over the world to develop a range of foods that are exclusive and unique to our brand. It insists that our lines are made to the highest specifications with the finest of ingredients we can find, researching historic recipes till this very day as well as maintaining a close working relationship with the artisans that produce the innovative recipes in the true spirit of The East India Company.
Sanjiv Mehta’s stores showcase a range of 350 luxury products, including 100 varieties of tea, chocolates, spices and mustards developed by the company from across the world.
Recreating the lost brand
The recreated brand philosophy seeks to recapture the spirit of exotic discovery:
We are pioneers, explorers and innovators.
We are idealists, dreamers and traders.
We are sensitive to the cultures and beliefs of others. We seek to enrich and enliven the world and increase our positive impact through our corporate and personal actions.
At the heart of it all, we are adventurous, honourable merchants; traversing the oceans to forge new connections, to set up trading relationships, to discover the exotic and elusive.
Soon after receiving royal approval from Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, The Company began to use an identifying mark called The Merchant’s Mark or the ‘Chop ‘ on all its goods and cargoes. Derived from the Hindi word, ‘chap ‘, meaning stamp, this mark was considered by many to be the first commercial trademark and soon became a global symbol of excellence recognizable across all of the brand’s activities.
Initially a simple mark, it evolved by the 1700 ‘s into a heart shaped figure surmounted by a figure four, or sail, and containing the initials of the company, EIC. It is this same symbol today that we carry forward today to mark the quality and exclusivity of each and every one of our products.
https://vimeo.com/29371436
https://vimeo.com/29371391
Inspired by a great story
Granted a Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, The East India Company was founded to explore the mysteries of the East. As The Company grew, it mapped trade routes through unchartered territory and changed social customs, tastes and ways of thought to influence the very fabric of our lives today.
The Company’s pioneering spirit and sense of adventure created British India, founded Hong Kong and Singapore and introduced tea to Britain and India. Their warehouses were places of wonder, stocking never before seen silks, chintzes, calicos, porcelain, coffees, chocolates and spices from around the world. They played a pivotal role in writing our history by planting the first teas in Darjeeling, causing the Boston Tea Party; holding Napoleon captive; and generating the fortune of Elihu Yale, founder of Yale University.
1600: The Royal Charter … The Company of Honourable Merchants of London trading into The East Indies was granted a Royal Charter by Queen Elizabeth I, and established itself with 125 shareholders and £72,000 of capital. Sir Thomas Smythe was appointed The Company’s first Governor.
1601: The First Voyage … Five vessels left Woolwich for the Spice Islands or East Indies in February, 1601. The mission, led by James Lancaster, carried six letters of introduction from The Queen, each with a blank space for the name of the local King. Though Lancaster’s intention was to trade iron, lead and British broad cloth for spice, he made little impression, as the Dutch restricted British access, and the broad cloth was deemed too heavy to be of use by those living in the tropics.
1608: Landing in India … The Company’s ships first arrived in India, at the port of Surat, in 1608. Sir Thomas Roe reached the court of the Mughal Emperor, Jahangir, as the emissary of King James I in 1615, and gained Britain the right to establish a factory in Surat.
1613: Japan Landing … The Clove, an East India Company ship, became the first British ship to reach Japan. Bearing official letters and gifts from King James I for retired Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu and his ruling son, Hidetada, and with the assistance of Englishman William Adams known as ‘Anjin’ (a trusted advisor of the Shogun), the Commander of The Clove, Captain John Saris presented from England, a telescope, a precious cup and cover and English Wool. By return, Hidetada presented Saris with two suits of armour for King James I, while Ieyasu gave to him ten spectacular painted gold-leaf screens, as well as a warm letter for the King and an official Vermilion Seal Letter granting the English permission to live and trade throughout Japan, thus beginning a remarkable friendship between two countries on opposite sides of the world.
1684: Trade with China … England, with the demand for tea booming, The East India Company placed an order for 100 lbs of tea and by 1750 annual imports reached 4,727,992 Lbs. The Company received Chinese permission to trade from Guangzhou (Canton) importing silk, tea and porcelain, and so trade began with the Hongs who controlled trade within China. Having initially traded tea for silver, the English were concerned that too much silver was leaving their shores. So they began to trade a product locally grown in its Indian territories, opium, in exchange for tea, which lead to the Opium Wars between Britain and China.
1733: St Helena, The Forgotten Coffee … The East India Company first introduced coffee plants and seeds from Yemen to St Helena on board the Houghton from the Red Sea port of Mocha. Unique and rare in flavour, St Helena coffee is produced from a single type of Arabica bean known as Green Tipped Bourbon Arabica. It is still grown in St Helena and remains one of the world’s finest and most respected coffees. Napoleon Bonaparte, exiled to the island in 1816, remarked on the fine quality of St Helena coffee, and allegedly even asked for it as his dying wish.
1773: The Boston Tea Party … This was driven by resistance throughout British America against the Tea Act, passed by the British Parliament in 1773. Colonists objected to the Tea Act as it violated their right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives. Men thinly disguised as Mohawk Indians dumped 342 chests overboard the Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver ships into the Boston Harbour. Each chest was loaded with precious cargo, tea from The East India Company. Today, a single chest, with its original East India Company marks survives in Boston’s Tea Party Museum.
1848: Darjeeling Tea Established … Once a botanist, Robert Fortune was hired by The Company to obtain the finest tea plants from China to establish plantations in India. He began his espionage disguised as Chinese man ‘from a distant province’ and hired an interpreter as a precaution, as the Chinese were extremely protective of their virtual monopoly on tea production. His efforts eventually resulted in the shipment of 20,000 plants to the Himalayas, established Darjeeling as one of the finest tea producing regions in the world, and India as a dominant world tea producer.
1873: The East India Company Stock Redemption Act … By the time of The Act’s passing, the East India Company was effectively dissolved, as The Crown had assumed all governmental responsibilities held by The Company by The Act for the Better Government of India. The Company’s 24,000-man military force was incorporated into the British Army, leaving it with only a shadow of the power it had wielded years earlier. Its legacy was to last forever, as quoted by The Times in 1874, “[The Company] accomplished a work such as in the whole history of the human race no other company ever attempted and as such is likely to attempt in the years to come.” Queen Victoria, the ruling monarch at the time, became the first monarch to use the title ‘Empress of India’.
Of course the history of the company is also controversial. Whilst The East India Company is widely recognised as the world’s first multi-national company, it also had a significant army, which ruthlessly used its power to secure its advantage. A visit to the magnificent Powys Castle in Wales demonstrates the vast wealth acquired from colonial India over these years. An excellent broader perspective is found in this recent article by The Guardian.
Flying has never been fast and easy, and certainly not as easy as watching a movie on Netflix, listening to music on Spotify, or jumping into an Uber taxi. There is the hassle of searching through schedules and flights times, booking tickets, selecting seats, checking in, waiting, queuing, boarding, and much more. But no longer.
A new generation of airlines has landed, challenging the very idea of booking a seat on a plane.
First there was Victor, described as “the Uber of private jets”, trying to democratise luxury air travel but still with multi-thousand pound tickets. The UK startup works much like the taxi service. Prices vary depending on time, place, and the size of each airplane. The cheapest fare I found was a flight to France for £450 per seat, if you have seven friends who fancy a bit of impulse wine-tasting. Victor claims to be cheaper and more transparent by removing additional fees and partnering with aviation suppliers, so there’s no need for brokers who might hike up costs through commission, CEO and founder Clive Jackson says. It even has a “Pets on Jets” service, for those obsessive chihuahua owners.
But it still didn’t transform the business model, like Reed Hastings or even Elon Musk might seek to do. So how about an unlimited travel subscription model?
Imagine flying as often as you want, anywhere and anytime, for one monthly fee?
I remember exploring this exact concept when managing marketing at British Airways. We called it the Pegasus Pass, the ability to jump on any plane as often as you wanted. We calculated that even the busiest traveller flies no more than 20 flights per month, and the ability to offer the simplicity of travel (albeit with a headache of capacity management!) was worth it. At the time we couldn’t make it work, because of old rules (like needing paper tickets – remember them – with the IATA convention typed on the back). Now a former colleague from my days at BA has set up a new airline for Europe, doing exactly that.
Surf Air was launched in 2013 by Mucker Lab, a Los Angeles business incubator, charging $1,750 a month. Fly as much as you want. Arrive a few minutes before takeoff. Park for free. Forget TSA security; you don’t even need an ID to board. And then get comfortable, every seat is both a window and an aisle.
In the first 2 years Surf Air grew to 1,400 members, with a waiting list of 600. The original business plan targeted business people traveling between Southern California and Silicon Valley. Now the Santa Monica company is gearing up for a major expansion to four other California markets by October: Santa Rosa, Monterey, Sacramento and Palm Springs.
Surf Air hoped that with its entry into those cities, chosen because they are gateways or popular as weekend getaways, it will evolve from a business airline into one that includes personal lifestyle travel.
At a time when commercial air travel is universally loathed, Surf Air has become a gamechanger among entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. About a third of its passengers work in the tech sector; others include lawyers, consultants, real estate agents, sales and advertising reps, entertainment types and retirees.
After a much-hyped launch, the airline by early 2014 was struggling and had signed on just 225 people. Members complained that the flights they wanted were always booked, while prospective customers languished on the wait list for months. Flight delays and cancellations were also a problem.
“We didn’t have a lot of confidence in the model at that point in time,” said William Woodward, managing partner at Anthem Venture Partners, which led Surf Air’s seed and Series A rounds.
Those growing pains led to a shake-up that saw the exit of co-founder and Chief Executive Wade Eyerly and other executives. Eyerly recently announced that he would be launching a similar all-you-can-fly private membership airline serving the Northeast.
At Surf Air, the controls were handed over to longtime membership and aviation executive Jeff Potter, who was brought in because of his experience running a major airline as the former chief executive of Frontier Airlines. Potter, who is CEO, and Executive Chairman Sudhin Shaman have now launched a multiyear growth plan across to shake up the airline world. Simon Talling-Smith is making it happen in Europe.
Under Armour’s mission is to make all athletes better through passion, design and the relentless pursuit of innovation.
Founded in 1996 by former University of Maryland football player Kevin Plank, Under Armour is driven by a passion for high performance clothing – engineered to keep athletes cool, dry and light throughout the course of a game, practice or workout. The technology behind Under Armour’s diverse product assortment for men, women and youth is complex, but the program for reaping the benefits is simple: wear HeatGear when it’s hot, ColdGear when it’s cold, and AllSeasonGear between the extremes.
Born out of sweat
In 1996, 23-year-old Plank, turned an idea born on the football field into a new industry that changed the way athletes dress forever. Back in his playing days, Plank hated having to change his sweat-soaked cotton T-shirts over and over again during two-a-days. Knowing that there simply had to be something better, he set out to create a solution.
Plank named his new company Under Armour, and after extensive research on the athletic benefits of synthetic fabrics, he designed the first Under Armour HeatGear T-shirt, which he named the #0037. Engineered with moisture-wicking performance fibers, the shirt helps keep athletes cool, dry, and light in the most brutally hot conditions.
Working from his grandmother’s basement in Washington DC’s Georgetown neighborhood, he traveled up and down the East Coast selling his revolutionary new product out of the trunk of his car. By the end of 1996, Plank made his first team sale, and Under Armour generated $17,000 in sales.
In 1997, Under Armour introduced the now-famous ColdGear fabric, which keeps athletes warm, dry, and light in cold conditions, and then the AllSeasonGear line, which keeps athletes comfortable between the extremes.
By the end of 1998, Under Armour outgrew grandma’s basement and moved to an all-new headquarters and warehouse in Baltimore.
In 1999, Under Armour played a supporting role in one of the year’s most-talked about movies. Plank and his team signed on to supply product for the Oliver Stone film Any Given Sunday starring Al Pacino and Jamie Foxx. In the film, the football team wears Under Armour apparel and accessories in key scenes.
Realizing the incredible opportunity to leverage the exposure from Any Given Sunday, Plank bet big and bought his first print ad in ESPN the Magazine. A risk at the time, the move paid off, generating awareness and a $750,000 increase in sales. For the first time since starting Under Armour, Plank officially put himself on the payroll.
Growing by word of mouth
In 2002, to support its continued growth, the Brand moved its global headquarters to an old soap factory in the Tide Point section of south Baltimore located on the historic Inner Harbor.
With word of mouth growing every day, the Brand bet big again and launched its first-ever TV campaign. In 2003, the legendary Protect this House TV commercial featured former University of Maryland football standout Eric “Big E” Ogbogu and a group of young athletes bringing the Brand’s voice and overwhelming passion to life in a way no one had ever seen before. Protect This House became a rallying cry for athletes everywhere, it established the Brand as the authentic voice for the next generation, and it officially made Under Armour a household name.
Under Armour officially launched its women’s line, UA Women, in 2003. In 2004, the brand introduced lines specifically for boys’ and girls’ and Outdoor athletes. Under Armour Golf was introduced in 2005, and, in the same year, Under Armour signed its first all-school deal with Plank’s alma mater, the University of Maryland.
On November 18, 2005 Under Armour went public and became the first U.S.-based initial public offering in five years to double on its first day of trading.
Less than 10 years after its launch, Under Armour ended the year with $281 million in revenue.
Head to toe sportswear
In 2006, Under Armour set its sights on dressing the athlete from head to toe.
A new campaign, Click-Clack launched the brand into the footwear business through the introduction of its first line of football cleats and the Brand captured a 23% share of the market in just the first year. On the heels of this enormous success, the Brand expanded its cleat business to include baseball, softball and lacrosse cleats.
In 2008, after nearly 12 years of providing technically advanced performance accessories and apparel, and less than two years removed from its foray into cleated footwear, Under Armour revealed its highly anticipated line of performance trainers marking its official entry into the athletic footwear market.
This period also marks the beginning of key additions to Under Armour’s elite roster of world-class athletes, including future NFL Hall-of-Famer Ray Lewis, gold medal skier Lindsey Vonn, MMA World Champion Georges St-Pierre, and Brandon Jennings, the first US basketball player to go straight from high school to a European professional league. But that was just the beginning. By the end of 2010, the Brand added the most accomplished Olympian of all-time and Baltimore native Michael Phelps, two-time Super Bowl MVP Tom Brady, and a young tennis phenom named Sloane Stephens.
In the midst of launching new product lines and new athlete partnerships, Under Armour also opened its new European headquarters in the old Olympic Stadium in Amsterdam and built its first branded-retail store in Annapolis, MD.
In 2010, on the biggest stage in college football field, the Under Armour sponsored Auburn Tigers won the 2010 BCS Championship game, led by future Under Armour athlete and NFL Rookie of the year Cam Newton.
2010 ended with a truly incredible financial milestone as Under Armour surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue almost quadrupling revenues in a five-year period.
Will power
Over the years, Under Armour has made significant strides in establishing a strong presence outside of the US. Through on-field partnerships with elite professional teams and players, the Brand gained enormous traction with athletes in Japan, Europe, Canada, and Latin America. The international footprint skyrocketed in 2011 when Under Armour opened its first-ever brand store in China and became the official technical partner to Tottenham Hotspur of the Barclays Premier League. The Tottenham Hotspur partnership is Under Armour’s largest individual team deal to date.
2011 is the same year the Brand ended a long-running feud with one of its biggest enemies: cotton. After years of declaring, “Cotton is the Enemy,” Under Armour further cemented its reputation for relentless innovation by developing Charged Cotton, a line of cotton apparel that dries fast and performs. From Charged Cotton came Charged Cotton Storm, which gives athletes the same quick-drying cotton with revolutionary water-resistant technology.
In 2012 and 2013 two key Under Armour athletes celebrated monumental accomplishments. In the summer of 2012, on sports biggest international stage, Michael Phelps cemented his legacy as the most decorated Olympian off all time by winning seven medals and increasing his medal total to 22 including 18 gold medal performances. In January of 2013, Ray Lewis capped off his career as one of the game’s best ever-defensive players by bringing home the second Super Bowl ring for the Baltimore Ravens.
17 years after that first moisture-wicking T-shirt, Under Armour innovation took center stage once again with the launch of all-new Armour39, the first-ever performance monitoring system that measures what matters most to an athlete: your WILLpower.
The Brand’s mission is to make all athletes better through passion, design, and the relentless pursuit of innovation. Its commitment to that mission has led to countless game-changing products that give athletes an advantage.
In college, Kevin Plank had an idea to help football players get better. Today, with revenue approaching $2 Billion, the Brand is widely recognized as a global leader in performance footwear, apparel, and accessories, and its commitment to making all athletes better drives its never-ending dedication to building tomorrow’s next great innovation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh9jAD1ofm4
Changing the game in Rio
Under Armor’s 90-second long “Rule Yourself” advertising starring the Team USA Women’s Gymnastics is athletic ad perfection. It’s on the verge of 3 million views and deserves every single one of them. It makes pudgy, middle-age men want to do some gymnastics. And while it’s not the 5.6 million views of Under Armor’s companion Michael Phelps ad, it’s the superior spot—making a successful argument in 90 seconds that even P&G’s Olympic “Like a Girl” campaign could appreciate.
It would be easy to congratulate Under Armor for rising so fast since its 1996 founding to become a sponsor of something as global as the Olympics. UA, however, is not a Rio Games official brand, but Nike is. In the past Nike has successfully elbowed its way into events like the Olympics despite official competing sponsors, like Adidas. It has become the kings of “ambush marketing”.
The practice is now a codified marketing strategy for global sporting events, with ambush marketing prevalent in nearly every event: the 2010 World Cup (Nike ambush Adidas) to London 2012 (Beats ambush Panasonic, Nike ambush everyone) to Euro 2016 (Nike beat Adidas again). One thing obviously in common with all of those events is Nike as the ambusher. But now in Rio, Nike has become the ambushee.
Out-thinking Nike
How is Under Armor out-ambushing Nike? Essentially by doing everything Nike did to every other athletic brand for 20 years until about 2005.
It currently uses “Rule Yourself” but “Fake It ’Til You Make It” should be Under Armor’s motto. The brand itself traces its big break to Hollywood, when filmmakers put UA logos on the jerseys and gear of athletes in hit football movies Any Given Sunday (1999) and The Replacements (2000). “The object was authenticity, and Under Armour delivered,” the brand says. The brand’s huge push in 2003 built around “Protect This House” was no “Just Do It” but it got the job done. Under Armour was slowly going from that “weird upside-down U’s” logo to that laughable upstart brand that actually thinks it can challenge Nike. Of course, today Nike is the only athletic brand bigger in the US than Under Armour.
In 2007, working under the slogan “Click Clack,” UA had an IPO and its first retail experience. Under Armour was signing up random teams like the Toronto Maple Leafs and damaged star athletes like Ray Lewis. And from the beginning, Under Armour recognized female athletes were an underserved market; at 10 years old, its women’s product sales were by far outpacing its men’s sales. The brand owed some of this success to tapping into female designers, years before and signing up under-the-radar female stars from the women’s US soccer and Olympic softball teams. By 2016, Nike maintained a lead in the headspace of the American consumer, but not much.
Under Armour’s recent ambush of Nike at the 2016 Rio Games is a page from Nike’s playbook. But it’s also thanks to loosening International Olympic Committee rules, especially Rule 40. Attention to Rule 40 started at the 2012 London Games, and the rule governing what ads can and cannot be broadcast during the Olympics has expanded since. Ironically, allowing Under Armour easier access to ambush Nike, came thanks to decades of Nike’s successful Olympic ambushing of other brands.
The Freitag brothers defy the stereotype that creative minds cannot be also commercial. In 1993, the two college graphic design students had an idea for a product. Twenty-one years later they have a flourishing company with retail locations all over the world, their own manufacturing plant, and hundreds of employees. Their products are displayed in the design museum in Switzerland and MoMA New York. They shared how their personal story informed their brand identity and the success of their business with the Berlin School of Creative Leadership.
They admit they didn’t have any real business skills or experience when they started. They just had creativity and a philosophy oriented from their story. The brothers grew up in environmentally-conscious Switzerland, paid attention to marketing ads at a young age, and lived in a student flat located right next to a freeway. Many Europeans biked to decrease their carbon footprint, but no one had a useful travel bag for biking cities in unpredictable weather conditions. The combination of these points led them to create bike-able bags made from recycled semitrailer truck tarpaulin.They started with one simple design: durable recycled one-of-a-kind items that were easy to carry on a bike.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnGrcCVG8TE
How has such specificity lead to wider success? Never mind the fact that they tapped into an unsaturated market at the right time. They have seen many competitors enter the market, but their business continues to expand with loyal customers and new products because they stay true to the personal philosophy that emerged from their story. Their products are always eco-conscious, always individual, always made from durable truck tarpaulin, and always bike-able. They shared how their personal story influences these products. From their visit to the Berlin School, here are three tips that other business brand managers can take away from the Freitag narrative-oriented philosophy:
1. Narrative gives you a firm foundation in which to root your brand identity and your business mission.
A series of life events led the Freitag brothers to a certain business mission. In their presentation they talk about having a holistic approach, meaning “to think from the beginning to the end and once back again,” to their company. To build a brand with a holistic perspective, you must know your values. Brand identity emerges from those values, but often the values are rooted in personal experiences.
For example, growing up in a green-minded atmosphere made the Freitag brothers value recycled materials and decreased car use. These values show themselves in Freitag’s product made from recycled materials for people who don’t drive cars. The brothers communicate that one’s product must be good, but business isn’t just about the product—“it’s about the world around the product.” And the world around the product is fixed in the story of creating the product.
In short: What happened? What do you value in light of what happened? What products exude those values? That’s your brand identity. That identity fuels the company mission.
2. Narrative provides ways to expand your product into other areas while staying true to your values.
Freitag started with bike messenger bags. Now they have several collections of bags with a wide range from functional to fashionable. They also sell other bike-able accessories, allow people to design their own bags online, and house a flagship store that lets customers view the freeway from the same location where the brothers created the first bag. In each expansion, Freitag adds value to their product line without sacrificing their product identity. New products are grounded in the Freitag story—different items all carrying a single identity. Knowing and staying true to a narrative allows a business to expand products (and perhaps revenues) without coming to market with items that don’t represent its values. (i.e. products that are prone to fail under the brand identity.)
3. Narrative gives customers a loyalty-inspiring caveat to your value proposition.
Freitag never discounts its products. Retail stores display signs that say, “Everything 50% Off (except Freitag).” The company has this luxury because its customers aren’t shopping for a price. They are shopping for a bag that they believe in. They buy Freitag because they believe in using recycled materials, in having one-of-a-kind products, in having a durable bag that will last for years. They are buying more than the bag: they are buying the story surrounding the bag. They believe this dynamic creates loyal customers who won’t run to competitors when their prices are lower.
Freitag continues to communicate its narrative and personal philosophy to employees and customers. The most loyal Freitag customers compete in design competitions, RSVP to tarpaulin-cutting parties, and make special visits to the flagship store. They dish out time and money for Freitag products because they know the story and they believe in the values that transpire from that story.
In college, the Freitag brothers were under the assumption that building up a brand meant one needed money, a business plan, a target group, an advertising campaign and so on. What they found is that (1) all of those things can’t grow a business that doesn’t have clear narrative-focused values and (2) all those details come to fruition much easier when they stick to their story.
The entire design concept of Hysteric Glamour is based on the 1960’s to 1970’s American cultures that influenced Kitamura during his childhood. Designer Kitamura works hard to design each piece using bright vivid colors while remaining pleasing to the eye. The inspiration of Hysteric Glamour clothing comes from intriguing aspects of American culture such as music, comics, pornography, automobiles, mass media such as package designs and neon lights.
It is a clothing line for ladies from the high teens to the mid-twenties. It is mainly known for its t-shirts and jeans. The designs are colorful and mixing the 70’s style with a taste of industrial mass media pop recognized in American comics. The brand covers a wide variety of clothing including t-shirts, jeans, cardigans, frilly tank tops, mini dresses, and many accessories.
Hysteric Glamour was launched in 1984 when Kitamura decided to bring his designs to the world. Serving as chief designer, company manager, and store developer, Kitamura has spent his entire career building the label Hysteric Glamour into the popular tag it is known as today. Since the beginning there have been over 51 stores opened in Japan alone.
The brand began launched outside of Japan in 1991 by opening a store in United Kingdom, and became a favourite of alternative rockstars like Mark Bolan. Stores have been popping up all around the world since. While the company is expanding quickly there are currently no stores located in the United States. This leaves many Americans desperate to find authentic Hysteric Glamour clothing in-turn driving up the prices.
In 2006 Hysteric Glamour launched a line of limited production clothing inspired by, and based on the designs of, American pop artist Andy Warhol. Some of the most popular items sold out on the first day. Warhol branded Hysteric items included jackets, jeans, t-shirts, and accessories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02TTN5ZUgn8
“The best way to communicate with any prospect, customer, or coworker based on their unique personality” claims the website. Really? How could it possibly know about my affinity for emails containing attachments or my dislike of hyperbole? Without actually searching through my emails, at least.
Crystal is a new service that analyzes publicly-available data sources to come up with personality profiles for coworkers and friends, and then recommends ways to communicate with them. If you pony up for the paid version of the service, Crystal will also offer real-time editing suggestions in emails, tailored to the recipient’s personality.
It was masterminded by Drew D’Agostino, the co-founder of management software company Attend.com. In the summer of 2014, he left that job to experiment with the possibilities of using online content to gauge people’s personalities.
“I naturally don’t have a high emotional intelligence, and I saw a lot of email miscommunication happening,” he says. “So I started building this algorithm to detect personality type. After a few months, it got to be kind of scary accurate.”
According to D’Agostino, the information that Crystal finds is essentially what you’d discover by Googling somebody—company bios, Amazon and Yelp reviews, social media profiles, and so on. Crystal weights certain sources more than others—a big block of text written on a review site gets more weight than a retweeted article, for example.
I was surprised at the low accuracy confidence of the score considering how much publicly-available text I write as part of my job. “For a writer with tons of articles, there’s actually a lot of noise in that. It’s stuff that’s not necessarily talking about yourself,” says D’Agostino. “That can throw it off, but also the algorithm isn’t perfected.”
“We see public data as the starting point,” he says.
The service falls in line with a growing number of attempt to use data to gauge people’s communication styles. Many of these come in the form of monitoring at work. One startup, for example, is creating “sociometric badges” that listen in on conversations.
In Crystal’s system, people can fall into 64 “personality buckets,” which borrow heavily from personality tests like DiSC. “There are different communication styles for different personality types, and those communication styles use email differently. Like with people who’d put an entire email in a subject line with no text—a lot of little things like that can be traced back to how a person’s wired,” says D’Agostino. Hence the feeling that Crystal must be delving into your email archives, even though it isn’t.
Though the service has only been available for a short amount of time, and hasn’t spent any money on marketing, it already has thousands of users. It’s especially popular among salespeople, recruiters, and managers.
For now, Crystal is focusing on email, but it will eventually branch out to other kinds of online communication. “The real key going forward is getting more of a recipient-focused experience. I want people to email me in the way I like to be emailed, and that’s not part of our product yet,” says D’Agostino
“Hi! I’m Michelle” says Phan as we enter Ipsy Open Studio in Santa Monica, California, home of the subscription company she co-founded four years ago. Sophie Torres is sitting at a table, neatly arranging brushes, bottles, and tubes in preparation for a video tutorial she is going to film about hard-to-pull-off hairstyles. She is a member of Ipsy’s extended family of online beauty influencers, who all use YouTube, Instagram, and other social media to build careers as beauty gurus.
Phan is the biggest guru of all. Since 2007, when she started making videos of herself applying makeup in her bedroom and uploading them to YouTube, she has amassed a following of almost 9 million subscribers who tune in to watch her dreamy-voiced instructions on everything from “grunge beauty” to how to achieve the Daenerys Targaryen look from Game of Thrones. Now, through Ipsy, she’s helping others follow in her footsteps—last May, Ipsy opened this 10,000-square-foot studio, complete with 360-degree cameras, state-of-the-art lighting, and elaborate props, for its network of beauty vloggers to shoot their videos.
The standard of beauty, the idea of beauty, is changing. The one-size-fits-all look no longer really exists.
Torres seems a little flustered by the sudden appearance of the 28-year-old Phan and apologizes for not wearing any makeup. Phan, who’s dressed in a simple black turtleneck dress and colorful Nikes, smiles warmly. “It’s fine. We don’t judge here. I don’t have any makeup on either.”
It’s true. But though there is nary a hint of kohl or foundation on Phan’s porcelain complexion, it’s clear she takes beauty very seriously. Phan has written a book and is developing a premium video network and music label, but Ipsy demands most of her attention—and brings in the most money. The subscription service works in much the same way as rival Birchbox, sending out a set of personalized beauty goodies each month in an ever-changing set of “Glam Bags.” Ipsy now boasts more than 1.5 million subscribers (who pay $10 a month for the bags), surpassing Birchbox at just over a million. In the fall, Ipsy raised $100 million in Series B funding from the high-profile firms TPG Growth and Sherpa Capital, valuing the company at a reported $800 million. Since then, Phan and her partners, CEO Marcelo Camberos and president Jennifer Goldfarb, have been busy. They bought back her two-year-old cosmetics line, Em, from L’Oréal, to reassert creative control and fully profit from its sales. But their ambition is much more far-reaching. While Birchbox takes in a reported 35% of its revenue from sales of full-size beauty products online and in flagship stores, Ipsy remains focused on using its community to drive subscriptions. Its bet: that as the cosmetics industry grows ever more decentralized, Ipsy will emerge as the go-to source for beauty advice and intelligence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFq5caWVOrU
To realize this, Ipsy is investing heavily into building up its already 10,000-person-strong network of amateur beauty vloggers, such as Torres. These content creators aren’t bound by a stringent contract. “They just have to make a few videos a month that are Ipsy related; the rest is up to them,” Phan says. Together with Ipsy’s in-house stylists, they generate 300 million social media impressions a month for the company. Ipsy gets exposure (it has so far done very little paid advertising) and more views of its ad-embedded YouTube content. In exchange, it gives these vloggers access to the Open Studio, mentoring, networking, and publicity opportunities, and special tools, such as a mobile app that helps with beauty giveaways.
Ipsy’s plan reflects where the cosmetics industry is heading. No longer do many women (particularly millennials) get their makeup tips at the department-store MAC counter or from a celebrity spokesperson. Rather, they head to the Internet and binge-watch DIY videos posted by people like Phan and Karen O, one of Ipsy’s in-house stylists. The fact that these new voices of authority are both diverse and relatable makes them invaluable marketing tools for brands. One recent study by Defy Media found that more than 60% of 13- to 24-year-olds said they would try a product suggested by a YouTuber. “The standard of beauty, the idea of beauty, is changing,” says Phan. “The one-size-fits-all look no longer really exists in this new paradigm.”
The YouTube-wrought democratization of beauty has also allowed smaller makeup lines, which lack the marketing budgets of bigger competitors, to break through. Researchers at the Kline Group estimate that sales of indie cosmetics brands grew by 19.6% from 2013 to 2014 (though they still represent just 7.3% of the total market). NYX, a Los Angeles–based cosmetics company now owned by L’Oréal, skyrocketed to $100 million in sales in 2014, thanks largely to beauty influencers who participated in NYX’s annual video contest.
Given this new reality, major cosmetics brands are aggressively courting social media stars. Smashbox has opened its photo studios to vloggers who create “Made at Smashbox” videos. And the campaign for Garnier’s Fructis Full and Plush hair-care line last year was put entirely in the hands of 100 vloggers; the resulting YouTube videos received more than 3 million views. “We get complaints if we launch a product and it’s not reviewed by key vloggers,” says Beth DiNardo, Smashbox’s global general manager.
For companies unaccustomed to the strange new world of social media celebrity, Ipsy serves as a guide, helping to get their products not only out to subscribers but also into the right tutorials. In return, Ipsy gets its Glam Bag products for free. “Part of our proposition to brands is ‘We will give you an amazing marketing campaign and an amazing experience with our community,’ ” explains Goldfarb. Ipsy also provides brands with a detailed report on their products based on feedback from subscribers. According to Goldfarb, there are no plans to charge for this intelligence, but it helps the company attract “the best of the best” beauty companies, from more established brands such as Urban Decay to up-and-comers like the two-year-old Trust Fund Beauty.
But even with its army of vloggers, Ipsy faces a stiff challenge: Consumers may be getting their beauty tips online, but most still buy their products in brick-and-mortar stores. According to Shannon Romanowski, senior beauty analyst at Mintel, less than 5% of women who are 18 and older and online use subscription services like Ipsy and Birchbox. “Although the beauty subscription model is a growing trend, beauty tends to be an in-store purchase,” she says.
Ipsy’s response is to keep growing its community. The company’s latest effort is hosting a series of Generation Beauty conferences—a Comic Con of sorts for beauty lovers. In 2016, there will be four events in cities including San Francisco, up from two last year. “The one we just had in New York, we had 850 creators, plus 3,000 people paying $150 each to attend, plus all these brands,” says Camberos.
At the heart of Ipsy’s community, of course, is Phan, whom Camberos calls its “soul.” Although she’s become fluent in MBA–speak, chatting easily about new “business paradigms,” she still uploads a video every week and is Ipsy’s primary source of trendsetting ideas. As we talk, she opens up a notepad and starts absentmindedly sketching a pair of enormous, seductive eyes with long lashes. “I think this will be the design of a new bag,” she says, holding it up like a mask in front of her face. “If this was the Glam Bag, you could take a selfie like this and just have fun with it.”
This article was first published in Fast Company.
Michael Dubin has a sense of humour. He wrote, produced, and starred in one of the most viral YouTube videos that’s ever been posted, a 2012 ad for his company, Dollar Shave Club. In it, he brings the viewer on a hilarious tour of his warehouse to explain why “our blades are f**king great.”
A flood of visitors crashed his company’s servers 90 minutes after the video went live. It has been watched more than 22 million times. That video, and the story of its creation, has become entrepreneurial folklore. Today, his business is the second-largest men’s razor brand in America, topped only by Gillette.
Here, in a recent interview, he describes how it all started:
“The beginning of the story is about solving a problem for guys. And the problem that we’re solving at the very basic level, and that we have been very focused on for the last couple years, has been that razors are really expensive in the store. It’s a frustrating experience to go and buy them. You have to drive there. You have to park your car. You have to find the razor fortress. It’s always locked. You have to find the guy with the key. He’s always doing something else that he doesn’t want to be helpful. We actually just launched a bunch of TV commercials set in the store that kind of have some fun with that frustrating experience. They’re doing really well for us.
I launched a beta site in 2011, and I ran that for about eight months. I ran it from my apartment—it was totally bootstrapped—proving out the concept before going out to get some investment. And so I kind of funneled the early dollars from the beta phase into the production of the original video, which I used as a tool to help raise money.
Ultimately we closed our angel round in January of 2012, and that was $100,000 from an angel in L.A. And then we re-launched the site in March of 2012. We closed a million-dollar seed round on March 6th, 2012, which was coincidentally the same day that we launched the video.
The first couple days of that were terrifying. The site crashed because of the traffic, and the video had gone viral, and we ran out of inventory in the first six hours. And I mean, you know, I blocked a lot of that out because it was a very trying, difficult time to get through. You work so hard for years on this idea that everybody has told you is a terrible idea, and suddenly you’re about to prove them all wrong, and your wildest dreams turn into your worst nightmare.
And so that was an intense time. A lot of label-printing at the office, driving the labels down to the warehouse, which was a very small warehouse, not equipped for any commerce operation. I mean, literally there were days when I was taking the trash bags—we were printing out thousands of labels a day, and we were putting them into trash bags because that was the only thing that could carry them. And we were hurling them over the fence at night for the people to pick up the next morning and slap on the packages.
This was a fulfillment house that had never done any kind of mail order e-commerce or anything. They were doing things like wrapping up soap bars and putting them back in boxes for wholesale, or like sticking windshield wiper washer fluid pellets into tubes and putting it back on the truck. They were not experienced fulfilling customized e-commerce orders.
We did $4 million in revenue in 2012. We did $19 million in 2013. And we did $65 million in 2014. And we’re now on a 100-million-dollar-plus annualized run rate. We did $8.5 million in revenue in December of 2014. I would say that that was an intense period for hiring. We brought on a lot of great talent in the very early days that are still with us, all of them are still with us, and all in service of solving that kind of key problem.
I spent about $4,500 on the first video. I wrote it in a day. It was directed by a friend of mine who I had studied improv comedy with in New York when I lived there for about eight years. When I was working during the day at Time, I was studying improv at night along with other things, taking some business classes, et cetera.
Somehow I’ve become known as a standup comic. That is not the case. I was never a professional comedian or actor. Maybe you can clarify that. But it’s sort of become this urban legend that I was a standup comic. I studied improv with a woman named Lucia Aniello, who became a friend, and she just happened to move to L.A. like two weeks before. And I said, ‘Hey, I’m launching this business and I want to launch this video. I want to film this video. Can you do it?’ And she did it for next to nothing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FOae1V1-Xg
And all that money basically went into production, and we probably shot it in about eight hours in the original warehouse in Gardena, California, where we were doing all the fulfillment at that time. So I remember leaving that shoot day and thinking to myself, ‘That was good. We did good work today.’ And then I got on a plane to go home for something, I forget what it was.
I had no expectation for how the video would do. I knew when I saw it that it was good, and It was a piece of work that I was proud of. It was funny, and it told the story really well. There’s a lot of funny videos on the Internet. And this one had a real purpose and a real story. And the reason it hit emotional pay-dirt for people was because there was an enormous amount of frustration. And finally here’s something that somebody’s doing about this really big problem. And we also created this piece of social content that was very sharable. Guys talk about how expensive razors are, and we gave them a piece of content that said, “Hey, remember this? We were just talking about this. Check this out. And it’s really funny.” So it went much more viral than I would have expected. And we would have planned a lot differently server-wise, inventory-wise, if we had known. It was a crazy time.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbtB3ta-Qco
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCjCI-4U81U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbKz9-hJuYY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD72gghdqtU
Update, 19 July 2016
Unilever acquires Dollar Shave Club for $1billion
Unilever is paying $1 billion in cash for the Santa Monica-based business. Dollar Shave Club founder and CEO Michael Dubin will continue to run the company, which will operate its direct-to-consumer razor business as an independent entity. The acquisition should help Dollar Shave Club expand faster into new geographies (it’s currently in three countries), and significantly improve its distribution abilities in existing markets.
“DSC couldn’t be happier to have the world’s most innovative and progressive consumer-product company in our corner,” Dubin said in a prepared statement. “We have long admired Unilever’s purpose-driven business leadership and its category expertise is unmatched. We are excited to be part of the family.”
Dollar Shave Club had raised over $160 million in venture capital funding, most recently last November at a $539 million valuation. Its seed round of funding was led by Forerunner Ventures, its Series A and Series B rounds were led by Venrock, while Technology Crossover Ventures led its two subsequent rounds.