Lessons from building $1b worth of brands. | Willow & Blake

I’ve been building brands for 20 years.

I’ve (along with my team) played a heavy hand in developing a haircare brand that sold for $350m and a tanning company that sold for $450m. I’ve created campaigns for a menstrual care brand that exited for $140m and scaled my own skincare brand to a $100m valuation. That’s just four brands out of the hundreds that I’ve built alongside the amazing founders, their teams and our team of strategists and creatives right here at Willow & Blake.

Growing a brand is not a one person project. Growing a brand by yourself is like trying to sail The Drake Passage with a crew of one. It’s a never ending saga with more twists and turns than a telenovela. Building a team of advisors and team members around you is key, and inlieu of people in the early days when resources are limited, reading articles like this can help.

After 20 years, I’ve seen it all. So, what does it take to grow something from nothing and sell it for 9-figures? And more importantly, is that the right thing for everyone? The answer I’ve learned is that no, it’s not. Building to keep and building to sell require very different strategies, but there are four tips that apply to everyone, whether you want to scale and sell or keep things deliberately smaller (and often more profitable).

Lesson 1: When you say yes to something, you say no to something else.

I call it shiny thing syndrome. Others call it FOMO. At the end of the day, every green light you give is a red light somewhere else in the business. Unfortunately, you usually don’t see it until you’re about to drive right through it.

It may be that a new retailer can take your team's eye off improving profitability, jeopardising a capital raise. Or the new product you’re launching may mean unsavoury inventory holdings of other skus, the result of which rears its ugly head two years later. Or perhaps the sale you run out of fear gives you a nice little cash boost, but means that the entire cohort of customers resist buying at full price again ultimately driving your CAC up.

There are consequences to every decision you make. Thinking long term and getting second opinions from people who have done it before is important. Be strategic. Be clear. Be consistent.

Lesson 2: Brand pays dividends.

Investing in brand building will almost always improve your performance marketing metrics, NPS and CRM results. Performance marketing channels will run out of steam unless you invest in building your brand and developing content that is not about product. This is a fact. It is math. Anyone who tells you otherwise probably owns a performance marketing agency. Am I biased because I own a branding agency? I’d like to think I am not as I ran every experiment under the sun in my 11 year tenure as Chief Marketing Officer at frank body. My sole goal was to get to the best outcome, meaning that even I test and learn with performance channels at the sacrifice of brand. I paid for it later.

Performance marketing is HUGELY beneficial to businesses, but it is not the foundations on which legacy brands that sell for 10x multiples are built upon. You don’t IPO a company because it’s got a good ad set on Meta.

A brand that has loyalty, that has clout, that has something so valuable but intangible beyond product is the type of business that VCs and strategics want to get their hands on. AND it will always make your performance metrics work harder. It’s a win-win.

Lesson 3: Risk it for the biscuit.

Being calculated and clear in your decision making doesn’t mean being risk-averse.

As Culture Kings founder Simon Beard put it, “One of the best ways to find the right answer is to find the wrong ones first.”

Staying small out of fear, being indecisive, never trying anything new: they are all quick fire ways to never get where you want to go.

The best time to start taking those risks? Now.

Lesson 4: Price positioning is key.

Often overlooked by those in the brand, but literally scrutinized by the customer, I have never understood the complete ambivalence some founders and marketers have toward pricing strategies. They pluck a figure out of thin air forgetting that those little numbers hold so much weight; from where our wallet can stretch to, to what the figure conveys about status, to the future gross margin battles you may have within the business.

After brand and alongside product quality, price is the ultimate decider if your business lives or dies.

If you need help refining your brand strategy, positioning or creative assets, we’d love to chat. The team at Willow & Blake operate at the intersection of creative thinking and commercial acumen. We love building brands of all shapes and sizes.