The Science Of Building A Premium Brand

TITLE: The Science of Building a Premium Brand CHANNEL: Air DATE: 2025-11-19 URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDsqIH6Xai8 ---TRANSCRIPT--- This is a guide to creative operations. The modern conundrum is how do you manage product development, content strategy, building a brand, and living your own life as a creative? And the truth is, every arc is really different, and that’s okay. In this video, we talk with three businesses here in London about their very unique journeys. How Earl Veast built their fragrance, label, and retail all the way up to two stores before they even left their jobs. How About Blank built a monster clothing line in just 4 years through relentless focus. And how our friends Alan Reggie and wholesales started as curators into resellers. This now led to wholesales breaking off into his own brand standard format. And videos about this have been one of our most requested topics. How do you start out? How do you begin curating? How do you keep this alive? What’s the pressure like to focus on a brand or live your life together? We’re super excited to walk through these journeys with you and then share some tips on how to think about your brand, your content in this modern era and actually build a strategy for creative operations. So Clayton’s got the stony on. We’re going to go get kicked out of Fortnite and Mason and lock in.

Hey, so while in this video we talk a lot about journeys and arcs and how people got to where they are with their brands and their creative journey. The real creative operations, creative strategy comes down to what interesting standout unique things do you do to actually make your brand resonate. You’ve got some incredible examples. I’m excited to hear. One of the first examples I want to touch on is Pain World, a new and interesting independent footwear brand. And before they ever launch a single product, they were generating thousands and thousands of followers from their email list and social accounts by seeding out product to influencers and having them post about the product. There was no paid ads. There was no billboards. It was just generating interest through people who have genuinely good taste and using that as a lever to be in the right circles. By the time they launched, they already had a huge funnel with demand on their website. So I think what goes into the operational side of a product launch is having a plan for a content in the first place, seeding it to the right people and creating momentum which leads to greater brand distribution before you even launch.

And probably one of the most interesting niches that I think we’re all talking about is tennis. It’s continued to like everyone thought it would peak during covid there’s like a resurgence. Everyone’s kind of awaiting for a challenger brand. But then one brand’s been standing out in particular, right? Yeah. What’s interesting about a lot of these individual sport brands like golf and cycling and running is that they’ve all had their own respective renaissance moments. But tennis is one that has sort of stood on the outside looking in and is sort of waiting for this clear player in the market to step in and fill the void. And I think a brand like Spence that’s based in the US is doing a really good job by having a clear POV through their creative and art direction. So whether you’re auditing their email marketing, their social content, their video, their art direction, it is crystal clear that they’re operationally building a brand that has a distinct philosophy because you want your customer to buy into your perspective and not just the product. So at a time when individual sports are having their respective first movers, there’s something really important about being the first mover because you get to own and dictate how you present yourself to the consumer.

[About Blank interview]

Yes, boys. How we doing? Right. Give you guys a little tour. So, everyone obviously works in here. Downstairs, we’ve got a nice gifting lounge plus all of our kind of sampling production. Over here is when we have like meetings and over here is obviously where we have current collection. This is AW25 drop one, drop two, and then it goes into the rest of the year up until December. This is all our core caps. Caps are probably our second biggest category at the moment. They’re flying out. We’ve obviously got quite a custom fit and shape. It’s taken us so long to get it right as well. We were both so specific about what we wanted and how we wanted it to look. It took us honestly nearly 2 years to get it right.

For those who don’t know, I previously had a men’s wear Instagram page which was like heavily influenced on curating other content. It was called NCL Gallery. So when Perry and I started, that was going to be a main driver to actually push the brand. It was like an interesting time in the social media landscape like reals were just starting up. Tik Tok was obviously on the rise hugely. So we just tried to use our existing skills and like put like a strategy in place and sort of ran with it.

It helps if you have experience elsewhere or things that you can try elsewhere. So, for example, if you’re doing your own personal content creation and you want to start doing reels where you talk to camera or you want to curate things, things like that, make a video every day or make a thousand videos and then your thousand video will be good because you just figure out what works and what doesn’t.

We started off really getting a lot of traction from reals and it was very very fast. It was a lot of behind the scenes like a mood board in a real with a little bit of product in it. We developed that further and started to have more sort of cinematic videos and a little bit more behind the scenes rather than like the mood film sort of stuff. I think that’s like a good pointer for brands starting out because what people don’t realize is when you’re doing a shoot, especially when you have low budgets, having one background, one camera position, you can run through like 20 looks in like half a day.

So, on the topic of product drops, you mentioned you do monthly drops as a brand. I feel like people are definitely starting to get more fatigued. As you grow, it’s harder to have those drops have such an impact because you have more product, you have more customers, you want to have people who buy every day. I think when you’re starting out as a small company or an individual, it’s a great way to sort of get everything in a chronological order. So, you design around an idea or a theme, build the hype, and then try and transition into more of an evergreen process with those drops.

Walk us through some of the creative process or the mechanics behind how you bring that drop to life. Well, this autumn winter has been a little bit different for us where we haven’t tied ourselves to themes so much and more build themes around product. So, for example, we have some puffer jackets. One of our big things is like versatility and showing the full look and how to style it. And then we’re thinking right what is the key points of the puffer? The big ones like versatility. It’s not too overpriced. We want to show it obviously in these different locations and settings to show that it’s warm, it’s like water resistant, things like that. And then work back from there looking at what’s been done, looking at what we can do, looking at what our budget is, which is generally 10% of of what the whole commercial value of the shoot is. So, we try and work with that on like a ballpark figure. And then in terms of content formats, lookbook is is strong. Trying to do more like static shots on the details and things like that. And then video for a real and also video carousels is something that we’re trying to do more of now as well.

[Earl of East interview]

So we started nearly 11 years ago. It kind of happened by accident. We had started as a journal. We eventually were like we should just do something and start making. So we started making at home. We have friends in LA. We used to go often and we were like there’s this big craft scene here and there’s no one doing it in the UK. And so we started a candle brand. We started trading at the market. And I think because of the market and where it was in London Fields, it started to open doors for us like we were featured in New York Times really early on or the market was as a whole and we were just like okay this is something. It went from being like a weekend thing to taking over every minute that wasn’t the 9 till 5.

You know what’s nice about starting something and never really intending for it to become a brand is you say yes to a lot of stuff. From the very first market stall, it was always just more than our own product. We always kind of curated other brands. It was always for us about working with best in category cuz then that became the playing field for us. So working with you know like a firm living or a hay in homeware becomes your playing field but then we became the add-on product and also the thing that they would come back for. So it was a really good way to kind of build a customer base.

I think there’s always an element of feeling fulfilled in what it is we do and enjoying it and learning. Often we also release products cuz they’re just necessary cuz the customers have asked for it cuz if you look at the catalog, it’s clearly missing. There’s a gap and we should fill it. That’s a really important thing for a lot of other brands to look at for themselves and be like, we are not just making products that we like. We’re making stuff that the customer actually wants. And there’s a delicate balance between the two.

One of the things that always comes back to us is you’re unique in that you don’t just have one bestseller. So for us, what we did is kind of we looked at it and said we should invest in the scent family. Candles, incense, air fresheners, room sprays, lots of different touch points for people to be able to invest into their favorite scent. You know, our amber jar candles are quite minimal. The cafe line is the opposite of that. And then we were like, let’s do a dynamog which is iconic which can be refilled and do sustainability but in a fun novel way and see if it sticks.

The pandemic came at a point where we 6 months out had just transitioned into it being full-time and it paying for us to live. And so we were always like, doesn’t matter what happens, we’ll be fine cuz we’ve got workshops, we have DTOC, and we have wholesale. We were also fresh out of advertising. So we’d been having conversations in that first 6 months about do we just outsource stuff and do we kind of position ourselves more like a creative studio as a brand, keep the team small. The first thing we did is we went who’s got money. And I’d spent 15 years in media knowing that there was a lot of money and nowhere to spend it. We were bankrolled by like Pinterest and Meta and Google. All of which like in that pandemic were like we have budget and we need to show love to our clients. Anyone who didn’t have the full control and weren’t fully vertically integrated, they couldn’t do anything. So we became like a client care pack business. For us, once we had that experience, we were like that’s our superpower. Having designers in house, investing in creative and content, producing the product, formulating the scents, having retail stores whilst it comes with a lot of overheads also gives us a competitive edge.

[Dan Reggie / wholesales / Standard Format interview]

So, this is like the first shop in the building. It’s my shop. It’s just my name, Shop Dan Reggie. And I mainly do Japanese brands like CDG, Isumiyaki, but I also do some European labels like Armani, Hugo Boss, and it’s mostly vintage from around the ’90s, early 2000s, and everything is shoppable in here basically.

Me and Louis just started off as really like collectors. We’re very much into everything we sell. At the start, we were just showcasing what we were kind of collecting and then some pieces was we were selling on the side and that kind of just built it into like a whole another world. Everything we do is quite unique. So, obviously the brands like that because they can find unique references. But I think we’re getting a lot of like just regular consumers who realize that they don’t really want the new thing that’s the new reference. They want the originals.

I literally only sell what I would wear myself, but there’s loads of brands out there that also experiment in the technical space that might be interesting. It’s more from a case. If you can pick a piece up and talk about it for 20 minutes, then that’s kind of the stuff that I would put in here to be honest.

[Frameworks section]

So, we covered a lot inside these conversations about everything around a brand’s arc, but now it’s time to get tactical about actual creative operations and creative strategy. And I want to start with this idea of the funnel. I think a lot of creatives, even modern marketing people are taught that like the funnel is a bad word when really it’s the core of how you want to think about any piece of marketing that’s happening in the world or how your brand approaches the market. At the top of the funnel, you have brand awareness. How people learn about your brand. In the middle of the funnel, people actually begin to grow affinity to your brand. And then at the bottom of the funnel, they actually do the conversion.

But you have to think about this in terms of your creative strategy as well. What initiatives do you have that are filling that top of the funnel? So for instance, in the first example that Clayton gave earlier about a shoe company that was seeding out to influencers, they use that to start top of funnel leveraging others influence to do it. Then you have to have a recurring strategy for how you educate and let people learn more about the product over time and that middle of the funnel strategy which most brands do on social media. But we’re seeing a lot of new strategies for this now. Some brands are opening up their communities. Outlier NYC pushes people to Reddit and to Discord to learn about what their products look like.

And then the bottom of the funnel, you actually have to have an emphasis on how do you sell. This is why I always love to bring up the examples of people like wholesales. That’s a classic example of someone that curated, who developed their own unique sense of taste, that had an idea about design. But until you’re actually selling things and taking money from people and realizing I’m going to whether it’s reselling an item or selling an initial product online that that’s actually a really personal relationship that there’s a sales process there.

But let’s shift over into social in general. I want to share a bit of a social framework that any brand can look at to actually improve. So most brands have content pillars. This is four or five types of content that they do recurringly. But basically break down your content into four core pillars and then actually begin to measure it and you can say of these four buckets and we do three of one every month and five of one every month and then asking how did it do better this 30 days than it did the previous 30 days. Comparing apples to apples, what product type is going well? how you’re working to improve it. And when you measure social media, it’s important to look at it over something like a month because it takes time for content to settle in and marinate.

But then within the pillar system, it’s important to think about improvement. Making a decision point for every pillar to say, “This month, we’re going to work on improving our educational carousels by doing X.” This gives you a framework and a strategy that you can repeat that actually allows you to measure what you’re doing.

And then next there’s this idea of campaigns. When you actually launch something, you want to put out critical content. Have some like really big moment that you’re engineering. But the new format is really creating more like 9 to 15 pieces of content that cover kind of your unveil of the first time someone sees it, the actual launch, some of the BTS, like turning those shoots into multiple shots on goal that can all work as organic video with viral potential and can potentially work as advertising.

And related to that, thinking about your content like an ecosystem. It’s not just about the content you create. It’s about what all your employees create, your influencers that you work with, what your customers do, who you’re seating and sending free product to. And even when you’re on a shoot, if the makeup artist has 15,000 followers and they’re posting, or you can add that into a contract, it builds this really interesting tapestry that is your brand’s creative world that goes beyond your brand.

The last piece I want to talk about that forms a foundation of this content strategy from your core pillars is this idea of reactive content. If you’ve worked at a brand, you’ve worked in content, you’ve probably been sent something in Slack that’s like, “Taylor Swift just has dropped a new album. We need to post something.” And often times you’ll go whip up something bad that doesn’t even get approved anyway. But most brands need to be reactive is an actual framework for reaction. It works like this. First is how you decide if you participate in something or not. And basically, you have to ask yourself, is this something my consumer cares about? Do we have bandwidth to actually do something on this? Well, if you answer yes to both those questions, move on. But if you have no for whatever reason, hey, our consumer doesn’t care or hey, guess what? we’re actually not that good at responding within 24 hours to a Taylor Swift album. Maybe we shouldn’t do it. Then you actually know where you stand. And then the second thing is how do we have a lens with which we attack this in a unique way. I feel like savvy brands are starting to think like, hey, if something culturally happens, we have a recurring voice that participates in it.