Brand Makeovers: Kamini Sharma Of Lovability On The 5 Things You Should Do To Upgrade and Re-Energize Your Brand and Image
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
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Be creative. That’s really what the essence of rebranding is. One of the best ways to do this is to allow new thinking. You should not only be refreshing your brand, but constantly going back to the drawing board with your entire team. Here at Lovability, we’re constantly open to new ideas and opinions, which has opened doors that we would have never imagined.
As part of our series about “Brand Makeovers” I had the pleasure to interview Lovability’s Kamini Sharma.
Lovability is a women-led sexual health and wellness company that delivers body-safe, eco-friendly and revolutionary products for the vulva. The brand was acquired by Kamini and two additional investors — Maureen Pollack and John Paul Basile — in early 2020 with plans to re-energize Lovability.
Sharma serves as the CEO, overseeing the brand and leading the team in planning, development and execution of the wellness company’s strategy, content, marketing and partnership initiatives.
Kamini was born with the drive and passion to make her untraditional dreams come true. When she isn’t fighting to change the world for vulva owners, she is enjoying a glass of champagne and live music.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit more. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
My career path begins with my love for sport at a really young age. Though I studied law, I had always dreamt of working at a sports agency. This meant that I knew the ins and outs of the industry before I even started, which wasn’t so common for women at the time. After countless cold calls at various agencies in the city I was studying in, I finally scored a summer internship, which resulted in a part-time job at a well known agency. This was while I was still a full-time law student.
What came next was a 20-year global executive career in the sports and entertainment industry. Throughout this time, I held various executive positions in the U.S. and internationally, first as Director of International Marketing for the National Hockey League (NHL). I then served as Director of Marketing at ESPN (EMEA) in London and later as Vice President of Global Marketing at Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
As a high-ranking female executive, I witnessed firsthand the challenges and setbacks that women face within the industry, and I set out to make a difference. I served as a board member for several organizations that fight for women’s inclusion in the industry, including Women In Sports and Events (WISE), Women’s Sports Network, Women in Cable Telecommunications UK (WICT) and more.
After returning to the United States after living all over the globe in 2017, I linked up with John Paul Basile, who is now one of the co-owners of Lovability. We launched Frontier Sports & Entertainment, an advisory firm to global brands and where Maureen Pollack’s film project (“MomPreneur”, coming soon) an overall nontraditional, entrepreneurial story fell into our lap. She was the inventor of The WaterSlyde® at the time and a close partner with the then Lovability team. We loved her vision, her story, and her work, and we knew that we wanted to join forces with her.
Investing in Lovability provided a unique opportunity to combine two of my passions: building global brands and empowering women. I jumped in headfirst because I wanted to destigmatize the conversation around female sexual health and hygiene and give women access to body-safe and environmentally friendly products.
Though my career has taken me places I would have never expected, I feel like I’m just where I need to be. One of the most beautiful parts of my career journey is the support I have received from my family. My parents are modern yet traditional Indians, and though it took them time to understand that there is success in the sexual wellness industry, they have been so supportive of me and my goals.
Empowering women and showing them that they are capable of doing anything that they desire has been a common thread throughout my career. I want other women to see my story and Lovability’s mission and believe that they are capable of achieving their wildest dreams.
My business partners and I are so excited about the future of Lovability. Above all, we want to remind everyone of the importance of self-love and self-care, and we strive to create a brand that is unapologetically wonderful for women.
Can you share a story about the funniest marketing or branding mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I was starting out my career at the NHL, I was put in charge of a new initiative focused on exploring ways to expand our fanbase to a broader and younger audience. We spent months designing the new look and feel of the brand, and we ultimately decided that we wanted it to have an urban street feel while still maintaining our parent NHL branding. Everyone loved the look and feel of the final design, but in a final meeting, just days before launch, a senior executive asked about the fonts we had used in the logo design.
At that moment, it occurred to us that we had never even looked up the name of the font that we were using. When we discovered and shared that this cool new font was called “Crackhouse”, you could have heard a pin drop at the meeting. We were told that there was no way we could go out to market with a look based on that name, and after hundreds of hours of work, it was back to the drawing board.
In the end, we came up with an idea to modify the font, creating something very similar but that we could have ownership of and rename. This allowed us to portray the message we wanted to get across in our own unique way.
My big takeaway from this was to be minutely careful with every detail as you grow your brand. Something that may seem trivial will nevertheless become part of your brand’s DNA. And most importantly, I learned how crucial it is to understand what is really important to your brand. At the same time, you need to be creative in finding solutions if adjustments need to be made in order to retain those non-negotiables.
Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Is there a takeaway or lesson that others can learn from that?
I’ve worked with both big brands and startups throughout my career. In larger, more established companies, there are typically a lot of people in the decision-making process. But when I worked for my first startup, it was completely different. I was in charge of crafting our brand, mission and voice. I still had to make sure that I had the support of my business partners, but it was ultimately my responsibility to make sure I had built a strong proposition, a change that was both exhilarating and daunting.
This allowed me to begin to trust my intuition more. I often think of the words of Steve Jobs: “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” Being able to hear and consider everyone’s input while knowing that I had the power to make the decisions that I saw most fit was a big turning point for me in my career. It’s been the same experience since my partners and I acquired Lovability. I feel lucky that I have the freedom to create something that reflects my values while staying true to the brand’s mission.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
We have a couple of exciting projects in the works at Lovability. First and one of the most important action items when we took over was making the transition to a more sustainable and eco-friendly brand, starting with how we build our products and packaging. While this sustainable transition is more top of mind, we’re also excited to own grow in the bath space. The success of The WaterSlyde allowed us to begin this. We just recently announced our newest of many products that can be enjoyed in the bath, ThreePlay™ Massage Candle.
We’re also very excited to be rolling out a number of partnerships with other woman-owned brands that have a similar mission to ours, such as the underwear and lingerie company Hanky Panky.
Additionally, we are working on an overarching project to destigmatize conversations around sexual health and hygiene. One of the ways we’re doing this is through the online platform we’re building, Babe With The Power. We want to empower women and be a resource in the sexual health and wellness community.
More to come!
What advice would you give to other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?
I think this topic is just like everything else in life. There are so many things that we can be doing and so much information coming at us constantly, and it all changes so fast. You need to hone in on and prioritize the 3 to 5 things that are going to make a difference in your business.
Focus on why you do what you do, who your community is, and what’s important to them. My best advice is to shut out the noise and stay on your own path. And on a personal level, you need to accept you can’t do it all and find time for the things that matter to you. And some me time in the bath is always nice.
Ok, let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?
Simply put, brand marketing is the “why”, and product marketing is the “what”. When it comes to brand marketing, you’re looking to convey a story about why you do what you do and how you connect with your customers. With product marketing, it’s all about the details: what you are selling to whom, how, when and where.
Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?
Your brand is how the rest of the world sees you. If you build it right, it can be why people love you and relate to you. More and more, consumers want the companies that they support to stand for something that they align with. They are increasingly making choices based on which companies’ missions reflect the values that are important to them. Being able to build out your brand to connect with customers on this level is how you build loyalty and differentiate yourself from competitors.
Let’s now talk about rebranding. What are a few reasons why a company would consider rebranding?
I could name so many reasons for rebranding: environmental reasons, new ownership, changing the nature of the products, trying to reach a new audience, the pandemic… We decided to rebrand Lovability after we purchased it because, although we loved it as it was, certain things that were important to our values were missing, like being more eco-friendly and sustainable. It was important to us that we emphasized messages which empower women across our packaging and digital media — all without losing the sense of fun and cheekiness that makes Lovability, Lovability. The sexual wellness space has long been dominated by men and has targeted men. We want Lovability to be unapologetically for women.
Are there downsides of rebranding? Are there companies that you would advise against doing a “Brand Makeover”? Why?
There’s always a risk in rebranding, as you may lose customers or followers. For that reason, you really need to be intentional about what you want to achieve with your rebrand. There needs to be a solid business reason, or something that you are passionate about, to make rebranding worth it.
A lot of times, companies think that changing a logo or a tagline is enough to constitute a rebrand, but it goes much deeper than that. If you want to undergo a rebrand, you need to be very self-reflective, evaluate what your brand stands for, analyze your business reasons for rebranding and decide if you are comfortable with changing your image — it’s really going back to the why.
Ok, here is the main question of our discussion. Can you share 5 strategies that a company can do to upgrade and re-energize their brand and image”? Please tell us a story or an example for each.
Rebranding can be a double-edged sword. When you’re launching a new brand, you’re putting something out in the world that has never been seen before. There is no history to your brand, and you have all the freedom in the world.
But when you rebrand, you need to make sure that you’re doing it in a way that enhances something that already exists. It is crucial to balance the history of your brand with the future of your brand.
Re-evaluate your “why”. You need to reassess your brand’s past and why you want to take it in a new direction. At Lovability, part of that “why” was becoming more sustainable and eco-friendly, a reason that has guided us through the whole rebranding process — from products and packaging to partnerships and the causes we support.
Do not let your old brand limit you. Don’t be afraid of change! That’s why you’re rebranding, after all. That being said, if you want to retain your old customers, you need to figure out what’s important about your brand to your community so you know what aspects you need to maintain. You should use that as a foundation to work around. At Lovability, one of the biggest challenges of our rebrand has been finding broader space in the industry without alienating our existing followers, and I think we’ve been doing a good job of that.
Reanalyze the market. There will be different competitors from when you first launched, the media landscape will be different, and cultural norms will have changed. For us, the sexual wellness space has evolved immensely in the past decade, and even more in the last couple of years. This has given us the opportunity to make changes that are necessary to keeping ourselves not only relevant, but also ahead of the trends.
Tap into your community. You have a built-in focus group here, so talk to them, listen to them, and take their feedback to heart. Lovability is an interactive organization: we do surveys, ask questions on social media, and are constantly seeking feedback from our customers and brand ambassadors. You’re always going to have some unknowns when you undergo a rebrand, but you’re playing with the advantage of having access to a community that knows you and knows what they want.
Be creative. That’s really what the essence of rebranding is. One of the best ways to do this is to allow new thinking. You should not only be refreshing your brand, but constantly going back to the drawing board with your entire team. Here at Lovability, we’re constantly open to new ideas and opinions, which has opened doors that we would have never imagined.
In your opinion, what is an example of a company that has done a fantastic job doing a “Brand Makeover”. What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?
High-end fashion labels do an incredible job of consistently evolving and adapting while being authentic to their core brand and audience, all while navigating a very competitive landscape. A brand that I watched closely, especially when I was living in London, was Burberry, a company whose history and heritage dates back to the 1850s.
A number of years back, they found themselves in a difficult position: many of their products, especially those with their iconic “nova check” pattern, were being copied. Look-alike products were being mass-produced, and the brand began to lose money and prestige.
Burberry realized that they needed to modernize their brand and their products, so they implemented some daring initiatives, like adopting a streamlined logo, targeting a younger audience, and collaborating with well-known celebrities.
They also broadened their product range and adapted the ways in which they incorporated their iconic prints into these new products. All of this innovation led to a turnaround in profitability, all because the iconic brand was willing to take a big risk and lean into a more modern image.
What people can take away from this is that sometimes you need to be willing to be bold when making over your brand. The Burberry case study also teaches us that it’s never too late to change, even for a brand with so much history. You just have to be willing to take a chance on a new identity.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
If I could inspire a movement, it would simply be a push for more kindness. We live in an increasingly fragmented and divided world, and I think everyone has felt more isolated in some way, especially since the start of the pandemic.
Kindness can break down stigmas and shame and lead to tolerance and acceptance of people with different views, beliefs, and backgrounds. At the end of the day, kindness is a manifestation of love.
It’s one of the reasons that Lovability has the name that it does. The brand aspires to go beyond being a sexual health and wellness company and dive into a deeper mission of love — love for others and of yourself — and kindness.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Though I did see it in an interview, the following phrase is more of a mantra that I live by: “You dream it, then you do it.”
For me, this phrase embodies the concept of imagining and dreaming, attempting what seems impossible, and acknowledging what’s important to you. But more than that, it’s about taking action to fulfill your dreams. I’ve often felt that the “doing” is the easy part, but daring to dream big is what has the potential to change your life and even the world.
You have to think big, dream big, chase big, and make things happen. Fear will always be there. Don’t let it hold you back.
How can our readers follow you online?
Readers can find me on Lovability’s Facebook and Instagram pages, as well as the Lovability website. You can also follow me at our blog, Babe With The Power, or shoot me an email at kamini@lovabilityinc.com.
Thank you so much for these excellent insights! We wish you continued success in your work.
