Answers to your questions.
Hope you all had a nice weekend.
We’ll be back to regular programming tomorrow.
I have a question for our Queen! As a little baby brand I feel like I'm constantly reading how fucked DTC and CPG brands are now and nothing is like it used to be. It's all very doom and gloom. If you were advising a baby brand with no money what would recommend the focus should be on to gain traction.
When you say “how fucked up” I’m assuming you mean the fundraising environment, competition, and the general blandness of the state of marketing. My first suggestion is to get off of Instagram and TikTok for new ideas. You know what the lessons are there — find good creators, build relationships with them, figure out how to consistently create excellent content in-house. I suggest you get into a library or some magazine archives to look outside of DTC marketing. Try to make work that you could imagine sharing with friends… if you wouldn’t share it or be impressed by it, why would anyone else? Vacation Sunscreen built a wacky world of Club Med stuck in the ‘80s, James Veloria posts new arrivals on their Stories every day and photos of their store consistently, Dieux sticks to using biblical/ethereal imagery and language in their copy, Graza (consider this a truce) sticks to their brand’s signature green without being monotonous by changing up the fonts on their posts and gifting EVERYONE…. they literally got that stuff in everyone’s kitchens.
Whether it’s posting every single day, or investing time into image research, or sending your product to a ton of people, all of these things take a lot of effort. Starting a business isn’t easy — if it was, everyone would do it. You also have to tell me why I should take out my credit card and buy your product. Everyone is trying to sell me shit, and education is so effective when done well.
It’s not actually true everyone’s fucked. If you’re comparing yourself to brands who exploded in the early 2010’s because they relied on super cheap Facebook CACs, and lots of VC funding… yeah, you’re not going to get that again.
Thoughts on the current state of retail in NY? And the future of Dimes Square?
Retail in NY: I don’t love all of the liquor and weed stores appearing everywhere. I also don’t like the weird short-term corporate pop-ups like the Kellogg’s store in Union Square or the Museum of Ice Cream or touristy shit like that. I’ve written about department stores here. That being said, I see stores like Kalimera, or the new Glossier store, or Blue In Green, or C.O. Bigelow (giving you a range here) and I see really excellent retail experiences. So I think it’s possible to succeed, but you need a heavy amount of emotion and detail oriented people to keep a store alive in a city that’s so demanding of novelty.
Dimes Square: