CLIP: One Google Ranking Saved My ENTIRE Business | George Sullivan

0:00Olly Fawcett:Yeah. Was there a point in those very early days where for you, the idea became a bit more like this could actually work? Because how's the business making money? Yeah, it wasn't making money. The business made nearly no money for nine months. And I was still working in recruitment. I was ready to give up. The recruitment or the sole supplier? Ready to give up the sole supplier. Oh, right. because i was working in recruitment having to hit my targets whilst also building the website a little bit in lunch and in the evening and that's where the freelancers came in because they would help me whilst i was working put the content out on the website so i was ready to give up the same week or within that two week period we finally got a number one ranking in google for the triple black harachi it was a shoe that i was non-stop talking about right you remember it and that's 20 that's 2015 yeah yeah probably 20 yeah around that yeah exactly yeah and everything went mad on that release day we made two thousand pounds in affiliate commissions in around uh an hour so that was the model is that you would make at the time yeah if the article did well on organic search you guys would make cash yeah the thing that exists today that we've always stood by is we help people find out what's next in sneakers and streetwear we tell you what's good and what's not it was always me saying what's good and what's not and it was always a taste and judgment thing and that's what it is today not me but 18 people across the marketing team that have taste personality their own individual style giving you what they think is good so as human beings helping other human beings to get inspired yeah and find out what the cool brands and products are that are coming and that is that is why the sole supplier is important for the audience and also for the brands that is why probably this year we've had more incoming briefs from brands than ever because we've scaled our content we've doubled our reach monthly from 23 million to 50 million fuck right in a year in in since the start of this year shit what without hiring more people or without spending any more money and we've done that for improving the content strategy how the content lands and who engages with it like it's been a powerful year for our content strategy but it works because real human beings with real perspectives real opinions and that's what the audience like and that's what the brands like and the brands can't do themselves yeah because obviously they're the brand they're going to say they're good they need a third party like an influencer or a sole supplier to certify so that's where it started ollie like so how do you work with brands now what's the interaction with brand you said the partnerships piece mostly partnerships yeah mostly brands that we know we can tell a great story with we look at what they've got coming up we say that would be great that would be great they tell us what they're trying to do yeah and we put together a plan for them that will help elevate their brand create new demand and help them land in culture for real not just a one-off campaign not just can you pump this shoe it's like how are we going to work with you to help your brand with gen z actually land yeah so it gets adopted not so it's forced into their minds and the only way we can do that is we say to the team what do you think of this brand we could work with them they're like no no their products aren't good enough.

3:33There's nothing to tell about this story. It's our job to find the story, right? So we've turned down brands. We still turn down brands. But when we work with a brand, it's always like a partnership. They're coming to us to understand how do we land in this market correctly. And that's always like us going, we think these products could be good. And them saying, but we want to talk about these. And a partnership of like how we do it together. nice but 12 years doing this it has to work for the audience and us and them if we just play for

4:08Olly Fawcett:the brands the audience get pissed off the triangle it's the triangle yeah one of the four yeah you're full fucked so that's why people will be like oh you you're just saying you turn down brands because you're trying to sound like a humble no no no i would have said that before probably but the reason we do it is because it will it will ruin the audience and we've done that before right we've pushed stuff that we know we've just been paid for we've done that before everyone has right again it's these things where you've got to just experience the fucking mistake right yeah and the pain and the and the the cringe feeling of why did we do that yeah you know we shouldn't have done it