How A Small Clothing Brand Got Famous And Acquired Without Instagram
How A Small Clothing Brand Got Famous And Acquired Without Instagram
How we scaled to 250 retailers worldwide and got acquired before the golden marketing age of Facebook.
Photo by Brandon Pavan.
My first business was built before the golden age of Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. ⠀⠀
The best marketing channels we had at the time for our business were music festivals and magazines. ⠀
Because music festivals come around only 1x per year and you can’t change a magazine ad once it’s printed, our hands were forced in making our content pretty darn exciting. ⠀
We had one shot at making our content convert, otherwise, we’d have to wait a whole year until we had another chance.
We didn’t want to just slap a picture of our clothing on an ad, give a discount code and direct people to a link to shop. Everyone else was doing that. ⠀⠀
No, we were a small business that no one knew, so we needed to create content that would grab people’s attention. ⠀
To do that, we had to tell a story. We had to entertain the hell out of our audience even in the context of a flat, magazine ad. ⠀
Forgive our clothing — I was 19 and it was the early 2000’s. Photo by Brandon Pavan.
We released a series of ads that told the story of a bank robbery gone wrong (our company was called BANK Clothing after all).⠀
Our models wore our clothing throughout their robbery, their escape, while they were rolling in their money at the hotel, hitchhiking between states, and when they got caught by the cops.
One was a tattletale, and the other bought a fur coat as soon as they got their hands on the money. ⠀
We crafted our content with the focus of getting people’s attention, tying every content release to an existing story so that people would remember us even with a month between each ad. ⠀
It worked like a charm.
We became a household name, celebrities wore our hoodies on TV and in magazines, we ended up in 250 retailers worldwide, and we sold the company within 3 years.
Create Content Like It’s Your Only Shot
I’ve had over a decade now to think through what made our ad campaign so successful back in 2008 when we had no audience and only our personal MySpaces to blast our brand on (we didn’t use MySpace for business back then, we thought it was cheesy — who knows what 20-year-old me was thinking).
What I’ve come to realize is that our marketing content was so successful because we treated it like it was our only shot.
We didn’t create content for the sake of broadcasting, we rose to the occasion and created content as if it was our only opportunity at making an impression and engaging our audience.
Brands today have a lot of trouble creating compelling content for their business.
I think it’s because they’re overwhelmed by the quantity of content that they need to produce, leaving them with little brainpower to obsess over quality.
Because social media channels allow you to post for free, there’s no skin in the game for small businesses to contemplate their next wave of marketing content with a $2,000 ad invoice hanging over their head.
There’s no urgency to bring out the big guns, there’s no chance that you can screw it up and therefore, not enough brands rise to the occasion.
Here’s the easiest thing you can do to create content that converts —
Give it the thoughtfulness of a permanent print in a world where content is temporary, forgettable, and short.
Stand out from the noise by choosing not to contribute to the noise. Tell a long-form story, be funny when everyone else is being serious, go deep in an industry where everyone else is going wide.
Surprise people, entertain them, be thoughtful. Embrace your inner Don Draper and create content like everything’s on the line.
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