Awesome People - Ep 107
brand, creative, culture, and building fans
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
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Please meet Brooke Amber Johnson, your creative brand genius 🤩
I met Brooke in Austin via David Rodigruez, a bestie and co-investor at Draft.
She always attends events with the most beautifully branded products that she’s working on - ranging from Basbas Spirits from Ibiza to KA! Empathogenics a powerful South African plant chew. Little did I know she did the branding for two of my portfolio companies, Aether Diamonds (diamonds made from thin air) and Transcend (tree burial company). As I’ve gotten to know her, I’ve learned that she is one of the hardest working, coolest, and most invested brand people I’ve met.
Over the past decade, she creative directed and wrote award-winning campaigns at companies like Google, Amazon, R/GA, and Digitas. Today, she runs her own creative studio, Baubo, that helps brands find their souls and launch them. One little-known fact about Brooke is that she low-key identifies as a “brand witch”—turning abstract ideas into manifested realities that have the power to shape culture and consciousness. NBD.
You can hire her to help you find the soul of your brand through strategy, naming, verbal identity and copywriting, visual identity and design, packaging, website creation, campaigns…basically, anything you’d need to launch a brand into the 🌍. She works with Seed+ stage companies.
Need branding help? Want an intro to Brooke? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
Brooke was gracious enough to share some branding pro-tips with us here✨
Tip: Build your brand as if it’s a living being (‘cuz it is!) 🧬
We all know the brands in our lives that make us feel something real. The ones that move through the world so recognizably you don’t need to see the name or logo to know who it is. But that je ne sais quoi doesn’t just happen. The Nikes and Apples of the world are thoughtfully and strategically infused with a lifeforce that’s authentic to them. That takes work.
How do you know if you’ve gone deep enough into the brand-building process? Ask yourself:
Are all stakeholders aligned on your ultimate reason for existing?
Have you detailed your company values and promises related to people and the planet?
Do you have a positioning statement that gives you chills?
Have you completed a cultural analysis exacting this precise moment in time and how your brand fits within it?
Have you written a brand manifesto to set the tone and rally your troops both internally and externally?
Do your visuals relay the highest manifestation of how you want your brand to make people feel (and act?)
These are just some of the inputs that bring your brand to life...
One artifact we love to create is the brand manifesto. In today’s saturated markets, consumers expect more than your average skim-the-surface brand. They want to feel you and take pride in a company with their values. So you need a compelling story. We do a series of founder deep dives, mood board exercises, and language try-ons to capture the essence of who your brand is.
For our client Aether Diamonds, the world’s first diamonds made from 100% carbon capture, we tell the story of the future as a luxury…
For Aether, you read this manifesto and feel who they are — their ethos, vision for a better world, what they care about, who they’re speaking to — and, of course, you learn about the product.
Tip: Don’t just figure out your brand; figure out your brand’s offering to culture 🤝
To “make it,” you must stand for something, take risks, and organize like-minded individuals around something bigger than your product. You can’t just participate in culture. You have to create it.
Our brand, KA! Empathogenics is one of the first to introduce Kanna to the US. It’s a psychoactive (not psychedelic) medicinal plant that “brings you to life.” It has a calming and opening effect on your body, emotions, and (dare we say) spiritual state while also making you feel more grounded and energized.
The brand’s mission is to help humans restore their full spectrum of aliveness. That manifests in a variety of ways, including:
A monthly Friday Feels newsletter that features 5 can’t-miss stories from across the internet that make you feel different emotions.
An equal parts educational and inspirational podcast by the founder called How Things Connect.
Regular social content that offers something valuable like heart-opening meditations, tools to reduce anxiety, and expert tips to foster more joy in your life.
A WhatsApp “KAmmunity” that guides people through a 30-day kanna microdosing journey where they are invited to participate in an AMA with our lead scientist and muse on their experiences and discoveries.
So far, 80% of people who participated in our 30-day journey have converted to official brand affiliates! This humanizing brand approach not only moves product, but moves people to become loyalists and even evangelists of the brand.
Tip: It’s OK (read: required) to be a uniqueness-freak ❄️
There have never been more new brands than there are right now. To be noticed, you must understand your brand deeply and make moves to stand out from the sea of the same.
Start by conducting a creative competitive audit to identify the "whitespace" in your industry that you can truly own.
Here are some exercises to get started:
Create a spreadsheet of the top 30 brand names in your industry and compare their names. If most have a one-syllable name centered around the product function, try a 2-3 word name that feels actionable or celebrates the consumer's identity.
Print out all the logos of your peers and put them on a wall side by side. Take a close look and see if there are any patterns or similarities. If everyone's logo is a boring all caps sans serif, try more ornate fonts or lowercase letters.
Use the same process for color, photography, graphics, taglines, and typography to find your unique place to play.
Remember, it's not about copying or doing the exact opposite of what others are doing. Find the sweet spot between what's authentically you, what your audience is looking for, and what hasn't been done yet. Avoid trendy choices and focus on creating a brand identity that will last for at least three years. As Oscar Wilde said, "Be yourself. Everyone else is taken."
Want an intro to Brooke? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to Brooke!
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🤩
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Jeremy, Your Freelance Product Designer — helped 20+ startups establish design systems, ship beloved products, and raise capital with clear, concise, and beautiful pitch decks. Before consulting, he led design for Square’s Invoices, Appointments, and Virtual Terminal products — tools millions of small business owners use.
Yiren, Your Technical Writer — founded Frindle, a technical writing agency that helps developer-facing software companies with technical content. You can hire her to produce technical blog posts, tutorials, how-to’s, and whitepapers, or refresh your documentation.
Cassius, Your Freelance Product and Venture Designer — led product and growth for Mora.com, a healthcare startup that creates physician-led support groups to reverse chronic disease. Cassius has raised over $15 million for his startups throughout his career. He also won the coveted Apple Design Award. You can hire him to help design and ship something from nothing. Cassius specializes in complex, messy projects focused on product-market and channel-market-fit.
Want an intro to Brooke, Jeremy, Yiren, or Cassius? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!