00:00The principles of marketing and building a brand have not changed and I wrote a book called The
00:06Birth of a Brand and the theme of it is you can't give birth to adults. Every business starts with
00:12conception and then the first action. So me buying samples from Australia was the birth of UGG,
00:18but then every business goes into this infancy, sorry, this infancy where, you know, it doesn't,
00:25it looks like it's failing because it doesn't do anything. But if you can keep, you know,
00:30working at it and you believe in it enough, it'll start the toddling stage, which is where people
00:35start to get interested in your product and then you'll hit the year's best phase of all. And if
00:40it's a great product or service, you're going to the teenage years and that's, you know, when you
00:45really start to come up with all the big business problems and it'll eventually mature just like UGG
00:51did. So if you're a new person starting out, you know, that first aha you have where you're
00:57going to be an instant millionaire, stick with it, but know that you're going to go through these
01:02phases. Brent, I want to ask you a question about what the difference is between a product
01:07and a brand and why that distinction matters. Great question. Great question. A brand is not
01:14your trademark registration. A brand is not your logo. A brand is what consumers think about you.
01:21It took four years before I understood advertising and marketing. And the theme is you never sell your
01:28product. You sell the feeling, the emotional tie that you want people to have with your product.
01:35And so if you're a new, new, you know, person starting out with a new footwear brand,
01:40that's what you have to conquer is how do you get your audience to absolutely be wanted in the,
01:47in the photograph or the video or whatever it is that that's the trick.
01:51And how do you sort of maintain though, that brand authenticity once you start growing and scaling up?
01:57I mean, I feel like it's probably easier to do that when you are small and can take bigger risks,
02:02but once you become bigger, of course, taking bigger risks also means the potential for bigger failure.
02:07Yeah. Yeah. Well, the evolution for me was I started with those youth surfers and that was highly successful.
02:15So I thought, oh my God, snowboarding is just beginning. So I went into all the snowboard magazines
02:21and that was a huge success as well, advertising to the youth. And I was stuck in the Midwest and
02:28the back East
02:28because I didn't know what the kids did in the wintertime. And eventually some sporting goods retailer told me,
02:35oh my God, Brian, they play hockey. And I being Australian, it was an alien sport to me,
02:41but I advertised to the youth hockey man. And that thing that took the brand, you know, nationwide,
02:48but there was something missing. There was, I was all these fragmented images, which was not a good for the
02:55brand.
02:55So I came up with this theme, casual comfort. And I started to advertise that.
03:00And I had a really successful campaign in USA Today. And that sort of took it into the Hollywood area
03:10and a celebrity's area.
03:12And that's when the traction for the brand, even though we were doing five, six million at the time in
03:19sales,
03:20that's when the traction started to go in. And that's that drove it up to the 10 to the 15
03:24million stage.
03:25Are you surprised at the longevity of the brand, that it not only still continues, but it's still thriving?
03:35I knew it would be a phenomenon once it took off. I thought it would be a year or two
03:41and I'd be an instant millionaire.
03:43But it took nearly 20 years before I got to the stage where I had to sell it. It just
03:48got too big.
03:49And I predicted back then it would be a 200, 300 million dollar company.
03:56So the answer is no, I never saw it being $2 billion a year at the time.
04:02If there is sort of a young Brian Smith out there today who's tinkering around with an idea in his
04:08or her head,
04:08what's the one piece of advice that you would want to leave with them?
04:13If you believe in your product, just don't, don't give up.
04:19There's a great saying that once you start out on a path, the universe will conspire to work with you.
04:25That is so, so true. And as long as you keep forward momentum, things will keep dropping into your awareness
04:32about,
04:33oh my God, I could use that channel or that person there could help me.
04:36As long as you stay in momentum, things will just fall in place eventually.
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