David Lemley of Retail Voodoo: 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand

Don’t focus on getting rich by baking cookies. Nobody needs more rich and famous cookie makers. Focus instead on the promises your brand makes and the way you want people to feel about the manner in which you keep them.

As a part of our series called “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand”, I had the pleasure of interviewing David Lemley, Founder & President at Retail Voodoo.

David was two decades into a design career with a wall full of shiny awards and a portfolio of clients including Nordstrom, Starbucks, Nintendo, and REI. His rocket trajectory veered when his oldest child faced a health challenge of indeterminate origin. Hundreds of research hours later, David identified food allergy as the issue and convinced skeptical medical professionals caring for his child. Since that experience, David and Retail Voodoo have been on a mission to create a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system for all.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

As a child, I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family that appreciated commercial art. From the time I was 7 years old, I told the world I would be the next Picasso and I set out to do just that. Once I realized I didn’t want to be poor, I took the path of studying design to do commercial art. My plan was to retire at age 42 and then fulfill my dreams of becoming like Picasso. But as you can see, it didn’t quite work out like that.

Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of your company, Retail Voodoo?

Retail Voodoo first began as Lemley Design. The map we used to help brands was called, at the time, Retail Voodoo.

Here is how our process map came to be:

Starbucks came to our consultancy back in the early 2000s, when their senior leaders knew that their stores were in imminent danger of becoming generic. Customers needed to have a fully branded experience in order to be engaged by Starbucks’ coffee shops — a world of premium, distinctive coffees embodied in one place. Otherwise, customers might as well buy their coffee at the corner convenience store. It was Starbucks’ management’s objective to make Starbucks a memorable and connecting brand experience for coffee lovers — so they would make Starbucks their chosen, ultimate destination for great coffee. In fact, Starbucks management specifically desired to become the global leader in coffee. Their stated objective from the beginning was to “open a store per day forever”!

For Starbucks, future growth, brand and corporate valuation and “getting its brand positioning right” were key; long before the idea of specialty coffee brands and coffee shops caught on and proliferated. Starbucks felt that if they got it “right”, every new specialty coffee brand that emerged would be either viewed as a Starbucks “knock-off” or a poor second to a superstar brand.

Research showed that Starbucks lacked the right retail brand platform and environment to create a premium “coffee culture”. In order to become relevant to coffee aficionados, the Starbucks brand would have to embody the culture, magic, romance and cult surrounding the exotic offerings in its shops. Those shops, too, would have to be inviting, warm environments where customers — human beings — would want to come and linger for a while, enjoying their coffee with a newspaper, just sitting and relaxing away from daily rushed routines, or experiencing the camaraderie of visiting with their friends.

By creating that “Third Place” — not home and not work — but a unique environment where people are welcome to come in and linger, a deep connection was — and still is — being made, between Starbucks and its customers all over the globe. The concept of “third place” was conceived by CEO Howard Schultz and his marketing team and implemented by Lemley Design.

I was lucky to be invited into this project alongside the former Head of Disney Imagineering and the former CMO of Nike. When what we did for Starbucks became a global smash sensation, I knew I couldn’t let this be the mountaintop of my career, I was too young for that. I decided to go back to school to codify my experience with Starbucks. Two years later, I walked out with a degree in leadership & management as well as the Retail Voodoo map we use today.

Shortly after, my partner, Diana Fryc, and I decided to reinvent Lemley Design to become a force for good. The work of helping brands transform the food industry is deeply personal to us. In order to follow our new mission track, Lemley Design needed to take the backseat for Retail Voodoo to lead the charge.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The first time I made a mistake was right out of school. While working a freelance gig, I had this great idea on how to save a buck. I decided to hand cut the layers of the overlays of my production at size instead of doing them big and shrinking them down. It was a complicated process, especially during the 80s. The inks used were Miami Vice teal and Miami Vice Pink, so when they overlapped, they made a Miami Vice purple. All the hand cut edges at scale turned purple and the client rejected the job, but it didn’t end there.

I owed the printer money, so I worked it off as a stripper, which sounds cool, funny, and provocative, but it’s not what you think. A stripper is the person in the dark room stripping up the film negatives.

Although that was my first and worst mistake, it turned out to be a massive blessing. I was in the darkroom figuring out everything there was to do with mechanical production for illustrative and creative works and never blew anything up from that perspective ever again. Not long after, printers ended up hiring my team to do their work because we had become so good at technical aspects — all thanks to my biggest mistake.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they start a food or beverage line? What can be done to avoid those errors?

There are two common mistakes I see when starting a food or beverage brand. The first one is they over index on operations and end up creating a commodity or me-too product. The inverse of that is I see awesome, charismatic, beautiful people focused on Tik Tok go out and create a magnetic, insta-worthy brand. But they don’t have finance, operations, supply chain, sales disciplines well-organized. Instead, they go out and get a lot of traction, and then flatline because they can’t make enough product, they don’t know how to distribute it, and they don’t know how to manage for profit. You need both sides to success in food & beverage.

Let’s imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

I would recommend starting with the foundation of your brand — your WHY. A meaningful, powerful WHY is your brand’s most valuable business asset — in fact, it’s your key point of differentiation. It’s the secret sauce your competitors cannot copy. What you’re going to make, what you stand for, how you talk to people, where you sell, what you believe — if any of it feels ho-hum or sounds just like everyone else in your space, you have an opportunity to level up, think bigger, and disrupt.

Don’t focus on getting rich by baking cookies. Nobody needs more rich and famous cookie makers. Focus instead on the promises your brand makes and the way you want people to feel about the manner in which you keep them.

Here is the main question of our discussion. What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

Can I be a rule breaker and not give you five?

I think in the 20th century, all business schools taught there were four P’s of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Yes, all those are important, but we’ve learned in the 21st century that there are at least four more: people, purpose, planet, and profit. If you don’t have the first seven and a plan for the eighth, don’t do it.

People, price, place, and promotion get you to the who, how, and where. You need people, purpose, and planet to get you to your WHY. Without all seven, you are just making and trying to sell stuff. There are a lot faster ways to do it that are more profitable than making better-for-you food and beverage products.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I got into this business because I wanted to influence people. I was wide-eyed enough to believe that I could make a difference through design. I learned early on that wasn’t going to happen if I didn’t get invited into the board room where big thinking and dangerous ideas are the norm. I studied brand strategy, leadership, and management so I could contribute to their business-building ideologies in ways that integrate marketing and design thinking.

In 2007 to 2010, Diana and I were talking about what to do with this whole better-for-you food and beverage space in the world, which is all normal now but not back then. When we discussed this with friends, banks, and clients, they thought we were lunatics for trying to normalize better-for-you products.

What we’re doing today has far greater impact than I imagined. We are helping those people and companies who have tremendous reach, go out and change the world for the better.

In 2019, we realized we had achieved our mission to normalize better-for-you food and beverage including clean ingredients, allergen-free and organics. We didn’t do this by ourselves, but we did help several brands get to the shelves. Our evidence: Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco have become the biggest retailers of organic, natural foods, and better-for-you foods.

When the pandemic hit, and the country went into a chaotic state. George Floyd was murdered, riots were happening, and so on. It was then Diana and I began reflecting, “What are we doing?” We helped create this industry that is largely for elite, affluent, Caucasian Coastal Elites. We decided that we need to help brands who want better-for-you to spread around the world become available to all people. That’s why evolved our mission and started using our platform to promote women and people of color in business and in the better-for-you industry. (Check out The Gooder Podcast.)

You are an inspiration to a great many people. 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 be to get brands like PepsiCo, Nestle, Amazon, Mondelez and all the multinationals to play at the level I was just talking about. They are big enough to handle the costs, have the distribution, cultural influence, advertising reach, and social media relevance to make this happen. It could be so popular that food banks could give out better-for-you food.

That would be a movement worth starting.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.