S06.EP20 - From Kickstarter to Cult Brand w/ Brandon Kim, Brevitē

0:28We want to build a brand that we're proud of. channel and that's worked out really well.

0:34Hello and welcome to Just Branding, the only podcast dedicated to helping designers and entrepreneurs grow brands. Here are your hosts, Jacob Cass and Matt Davies. Hello everybody and welcome to Just Branding. This time we're going inside the story of how a scrappy Kickstarter project has become one of the most beloved creative brands in its category. Our guest is Brandon Kim, co-founder of Brevity, the Brooklyn based company behind a new generation of camera bags built for photographers, creators and everyday explorers. And in a market dominated by legacy players with really deep pockets, Brandon and his team bootstrap their way to success by combining smart strategy, clever positioning, thoughtful design, and genuine community building.

1:31And so we're going to unpack all of that, how they broke into a crowded category with no outside funding, and how they've built a brand that resonates with creatives, and how they're now evolving brevity from product to lifestyle. So if you're in brand building, whether you're building a D2C brand or a leading kind of looking to challenge into any kind of category, this is a podcast for you. This one's going to be packed with lessons to you, for you. Brandon, I'm talking too much. Welcome to our show. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. This is really exciting. I've been listening to the podcast for a while now, so it's fun to be on like the other side of it all.

2:14uh very interesting yeah hopefully interesting good not interesting disastrous um you know letting you down and all that seeing seeing behind the curtain but no no on it in all honestly i think you reached out to me to a while ago we've been looking at the brand and we're just super thrilled to really get the inside track from you because it's tough out there right it's really tough to to build a brand to the level you have so perhaps we can start with that like you know you launched into this really saturated category. So I guess, you know, it would be good to know what gave you the confidence to kind of do that, you know, to find that space for this new brand.

2:53Oh, yeah. I mean, we didn't know anything going into it. It was pure, like, you know, it was pure, like, ignorant bliss. But we were in college. We were students. My brother was going abroad to Hong Kong for a semester abroad. And he was a photographer. And he needed a bag that would hold both of his photography gear and his normal everyday stuff and didn't look like a target on his back, right? Like he was carrying thousands of dollars a year. And oddly enough, at that time, like 2014, 2015, there was actually really no solutions on the market. There was like these like large, bulky black camera backpacks that existed.

3:32And so I took a look at that and I was like, well, I think we can design this. And we suddenly started talking to photographers and we were like, you know, doing a bunch of these interviews and we figured out that, hey, there was a real need in the market for a camera bag that didn't look like a camera bag. And that kind of like really kicked off the journey. And then kind of over the course of the next like four or five years, we learned how the market worked. We kind of iterated on our product over and over and over. So we reached kind of this like the pinnacle, right? we kind of found our main hero product, which was the jumper.

4:09It's this camera bag. It doesn't look like a camera bag. It's like really well made. And it's just like all the devils are in the details of that bag. You know, over time that like, it kind of ended up becoming a category defining bag, which was an interesting thing to design. Yeah, it's a beautiful, beautiful product. It's got so many cool features as well. Like, as you say, it's the detail, right? I just love the flaps that open up look super interesting. And then also like the fact there's something that in bags, right? Because I travel a lot, right? And I never buy a backpack now that doesn't have, you know, that little strap that goes round.

4:45I don't even know what the technical term is, but it's like underneath the bits that go over your shoulders. There's another strap that runs horizontally across the back and you can put it over your suitcase, right? So you can put it through your suitcase handle. Mate, that is a game changer. If anyone is out there who has not got that, get that. and definitely check out the jumper backpack because it's all on there. You've got to love luggage pass-throughs. There you go. Cool. So I love that. So it was born out of a need, a gap in the market through, you know, basically you or your brother at least being a customer of this and then realizing there wasn't something out there.

5:21But I know you did some kind of Kickstarter campaign. How did that kind of go? And why did you sort of go down that route or route if you're in the US? Yeah, it was kind of the days where Kickstarter was at its genesis or kind of just kind of passed. Like suddenly people were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars and it was coming into vogue. And so we had no money. So we were like, we're students. We started this thing with like 200 bucks, right? It was like, you know, kind of like your beer and pizza money, right? And it was a very interesting thing. We spent a year prepping for the campaign, building prototypes, putting together some sort of marketing strategy, trying to understand even what it was, like brand was.

6:05And we ended up raising a little over$38 ,000 USD, which was a lot of money for us. It allowed us to place the first order for the PO, the purchase order. And it just continued. Customers still wanted it afterwards. And so for many years, myself and my brothers, my two brothers, we continue to run this company, right? We ran it on the side for many years. We were working full-time jobs. We were in grad school. We were doing other things. And we joined every single school incubator we could or like even like other kind of company incubators. We went through six of those. Oh, wow. We won a bunch of business plan competitions.

6:45So we funded it through that. We did a second Kickstarter and then we just kind of reinvested cash flow. and so after about four years of running it we all came on full-time back in 2018 and it's kind of we were like we'll give it one year right and after one year if we gave it two years and two years turned into three years and now we're all these years in and uh you know still at it all right it's nice and you said you you were trying to get your head around what brand was how do you see brand and the brevity brand like sort of talk me through that evolution to where you're at today totally totally i think brand right like it's a few different pieces coming into play it's it's kind of this like low and slow community stuff like that doesn't scale that you you rev up and you just kind of do consistently over years right really low and slow and like that always gets mixed up with like all the cac activities right like you're like it totally gets brushed under the rug and like nobody wants to look at that but actually we think that that stuff's really important and then you have your branding guide and things like that which like can get very over leveraged is what we've found with time we ended up having putting together branding guidelines maybe in like 2020 that were beautiful but ultimately were difficult to scale with and like we found maybe really strong imagery and kind of cohesiveness has gone much further for us now this day and age and then really like because we're in physical product really good product, right?

8:14And like standing by that promise of the really good products. Like I'm a product designer by trade. So going through that, kind of like that intimacy of what it is, and then creating products that we feel comfortable selling to at a price point and a quality to friends and family. Like that is literally how we approach it. We're like, is this a$150 backpack, which is a lot for a backpack for most people. Like, do we feel comfortable telling our friends? Yes, you should buy this for$150 because this is actually what it's worth. That was a fantastic barometer. And we found like when we do all of those cohesively together with like a touch of storytelling, it goes really well for brand.

8:56Nice. Brandon, Jacob here. I had a question for you because you mentioned product designer and I was going to ask about your history because to come into this without any, you know, brand knowledge you mentioned, how did you actually bring it to life like what's the history behind your experience of product design and so forth I think I was brought into this world to build product like honest to god and I'm a problem solver I studied like philosophy and then I went to grad school for industrial design and so like not normal things you think of but they're actually just problem solving activities it's not that much different from business as well they're all just these problem solving activities and so I happened to just, you know, we found the problem and then you're just searching for a solution.

9:37And then suddenly you're like, oh, wait a second. There is like an entire ecosystem, entire supply chain that allows you to like produce this sample, this import it, ship it out. And then over time, we've been very much just iterating on the brand. So all my product experience after design school has been with the brand, which has been interesting, right? Because now I know way too much about backpacks, but it's been kind of holistic because there's multiple sides of products. You have the product design. You also have the whole development and supply chain backend. And oftentimes designers get kind of caught in their lane.

10:13But I think the best thing was to really see holistically how everything works. And so you can understand how something's sewn, why that's difficult for the sewer to sew that. Right. And like I've sewn my own bags. I've learned how to sew my own bags and all that. kind of like learning the deep craft of what you're doing is just kind of is really the heart of it all i love that and in product design right it's interesting because i i leverage a lot of thinking from product product design like design thinking kind of approaches to things and one of the things that i find you know fascinating is if you do brand properly it has a lot of similarities with product design except you're not necessarily going as far as to produce a product because usually the products are in play, right?

10:57So for example, one of the key areas is like knowing your customer, knowing the problems the customer might have, understanding how you're going to begin to solve them. If you do that, if you have an understanding of that, you basically have value that you can put out there. Yes, one expression is the products, but the other expression is the story you tell, which you've hinted at and the sort of the positioning of that. And the thing I like about your brand is that you settled very clearly on a target market, it right which was photographers so these are backpacks specifically for photographers with all the challenges that photographers have which you've hinted at the higher you know high expense equipment traveling stuff but not just that like looking at the product range it's like you're solving for looks to me like easy access to to the camera so that if i guess if i'm backpacking around i'm like oh there's a there's a monkey swinging through the cheese i can kind of quickly grab my camera and it's there and and you know it's comfortable there's all those ergonomic things so it's it's a fascinating sort of scenario because you've not just kind of entered the market and tried to capture the whole market like the bag market right you've you've gone in and you've niched into a specific audience type how have you found that like you said you talked to a lot of photographers did you profile them or was it quite niche for you know just photographers or was it a specific type of photographer that you were trying to target that's a great question niches hold riches is kind of what we were told early on and it's totally true if you go niche your ads work right your brand works who you speak to works like if you're not speaking to like a very specific person you're speaking to nobody literally and that is like a very stressful thing to go through and we've we've totally swayed in the brand and we've been like oh what would happen if we go broader and what would happen if we go tighter we've always found that things are better when we go tighter generally no i didn't niche down too much right you kind of want like a fairly broad understanding.

12:49I find when you do this qualitative research, you're kind of, you speak to a range of photographers and you're just looking for like patterns, right? People say the same things. And after like four or five conversations, you're like, there's some pattern here. There's kind of like something you can pick up on after 10, you guaranteed got answers. I did like 50 and like, there was like, it was super early on. So we didn't know. So we're like, all right, well, let's just talk to people. Let's figure it out. And it very clearly, it set the foundation for what we're doing. The features that people are looking for have not changed, right?

13:22In 10 years, right? The difference is maybe people aren't carrying large, large lenses anymore. They're carrying drones, small drones, which is very different. Or now everything's gone from DSLRs, these kind of mirrorless cameras, small form factor, but they still kind of have these medium sized lenses and things like that. So not too much has changed, but for anybody who's starting and i'm sure you guys see this in your practice like when there's a clearly defined niche with a really clearly defined problem right like not even maybe even the end user but like there's like there's a there's some problem there that somebody is really like struggling with right then then you got a brand then you got like you can you got your product you can you can really cater to it you can create something visual that people are attracted to and identify to right because i I mean, I always say this to folks, but like, why do we get paid, right?

14:15We get paid for adding value, right? And value often comes when you're solving somebody's problem, which is exactly what you're talking about there. Like you're producing products that solves challenges and is for that niche, for that particular target market. I just think there's so much in there of value that you just said. One thing I wanted to pull out was this idea of talking to customers, right? I meet so many entrepreneurs and business owners who don't talk to their own customers, right? It's the most bizarre thing that I find. Wow. They'll be like, oh, yeah, well, our research department will look into that.

14:48It's like, mate, I get that you've got a research department, but you're the CEO. You should get out there because you need to get your finger on the pulse. You need to understand the market, your customers. Don't rely on others. Don't put layers between you and the customer. I think it was Peter Drucker, the famous old-school management consultant, who once said, the purpose of a business is to create a customer. right so if you're the leader of that business you know you need to understand how and why the business is creating customers if you're gonna last the test of time so everything you said there was amazing but i did have one follow-up question which is you also mentioned in your comment that you know the trends in the market are changing right the tech that people are carrying around with them is changing how do you keep abreast of that do you continue to talk to people or is your brother still in in the photography game like how are you kind of keeping up with the trends i guess yeah it's that's actually a great question and a difficult one i i think we felt we certainly have like fallen i don't like the word victim but like victim to not talking to customers enough you can digital business is like there's a disconnect like thousands of people are coming through your door but you don't see them it's all data points and so there's a few ways we've gotten around that we all attend all of our trade shows now and like we make sure we work the booths which we love doing And like, you know, before when we used to work those booths, people would come up to us and be like, who are you?

16:11Like, what is this? Like, why does it matter? And now we go to the trade shows. And the last one we were at, I think our bag was the most common camera bag I saw at that show. That was, it was crazy. It outpaced all of our competition. I was like, what is this? And then now we do a few things like we maintain a calendar in a post-purchase flow. So we'll try to take a few meetings every week with customers, chat with them, kind of keep on kind of hearing those patterns. I maintain like my own list of customers that I consistently like send surveys and ask questions to, which has been brilliant, right?

16:50For anybody, like you don't need to be like bombarding your post-purchase customer, right? You just need to find a group of people like who care to give feedback and like opt into that process with you. and you can be very iterative with it. And so that has been certainly transformational in our process because then we can go out very quickly to a group of willing people who are willing to give us really clean feedback. And I totally empathize with seeing other business owners who don't do that. They just don't think to do that. And so suddenly you're making decisions blind, which is one of the most dangerous things.

17:28right like hunches and like your gut intuition is a really good thing especially as a founder but it doesn't mean you're always correct and like you might find patterns where there aren't patterns right what's that hunch based on right if you're talking to customers and you're getting vibes off of them then you know your hunch and intuition can kind of sink in with that uh it's it's interesting i think we would call that little niche group like in our world we call that like brand loyalists right these are people that love you they love your brand they may be been with you for a while they're the ones that you want to really keep on side you want to keep in with because they're seeing the value and will tell you as well and give you a little bit of grace you know to make some adjustments if necessary.

18:07One story that came to my mind is I think you have it over in the US there's well I think you call it Walgreens boots right Walgreens they took over boots here in the UK and boots are like a chemist from like hundreds of years ago they were in Nottingham where I used to live and I did a bit of business with them back in the day and their head office was in the center of well near the center of nottingham massive complex as you can imagine really labs and tests and like loads of offices with people in them and stuff anyway really really interesting but one of the cool things that they did was because they were retail store yes they developed a lot of kind of chemist and boutique kind of clinical product but in the head office but they also had all these around the uk they're like national right and what they did was they had this thing because coming up to christmas they called it their i I think it was called the golden quarter or golden month or something like this.

18:59It's basically they made most of their money through the year in the build up to Christmas. And the stores get overrun, okay, with like customers and it's so packed just before Christmas. I don't know how long they've been doing it for, but it's a really smart move. They basically said to all their office workers in the central office, right, in December, or I think it might be November or December, you have to spend a certain amount of time, might have been a week, I can't remember the exact details, in-store, right? Like supporting the store. You're going to apply to the store. The store manager will take you in.

19:31They'll put you somewhere suitable in the store, but basically you're supporting the store. Now, why I thought that was so smart is that, therefore, you get loads of people that often never see a customer. At least once a year, they're going to be in front of customers. Most of them will be serving on the tills and stuff, in the store, in the environment where the products ultimately will go to be sold. Such a smart move. And I think that's one of the reasons Boots is successful, because they're developing products that they know people will love and appreciate. So just a little tidbit there to get out like you were saying, like talk to those customers, speak to them, get in front of them to shape your gut instinct.

20:06What do you think, Jacob? I was going to follow up with Brandon about how he implemented the feedback. It's one thing to listen to your customers, talk to them, but with a product, right? Like you've got a product existing and it's like a slow process to iterate and get launched and marketed and all of that. So what's that process look like for you once you have that feedback? How are you iterating? That was a great story. So we have a lot of product going at any given point, right? Like, you know, we also have like a lot of brand campaigns and things happening like that, which we can get feedback for.

20:36But, you know, I like to do it more on the product end or the brand end of things, things that are kind of slower and heavier. you're kind of checking in at every point of the development right so like from idea genesis all the way out to like you have something that like you can show them something that's near final sometimes we're sending bags out to people letting them try them all of our bags we're trying the whole way through so we have our team members who are like they're wearing them out and about and giving us feedback and that right there kind of all those like coming together all those pieces that triangle creates a real-time feedback loop that is actionable, right?

21:14Like bags take maybe nine to 18 months to make, right? From a design perspective. So they're really long development cycles to do it, right? Some people are really fast. You can whip them out in like six months if you really want to try, but I think to do it really well, it takes a long time. So you just have to have like a lot of balls up in the air and you have to be getting a lot of feedback constantly in real time on those. And then, you know, for us, if we can get our hit rate to increase by, you know, 20%, that's a huge win, right? So like, not every product is going to be a winner. You know, we have like, statistically, we know, like one in this many will hit.

21:51But if we can increase those odds, then, you know, everything's worth it.

22:04Yeah, the co-creation and that feedback loop, as you mentioned, is so important to not just have this aha moment, but to actually get that feedback, see how it works and iterate and improve. All right. I was going to ask about the values in terms of your inside your company and also externally. Do you have any values that you really hold true? So we did this big, long exercise with them. I don't know if you guys ever heard of systems dynamics. It came out of MIT back in like the 80s or so. And we ended up going through a big, long exercise with a family member of ours who practices systems dynamics.

22:44And so out of that came our purpose, our mission, our core values and our vision. And so we do have core values we live by. And I have to admit, we've really embodied them. One of them is we're serious about play. I think that's very important to us. Right. We want to have fun in what we do. I run this company with my two brothers. We're a family business. We have a whole team. And so we want to run an empathetic organization and one that people want to stay at for years. And we've had people stay for years with us. Like, you know, we've had some team members who've been with us for over five years, which is wild, right?

23:18That was like right as we started hiring people. Another one is, you know, we're fair in all we do. And we take that one really seriously. We want to be good at business, right? Like we want to be fair in business. And so we want to be fair to our customers. We want to be fair to all of our partners, right? We want to treat everybody right, all of our employees. And so those are probably two that really stick out to me that are really important as far as values go. And it very much led how we approach kind of our day to day. It's a great, like a really brilliant framework for decision making because you're like, are we living by these?

23:53And then you're like, yes or no. And you're not actively thinking about it. You've just, I don't know if you've done vision boarding at the beginning of a year, you're like, my year is going to look like this. And you scrapped it all together. And then if you look at the end of the year, you're like, oh, well, damn, you know, maybe I am a little more fit. Or like, you know, oh, my business does look better. I'm not like so strung out working long hours. I, you know, I've set good boundaries, things like that. And those values kind of helped us in very difficult periods to make the right decisions.

24:21Yeah. It's important not just to have values written on the wall, but it really sounds like you've integrated that with, you know, play. I think it just makes sense with the audience and, you know, enjoying the process and otherwise you just would burn out. Right. Oh yeah. Soul sucking if you don't, right. Like, like anything in life. Right. So all I want to do is work with people I like, right. And do work I love. And so that's really important when we hire people it's like is this somebody we want to hang out with all the time and which is an obvious one but i think one that often gets overlooked but you know our team is brilliant and dynamic and just so much better than me at what they do which is the best that's all you want so that was a very good question i think founders often overlook the importance of culture inside an organization how it can actually lead to a better brand and product as well because it's all integrated if you're not enjoying life i don't want to be there it's gonna it's gonna show so funny like we were told early on like you're building culture every day and so like anytime like one of us do something silly right you're like oh no we're building culture i love that you end up with like a lot of good things like like every day this sounds silly but like every day there's almost like a sacred ritual that the team plays Nintendo Super Smash and it's so funny and they've gotten nasty at it the whole team they're all just like incredible at playing this game I'm terrible at it so I just get wrecked every time but those kinds of things like work is hard for anybody right and like you know finding happiness and joy in that I think is a very reasonable thing very reasonable i'm going to shift the dire a little bit into kind of the story and the growth kind of aspects of it because as we sort of hinted that you didn't take heavy investment to start with like how did that do you think influence the pace and priorities and has that changed like are you have you taken investment have you thought about taking investment like what where are you at with on that side of things yeah so we're we're still completely bootstrapped i I think you can do it when you're young, like really fresh out of school.

26:35Like you're just scrappy as anything, like literally don't really know nice things or anything. That's of any real comfort. Like I said, we ran it on the side for many years. My brother, one of my brothers went through venture for America, which was kind of a fellowship program. We were the only one of the only companies, if not the only company to like just be a member company with a with a fellow. I was in grad school for industrial design. and then my other brother worked at the New York Fed. So he's kind of like a suit, like very like financially savvy and operationally driven. So the trifecta actually worked really well.

27:08And we kind of raised money through all these business plan competitions, kickstarters, all these accelerators, you know, we went through so many of them, and really good ones, and they assigned us brilliant mentors. And so the young mentors would always tell us, yeah, raise tons of money, because they raised hundreds of millions. And they were like, you should do that. And all the old heads were like, don't do that. Like, just kind of like scrap this thing out until you hit the next level. And I'm so grateful that we didn't take money because, you know, every founder I swear I meet who's as far in as we are, like kind of in that seven to 10 year mark, they're just totally burnt from it, right?

27:50Like from answering to their investors, from growing and then laying off teams and like growing and then laying off teams. And like, I think the path to success here is very narrow for any brand. And then going through that and losing the sense of fulfillment that kind of comes with what you're building. Like it's a creative journey, a brand. And like when you lose sight of the creative journey, that's where I think a lot of these brands really begin to suffer. They like, you know, the founders suddenly don't like they lose whatever majority say, and suddenly the brand's being taken in different directions.

28:23And I think that can be very detrimental. Whereas if you can build a brand in your vision, right, and where you think it needs to go, where your hunch is saying to go, right, and then back that up with data and logic, suddenly you have something that's really beautiful. So for us, we're continuing to bootstrap this. It's not always the easiest, but it certainly makes for like a really tightly run org that we enjoy. Like we kind of gone through the hard part. And then never say never, maybe one day we'd be open to taking investment but as it stands right now we're trying to not find balance per se we're just trying to kind of build something we really love and continue to build it the way we love it right well it allows you that level of control to build for the long term doesn't it right like one of the things i often find is when businesses take investment you know and sometimes there's good reason there's a growth opportunity or whatever and it's it's it's the right thing but it does change the dynamic as you say, right?

29:18Because suddenly the business is answerable to investors and those investors ultimately want to pay back despite what they say, right? They want their money back, you know, two or three years time, right? You haven't got long to demonstrate that. And brand building is long-term, it's strategic. It's, you know, my view is when you talk about the brand, you're talking 10, 20 years out, right? Like what position in the market are we going to dominate and hold, right? Like what is that? That isn't how much are we going to sell next quarter? right? Like, do you know what I mean? There's a big difference in how you think.