Brand Builder

Spend a few minutes with the dynamic duo behind Owl's Brew, and a few things become apparent.

First, the depth of the passion for what they do. Founders Jennie Ripps and Maria Littlefield are a testament to the idea that big things happen when vision meets drive. Another - the importance of discovering white space in the market. Add to that, the imperative to capitalize on that discovery, before someone else does.

The Owl's Brew story is a case study in brand building, with all of its challenges and triumphs, its strategy and its serendipity. But I'd argue that you can actually sum up the Owl's Brew story with two words -

No compromise.

The temptation to compromise is something that most challenger brands face, but one that people don't really talk about. It's an especially thorny area for emerging better-for-you brands, whose values are core to their appeal.

In fact, it is precisely this unwillingness to compromise that actually creates the magic for these brands, and that paves a pathway for success.

This week we talk to "tea drinking boozers" (their words not ours) Jennie Ripps and Maria Littlefield, the CEO and COO of Owl's Brew. They make organic spiked tea and tea and botanical mixers that have been a huge hit with a new class of alcohol consumers.

Owl's Brew has won by saying "no" - no to flavor houses, no to artificial ingredients, no to compromise of any kind - and that has made a world of difference. This ethos is why Jennie and Maria are well on their way to making Owl's Brew the category king in the spirits industry.

Links

• Owl's Brew
• Connect with Jenni and Maria on LinkedIn

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What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!

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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.

A lot of brands looking to scale focus on optimizing and growing in the market they're already in.

But at a certain point, you've got to think bigger. In order to achieve scale, you have to break into new markets. And that's what this week's episode is all about.

Alejandro Restrepo is the co-founder and COO of Ekoa, and he's embarking on the ultimate market breakthrough - taking a successful suite of brands in Brazil and entering the U.S.

Ekoa is a line of all natural dried fruit bars. Their tagline says it all - discover simple. In this interview, Alejandro describes his strategy for breaking into the U.S., plus all the unexpected obstacles he encountered along the way.

He also talks about the meaning of brand, his four part framework for success, and why he personally ate more than 700 bars as part of Ekoa's R&D.

Links

• Ekoa
• Listener spotlight: JOI

Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!

What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!

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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.

This week on Brand Builder, we hear from Oliver Bogner, the CEO and founder of brandable.

Brandable is a CPG platform focused on innovating, curating and creating brands that enable people to live their best lives.

Think of it almost like an entertainment studio, but for better-for-you CPG brands.

Oliver has a big, audacious vision for brandable: he wants to become the "Millennial Unilever," with a suite of brands that will be around for the next hundred years. And with exclusive deals with Target, Walmart, and other big time retailers, he and the team are well on their way.

So how do you create transcendent, better-for-you brands that will stand the test of time?

By "keeping your eyes open" and honing in on true consumer pain points. Oliver breaks down his framework for discovering these pain points, and explains why brands have to focus on moving the needle for consumers in order to be successful.

Links

• Brandable
• Connect with Oliver on LinkedIn

Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!

What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!

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Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.

What does your brand stand for?

If you've never considered it, now's the time. Today's consumers - especially Millennial and Gen Z - vote with their dollar, and want to support brands that make a difference, not just a profit.

This week, SnackNation Chief Revenue Officer Chelsie Lee sits down with Briana Crane, the Director of Development at Feeding America to understand how this dynamic shows up for your brand.Both Briana and Chelsie have unique insight into the ways philanthropic giving can help create a lasting affinity and deeper loyalty with your brand. The Feeding America network is the nation's largest domestic hunger-relief organization, and they rely on the support of hundreds of companies across the U.S. to help end hunger in America.

Briana also delves deeply into the problem Feeding America is solving, and the ways brand storytelling helps raise awareness and inspires both brands and consumers to get involved in the fight.

Links

• Feeding America
• Take action to fight food insecurity
• Connect with Briana on LinkedIn
• Connect with Chelsie on LinkedIn

Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!

What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!

Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod

Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.

Fresh from Expo East, SnackNation's Clara Kim joins Brand Builder this week to talk about the best products, flavors, and trends from this year's show. Plus, learn how to get the most out of your next trade show.

Links

• Connect with Clara on LinkedIn
• Expo East 2020

Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!

What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!

Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod

Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.

This week Jordan is going back to school, because our guest is Brenda Bailey-Hughes, a Sr. Lecturer at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business - and Jordan's former professor.

Brenda is a communication expert, and she has coached executives in Fortune 500 companies around the world, helping them understand their audience, build a personal brand, and become more effective executives.

We go deep on the topic of influence - which, by the way, probably doesn't mean what you think it means - unlocking the 3 pillars of influential communication and the two dimensions of credibility.

Why does all this matter? Because if you're listening to this, there's a good chance you have to make big pitches - to your board, to investors, to retailers - and Brenda's here to help you nail that next big, important meeting.

If that weren't enough, we also talk about design thinking, which is both a fascinating topic, and a useful framework that will help you create a stickier brand.

Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!

What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!

Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod

Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.

Think about the one thing you love to do.

It could be a task you perform in your job, in school, or in your everyday life. This is the thing that energizes you when you think about it, and motivates you to get up every day. When you're doing it, time seems to fly by, and you walk away with more energy than when you started.

This is your unique ability, and designing your life (and work) to spend more time doing it is the secret to greater happiness and productivity.

In this leadership-focused episode, we break down the concept of unique ability in the context of our working lives. You will learn:

• What we mean by unique ability.
• How to discover your own unique ability.
• How to align our work with our unique ability.
• How to bring out unique ability in the people you work with.

BONUS EXERCISE: Love It / Loathe It

Here's Marcus Buckingham's quick and easy strategy for discovering your unique ability:

• Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side write "Loved It," and the other write "Loathed It."
• As you go through your week, reflect daily on the things that you looked forward to, that made time speed up, that energize, or that may have made you a little tired, but that you want to do again. Those all go in the "Loved It" category.
• Now think about everything you do that you put off, that makes time drag on, or that leave you completely drained and exhausted. Those go in the "Loathed It" category.
• Before long, you'll have a clear picture of your strengths. The beauty of this method is that it's not abstract – these are actual tasks, functions, or activities that you actually perform during your week.
• Now summarize your findings using specific action verbs (again, nothing abstract).
• For Marcus, these words were "interview" and "mingle" – he found that he loved interviewing people, but absolutely loathed mingling.

Links

• Dan Sullivan, Strategic Coach

Is happiness something good leaders should care about? Ask most business leaders fifteen years ago, and you'd be hard pressed to find one who thought that happiness was a primary concern.

Work should be about results, right? Happiness is incidental at best.

Or so we all thought.

Then came Zappos' visionary CEO Tony Hsieh, who realized that delivering happiness was a unifying theme throughout the business. Not only did delivering happiness sum up the ideal experience for his customer, but making happiness a primary concern internally actually drove results.

There's no one in the world who understands the power of Happiness better than this week's guest, Jenn Lim.

Jenn is the CEO and Chief Happiness Officer of Delivering Happiness, a consulting firm she founded with Tony Hsieh to inspire science-based happiness, passion and purpose at work, home and everyday life.

Jenn was a foundational team member at Zappos, and in 2010 she led the launch of Tony's book Delivering Happiness, which has sold over 600,000 copies worldwide.

Jenn refers to Delivering Happiness as a book that became a company that became a global movement.

This episode is all about how to supercharge your team with happiness. Jenn takes us through the Delivering Happiness framework, describes the life-changing events that led her to focus on positive psychology + the science of happiness, and shares her inspiring vision for the future of work.

• DeliveringHappiness.com
• Delivering Happiness on Facebook
• @DHMovement on Twitter
• Email Jenn directly: [email protected]
• UC Berkeley

Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!

What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!

Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod

Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.

Our guests this week are Becky and Jeremy Dahl, the creative minds behind Bex Brands.

Together they lead an agency that specializes in packaging design, brand identity, and brand management in the packaged goods industry (i.e., they are the perfect guests for Brand Builder).

If Bex Brands sounds familiar, that might be because they're the agency behind the transformative brand refresh and packaging redesign for Lily's Sweets (episode 116).

In fact it was our conversation with Lily's CEO Jane Miller that inspired this episode. We wanted to learn about the rebrand process from the agency side. How do they approach projects like these? What's the best way to maximize the chances of success when working with a branding agency like theirs?

Becky and Jeremy are the perfect people to provide this insight. In addition to Lily's, they have worked with Chameleon, Once Upon a Farm, Dr. Praegar's, and Primizie, just to name a few.

We also really loved what they had to say about trends... and why they don't believe in them.

Links

• Bex Brands
• Connect with Becky and Jeremy on LinkedIn

Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!

What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!

Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod

Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.

Our guest this week is Steven Izen, the CEO and founder of Lokai.

In simplest terms, Lokai makes bracelets that promote balance. In every Lokai bracelet, one of the beads contains water from the top of Mount Everest and another contains mud from the Dead Sea - a reminder to stay humble in life's high points and hopeful in life's low points.

The Lokai story is one of rapid, viral growth. They've sold 10 million units in about 6 years, and because they donate 10% of profits to charity, they've raised more than $8 million for charitable causes.

But while Lokai bracelets symbolize balance, the brand is coming out with a new functional product line that promotes balance in a much more tangible way.

Meet Elements by Lokai, a line of herbal tonic concentrates made with adaptogenic plants that work with your body to give it what it needs.

We talked to Steven about why a bracelet brand is launching a beverage, why athletes like Cam Newton love Lokai, plus how Lokai went viral in the first place.

Links

• Lokai
• Elements by Lokai (use promo code SNACKNATION for 50% off)
• Connect with Steven on LinkedIn

Join our Exclusive Facebook Group!

What's your biggest takeaway from the episode? Join our invite-only, private Facebook group just for Brand Builder Community members, where you can connect with fellow entrepreneurs and founders, crowdsource ideas, share best practices (or lessons learned), and get your most important questions answered. Join now!

Facebook.com/groups/brandbuilderpod

Brand Builder is a co-production of SnackNation and ForceBrands.