#3: Branding

Time spent: 13 months, 3 weeks
Time to launch: Website: 1 month, Products: 5 months
$ Spent: Approx 100K

I have always told people that you need to spend money to make money.

Enter branding. Potentially the least understood part of what makes a business work.

I have had several conversations with people asking why their ‘brand’ isn’t a success after they’ve picked a font, started an Instagram account, and have been waiting to become millionaires since.

More than just a logo, a few colours, and a font, our brand is the execution of our personality — built off the back of our strategy, off the back of our research. We could argue it’s not just 12 months of work, but a combined 12 years of industry experience in the making.

Full transparency: my business partner has a branding agency, Love & Money. Which has meant that, rather than paying what you’d normally pay to get the necessary work done, he’s been able to provide it for free in return for further equity (known as ‘sweat’ equity.) This has helped us greatly with cash flow as we complete our seed investment (email coming soon).

Having an agency working across this brand more or less full-time has provided me with an amazing partner in understanding the disjointed thoughts that flow from my head; challenging my ideas and researching and confirming their validity and potential, and pushing our brand further than we ever could have dreamed it could go. So far, they’ve spent over 750 hours on research, strategy, creative direction and rollout of the brand.

It’s worth mentioning that on the product side, we’re not reinventing makeup, but we are bettering ingredients, formulations, and functionality where we can. Aware that there is enough makeup in the world already, we’re hoping our brand will be our point of difference, our reason for getting out of bed every day.

But this isn’t easy. When frank body launched, it was a completely different social landscape to today, and we had no intention of making more than a few hundred dollars each week on the side of our full-time jobs. So we launched with a pretty basic initial brand and website. At the time, ‘influencer’ collaborations were genuine and converted into sales. Now, they’re full of shit.

This time it’s different.

The stakes are a lot higher for me and the industry landscape is saturated. So where did we start?

Firstly, with a different name. Pony.
It was what I thought every girl wanted. And what we could spin a brand off of. It was also what my friends called me. But its trademark was taken, and the more we flexed it, the more it didn’t seem right. For a second I thought it was all over — I’d convinced myself that everything was in this name.

But it wasn’t, and it never is.
Fluff (despite also being what my friends call me), has felt right ever since we said go. Not just fun to say, but the backbone to our whole reason for being:
To help girls figure themselves out, and realise that this is all just Fluff anyway.

Fiona Apple said it in 1997, and the sentiment still rings true. Through our brand, we’re letting girls be themselves, as opposed to us telling them how.

How does this translate into an identity? Because we’re a reflection of our target audience — you’re going to see a lot of mirrors; and because these girls are constantly changing, our brand is going to change too. Which means we’ll have more than one logo, one typeface, and one voice because these girls have more than one mood.

One of our biggest challenges will be executing our ideas before someone else does. I remember at frank body, thinking that someone had bugged Bree, Jess, and my brains. It felt like every idea we discussed suddenly appeared in another brand’s campaign. This still happens, and I still get really hung up on it- for about five minutes, and then I realise, what is a new idea anyway?

At the end of the day, what matters to us is doing different differently: making ideas our own, and for a reason, not because it’s a trend.

This means no more of the things I’m sick of seeing:

Millennial Pink
Unicorn everything
Personified products
Calligraphy type
Monogram everything
#inspo quotes
The same icons everywhere
Boxed logos and framing
Overt branding
Packaging that tells me what I know I’ve bought. E.g. a mascara bottle that says, ‘mascara’.

A lot of these are concepts we worked on at frank body — which I’m super proud of — but the replication tired all of us.

“Bad artists copy. Great artists steal. The best creatives don’t really care what everyone else is doing; they’re already doing the next thing.”

A few people have asked if I’m worried about copycats — but I think it’s important to put a brand/idea out into the world. This isn’t just to keep us accountable but to get the thoughts and opinions of relevant people in the industry. I couldn’t possibly detail our whole strategy, and at the end of the day, it’s a strategy for Fluff, and would never work being replicated by someone else. People can take inspiration, of course, but without a personalised approach, copying could never produce long-term results. Side note, use NDAs.

In summary, your brand should start with a purpose, followed by research that informs your strategy, before it is translated into an identity.

But enough talk. What does our brand look like? You can see it on social here: