Running The Three-Hour Brand Sprint
How To Create an Apparel Brand in Three Hours
My brother and I wanted to see if we could start a brand from scratch, in an industry we know nothing about, and see if his artistic abilities, my product and marketing background, and the desire to get out of our comfort zones will turn into something fun and maybe profitable. We wanted to create a new brand for a hat company.
We decided to run GV’s three-hour brand sprint, nicely described by Jake Knapp about a year ago.
To be fully honest, the subtitle is a bit misleading, because it took us more than 3 hours to run the brand sprint. My brother and did this somewhat asynchronously, being constrained by a 10-hour time zone difference, as well as our busy schedules. Luckily Slack and Google Hangouts were there for us.
When to run a brand sprint?
Don’t run a Brand Sprint unless you really have to. If you won’t use the results right away, wait for a trigger event. Good triggers are naming your company, designing a logo, hiring an agency, or writing a manifesto.
We took Jake’s suggestion ⬆ ️seriously. We needed a name and a logo for our company, but also needed to clarify what our brand should stand for and how it’s different.
Pre-sprint Homework
We read Jake’s article, but also felt the need to do some in depth competitor research beforehand. So we took an extra weekend to dive deep into competitors and did the following:
- a list of all the companies in the apparel industry that sell products similar to ours; we used this list in the last exercise of the brand sprint.
- researched each company online (social media, blog posts, website content) to understand who their audience is, what message they deliver, and what voice they use to deliver that message.
- a list of all the related products these competitors sell, with name, price, description, pictures, and tagged each with specific keywords; we will use this later when we deal with pricing & packaging our products.
We didn’t have to spend all this time on competitors up front, but placing these competitors accurately on the 2x2 matrix gives you a good understanding on how crowded your space actually is, and also acts as a reality check.
For competitive analysis, we used Airtable, a mix between spreadsheets and databases. They have data templates called bases, and I found one for competitor tracking that was just right.
Outcome of The Brand Sprint
Even though we didn’t do all six exercises in one sitting and we exceeded the allotted time for some of them, the results were quite satisfying.
20 Year Roadmap
This was the most uncomfortable part of the sprint. Coming up with where the brand would be in 5 years was very hard, not to mention we we would be in 20 years. It took us more than 15 minutes, and we came up with some options. The exercise made us consider future expansion to other product lines and markets, and helped us later when it became very easy for us to exclude some names that were too specific to just hats.
What, How, Why
The what was pretty obvious, we wanted to make great hats. We also wanted to do it in a conscious way, and use sustainable manufacturing. And we wanted unique designs, made by aspiring and up-and-coming artists. This was our how. The why was inspired by our desire to make the world a little bit better and create something that embraces uniqueness and being different.
Top 3 Values
We wanted our brand to be many things to many people, but following the exercise guide we narrowed it down to Innovative, Sincere, Kind.
Top 3 Audiences
When you start a business, it’s normal to want your product to be liked and purchased by everyone. We decided that the best fit for our hats would be young adults with an active lifestyle, aspiring artists, and fashion lovers. We’re going to have to expand on this, but it’s a good start at this point.
Personality Sliders
This was a simple and fun exercise and my brother and I really saw eye to eye on the brand’s personality. Here’s the result:
Competitive Landscape
Going through the pre-sprint homework exercise I described above helped us a lot, especially in such a saturated market, where everyone is selling hats. We really wanted to place on the matrix only those brands who we felt are targeting the same audience and that may have similar offerings.
Conclusion
The most important things that came out of the brand sprint:
- The why. We now have clarity on why we are starting this brand, beyond just to make a profit and get uncomfortable. We’re doing this to make the world a better place, to celebrate uniqueness, inclusion, and help each other embrace diversity by promoting art through fashion.
- The alignment. We know and agree on the characteristics of our brand and are ready to move forward. We want our brand to be innovative, sincere, and kind.
- The brand. We decided on a company name and a logo we believe represents our values. After several iterations, we fell in love with Halftone.
We’re now working hard to create our first set of designs, choose fabrics, and build early prototypes. This is really only the beginning and the road is long. You can get a sneak peek at a very early version of our designs.
Website
I decided to test some advertising to gauge interest and start building a database of potential customers. I plan to build a landing page where we present our products and use an email collector to feed leads into my database, so that I can email them when products are ready to ship.
As we’re working to design that page, I put something quick and dirty to gauge your interest in our progress. I embedded a Google form on the page to collect emails. You can check it out here:
Google has some tools that helped me create and host a website for free, as long as I purchased a domain through Google Domains. They also have domain privacy and secure certificates included with your domain purchase, things that other vendors (such as GoDaddy) will charge for.
For those interested in following our progress, I embedded a Google form on the website to collect emails. You can check it out here:
Resources used to create the coming soon page:
I’d love your feedback on the process, the brand name we ended up choosing and any suggestions or advice you might have to make this process better.
