In this interview Darius spoke with Kevin Gould of Kombo Ventures on building digitally native brands and best practices of using influencers and social selling to drive revenue.
Kevin Gould is an entrepreneur, talent manager, brand builder, and investor based in Los Angeles. He is the founder and CEO of Kombo Ventures and is also a co-founder of three direct to consumer brands; Insert Name Here, a hair extensions and product brand, Wakeheart, a fragrance and scent brand aimed at Gen Z and young millennials and co-founded with the Dolan Twins, two of the largest digital influencers in the world, and Glamnetic, a leading magnetic eyeliner and lash brand. In 2019, Gould was named to Variety magazine's Dealmakers Impact List, honoring top dealmakers in the entertainment industry.
Kevin's road to the present
Kevin grew up in North Carolina and started his career after graduation 12 years ago when the Internet was just starting to take off and the beginning of the rise of Facebook. He wanted to be an entrepreneur but resources were limited in NC then so he packed up and drove to LA and has never looked back.
Kevin landed a job in the mailroom with William Morris, which is the largest talent agency in the world with a speciality in a broad variety of entertainment fields. That's where he began learning how to work with with young, talented hollywood type actors.
There were people that were in investment banking that quit their banking jobs to go work in the mailroom and everyone starts at the bottom. But what comes out of it is you gain a massive amount of knowledge and relationships in the entertainment space that is very unique that you would not gain anywhere else.
Kevin realized early on that digital was starting to really take off with influencers and how fast the YouTube influencer ecosystem was growing. And in parallel he saw that a lot of these companies in Silicon Valley were interested in working on the entertainment side and with the influencers, but they did not have the relationships or the Rolodex.
That's when Kevin started Kombo Ventures.
Kombo Ventures is with multiple things, one side of the business is digital talent management and other side we have brands. Management side we will manage digital influencers for 6 years.
We're managing top YouTube creators and digital content creators and influencers. And we also do a lot of strategy work with brands, primarily on influencer and talent strategy. An entire team of Kombo dedicated to that.
Two years ago we launched the first brand. It was a women's hair brand called Insert Name here. Kevin launched that with two co-founders, Sharon and Jordan, who were two early employees of Color Pop Cosmetics, a large cosmetics brand.
And then the other two brands they launched last year. One was called Wakeheart a Fragrance brand which was done with two large influencers, the Dolan twins, who are the co-founders.
And then they launched Glamnetic a leading eyelash and beauty brand with Ann McFerran.
All the brands have been completely self-funded with no outside capital and they have been able to scale them quickly.
So far the target audience is mainly female with Insert Name Here and Glamnetic, which are the hair and brands.
Wakeheart, which is a fragrance brands they have fragrance and candles and a number of other things coming down the pipeline is more unisex.
Kombo Ventures operates as a hybrid between a talent management firm, an IP and brand incubation studio, and a digital agency. In addition Kevin actively invests in early to mid-stage startups.
On starting new online, Direct-to-Consumer brands
It used to be that it was really difficult to launch an online company or brand and wasn't as difficult to get customers. This dynamic has shifted 180 degrees in the last 5 years.
In a way, It's never been easier to launching a company.
To get the brand launched you to source your products, get a a shopify site up and start promoting it and managing customer issues such as shipping, returns and other normal aspects of business. But what many people are finding increasingly more difficult is building a "brand".
Building a brand ties in directly into building a community which is not easy, and it's not quick, unless you already have millions of engaged followers. You have to stick out from the crowd and they way to do that is to create relevant and engaging content and use social channels to spread the word.
Brand building is more of an art than science right now but there are definitely repeatable aspects of the model which can be applied to different products, apecially in the same verticals.
On working with Influencers
Talking about the influencer model there are many ways to get customers. The influencer model is pretty established for most newer brands but it's still sometihng the established retailers and brands are struggling with, and there is an age factor at play here, if we are older we are typically less familiar with influencers.
In the last 5 years, the larger brands in the space have definitely gotten more up to speed on using influencers. They are trying to figure out the strategy, but if you are like a new brand then influencers can be a really important piece of your success.
Benefits of working with influencers
1. Content - create you own and encourage user generated content and repurpose across multiple channels.
2. Establishing distribution paths with people with an existing network is a lot faster than building your own followers organically.
2. Getting followers - any organic growth can multiply the impact of your influencers and vice-versa.
3. Run in media - Including influencer content in paid advertising can perform better than purely curated content, having a mix is a positive.
Paid & Influencer marketing example
If you take, lash brand by Ann McFerran. User generated content, how to apply lashes, and paid media, overwhelmed with graphics. Influencers speak with the brand particularly when you pay on media.
Content is the main goal for the whole formula.
Brands struggled a lot because they don't have exact content. Brands make a big mistake to create a super premium content, but that doesn't matter now. The name in the game is we need to have the scalable content for the brand.
What is a Content Infrastructure
You need to have an infrastructure, including playbooks in place for creating and distributing your content, and your influencer content.
When Kevin started his first brand with his partners they looked at other brands in the space and what they were doing, you can learn a lot from other people. And they had only one intern working on content. They they started working with Influencers and took the influencer content and started tested.
Editing ads doesn't take much time, so at that time our main game was creating some graphics, changing a the wording and doing ads on instagram and measuring performance . This is the main part of work, and the goal of the game is to play with lots of content and find the best quickly.
If you don't have a system in place to repeat this process consistently you are not going to be efficient. Kevin calls lthis system the Content Infrastructure.
Difference between Micro-influencers & Regular influencers
Typically influencers on Instagram below 100,000 followers are put into the micro-influencer bucket with the sweet spot being the 50 to 70 thousand followers.
We put deals together with micro inflencers to give them products and start building a relationship and measuring the performance. After we have experience and a track record with an influencer we can work on optimizing that relationship, as well as carry over the lessons to working with other influencers which may have larger audiences of 5ooK or more.
Not all followers are same, engagement is important especially when working with micro influencers, and you typically see higher engagement percentages with smaller audiences, if they are real, well targeted people.
A 5% engagement is good for micro influencers and 1-2% reasonable for influencers with larger audiences.
How they select the right influencers for their products
It is tough initially for a brand to figure out who is your customer and what types of influencers you need to work with.
Kombo has 4 to 5 people working on influencers engagement now starting with audience analytics and then experimenting to find out how engaged and interested the individual influener's audience is to the Kombo product.
For Glamnetic they particularly looked for beauty focused influencers. It’s absolutely the specialization that makes the difference. But it is also testing, lots of testing.
And the majority of work is still manual and high-touch but Kevin does see some room for automation.
On structure for an influencer engagement team
It of course depends on the business but in general you need the following roles:
1. Outreach: If it is a brand new startup with limited funds it is something that some of the founders can do and directly reach out, there is a DM in insta to reach out sponsors. Engaging with them once a while, it's a matter of giving them very clear direction on the content you are thinking of.
2. Creative content creators and editors: If you have editing skills, then do it yourself for or just go with interns who are coming from colleges as they have a lot of photoshop skills and designing skills. It is a repeatable process.
3. Experimentation and testing: specially on content and design is critical to find out which assets perform best and build on those.
4. Paid: you need to also cover the paid channels and understand their contribution and perfomance to build a complete marketing flow.
On new product ideation and launch processes
Glamnetic started in July 2019. It took 6 months of research and planning about space to get to the launch point but a lot of pre-launch work has to start before your official launch.
On Go To Market strategy
Discussed the GTM for Glamnetic which started with cofounder Ann McFerran's Instagram following of over 45,000. Ann posted the first videos to build awareness and then they began continous testing and experimentation to build on that.
The products are designed and created by their manufacturing partners.
COVID-19 impact on their supply chain
In 2020 they started noticing some delays from the China suppliers but after April They were getting concerned calls from China on what was going on in the US market. At this point China is more worried about the US market than we are about their ability to supply products to us.
The biggest challenge which is continuing is that the US shipping carriers are just tapped to the limit, and rates are increasing on shipping, with less delivery date certainty. And of coure shipping charges can not be directly transferred to consumers so they have to work out the economics in other ways.
On the channels they use most
Instagram is their hub, their view to the world
Facebook is also good specially with groups & communities but IG is the top channel for them.
They also run youtube, google and snapchat as well as email and SMS. Instagram is also great for the educational aspect specially when you are running a lot of paid experiments. We find and watch what other brands are doing and learn from the content with the best results.
Do you have to be good at all of the channels?
In the beginning you can focus on only 1 or 2 channels but to scale past the $50 or $100 mirrion mark you do need to be on most of the major, trending channels for your audience.
And you have to always be 6-12 months ahear of the market. So people who are just starting to think about Tiktok are already behind. We're already starting to look what's next after Tiktok because it's already getting saturated. Retailers need to understand this dynamic. The best way to do this is to have your pulse on "where the consumer is going" at all time, it's non-stop work.
There are some massive influcers on all the channels, never try to copy the outliers. It's better to start and do a good job with micro-influencers, people with 50 to 250K followers.
And of course get really good in experimenting - that is key! We test and fail, but we have to tests continuously.
On live-commerce aka shoppable livestreaming
Differentiation between livestream shopping experiences: one-many which is the QVC model, and one-one which is a VIP format experience helping one person or couple using shoppable livestreaming.
Life for old brands is getting harder for most established brands with every new consumer channel and technology tool because they have to fit these into their old structure which is not quick to adapt change.
Next big goals for Kevin in 2021
1. Live commerce strategy
2. The Follow-The-Sun strategy of building and running a global business operation [50:10]
Next things for Kombo Ventures
1. Making sure operational infrastructure is in place with the right people in the right roles.
2. Category expansion for existing products,
3. Working on new product ideas, and
4. Constant flow of creating and acquiring high quality content.
LINKS:
Glamnetic is a leading magnetic liner and lash company. The company was co-founded with artist and entrepreneur Ann McFerran in July 2019, and has quickly become one of the fastest growing beauty brands of 2020.
Wakeheart Founded in 2018 by Ethan Dolan, Grayson Dolan, and Kevin Gould, Wakeheart is an all-encompassing fragrance, scent, & personal care brand that aims to inspire the creation of experiences and memories through the design of high-quality scents.
Insert Name Here With an extensive background in the beauty space, the founders of INH identified a gap in the extension, wig, and overall hair market. Gould co-founded INH Hair in partnerhsip with two LA-based entrepreneurs and beauty gurus, Sharon Pak and Jordynn Wynn, who started their careers as the first two employees at Colourpop Cosmetics.
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