Michelle Mattar on Design & Identity

Michelle Mattar is the founder of brand building firm Practice. Prior to founding Practice, she served as Creative Director at Ritual, and worked as a Designer at Red Antler. Her work has been featured in Fast Company's Innovation by Design awards and Monotype's Type Trends.

So I start all these conversations with the same question, which is a question I borrowed from a friend of mine. She helps people tell their story, and I haven't really found a better question to kind of start a conversation sort of out of the blue. But it's a big question, so I over-explain it the way that I'm doing right now. Before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is: where do you come from? Again, you're in total control.

I love this question. Such a good thought starter. I think I might have two answers here.

The first is in terms of just background. I come from two really different cultures, a very blended background. My family immigrated to the US, and my mother is Swedish, which is a culture of being quite reserved, very respectful, very organized, a very peaceful country.

And my father is Lebanese, which is a chaotic country where they’re very outspoken. They don't necessarily keep opinions to themselves. There's a lot of life and action and disorganization.

So I would say I have a very strange background of two very different cultural types of ways of being, which definitely informs my own family's culture and how I grew up.

The other thing I would say, which is perhaps a bit less lighthearted, more serious, is that I come from a family that had a big moment of having to survive. And that has definitely informed who I am today.

When I was six, my father was diagnosed with cancer. Just out of poor luck, the next year my brother was diagnosed with cancer. Through my whole childhood, we had two very sick people in the household.

I think that surviving looks really different to other people through that. For a young child like myself, I found creativity and escapism as a method of survival. And I think that's really, if you ask me where I came from and who I am today from that background, a lot of it came from that experience.

Yeah. What was the experience? What was the challenge? Can you tell me a story about being, that word "blended," you know, growing up with two very distinct kinds of cultures?

Yeah, I think just in terms of our family, like we were always having these giant get-togethers. We have a huge family. We all love to cook. To me, this is extremely Lebanese, but it's got a lot of rules. It's got a lot of quiet expectations. It's very organized. Everyone silently knows their part. And this is such a Swedish way of being.

So I think when I think of our big get-togethers as a family and what that looks like, it feels really unique to me. And I'm actually really proud of it. It's not a negative, but it's certainly a bit unusual when I see it all.

And how are your brother and your father doing?

My brother survives. My father didn't. He passed away after a struggle of nearly six years, but they thought he was going to last much less than that.

I think that's a huge testament to the fact that he really wanted to be there. But my brother is doing great. He has some complications, but he runs a nonprofit that he founded. He was in high school, and it's called Student Movement Against Cancer. I think he's found a lot of personal meaning through that lived experience.

Yeah. Do you have a memory of what you, young Michelle, wanted to be when you grew up?

Yes. I was maybe seven or eight, and I really wanted to be an animal photographer. My mom would buy me disposable cameras, and they were a mix of stealth shots of squirrels and my dog. She would just get rolls and rolls of the same pictures developed just to allow me to entertain that dream.

Yeah. What kind of pictures of squirrels?

I would just stealthy-stalk them. Feel like I was out in nature. I was a Nat Geo photographer, but I certainly was an amateur. Definitely a lot in my imagination there, but I knew it was something creative, right? Like I thought photography might be something I wanted to do and something adventurous.

And where were you when you were stalking the squirrels? Where did you grow up?

We moved to New Jersey, just like 10, 15 minutes outside of Newark.

Nice. And where are you now? So to catch us up, where are you now? What are you doing? What's your day to day?

Yeah. So I live in Brooklyn. I've been here with one quick West Coast stint since college. I went to Pratt, which is an art school actually in Brooklyn, not even in Manhattan. I run Practice. It's a brand-building firm. We're six people. I started it four years ago in March. Before that, I was an independent doing very similar work.

So day to day, I partner with either brand-new ideas, venture funds, or founders and work to bring them to market. If that means research, naming the company, building the brand identity, everything to do with it—the packaging even. Oftentimes we're testing and learning and helping to validate market interest in the product development, and then all the way through to bringing that to launch and marketing.

We're doing a lot of this, especially in the last two years, working with established brands that really need to figure out their next chapter, or they're ahead of a big pivot and reentering the market. So major rebrands, even renaming and relaunching of pretty large scale—I would say not massive mega-scale, but maybe 250-plus employee companies.

Yeah, well, congratulations on four years and starting your own thing. What's it been like, the first four years of Practice?

I would say the first two years felt like getting my sea legs. Like when the boat would rock, I felt it. And the last two years have been really different, and I'm really glad that in those first two years I buckled myself up. I certainly didn't do things perfectly, but I made a point to learn every time because I've really had a lot of fun these last two years.

And then in terms of just what it looks like, I guess quantitatively, we were four people steadily. We've grown in the last two years to six. Initially, I just hired two people. So every year, we've kind of stepped change. It is intentional to be small. I don't really want to scale it. I actually have had opportunities to make it bigger and decided to go the opposite way.

When did you first discover that you could do this for a living?

Kind of accidentally. Well, I guess not really. I went to design school. The whole reason I discovered design as something that I wanted to do was because of what I said earlier about escapism and imagination.

We couldn't travel anywhere having two really sick people in the household. So I kind of traveled by going online, and I got into coding at a very young age. I bought my first domain name with my mom's permission and credit card at 11 years old. I was creating WordPress sites all through middle school and high school.

What was the domain though? What did you get?

I owned Juicebox as my moniker because I wasn't allowed to use my name, which then was purchased. So it was my first investment. Later, I moved on to something—I think it was like Adorkable or something really nerdy and embarrassing, like what your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) screen name would have been. Yeah. And I had a blog. I had design resources. I would publish digital art or drawings I was making.

But so you sold the Juicebox? You made money off of that?

Yeah, yeah, I did.

How long did you have that?

I think it was maybe like seven or eight years. And then I got this email to my WHOIS domain information. And I was like, "Mom, what do I do about this?"

I wasn't actually using it a ton at the time. I had changed to this new moniker. My mom—she was kind of watching what I was doing and making sure I was being careful. I always knew that she was aware of it. I don't think I knew to the degree that now, as I've gotten older, I realize she read everything I was posting.

Which I probably would have too if it was my daughter. But I think I just decided I wanted a different moniker online because I couldn't use my name.

Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, was it a... it sounds like a, like a... I mean, not exactly rags to riches, but an 11-year-old domain—you cashed out on an amazing URL.

Yeah, I mean, it felt good. I had like a little budget going to college that was meaningful to me at the time. I felt rich at the time.

What do you remember about choosing Juicebox? How did Juicebox come to be your first domain?

I was making digital art. This is a weird backstory, but I couldn't afford—or at least I hadn't proven to my family that I was going to be good enough at this stuff—to get Adobe products because they were really expensive. So I had this thing called PaintShop Pro, and it was like a much cheaper, free version. It had the pen tool, but the pen tool, when you saved the file, didn’t save as a vector. You would draw as a vector, but it would save at whatever resolution it was.

I found out that I was not the only person doing this, and that there was a small community of people making the same art I was making. We called it Vexel art—vector and pixel. I had created a bunch of that art, and one of my favorite pieces I made was this illustration of a lunch box that was a little funky and weird and different colors. I really liked this Juicebox and the label I had made on it. So I took that little icon from it and was like, oh, I'll just use this. I think it just came from a drawing of mine.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah, very online.

What's that?

I've said I've been very online my whole life.

Yeah. I think that Juicebox came in the middle of answering the story of how you discovered this work. When did you first discover you could make a living, I guess, building brands?

Yeah, okay. So I went to college for design and I knew how to code, so I had good internships. By default—not really asking what do I want to do, but rather, what am I capable of—I thought I was going to become a web designer.

I applied to an agency, Red Antler, as a web designer, and I got an interview there. The creative director, who’s also one of the co-founders, Simon Andres, looked at my portfolio and told me that I could have a job there, but that he didn't think I was a web designer. He thought I was a brand designer.

I had applied for an open role, and I was just given a different job that I had not applied for. And I said yes. I think there was a piece of my portfolio where, for a very long time—six months, I think—I had kept a diary, making a logo a day for each day. I think that was probably why. He saw that project and wanted to see me do more of that and less of the websites.

Were those logos—sorry to interrupt you—were those logos for imaginary companies or for companies that already existed? What was that project?

It was ways to just describe things that happened in my day. So I kept a diary of what was going on, and I remember one of them that comes to mind was a day I had a final project. I was in college, and it was a bound book. I had spent all day printing and formatting and perfecting these prints, and there were errors, and it took twice as long.

So I made this logo that said "print," and it had those sketchy lines that you get when your printer is running out of ink. It was just like whatever memento of the day, and I translated it into a phrase or symbol to create a memory. I made a big poster with a grid of all the logos for the final.

And what was your time at Red Antler like? I mean, they seem to... I mean, I know them to be kind of the poster child of a particular moment in brand building and identity design, right?

Yeah, it was the best big first job ever. I definitely came in at a time where, when I would say Red Antler, people kind of knew who they were, and by the time I left, it felt like everyone knew who they were.

One of the very first projects I was put on and saw launch was the mattress company, Casper. I think there was just a lot of... it was a time where I remember the meetings would be like, "We signed this new client, and it's the Warby Parker of blank."

There was so much of this: get things online, get things with money-back guarantees. But I learned a lot because they had a high volume of work in all different categories. So one week you're designing a fashion brand, the next week you're working on a new Silicon Valley bank idea, the next week you're working on the rebrand of—this is a real project—Foursquare.

As a designer, I could not use the same devices over and over. It didn't apply. It was like learning a whole new thing each time, and I had to really build a very robust creative palette for myself.

Also, it was there where I started writing into my work. When there wasn’t enough copy for something, I would just write it. Leadership there pointed out that I was a really good writer.

It was there where I got the inkling that I would be able to do a lot of the work that I'm doing today. I didn't actually do it in my role there; I just got enough feedback where people were like, "Oh, let's use that," or "That's good," or "That's a great idea," to know that I had enough of a baseline skill to really develop it.

Yeah. You describe Practice as a brand-building firm. I'm always curious about the language we choose about ourselves. Can you tell me a little bit about how you came to... yeah, came to what Practice is and how you talk about it?

Yeah. Yeah. I think this is a great segue. Since I left Red Antler, I was pretty young—I was 23 when I left—and I have been self-employed ever since, which is a decade now. It really has two distinct chapters.

The first chapter was just as an independent, working on a freelance basis. The way I was working and how I got my first round of clients was that I didn't have a great network as a designer, but I had a pretty good one when it came to early-stage funding and founders.

People were referring me on. I would help people create investor materials with temporary brands at a time when they really needed to convince investors that they could create this glossy millennial brand—that they were going to be able to just "sex up" a category. Creative was a differentiator for a lot of these companies, and they needed someone like me.

So I was building these decks while I was figuring out what to do next. Honestly, I was just a bit burnt out. I had a lot going on, but also by fault of myself. I burnt out because I was so young that I just didn't know you could say no. I would just do it all. Everything that came my way—I had no idea it was an option to say, "That's too much."

Eventually, I really needed a break. As I was just trying to figure out what that was and get a hold on what my burnout was actually doing to me, those people went out, used those materials, raised funding, and came back. They were like, "We've got investment. We have to build a brand. Do you want to do it?"

That's how I landed my first set of clients. It wasn't totally intentional. I never left saying, "I'm going freelance" or "I'm going independent," but that's how that chapter started.

For six and a half years, I was like a one-woman show making brands. Every project, I had a different seat at the table that a design background wouldn't have traditionally gotten me because I was so early-stage. I was the only person that was joining after a founder, oftentimes for six months until they made their first hire.

I was with them solving all sorts of details. They were delegating things to me that typically weren't delegated. For me to be able to design packaging, we had to figure out the form factor. We had to source the materials. I had to work through the supply chain with them. I had to look at the COGS (cost of goods sold) and the margin.

Ultimately, each level that I went more, every brand that I launched, I gained a new skill set, a new understanding, and a fundamental empathy for what it means to build a brand.

I stayed in touch with all these people, saw them scale, saw the pain points, and created a full second set of empathy for what it means to run a brand. Through the course of that, I would look at how I was delivering work, and I felt like it was kind of broken.

My big, depressing, pessimistic moment in my career was when I realized: I'm a PDF designer. I'm not a brand designer. These things don't actually look like what I'm making or all this stuff. And I thought, well, what if that wasn't the case? How could I fix that? So I developed my brand-building practice—that's what I was calling it when I was independent.

As I got more intentional about that and kept doing it, the more successful the brands were getting. Eventually, I had all this new business in my inbox—so much more than a one-woman show could ever execute on. I realized I was saying no to things because I was scared of scaling. Ultimately, I spent, I think, like six or eight months—I can't remember exactly—but I spent a lot of time thinking about, if I started a company, what would it be?

To me, it felt like a natural progression. I had built this brand-building practice. I had really kind of created my own recipe for how to build a brand. So calling it Practice felt like a really natural progression.

Why it is a brand-building firm is because, in the time when I was iterating and developing how to build brands, I realized that brand identity—which is often what people still come to us for; they recognize that and see value in that—but they need a lot more than that.

And I help them identify it. Brand identity is just one Swiss army toolkit part of what it actually takes to build a successful brand. Brand building requires a fundamental amount of research and understanding of the market so that you can successfully position it. You have to be really, really well aware and really, really well informed—not just from a business perspective, but also emotionally.

How are you going to resonate with people? Where are they? How do you meet them where they are? It means distilling that into the right message. Then design is a tool that helps communicate that message.

It also means making it the right experience. It means considering the big details and the small details and how a brand system can flex from a big brand moment to something transactional, to something more serious, and still have the same DNA—but not feel like step-and-repeat.

And it means building more than a brand, more than a product, actually. We expect a lot from brands today—to do more than just be the product they sell. A lot of that shows up in how brands drive community or different conversations.

That means having the right values they can show up with. How is the team going to scale with that? How do they know what's on-brand and what's not? What they're working towards? What's their North Star?

So brand building to me is a very complex thing that we offer. Brand identity is just one part of it. It wouldn't be right to call ourselves a design studio because design is just one thing we do. It wouldn't be right to call ourselves a strategy studio because we do much more than that.

What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?

There's a lot. I think for me as a person, it's maybe different from me career-wise or creatively. For me as a person, I love that I get to really make a change and a difference.

When we come into these organizations—let's say in a rebrand—we're listening first. Before we ever touch anything, we have this whole audit process where we are interviewing people, doing a lot of research and qualitative work, and making sure we're getting a lot of feedback in so that we're really hearing them.

We're designing this next evolution not just to make a brand perform better, but actually inside-out—to make everyone's connection to it and their work involved in it more meaningful. So I feel a lot of purpose in what I'm doing.

Part of why Practice is small is because, as someone who makes brands, I don't think the world needs more brands. I think the opposite. We just need brands to do better. So I find purpose in helping brands do better.

But, you know, like career-wise or creatively, I love that I get to become like a secondhand expert in a new thing every three to six months. I find it really fun. I have a lot of random knowledge. I don't know what to do with it all the time, but I learn from super smart people.

We have a client right now, and they have a chief medical officer, and they have their own facility that cost $5 million to do product development. Just learning from these people who have such rigor for what they do and trying to distill that down to a consumer—I learn so much. So it's always fun. Creativity or inspiration is never lacking when you're challenged with something like that. Every time.

Yeah, I want to hear more about—I mean, I love, you said so many things just there that I really want to follow up on. But the first one is this idea that, as somebody who builds brands, I don't think the world needs more brands. We just need brands to do better. Can you tell me more about what that means or what are the implications of that? What does that ask of you?

Yeah. Well, certainly something it asks of me is, if someone comes to us and they say, "We need a rebrand," I have this really strong filter of: we are not some blow-up or last-ditch effort. If you are going to really examine your business and rethink what it is and put it back out there, what is that purpose? What's driving that?

What I get really inspired by—when we land these projects where we’re totally aligned philosophically—is that oftentimes what's happening is we have an opportunity to challenge a category. That means, by creating a category leader, we're telling all the dinosaurs that are doing a bad job, "You've got to catch up now."

We're kind of cleaning up the category by making competition. So I feel like there's definitely a lot that you can do when you thoughtfully put a brand to market that means other people need to follow suit.

Yeah, can you—I mean, that's super exciting. I can feel the competitive will in what you've just said. Can you tell me a story about that, about the importance of having a competitive vision like that, and that it is a leadership position to build a brand in a way? Maybe that's what I'm hearing you say, that when you take responsibility for a brand, you're taking responsibility for a category.

Yeah, and that's in part because we're filtering for people who have great products that have a great purpose behind what they're doing, right? Like, I wouldn't sign on someone where we have to craft up some fake narrative to help sell something through that's awful.

I wish I could talk about this one we have right now in detail, but they are certainly creating a better product, and there's nothing like it on the market. This is a product in the medical and nutrition space.

I can't share everything, but they did a study that showed how it impacts people who are really, really sick. This is a product that, yes, you can get it through insurance, but also you can buy it as a consumer.

There's a huge change in people's health outcomes with this. And what's happened is a lot of these companies have cut corners. So when people need nutrition the most, they're putting a bunch of junk in it.

There's just such an opportunity to make that better. What does it mean if nutrition can be better? What does it mean for healing? What does it mean for how people feel?I think there's definitely a lot of drive to say, why are we doing this? What do we want to accomplish? Yes, there's what the companies that hire us need to accomplish, but then there's also: what is Practice accomplishing?

For me, a lot of it is really wanting to create category leaders. I want to create brands that work—not brands that are beautiful, not just nice packaging. If we can do that, then I think, category by category, we can get people to see that you're going to have to have a lot of intent to hold space.

Yeah. Yeah, I dug around a little bit in some things that you've written, and you've talked about how sort of modern design is beautifully considered, emotionally aware, but trying very hard, being too effortful. It's an assessment I think you've made about some design. To your point about what you just said, does Practice have a purpose? How do you think about the purpose of Practice?

Yeah, we have a pretty robust culture manual. I don't know how many pages it is. I want to say it's like 45 or 50.

Our mission is that we build category-defining brands that raise the bar for ethical commerce. Ethical commerce is that filter. I really want to look at who we are bringing on in the first place and whether we think they're ethically selling a product or a service. Whatever they might be, raising the bar is just what I talked about. And category-defining brands is what I do.

I love too, you said you enjoyed being a secondhand expert—that was the phrase you used to describe the benefit of the learning curve of diving into a category through a client. I like how secondhand becomes vintage in a way too. It's sort of funny, but for me anyway, because I identify with that experience.

And then you talked about listening being the first thing you do. As somebody who's a qualitative researcher, what's the proper role for qualitative and listening in your practice? And how do you go about it?

Yeah. I will say we started off doing quite a bit of this, and we are now doing a lot of it. And the reason is because it works—it really genuinely informs the work and builds mutual understanding. It builds really great goals and criteria for success.

We have basically two—actually, I would say three—major types of qualitative research that we're doing. The first is when we work on a rebrand, we require this auditing process. That is threefold:

One, to robustly onboard us to what this company is across the entire ecosystem: the business goals, the roadmap, how the internal systems work, who the major stakeholders are, what their challenges are, and what they see.

Two, to establish what's unsuccessful in the brand and why, and to help lay that out for them and create the goalposts: what has to evolve, why, and what's the evidence we can give to support it so they feel confident in why we need to do it. There is not a quantitative way to measure if a brand is successful. We have to ask a lot of questions and come at it from a few different angles to generate a report that feels really well-informed. One of the best things is to talk to multiple perspectives and put that against what we're seeing as outcomes—and then find the story in between.

Three, to identify what is working. We don't want to rebrand something and take out all the equity they've built. So we'll talk to existing customers or future customers and understand what they're taking away from the brand, what they're resonating with, and what's really sticking and working. We're establishing what we need to retain so that we’re not risking anything in the next chapter. That's a big part.

Another type of qualitative research we do is for really unique types of projects—typically with venture funds. Venture funds will come to us with an idea of a category they want to pursue. They know they're going to want to build a brand with Practice in this space, but they don't quite have a founder yet. They just see an opportunity.

We'll work with them to explore what that opportunity is. Then they will shop a founder back into it—find someone to lead it and join us. So we're already 10% through the process when that person joins.

That looks really interesting. One that sticks in my mind was in the sexual health space. We were talking to sex workers, we were talking to consumers, understanding how taboos exist in sex work.

We even talked to retailers like Target and Walmart. We asked, "What would it take to have an endcap or a display on a sexual wellness brand?" And we learned there were a lot of challenges— that we wouldn't be able to actually have the same criteria for a brand because of the American mindset around sex.

So that's a big one. And then the last is after we launch, we do a lot to inform any big investments. For example, we have a client where—it was nice—they chose the most expensive packaging we proposed. It's eating into their margin, and it was their decision. We evaluated all the criteria, and they said, "No, we want to do this one."

Now they're getting some pressure from investors to reconsider that. So we said, "Okay, before you do that, let's talk to the people and understand what's going to be effective if you're going to change the packaging." And that was hard to quantify. We had to really talk to people, get a lot of different types of opinions and perspectives to net out what the best path forward was.

Yeah, yeah. How do you articulate the value? On a couple of occasions, you said you can't really quantify—we're talking about things you can't really quantify. You can't quantify the efficacy of a brand. You can't quantify that.

What is the value? In qualitative, what do you love about what it delivers? Or what does it deliver that you can't get anywhere else that helps you do what you need to do?

I think it's the ultimate brief. There's still so much work to do once you complete that, but it's not just a shot in the dark at what we need to accomplish, or what the criteria for success is, or the things that are going to create successful work, or give us the lens to see something clearly in terms of the goal and the outcome.

I think if we were to do a rebrand without one of these audits, I would probably make a few mistakes. I would steer us in the wrong direction because I wasn't informed to understand certain things.

One comes to mind—we're actually working on a case study for this, and I'm excited to share it—but we worked on a really big rebrand of a stationery company. They're based in Australia and they had a lot of retail stores.

It's just a hard time to be a stationery brand with the iPhone and smartphones. We have so many tools now to replace notebooks, agendas, and calendars. So we had to think about how we evolve them into more of a lifestyle brand through this next chapter.

We saw that it was an ultra-feminine brand. We saw that they weren't performing well. They were actually bought out of bankruptcy. We thought that maybe they were too specific and needed to widen up—to be less extremely feminine. Even for myself, I found it too feminine. But then we went and we talked to customers and realized that the feminine identity of the brand was actually one of the main things that was working.

I think I would have taken us toward making it slightly more gender-neutral—and that would have been the wrong move. It would have been because that's what we're seeing in culture, that's what we're seeing in design. It wouldn't have been an unresearched opinion by any means—it would have been a very well-informed opinion—but it would not have been correct. And it would have lost them their core customer base.

Yeah, that's amazing. Something about that story—the case study about being a stationery company in the age of digital notes—reminded me of an old story. When I started out, the guy I worked for described this phenomenon. He called it unconsumption, I think, or non-consumption. His examples were buying seeds in winter, or he also talked about Old Navy, where the value is in the purchase of the experience, not in the use of the product.

I'm looking at... I have all these adorable journals right here, these wonderful notepads that my daughter has gotten me. I don't know that I have enough use for them, but the ownership of them is all the value—having this precious little journal—as opposed to actually having any use. I'll just use my phone to actually keep notes, but it feels good to have a notebook around.

That reminds me of that Japanese word—and I might butcher the pronunciation—but I think it's tsundoku, and it's the act of buying books and not reading them. I also have that problem. If we consider that a problem, I have that.

Yeah, I mean, we're in such an era of self-actualization and people defining who they are. I think there's a negative side to that, where people are buying things because it helps them cosplay as something, rather than it being an authentic "this is who I am."

I look at all the books on my shelves, and they feel like friends, or they keep me company. There's something personal, in the same way a photograph might be. But I think there's probably a good and a bad side to that these days. Yeah, I think that's true.

I'm curious. I usually ask these two things together. I'm not sure why, but: do you have mentors or touchstones? Mentors who have played a big part in your coming up? And then touchstones—concepts or ideas that you constantly come back to or return to, to orient yourself in a project or in your work?

Yes, mentors. Actively, I speak with a venture capitalist, Lisa Wu. She's out in San Francisco. I admire so much of what she's doing. I talk to her monthly, and we just talk about spaces we're interested in and where we see things going. But she has such a wildly different perspective than me, and she's been really empowering where I might have a little bit of imposter syndrome—as someone who doesn't have a business degree and still feels very much like a creative.

She's really been one to have my back and put me in front of the right people, and ultimately tell me, "You could start a brand, you could do all this stuff," and help me see past the wall I built around what designers classify themselves as.

We've built multiple successful projects together—Ritual, a vitamin brand, and Remedy, a skincare brand. So it's very meaningful because she's actually seen me in action. She's informed—it's not just a by-the-wayside friend kind of being nice opinion. So that's one person.

Simon Andres and I kept in touch after Red Antler. After he left, I asked him for some great advice, and he's been really helpful. And then, as a single... what's the right word for this... like a sole business owner. I don't have partners. I have people that I bring in on a consulting basis to just hash ideas.

There's this ops consultant I have, Nicole, who really challenges me in a fun way. For example, we have a bunch of clients that really want us to run their marketing after we launch them. There are these huge contracts on the table—big retainers—and if I wanted, I could take them. But I have no creative interest in doing that. Just as a creative, I'm happy doing what I'm doing. I don't want to do that.

And she really came at me when that was happening, to help me really understand what that was and why that was. Ultimately, I still kept the same decision, but she made me do the due diligence and not just go off the gut feeling. Just having people in my corner that challenge me is really important.

I have tried, to the very best of my ability, to create a culture at Practice where everyone knows that their feedback is really important, and I take it really seriously—to action it, to document it. We have this giant culture manual that sets a lot of expectations and processes, and there's a whole process for how you can submit a request and change that, how you could bring any changes to the organization forward.

I think that culture, to me, of being able to get feedback is so important because ultimately it makes us better. I really don't want a company where everyone just says, "Yeah, okay, we'll do whatever you say." That's not at all what I'm looking to do.

Cornerstones—what was that?

Touchstones.

Touchstones! How would you define that?

Well, I was just thinking for myself, I know that part of the real joy I get out of my work is metaphor and language and imagination. I feel like every project I'm spending time with things and ideas that I really love—this idea that the mind thinks in images, and that language is access to an image. That's something I constantly remind myself of and am fascinated by.

Yeah. Oh, I could go on forever about these. I think I have so many.

I think that's like the creative spirit, also—just going down a rabbit hole and seeing where it takes you. One thing I have that’s just led to so much—and it seems so hard to sort of say that, but looking back—is that I take every conversation that comes into our inbox. And I have, for years and years and years.

If someone wants to work with us and I don't think it's the right fit, I still talk to them. I meet with everyone, and I never close the door. Those meetings might be quick, they might be brief, but it's been actually kind of incredible.

Some of our biggest projects came from people I spoke to six years previously—people who went and built an awesome career and then came back and said, "Okay, cool, now I can actually work with you."

They weren't ready at the time, and they weren't the right fit, but it creates such a more meaningful relationship when you get to catch up and be like, "Oh, wow, you went and did that. You did all of that," right?

That philosophy has led to a really incredible, diverse network and has made me more diverse in my thinking.

So that's something I always come back to. When I start to feel overwhelmed and have too much in my calendar and I have one of those meetings, I remind myself: no, you have gotten so much out of these random conversations. You've gotten so much from being this open-door policy kind of person. And I think reminding myself of that, and always coming back to what I gleaned from that, has been a big part of how I've operated, who I am, and honestly, my success.

Yeah, where did that come from? What did you call it? I love that—you take every conversation that comes to you. Where did that come from?

Honestly, this is like a funny answer. I think it might come from being from an immigrant family.

Really?

I think so. Definitely, we never had some baked-in sense of security. And honestly, being self-employed for six and a half years, you don't either. But I don't think I was raised with a mentality of "you pick what you want" or "you do whatever." It was always like, no, you do what you gotta do, and it's not always going to be fun or whatever it is, but that's how it works.

So I think I kind of had a bit of that mentality going in from how my family works. I mean, we moved to the US so that my father, who was in banking, could start a candy factory. He had no prior experience with that or entrepreneurship. And my mom worked for him, and that's what they did.

I watched them. I spent a lot of time in the warehouse—it was right outside of Newark in Elizabeth, New Jersey—and I would just play in the office all the time. I watched them take every single call, go to every single fair or expo. That was the culture of how I saw people work before I even started working.

Yeah. So we have a little bit of time left, and I think I'm going to step back into a big, big, fat question about brand. You've been... I mean, Ritual was a beautiful brand. You've built very modern brands in a very modern way. And I'm wondering: what is a brand to you? When did you first encounter the idea of brand, and what do you think a brand is? And what makes a good one? That's super big and meaty.

Yeah. I think a brand is an expression of an organization. And organizations can be good or bad—like cults are organizations. So we really want to make sure we're expressing an organization, but that what the organization is at its core is very important—that it has a strong set of values and a strong sense of what it can be.

Ultimately, I think it's how we perceive what's there, but there are still things that are deeper than brand that are informing what that is. What was your second part of the question? What do we think they should be?

I don't remember. I feel like I have so many thoughts. I'm like, oh, where do we even go? I mean, I have it. Sometimes I get excited and I throw eight questions into one—one question comes out of me in eight different ways. But you just said there are things that are deeper than brand that inform the brand. Can you talk about that? What were you pointing at?

Yeah, like, we built a brand for ALLKINDS. This was an example of looking at a category and learning all about it. We learned what parents want for their kids' self-care and cosmetic products—like shampoo, not cosmetics, but the products they use. We learned how kids relate to fragrance.

We learned what kinds of products they were looking at, what their parents were worried about, and that really informed the values of the brand. But deeper than that are things like: what is in those products, and can they still be effectively formulated with those guardrails?

ALLKINDS is based in Australia, and they care about reef safety. They were careful not to include triclosan, a common cosmetic ingredient that harms reefs. They had all of these things they were making sure they could do.

Because you could say, "Okay, we're going to be free of it," but that doesn't mean you're going to have a great product. They invested a lot in developing products with this massive list of things they would not include. Me, as a brand builder, I looked at that and thought, oh, this is for kids and tweens. So we made that the "No Gross Stuff" list, and we had to express that.

But that was an organizational effort. That was a huge thing with formulators, a huge amount of investment, a lot of people working on it and thinking about it—scientists and labs. And that's not brand. That's really at an organizational level.

Yeah, beautiful. Well, listen, I want to thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure. I appreciate you accepting my invitation. And it's been fun talking with you.

Yeah, this has been wonderful. I appreciate being on here and just such thoughtful questions—and always love to nerd out.

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