JB Osborne, Co-Founder/CEO of Red Antler, Branding firm to Startup Stars
This fifth episode of Collective Wisdom is focused on how to build a brand on a startup’s budget. JB Osborne has designed logos, devised naming strategies, and helped a wide variety of startups put their best foot forward from Foursquare to BirchBox to Casper to Tyra Banks.
In this episode he explains why startups should invest more in emails and photography, how to best partner with a creative firm, and why you shouldn’t be afraid to “outsource” your brand.
Like what you hear? Subscribe!
Don’t have time for a podcast? You’re in luck! We have also prepared a transcript with links, highlights, and other audiovisual elements for easy skimming & sharing.
Hi. I’m Micah Rosenbloom, host of Collective Wisdom, the podcast where we interview founders, investors and tastemakers to help you uncover tips and tricks that will transform your startup from tired to wired. I’m a venture capitalist with Founder Collective, an early stage VC firm that has invested in companies like Uber, Buzzfeed, Hotel Tonight, and Coupang. Our guest today is JB Osborne. JB is the co-founder and CEO of Red Antler, a design and branding agency that has helped tech startups like Foursquare, eCommerce companies like Casper and Birchbox, and even celebs like Tyra Banks make their mark, trademarks at least.
We’re going to talk to JB today about how to think about branding in the early days of your startup, how to tell the difference between premier designers and the rest of the guys and how to make an object as mundane as a mattress, a must own object for millennials.
Micah Rosenbloom: JB, thanks for coming.
JB Osborne: Thanks for having me, Micah.
MR: I’d love to hear a little bit about how you got into the branding business. I know you started at Saatchi & Saatchi and I’m picturing a Mad Man-esque scene. Is that what it was and you wanted to leave? Tell us about how you got into this in the first place.
JB: Yeah, absolutely. Starting my career in advertising. I learned a lot about how big companies spend a lot of money to promote products. Was it like Mad Man, yes in some ways unfortunately not any martini launches that I found my way into but definitely experienced some of the politics of the different departments and you’ve got your Pete Campbells and you got your Don Drapers. What I ultimately saw as an opportunity was helping people who were trying to do new things, leverage strategic insights thinking about consumers, creating something that tells a story. Taking those skills from a space where it’s about selling more of something that already exist and applying it to launching new and disruptive things.
MR: What inspired the name Red Antler?
JB: That’s a great question. When my partner Emily and I thought about what we wanted to stand for and why people would be working with us it was all about growth. Everyone wanted us to help them grow something and through the power of Wikipedia. Emily found that antlers have some of the fastest growing cells in the animal kingdom and possibly the fastest but I’m not a scientist. Red Antler is really just an embodiment of the idea of rapid growth.
MR: How do you guys define yourself? Is it branding? Is that the right moniker for what you do? Is it a branding agency? Is it creative graphics? How do you frame your business?
JB: Yeah, it’s really different. I think something that a lot of companies we work with struggle with is how do you talk about something when you’re doing something new. When you call it something new people don’t know how to think about it and when you call it something that is relevant to what they do know that can be helpful but also puts you in a box. We struggle with that a lot because while we are a branding company, the reality is we do a lot of things that a typical branding company doesn’t do.
That being thinking about how the brand comes to life in the world across digital experiences, physical experiences, marketing content activation. Something that I think about a lot is the word “agency.” It’s a really tricky word. It comes with a lot of baggage. I think people especially founders and investors as well tend to have a mentality that agency is a dirty word like you don’t want to work with agencies like they are going to try to screw you over, they are going to try to make money off of you, they are not going to do something in your best interest.
That’s something that I think we’ve tried to figure out how to navigate away from that and not be an agency but really be a partner with the companies we work with which might sound a little like BS. I think we try to actually live it and remove some of the objectives and agendas that are inherent for creative businesses in the creative industry awards thinking about industry acclaim and recognition and the world of pitching and all of that. We try not to play that game.
MR: Tell us about some of your clients.
JB: Yeah, we work with businesses across all different categories, consumer, enterprise and everything from fashion and beauty, food and beverage, publishing, education, finance, healthcare, security. I think across the board we wind up working with founders and teams that believe in the power of building a brand. Our first client which is one that’s very near and dear to our hearts, getting us off the ground is a company called Behance.
MR: Near and dear to my heart as well.
JB: Yeah, Behance is one that we’re incredibly proud of the relationship that we had with them and so the trajectory of them ultimately being acquired by Adobe. I think some other ones that we’re really excited about at the moment Casper is a business and a brand that our team is incredibly proud of. Their growth and our partnership in working with them, I’m a proud owner of Casper and I sleep very well at night.
MR: You slept on it last night.
JB: I did.
JB: You look very energetic today.
JB: I’m feeling pretty energetic today.
MR: Did you guys come and put the name for Casper? I know they had originally a different name and changed it?
JB: They did. We did not come up with the name but we definitely strongly encourage Casper as the solution. We thought it was a really great name and I think one of the biggest struggles that teams have when you’re building a business is being comfortable taking risk and the name Casper is something that there were mixed emotions about whether it’s going to be a great name or not great name.
MR: Maybe like too cutesy, not serious, not technical.
JB: Yeah. There’s like, “Okay, there’s Casper the friendly ghost. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? He’s friendly. He’s fluffy. I think it’s a good thing.” Ultimately I think it’s having the faith that you can build something that embodies, build a brand that embodies the name so it stands for something entirely new.
MR: I want to go back just the client list for a second and just make sure because you guys have an amazing client list. Just read off a couple of the other names you mentioned Behance and Casper.
JB: Yup. A few others would be One Kings Lane, Birchbox, Vevo, Foursquare, Sugarpova. Really exciting business we launched with Maria Sharapova. We worked with Tyra Banks. Actually those have been incredibly exciting opportunities. I think what I’ve learned from especially working with Tyra and Maria is the just absolute rock star ability of people that are performing at that level whether it is in sports or it’s in fashion and beauty. I’ve never seen people that work harder.
JB: What’s the bigger challenge? Is it when a company comes to you that is early as I imagine Casper was when they got started, how do you even sold the mattress yet? Right? Versus someone like Tyra who’s got a brand already or companies who already have a business and a brand and how do you address those different stages of a business or personality?
JB: It’s a great question. Both are hard in different ways. I think when you’re working with early stage company you have the challenge of wide space and you’re navigating what could be the right thing without knowing really anything, right? You have to get people aligned. I think the challenge in that scenario is just getting people to the place of confidence to believe in the thing they can create and aligning different personalities.
If you think about a founding team most cases you’re getting two, three, four more people coming together who haven’t done something together before. They all had their unique perspectives but you have to figure out how to get them on one page going in one direction together as a team. A lot of what we wind up doing is like therapy sessions. It’s like trying to help people to get comfortable and understand each other’s perspectives and align our vision for a brand and experience and a story.
At that stage that’s really the challenge that companies are facing and that we’re facing in working with them but it’s incredibly fun because you’re trying to make something new and successful out of thin air. When you’re working with a company that’s later stage it’s different challenges. I think there you wind up facing operational challenges and politics in terms of different teams have been build and you’re starting to have different priorities. The product team needs this, the marketing needs that, the founders are thinking this, then you got tech realities.
Figuring out how to successfully build the right brand, create the right experience, navigating different priorities within the company and you’re also faced with the challenge of attachment. Just the emotions of the thing that someone has created and quite frequently people know that it’s not right but it’s very hard for them to understand how far away from it they should move. We have to help them work through a process to imagine the possibilities and to see where things could go to get to that better, stronger place.
MR: JB, walk us through the process. You meet a prospective client, you have a sit down, you understand what they want. Where does it go from there?
JB: Yup, we typically have a really interesting dialogue in helping people figure out what the right thing to do is because most people that come to us are asking for the wrong thing. They are thinking of it in terms of a final deliverable like, “Hey, we need a new website,” or, “Hey, we need a website.” When in reality that’s one piece of a broader puzzle. The first step is usually getting aligned around what is the right way to approach it and what’s going to be successful.
I think something we take really seriously is if we’re going to engage to the company we want to do what’s in their best interest that’s going to actually work not the thing that’s going to make us money. We’re always starting by figuring out, “Okay, how do we approach this? What is this ultimately going to roll out to in terms of the customer experience, the marketing experience, sales experience,” making sure there’s a plan to get from the beginning to the end not that we map all of that out but making sure that we’re on the same page of what it’s going to take to get there.
Then, once we’ve figured out the process and approach and figure out a proposal of what’s the time it’s going to take, what’s the cost it’s going to take and then figure out a relationship structure from there.
JB: Outside of clients that you had, what are some brands in the world that you just think do a fantastic job of communicating with their customers? What are the elements of that brand that just really resonate so when you look out at examples of great brands what do you guys look to?
JB: Apple is a brand that I think probably 90% of people that walk through our doors if you ask them what brands they admire they are going to say Apple.
MR: Is that because just the products are so damn good? I mean, did the products make the brand or does the brand go above and beyond good product?
JB: Yup, that’s a great question. Ultimately I think in Apple’s case brand and what they stand for and their values is what’s driving product and experience. If you ask someone who’s a big Microsoft fan they probably tell you that Apple products aren’t that great or someone who’s really into Android and Google it’s like, “Is Apple the best technology?” That’s up for debate but they create products that are beautiful and it’s a great experience like unboxing an iPhone is something that is a magical experience. How that extends through the advertising that they do, the campaigns you see, their website, the way they detail product features.
They are ahead of the game on everything they are doing and I think that’s the piece that that’s what builds to create the brand experience. They are doing all of those things really well and it’s incredibly hard to do that. We see all the time companies are doing a couple of the things well but those things that you missed could be the really critical things so whether that’s emails you’re sending out. So many startup struggle with sending great email marketing, whether it’s transactional emails, marketing emails, promotional emails, that’s a channel where you’re having a direct conversation with someone.
I can’t tell you the number of times whether it’s companies we worked with or companies we haven’t and they send out emails you’re just like, “What is this?” People overlook it because they don’t think it’s, “Oh, it’s just email. Whatever, no big deal.”
2 comments