From Kickstarter to cult brand, Brevitē is a case study in how a challenger wins without a war chest.

In this episode of JUST Branding, we sit down with Brandon Kim, co-founder of Brevitē, to unpack how a scrappy Kickstarter project became a beloved camera bag brand for photographers, creators, and everyday explorers.

We get into the real strategy behind their early momentum, including how they positioned in a crowded category, what they got right about their audience, and how they balanced instinct, research, and creative direction to build a brand people want to be part of.

Brandon also shares what bootstrapping taught them about pace, priorities, and protecting the “soul” of the brand while scaling operations.

If you’re building a DTC brand, growing a challenger business, or trying to create genuine community instead of empty reach, this one’s packed with practical lessons you can steal.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How Brevitē found whitespace in a saturated market
• What made their Kickstarter campaign resonate early
• How they approached positioning, identity, and brand voice
• The tradeoffs of bootstrapping versus outside investment
• How they built community and creator advocacy without chasing vanity metrics
• What’s next as Brevitē evolves from product to lifestyle

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Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to JUST Branding. This time, we’re going inside the story of how a scrappy Kickstarter project has become one of the most beloved creative brands in its category. Our guest is Brandon Kim, co-founder of Brevitē, the Brooklyn based company behind a new generation of camera bags, built for photographers, creators and everyday explorers. And in a market dominated by legacy players with really deep pockets, Brandon and his team bootstrapped their way to success by combining smart strategy, clever positioning, thoughtful design and genuine community building.

And so we’re going to unpack all of that, how they broke into a crowded category with no outside funding and how they built a brand that resonates with creatives and how they’re now evolving Brevitē from product to lifestyle. So if you’re in brand building, whether you’re building a D to C brand or a leading kind of looking to challenge into any kind of category, this is a podcast for you. This one’s going to be packed with lessons to you for you, Brandon. I’m talking too much. Welcome to our show. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you for having me. This is really exciting. I’ve been listening to the podcast for a while now. So it’s fun to be on like the other side of it all. It’s very interesting.

Yeah, hopefully interesting, good, not interesting, disastrous, you know, letting you down and all that, seeing behind the curtain. But no, no, in all honesty, I think you reached out to me to a while ago. We’ve been looking at the brand and we’re just super thrilled to really get the inside track from you, because it’s tough out there, right? It’s really tough to build a brand to the level you have. So perhaps we can start with that. Like, you know, you launched into this really saturated category. So I guess, you know, it would be good to know what gave you the confidence to kind of do that, you know, to find that space for this new brand.

Oh, yeah. I mean, we didn’t know anything going into it. We just pure like, you know, it was pure, like ignorant bliss. But we were in college. We were students. My brother was going abroad to Hong Kong for a semester abroad, and he was a photographer and he needed a bag that would hold both of his photography gear and his normal everyday stuff and didn’t look like a target on his back, right? Like he was carrying thousands of dollars of gear. And oddly enough, at that time, like 2014, 2015, there was actually really no solutions on the market. There was like these like large, bulky black camera backpacks that existed. And so I took a look at that and I was like, well, I think we can design this. And we suddenly, you know, start talking to photographers and we were like, you know, doing a bunch of these interviews and we figured out that, hey, there was a real need in the market for a camera bag that didn’t look like a camera bag. And that kind of like really kicked off the journey. And then kind of over the course of the next like four or five years, we learned how the market worked. We kind of iterated on our product over and over and over. So we reached kind of this like the pinnacle, right? We kind of found our main hero product, which was the jumper. It’s this camera bag. It doesn’t look like a camera bag. It’s like really well made. And it’s just like all the devils are in the details of that bag. You know, over time, that like it kind of ended up becoming a category defining bag, which was an interesting thing to design.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful, beautiful product. It’s got so many cool features as well. Like, as you say, it’s the detail, right? I just love the flaps that open up, look super interesting. And then also like the fact there’s something that in bags, right? Because I travel a lot, right? And I never buy a backpack now that doesn’t have, you know, that little strap that goes round? I don’t even know what the technical term is, but it’s like underneath the bits that go over your shoulders. There’s another strap that runs horizontally across the back and you can put it over your suitcase, right? So you could put it through your suitcase handle. Mate, that is a game changer. If you if anyone is out there who has not got that, get that and definitely check out the jumper backpack because it’s all on there.

I love luggage pass throughs.

There you go. So I love that. So it was born out of a need, a gap in the market through basically you or your brother, at least being customer of this and then realizing there wasn’t something out there. But I know you did some Kickstarter campaign. How did that go and why did you go down that route or route if you’re in the US?

Yeah, it was the days where Kickstarter was at its genesis or just passed. Suddenly people were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars and it was coming into Vogue. And so we had no money. So we were students, we started this thing with 200 bucks, right? It was like your beer and pizza money, right? And it was a very interesting thing. We spent a year prepping for the campaign, building prototypes, you know, putting together some sort of marketing strategy, trying to understand even what it was, like brand was. And we ended up raising a little over $38,000 USD, which was a lot of money for us. Like it was like, it allowed us to place the first order for the PO, a purchase order, and it just continued. Like customers still wanted it afterwards. And so for many years, myself and my brothers, my two brothers, we continued to run this company, right? We ran it on the side for many years. We were working full-time jobs. We were in grad school. We were doing other things. And we joined every single school incubator we could. Or like in even like other kind of company incubators. We went through six of those. Oh wow. We won a bunch of business plan competitions. So we funded it through that. We did a second Kickstarter and then we just kind of reinvested cash flow. And so after about four years of running it, we all came on full time back in 2018. And it’s kind of, we were like, we’ll give it one year, right? And after one year, we gave it two years, and two years turned into three years. And now we’re all these years in and still at it.

Nice, nice. And you said you were trying to get your head around what brand was. How do you see brand and the Brevitē brand? Like sort of talk me through that evolution to where you’re at today.

Totally, totally. I think brand, right? Like it’s a few different pieces coming into play. It’s kind of this low and slow community stuff that doesn’t scale, that you rev up and you just kind of do consistently over years, right? Really low and slow. And that always gets mixed up with all the CAC activities, right? Like you’re like, it totally gets brushed under the rug and nobody wants to look at that. But actually we think that that stuff’s really important. And then you have your branding guide and things like that, which like can get very over leveraged is what we’ve found with time. We ended up having putting together branding guidelines, maybe like 2020 that were beautiful, but ultimately we’re difficult to scale with. And like we found maybe really strong imagery and kind of cohesiveness has gone much further for us now this day and age. And then really like because we’re in physical product, really good product, right? Like in like standing by that promise of the really good products. Like I’m a product designer by trade. So going through that kind of like that intimacy of what it is and then creating products that we feel comfortable selling to at a price point and a quality to friends and family. Like that is literally how we approach it. We’re like, is this a hundred fifty dollar backpack, which is a lot for a backpack for most people? Like, do we feel comfortable telling our friends? Yes, you should buy this for one hundred fifty dollars because this is actually what it’s worth. That was a fantastic barometer. And we found like when we do all of those cohesively together with like a touch of storytelling, it goes really well for brand.

Nice. Brandon, Jacob here. I had a question for you because you mentioned product designer and I was going to ask about your history because to come into this without any brand knowledge you mentioned, how did you actually bring it to life? What’s the history behind your experience, the product design and so forth?

I think I was brought into this world to build product, like honest to God, and I’m a problem solver. I studied philosophy and then I went to grad school for industrial design. Not normal things you think of, but they’re actually just problem-solving activities. It’s not that much different from business as well. They’re all just these problem-solving activities. I happened to just, we found the problem, and then you’re just searching for a solution and then suddenly you’re like, oh, wait a second, there is an entire ecosystem, an entire supply chain that allows you to produce this, sample this, import it, ship it out, and then over time, we’ve been very much just iterating on the brand. So all my product experience after design school has been with the brand, which has been interesting because now I know way too much about backpacks. But it’s been holistic because there’s multiple sides of product. You have the product design, you also have the whole development and supply chain backend. Oftentimes, designers get caught in their lane. But I think the best thing was to really see holistically how everything works and so you can understand how something’s sewn, why that’s difficult for the sewer to sew that. I’ve sewn my own bags, I’ve learned how to sew my own bags and all that. Learning the deep craft of what you’re doing is really the heart of it all.

I love that. In product design, it’s interesting because I leverage a lot of thinking from product design, like design thinking kind of approaches to things. One of the things that I find fascinating is if you do brand properly, it has a lot of similarities with product design, except you’re not necessarily going as far as to produce a product because usually the products are in play. For example, one of the key areas is knowing your customer, knowing the problems the customer might have, understanding how you’re going to begin to solve them. If you do that, if you have an understanding of that, you basically have a value that you can put out there. Yes, one expression is the products, but the other expression is the story you tell, which you’ve hinted at and the positioning of that. The thing I like about your brand is that you settle very clearly on a target market, which was photographers. These are backpacks specifically for photographers with all the challenges that photographers have, which you’ve hinted at the higher expense equipment, traveling stuff, but not just that. Looking at the product range, it’s like you’re solving for looks to me, like easy access to the camera, so that if I guess if I’m backpacking around, I’m like, oh, there’s a monkey swinging through the cheese. I can quickly grab my camera and it’s there and it’s comfortable. There’s all those ergonomic things. It’s a fascinating scenario because you’ve not just entered the market and tried to capture the whole market like the bag market. Right. You’ve gone in and you’ve niched into a specific audience type. How have you found that? Like you said, you talked to a lot of photographers. Did you profile them or was it quite niche for, you know, just photographers or was it a specific type of photographer that you were trying to target?

That’s a great question. Niche’s hold riches is kind of what we were told early on. And it’s totally true. If you go niche, your ads work, right? Your brand works, who you speak to works. Like if you’re not speaking to like a very specific person, you’re speaking to nobody, literally. And that is like a very stressful thing to go through. And we’ve totally swayed in the brand and we’ve been like, oh, what would happen if we go broader? And what would happen if we go tighter? We’ve always found that things are better when we go tighter. Generally, no, I didn’t niche down too much, right? You kind of want like a fairly broad understanding. I find when you do this qualitative research, you kind of speak to a range of photographers and you’re just looking for like patterns, right? People say the same things. And after like four or five conversations, you’re like, there’s some pattern here. There’s kind of like something you can pick up on. After 10, you guaranteed got answers. I did like 50 and like there was like, it was super early on, so we didn’t know. So we’re like, all right, well, let’s just talk to people. Let’s figure it out. And it very clearly, it set the foundation for what we’re doing. The features that people are looking for have not changed, right? In 10 years, right? The difference is maybe people aren’t carrying large, large lenses anymore. They’re carrying drones, small drones, which is very different. Or now everything’s gone from DSLRs, these kind of mirrorless cameras, small form factor, but they still kind of have these medium size lenses and things like that. So not too much has changed, but for anybody who’s starting it, I’m sure you guys see this in your practice, like when there’s a clearly defined niche with a really clearly defined problem, right? Like not even maybe even the end user, but like there’s like, there’s some problem there that somebody is really like struggling with, right? Then, then you got a brand, then you got like, you can, you got your product, you can, you can really cater to it. You can create something visual that people are attracted to and identify to.

Right. Because I mean, I always say this to folks, but like, why do we get paid, right? We get paid for adding value, right? And value often comes when you’re solving somebody’s problem, which is exactly what you’re talking about there. Like you’re producing products that solves challenges and is for that niche, for that particular target market. I just think there’s so much in there of value that you just said. One thing I wanted to pull out was this idea of talking to customers, right? I meet so many entrepreneurs and business owners who don’t talk to their own customers, right? It’s the most bizarre thing that I find. Like, wow, like they’ll be like, oh yeah, well, you know, our research department will look into that. It’s like, mate, like I get that you’ve got a research department, but like you’re the CEO, like you should get out there because you need to get your finger on the pulse. You need to understand the market, your customers. Don’t rely on others. Like, don’t put layers between you and the customer. I think it was Peter Drucker, the famous sort of old school management consultant who once said like, the purpose of a business is to create a customer, right? So if you’re the leader of that business, you know, you need to understand how and why the business is creating customers if you’re going to last the test of time. So everything you said there was amazing, but I did have one follow up question, which is you also mentioned in your comment that, you know, the trends in the market are changing, right? The tech that people are carrying around with them is changing. How do you keep abreast of that? Do you continue to talk to people or is your brother still in the photography game? Like, how are you kind of keeping up with the trends, I guess?

Yeah, it’s that’s actually a great question and a difficult one. I think we felt we certainly have like fallen, I don’t like the word victim, but like victim to not talk into customers enough. You can digital business is like there’s a disconnect, like thousands of people are coming through your door, but you don’t see them, it’s all data points. And so there’s a few ways we’ve gotten around that. We all attend all of our trade shows now, and like we make sure we work the booths, which we love doing. And like, you know, before, when we used to work those booths, people would come up to us and be like, who are you? Like, what is this? Like, why does it matter? And now we go to the trade shows. And the last one we were at, I think our bag was the most common camera bag I saw at that show. It was crazy. It outpaced all of our competition. I was like, what is this? And then now we do a few things. Like, we maintain a calendarly in a post-purchase flow. So we’ll try to take a few meetings every week with customers, chat with them, kind of keep on kind of hearing those patterns. I maintain like my own list of customers that I consistently like send surveys and ask questions to, which has been brilliant, right? For anybody, like you don’t need to be like bombarding your post-purchase customer, right? You just need to find a group of people like who care to give feedback and like opt into that process with you. And you can be very iterative with it. And so that has been certainly transformational in our process, because then like we can go out very quickly to a group of willing people who are willing to give us really clean feedback. And you know, I totally empathize with seeing other business owners who don’t do that, right? They just think to do that. And so suddenly you’re making decisions blind, which is one of the most dangerous things, right? Like hunches and like your gut intuition is a really good thing, especially as a founder. But it doesn’t mean you’re always correct and like you might find patterns where there aren’t patterns, right?

What’s that hunch based on, right? If you’re talking to customers and you’re getting vibes off of them, then you know, your hunch and intuition can kind of sink in with that. It’s interesting. I think we would call that little niche group, like in our world, we call that like brand loyalists, right? These are people that love you. They love your brand. They may be been with you for a while. They’re the ones that you want to really keep on side. You want to keep in with because they’re seeing the value and will tell you as well. They give you a little bit of grace to make some adjustments if necessary. One story that came to my mind is, I think you have it over in the US. I think you call it Walgreens Boots, right? Walgreens. They took over Boots here in the UK. Boots are like a chemist from hundreds of years ago. They were in Nottingham where I used to live. I did a bit of business with them back in the day. Their head office was near the center of Nottingham, massive complex, as you can imagine, really, labs and tests and loads of offices with people in them and stuff. Anyway, really, really interesting. But one of the cool things that they did was, because they were a retail store, yes, they developed a lot of chemist and boutique clinical product in the head office, but they also had all these around the UK. They’re national, right? What they did was they had this thing, because coming up to Christmas, they called it, I think it was called the Golden Quarter or Golden Month or something like this. It’s basically, they made most of their money through the year in the build up to Christmas. And the stores get overrun with customers and it’s so packed just before Christmas. I don’t know how long they’ve been doing it for, but it’s a really smart move. They basically said to all their office workers in the central office, right, in December, or I think it might be November or December, you have to spend a certain amount of time, might have been a week, I can’t remember the exact details, in store, right, like supporting the store. You’re going to apply to the store, the store manager will make, will take you in. They’ll put you somewhere suitable in the store, but basically you’re supporting the store. Now why I thought that was so smart is that therefore you get loads of people that often, you know, never see a customer at least once a year, they’re going to be in front of customers. Most of them will be serving on the tills and stuff in the store, in the environment where the products ultimately will go to be sold. Such a smart move and I think that’s one of the reasons Boots is successful because they’re developing products that they know people will love and appreciate. So just a little little tip there to get out, like you were saying, like talk to those customers, speak to them, get in front of them to shape your gut instinct. What do you think, Jacob?

I was going to follow up with Brandon about how he implemented the feedback. It’s one thing to listen to your customers, talk to them, but with a product, right, you’ve got a product existing and it’s like a slow process to iterate and get it launched and marketed and all of that. So what’s that process look like for you once you have that feedback, how you iterate in?

That was a great story. So we have a lot of product going at any given point, right? We also have a lot of brand campaigns and things happening like that, which we can get feedback for, but I like to do it more on the product end or the brand end of things, things that are kind of slower and heavier. You’re kind of checking in at every point of the development, right? So like from idea genesis all the way out to like, you have something that like you can show them, something that’s near final. Sometimes we’re sending bags out to people, letting them try them. All of our bags we’re trying the whole way through. So we have our team members who are like, they’re wearing them out and about and giving us feedback. And that right there kind of all those like coming together, all those pieces, that triangle creates a real time feedback loop that is actionable, right? Like bags take maybe nine to 18 months to make, right? From a design perspective. So they’re really long development cycles to do it right. Some people are really fast. You like, you can whip them out in like six months if you really want to try. But I think to do it really well, it takes a long time. So you just have to have like a lot of balls up in the air and you have to be getting a lot of feedback constantly in real time on those. And then, you know, for us, if we can get our hit rate to increase by, you know, 20%, that’s a huge win, right? So like, not every product is going to be a winner. You know, we have like, statistically, we know like one in this many will hit. But if we can increase those odds, then, you know, everything’s worth it.

Yeah, the co-creation and that feedback loop, as you mentioned, is so important to not just have this aha moment, but to actually get that feedback, see how it works and iterate and improve. All right, I was gonna ask about the values in terms of your, inside your company and also externally. Do you have any values that you really hold true?

So we did this big, long exercise with, I don’t know if you guys ever heard of Systems Dynamics. It came out of MIT back in like the 80s or so. And we ended up going through a big, long exercise with a family member of ours who practices Systems Dynamics. And so out of that came our purpose, our mission, our core values and our vision. And so we do have core values we live by. And I have to admit, we’ve really embodied them. One of them is we’re serious about play. I think that’s very important to us, right? We want to have fun in what we do. I run this company with my two brothers. We’re a family business. We have a whole team. And so we want to run an empathetic organization and one that people want to stay at for years. And we’ve had people stay for years with us. Like, you know, we have some team members who’ve been with us for over five years, which is wild, right? That was like right as we started hiring people. Another one is, you know, we’re fair in all we do. And we take that one really seriously. You know, we want to be good at business, right? Like we want to be fair in business. And so we want to be fair to our customers. We want to be fair to all of our partners, right? We want to treat everybody right, all of our employees. And so those are probably two that really stick out to me that are really important as far as values go. And it very much led how we approach kind of our day to day. It’s a great, like a really brilliant framework for decision making because you’re like, are we living by these? And then you’re like, yes or no. And you’re not actively thinking about it. You’ve just, I don’t know if you’ve done vision boarding at the beginning of the year, you’re like, my year is going to look like this. And you scrapped it all together. And then if you look at the end of the year, you’re like, oh, well, damn, you know, maybe I am a little more fit or like, you know, oh, my business does look better. I’m not like so strung out working long hours. I, you know, I’ve set good boundaries, things like that. And those values kind of helped us in very difficult periods to make the right decisions.

Yeah, it’s important not just to have values written on the wall, but it really sounds like you’ve integrated that with, you know, play. I think it just makes sense with the audience and, you know, enjoying the process, and otherwise you just would burn out, right?

Oh, yeah. Soul sucking, if you don’t want to, right? Like anything in life, right? So all I want to do is work with people I like, right? And do work I love. And so that’s really important when we hire people. It’s like, is this somebody we want to hang out with all the time? And which is an obvious one, but I think one that often gets overlooked. But, you know, our team is brilliant and dynamic and just so much better than me at what they do, which is the best. That’s all you want. So that was a very good question.

I think founders often overlook the importance of culture inside an organization and how it can actually lead to a better brand and product as well, because it’s all integrated. If you’re not enjoying life, I don’t want to be there. It’s going to show.

It’s so funny. We were told early on, you’re building culture every day. And so anytime any of us do something silly, you’re like, oh, no, we’re building culture.

I love that.

You end up with a lot of good things. Every day, this sounds silly, but every day, there’s almost a sacred ritual that the team plays Nintendo Super Smash, and it’s so funny. And they’ve gotten nasty at it, the whole team. They’re all just like incredible at playing this game. I’m terrible at it, so I just get wrecked every time. But those kinds of things like work is hard for anybody, right? And like, you know, finding happiness and joy in that, I think is a very reasonable thing.

Very reasonable.

I’m going to shift the dire a little bit into kind of the story and the growth kind of aspects of it, because as we sort of hinted at, you didn’t take heavy investment to start with. Like, how did that, do you think, influence the pace and priorities? And has that changed? Like, have you taken investment? Have you thought about taking investment? Like, where are you at on that side of things?

Yeah, so we’re still completely bootstrapped. I think you can do it when you’re young, like really young, fresh out of school. Like, you’re just scrappy as anything, like literally don’t really know nice things or anything that’s of any real comfort. Like I said, we ran it on the side for many years. One of my brothers went through Venture for America, which was kind of a fellowship program. We were one of the only companies, if not the only company, to just be a member company with a fellow. I was in grad school for industrial design, and then my other brother worked at the New York Fed, so he’s kind of like a suit, like very financially savvy and operationally driven. So the trifecta actually worked really well, and we kind of raised money through all these business plan competitions, Kickstarters, all these accelerators. We went through so many of them, and really good ones, and they assigned us brilliant mentors. And so the young mentors would always tell us, yeah, raise tons of money because they raised hundreds of millions, and they were like, you should do that. And all the old heads were like, don’t do that. Like just kind of like scrap this thing out until you hit the next level. And I’m so grateful that we didn’t take money because every founder I swear I meet who’s as far in as we are like kind of in that 7 to 10 year mark, they’re just totally burnt from it, right? Like from answering to the investors, from growing and then laying off teams, like growing and then laying off teams. And like, I think the path to success here is very narrow for any brand. And then going through that and losing the sense of fulfillment that kind of comes with what you’re building. Like, it’s a creative journey, the brand. And like, when you lose sight of the creative journey, that’s where I think a lot of these brands really begin to suffer. They like, you know, the founders suddenly don’t, like they lose whatever majority say, and suddenly the brand’s being taken in different directions. And I think that can be very detrimental. Whereas if you can build a brand in your vision, right? And where you think it needs to go, where your hunch is saying to go, right? And then back that up with data and logic. Suddenly you have something that’s really beautiful. So for us, we’re continuing to bootstrap this. It’s not always the easiest, but it certainly makes for a really tightly run org that we enjoy. We’ve gone through the hard part. And then never say never, maybe one day we’d be open to taking investment. But as it stands right now, we’re trying to not find balance per se. We’re just trying to build something we really love and continue to build it the way we love it.

Right. Well, it allows you that level of control to build for the long term, doesn’t it?

Right.

Like one of the things I often find is when businesses take investment, you know, and sometimes there’s good reason, there’s growth opportunity or whatever, and it’s the right thing. But it does change the dynamic, as you say, right? Because suddenly the business is answerable to investors, and those investors ultimately want to pay back. Despite what they say, right, they want their money back, you know, two or three years time, right? You haven’t got long to demonstrate that. And brand building is long term. It’s strategic. It’s, you know, my view is when you talk about the brand, you’re talking 10, 20 years out, right? Like, what position in the market are we going to dominate and hold, right? Like, what is that? That isn’t how much are we going to sell next quarter, right? Like, do you know what I mean? There’s a big difference in how you think. So I think it’s a super smart move from what you’ve said. Like, it sounds to me like it’s going to give you that ability to really build something special long term for customers, for yourselves, for your staff. And yeah, you only need to take investment if you’re kind of happy with where you’re at and you just want to ramp up where you’re at. Do you know what I mean? Rather than sort of build something beyond that. But anyway, how interesting. So talking about customers, right? We’ve sort of hinted at your loyal fan base, the loyalists, if you like, and you’ve talked about business events and how you went to the last one and how a lot of people were carrying your backpacks and stuff. But have you done much with community and with building connections amongst customers? And if so, how have you sort of leveraged that and what sort of things are you doing as a brand?

Actually, truth be told, community is not something that we are brilliant at.

Okay.

I think community is an exceptionally hard thing to build and it happens brick by brick. And some people manage to build it exceptionally well. We have a very large online following. I think maybe it’s approaching maybe 3 million right now across social platforms. And we’ve been able to build hype, right? And deep interest, right? From customers and lots of like, you know, people are making videos and things like that. But I found like deep rooted community is incredibly difficult to build. I don’t know how people do it exceptionally well. I think like that comes from like a lot of small conversations over years and like continuing to do that. Just like it’s like having the dinner week over week and like doing that every week, year on year in and year out. There’s some brands that do it really well, like some of these running brands who run like, like, you know, run clubs and things like that. I think like those kinds of things build community exceptionally well. But otherwise, I think it’s an incredibly difficult thing to do.

Well, maybe there’s something to consider, right? Like, because I always think like to build a community, you kind of need to create spaces for people to connect. But like it has to be around whatever the brand stands for. It has to be around an experience that like is not selling to them, obviously. So like that could be the next level for Brevitē, right? Like what does that start feeling and looking like if you were to dominate an own, dominate is the wrong word, if you were to create that space, create an event, create somewhere for people to go. But it sounds like they’re doing it automatically online. Like you talked about hype and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, fame is so important. Like it particularly if your customers are basically talking about you without prompt, right? Like that you made it from a brand building perspective. If people are willing to kind of say, hey, check this brand out or check this product out. Because you’ve solved their problem so well that they’re so happy that they’re sharing it with others. I often think back in the day, like 200 years ago, right? If there was a bloke around here, I’m in rural Wales at the moment, right? In the UK. If there was a bloke that was good at, I don’t know, making spades, right? We’d be like, oh, Larry, he’s the really cool guy that makes spades. Somebody says, oh, Matt, I need a spade. I’d be like, go talk to Larry. He’s the guy. You don’t need to talk to anyone else. It’s a bit like that with brands, right? Online. If somebody has found something that’s brilliant, they will recommend it to their friends. We often overlook that as business leaders. Just create great value and give it some time, and that community and that hype will grow. But just deliver amazing value. Stop trying to manipulate things. Stop trying to play that game. That’s what I advise to people, and it sounds like you’re doing that really, really well.

You know what? I appreciate. I was so curious what your tape was on it. One of the craziest things we ever saw was we saw this like, someone tagged us in a clip on Instagram, and we have this other product called The Runner, and it’s like a bag with a flap, and it’s kind of cool. And there was like 30 runners, and all these women had these runners at this photography meetup. And it was like the first moment, it was like an oh shit moment. We’re like, oh, we’ve done something right. Like we totally like hit some vein here that like was resonating with this audience. And it was such a cool sensation. But yeah, it would be an agreement, like creating space for it in a way that isn’t selling to people is deeply important to probably build community.

Community is hard. I run a community myself and have also run failed ones in the past because it’s hard. Everyone’s idea of value is different and that people are coming from all different journeys as well and people come and go. And that’s the hardest thing is to keep the constant influx and the communication going and the space to connect and just understanding and listening and iterating. It is a constant process that takes a lot of work. So I feel you Brandon, I feel you.

I’m glad I’m not alone.

Yeah, absolutely. I want to shift the conversation to the identity design because you mentioned you went through this, I think, systems dynamics you mentioned or diagnosis or something like that where you worked on the mission, the vision, the values and everything. But jump in to the identity and your product. How did you make it all work together?

Like the visuals with the product itself and how we’re positioned.

Yep. All of that. Yes.

It’s so funny. I think the way that it comes together in like a lot of these venture-backed businesses is kind of sterile.

Right?

They have a name, they go to a branding agency, the agency goes into it and they’re like, no, no, you need to change your name and change all your colors and all that. For us, we’ve been deeply involved in that process. Then in our most recent round, we just went through a rebrand last month actually. I actually ended up leading the rebrand myself. I just ended up, I knew exactly what we wanted and I just worked with a really talented graphic designer and just went through it all. The way we had to look at it is like we had to talk to ourselves, myself and my brothers. We had to talk to our team and it’s like, is this aligning with everybody? Does this feel like us? Is this honest to what we’re doing? Because what we found is at some point, we weren’t on our honest path. We weren’t doing something that felt like it was legitimate to who we were as people and our true selves. We switched that path. I think as far as the product end of things to go and who we’re selling to, the most honest path was the photographer because one of our brothers is a photographer. It made it so straightforward to understand who the audience was, where the whole was in the market. We’re not perfect at that. We have people we know who have much better understandings of the niche itself, because every niche has its own nuances. Unless you’re really deep in it, unless you’re really into it and you’re like, I know all the YouTubers and I know all the forums and all that stuff, it’s sometimes hard to get a clear line of sight into. We have a few people who kind of reach out with who help with that. You look at all the pieces and you squint your eyes and you tilt your head, and you’re like, yeah, this feels correct.

There’s a lot of pressure for you guys, targeting photographers to have great photography as part of the visual language. My observation is this beautiful stuff. You’ve got these beautiful lifestyle kind of shots, I guess you’d call them, always showing a photographer in action or walking around or doing something really kind of lifestyle-y. But then you’ve also got these amazing kind of product shots where the product itself is displayed beautifully, kind of like hovering, I don’t know, this is just my take on it as an outsider looking in. How has that come together, that kind of the pack shot, the product visualization side of things, and was that just kind of a natural evolution or have you really had to work hard on any aspect there?

We’ve had to work exceptionally hard at it.

I’m not sure that’s the case.

What we learned along the way is that photographers recognize good photography and sometimes that’s easy to forget, especially with this world of ugly ads, and like UGC and all that stuff, it’s easy to just get lost in that. We were producing so much organic, we produced over 3,000 organic videos. It was a machine. We got lost for a bit, and so recently we’ve doubled down on our art direction, kind of doubled down on the long, per se, instead of the short, the long. The product photography that we do is all on 35mm and medium format. There’s some digital mixed in there, but we’re trying to be very true to that. You can’t fake film, and you can’t recreate film. It’s just so honest. We travel all around. We work with brilliant photographers to get that. We work really closely with them. Sometimes I’m mood boarding and leading the art direction. Sometimes other team members are, because that’s part of the really fun parts of the business. Then our product photography, that’s for the white background stuff that’s glowing. Each of those photo shoots take eight to 12 hours. One of us will be on set there, and we’re trying to curate really tightly what’s in the bag, how is the bag being shown, can we show all the pockets, because we have a bunch of weird, unique pockets. We figured out along the way, actually you don’t need to do things the normal way, you can make things really beautiful and interesting. And so we spend a lot of time and a lot of money to take photos, and it’s just been the most fulfilling and the best thing ever.

It really shows. When you go through the site and all the materials and your campaigns and stuff, it’s quality, right? And as you say, your target market are really looking for that. So you’ve got to be on that. So kudos to you for all of that. But I had another kind of question. You recently mentioned you went through sort of a brand identity process to kind of refresh things. What do you think your biggest learning has been around the expression of the identity, you know, from all of the product photography, all the way through to the logo design and all of that. Got any tips to share for other people who are perhaps about to go on a similar journey?

I think once you know where you’re going, it’s really easy, right? And it’s like easy to overcomplicate it, so don’t overcomplicate it. Wherever you’re going, like if something’s working somewhere, like in another category or in your category, like you probably want to go in that direction, or like find the hole in your category that isn’t there and then like figure out what it looks like in another category. Keep your branding guidelines simple. Like our last branding guidelines had like seven to nine colors. And it was like, I could execute on it, my brother could execute on it, but most of our team couldn’t actually. It was just too complicated. And it was no fault of their own. We just didn’t know enough to like create, like work with our branding agency to create like simpler guidelines. And so these new guidelines are very simple. They don’t rely on graphical elements, which was like a big thing, right? And instead, we rely on all the photo assets, which I think are much stronger. So if you can create evergreen photo assets, so you have like an overarching mood board that’s like, this is the coloring and like kind of treatment that we want. Like all of your assets should work for years until like, you know, like right now, like direct flash photography is super in, right? Like the GX7 is like camera people use and like, you know, that’s super cool. That looked terrible five years ago. And like probably in five years from now, that won’t look great. So you kind of have to change some of the treatments, but general like vibe of what you’re doing, I think photos go way further than any sort of graphical elements. So just keep it really simple.

Nice, and you talked about scaling. Some of the organizations I work with are huge, and that idea of execution is so tough to execute consistently, right? Because otherwise, you’re going to confuse customers or potential customers. They don’t recognize the brand codes because they’re just all over the place. How are you working on that scaling at the moment? By simplifying, you found that it’s easier to bring other team members in. Is that what you’ve mentioned there?

Yes. It’s much easier bringing them in. It’s much easier to be like, these are the assets you use, this is how they’re used. Before we had other systems, other kind of graphical elements, and it gets too complicated. I see that a lot with brands. It’s like they have these very complex, beautiful brand, beautiful website, all that. But then there’s no way to transfer that into packaging, or transfer that into product, or transfer that into some other format, a video format. It becomes too much. And so you can get very lost in that. You can stop doing the real deep work, and instead you’re kind of moving pixels in a way that isn’t conducive towards anything. There’s no creative exploration, there’s no real output. It’s just like, damn, we need to keep this thing cohesive with everything else, but it’s so complicated that you can’t keep it cohesive.

This is it. Consistency is the aim of the game, right? Particularly when you’re a challenger brand, because you cannot afford for your campaign or your graphic to flash by and the consumer not understand who you are, right? Because if you confuse them in any way, I see it so often, creative teams get carried away. They’re like, hey, let’s try something new. It’s like, how long have you been doing the other way? Oh, a month, right? You can’t change like that. People are not paying attention. You’ve just got to do what you would consider the dull, boring stuff, right? Just really well, really consistently and really simply. So yeah, that’s a great takeaway. So I just want to sort of ask you another quick question. The brand obviously started as a product brand, okay? Like, you know, in other words, the product. How much work do you do on kind of more like brand storytelling from a higher level, right? Like, do you know what I mean? Do you ever invest in, hey, we’re not going to show the product. We’re going to invest in speaking about what we’re about, or is that something that you might move to like kind of more lifestyle sort of aspects in the future? What are your thoughts?

Right now, truth be told, my brother Dylan, who can sell ice to an Eskimo, that’s kind of like the type he is. He’s like a brilliant storyteller. He’s very direct marketing. And so we don’t do tons of like talking about everything else. Right now we talk like it’s very direct. And we found that worked. You know, it works like the content we put out works. We found that when we get a little too fluffy with it, it’s like, it doesn’t, it’s hard to measure an ROI. But I’m also, I’m personally a believer that, you know, if you invest in the long, the short will perform. So I think as we’re going forward, we’re trying to produce more of those types of assets. They’re more, those kinds of things are more complicated. And they’re harder to even like sense an ROI on. I’ve certainly seen it. We put out a video recently and we knew when we’re, we’re pouring our hearts and souls into this thing. We’re like, this is not going to perform. We like from a performer, we’re not doing this for performance. We’re doing this purely for brand. And it just felt so good. Like you’re like, because this is actually the brand activities, whereas instead, like, I think everyone just gets caught up in like, well, you know, the ad account’s doing really great.

So it’s so tough, isn’t it? The whole long and short argument. And I think when you’re sort of carving a space out, the direct marketing, you’re kind of owning that space of photography, of photography backpacks, where you might want to think about things is just a thought from my side is that if other competitors really come in and start challenging and coming basically into your space, copying everything you’re doing, suddenly, then you need, you need a moat around you. You need something that you can defend. And so you need to then really kind of stake a claim in people’s minds that we stand for this and we’re the originals on this. And these other people are imposters basically. And that’s where, you know, in more, I guess, mature, mature areas of the market, I find like that’s where that long-term play really starts to play off. But yeah, it’s tough when you’re starting out, you know, and ROI’s are always an interesting argument, you know, between, between it. But there’s a lot of research done, Jacob, you’ll probably be able to quote some more by the Ehrenberg Bass Institute in Australia, particularly around this idea of brands that invest in the long and the short are the ones that are the most successful, like, you know, over time. So definitely check that out. Any thoughts on that, Jacob?

No, I think you’re pretty, we’ve been talking about it around kind of already, like you’re doing both of those things, Brandon. And but RRI is one of those tricky topics, as you said, like, how can you measure it? You can refer to other case studies in hindsight, but in real time, it’s near impossible because it’s the long, long game. But I did have a question before, kind of looping back, you mentioned you had, you made an honest decision because you went down a path that wasn’t honest. So I just want to understand that because you had these values of play and fear. How did you come back to your roots and kind of come back onto your path? If you can share a little bit more about that story.

Yeah, I can. I can. So I think like one of the wonderful things about maybe more traditional, like retail channels or even paid acquisition is that you can very much control the path you go down, right? But with Organic, you follow the algorithm. And so that becomes done at its best, can be just the most interesting, brilliant thing, and done at its worst can take you really far down certain paths. And so what we found is that we want to build something like a brand that we’re proud of that has lasting legs, right? It takes, you know, look at Patagonia, like 30, 40 years to build it. Like most of these brands take forever to build. And that’s what we’re in it for. We’re in it for the long haul. And then like Organic was just like, it’s so fast, right? We had never seen anything like it. We were able to scale it. It was crazy. And so the problem is that you are creating massive volumes of brand assets that you are putting out into the world that are being dictated by an algorithm and not by the brand. And the brand’s job is to control the brand, right? You control all the assets. You control everything that goes out. But when you treat Organic as a performance channel, you have to follow the algorithm. That is something that’s lost on most people because most people never really go down the Organic path. I think it’s talked about a lot, but I think very few brands are able to execute on it well. I think creators execute on it brilliantly. And even for them, you can see kind of the burnout and the, if you talk to like YouTubers, they’ll be like, I make four videos for the algorithm and one video for myself, right? And that just keeps them sane. And so for us, we ended up going down that path. They kind of, you know, we’re like, it burned us out. It burned the team out. It just was like this massive suck. And we were just like, okay, like, what are we doing here? This is not how we want to do this. And so we took a good hard look at ourselves and we’re like, what kind of business do we want to run? What kind of brand do we want to run? And we took a line and so we slowed down organic a bit, right? So that you’re not being kind of so jerked around by the algorithm. And we were like, we’re going to really dive headfirst into photography as a channel. And that’s worked out really well.

Thank you for sharing that. Matt, did you want to jump?

Well, I just had one other quick thing on the values and stuff. It’s just that I came across on your site an aspect of the brand perhaps we’ve not touched on. And then I’d love to talk about the future and then we can wrap. But it was this idea of I think I saw something that was like half a half a million dollars sort of donated of backpacks and stuff. There’s a philanthropic aspect to the brand. Where did that come from? And like, you know, how’s that going?

Yeah, so we’ve committed half a million dollars to donation of backpacks to America’s youth. I think we donated $200,000 of backpacks. So far to that, another $35,000 to like AAPI, COVID Relief and a few of these other initiatives. It’s something that we can do, right, when we can do it, and so we do. And it’s really important to us, specifically one of my brothers, it’s like, it’s very important to him. And so our mission in the brand and kind of what came out of it was to create lasting change for the greater good. And that can mean a range of things, right? It can mean running an empathetic organization or putting out products that we know will stand the test of time and like come out of ethical factories and are just like not crap. Or it can mean doing these donation initiatives when we can. And so it has been something that we put a lot of money behind. You know, when you consider how many backpacks you have to sell to then go and like, you know, then to donate that much money of backpacks, it’s like astronomical. But it’s the right thing to do. And it was something that we had the power to do and we had the supply chain to do it. And so it’s a part of the brand that lives. It’s kind of part of the heart of the brand. And we’re just trying to do our part to live a good life. So yeah, me, that’s part of it outright that allows us to do that.

What an amazing thing, you know, like beautiful that you can give back in that way, as you say, and that can become part of it. And I guess for customers investing in the brand, if you like purchasing a little bit of that support, they can see goes to a greater good other than just making loads of money for somebody. So I think that’s kudos to you for weaving that side of things into the brand. And I thought, I know you wouldn’t highlight it, but I thought I’ll just shine a little light on there for you. So it’s great. Let’s talk about the future. Like, where do you sort of see the product, the brand, evolving into the near future?

Yeah, so we see ourselves becoming a larger lifestyle brand for photographers. I think it has to do with the fact that there isn’t anyone who’s really great at doing it in its current form, and we probably do it decently well. And then probably out of my own interest to explore other product categories, I think like there’s so many interesting manufacturing techniques and products that people really need. And so I love the Patagonia stance that we’re going to create the goods because people are going to buy them anyway. So we might as well provide a better alternative than what exists out there. And so we’ll continue to do that. So we will continue to penetrate into the photography market and probably expand and we want to be like the cool brand in the space.

Would you ever do a collab with Patagonia?

Hell yeah.

Right, if anyone is listening from Patagonia or anyone knows anyone at Patagonia, right, you’ve got to ping them this episode. Get them to check this out because values definitely seem to align. So how cool could that be, Patagonia entering the photography space? I think that’s a match made in brand heaven, so to speak. So yeah, nice. Cool. Well, yeah, I mean, that would be really interesting, wouldn’t it? Expanding into different categories, you know, evolving the product lines, you know, creating different types of product. As a product designer, I bet you’re chomping at the bit to kind of explore how that could work. But that’s brilliant. I wonder if we’ve got time for a very quick fire bonus round. So we’ve started to do this recently, haven’t we, Jacob? Like quick fire questions. You don’t need to talk too much about them, just gut instinct, how would you respond? So first question, one message for brand builders listening.

Keep it simple.

All right.

Did your design process influence your brand thinking or vice versa?

No, it didn’t. But I think it could have influenced it more. I think we went more on gut feel than for the brand than we did on maybe as more logical I would be for product.

Did you ever have to rework or reframe the way that you were positioning the brand and why?

Yes. Back in 2018, our brand looked like an outdoor bags brand because that’s kind of what we were selling. And we realized that we did not live that life. We loved grinding it out in our office in Brooklyn, and we loved beautiful brands, and we were not doing that. Instead, we were showing all these people on the top of mountaintops and things like that. And so we took a massive pivot back in 2018, 2019 to these smaller, cuter, colorful bags and a really beautiful brand. That was a massive pivot we took, and a massive gamble we took.

Nice. What would be your biggest tip for another entrepreneurial founder building a challenger brand?

Keep your overhead low. Don’t take money. Don’t take money if you don’t have to, like really don’t. So, you know, have a good partner who’s very understanding. I think it’s all a good one. Yeah.

Awesome. Thank you, Brandon. I think we’ll wrap it up here. But before we do, where can people connect with you and the brand and anything else you’d like to share?

Please. You guys can connect with me on LinkedIn under Brandon Kim. I love to kind of meet everybody and anybody. I love meeting interesting people. And you can follow us online at Brevitē, B-R-E-V-I-T-E, or find us online at brevitē.com.

Brandon, it’s been amazing having you on. Like such a great story. Good luck with everything. And thank you for sharing your story so far, maybe in a year or two when you’ve when you’ve gone international and the brand is, you know, everywhere, even more. We can catch up with you and keep track on how things are growing.

Let’s do it. Thanks for being such a great host, you guys.

Pleasure. I should say as well, folks, one final thing. Jacob has just had a child, so kudos for him for being alert and awake. And congratulations to the Cass household from us all at JUST Branding.

Thank you, mate. Let’s forward now. I’m a crazy, crazy man.

Thank you, guys.