On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Brandon Blum. Brandon is the Cofounder and CEO of For Others, a mission-driven lifestyle brand based out of New York City. We talk about creating a brand with a positive community impact, launching without overthinking, the power of networking in business, and so much more!
Brandon Blum is the Cofounder and CEO of For Others, a mission-driven lifestyle brand based out of New York City.
Before For Others, Brandon spent six all-encompassing years inside the marketing wings of three prodigiously large media companies in New York City.
Brandon possesses a blend of experiences spanning branding, marketing, digital, media, content, and publishing.
Through his work, Brandon learned how brands - large and small - told their stories and built their brands.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Brandon Blum
Grow your network, build your network, and meet people.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today, I'm welcoming the show Brandon Blum. He is the co-founder and CEO of For Others, a mission-driven lifestyle brand based out of New York City. Welcome to the show, Brandon.
Brandon Blum
What's up, Chase? Excited to be here. Excited to chat.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, very good to see you again. Brandon and I ran into each other in Shop Talk in Vegas. How'd you like that event?
Brandon Blum
It was crazy. It was great though. I mean, I feel like I met a lot of great people, had a lot of great conversations. Not the biggest fan of Vegas, but it was a fun few days for sure. What about you?
Chase Clymer
I would basically say the same thing. Vegas was fun-ner when I was younger and I enjoy sleeping these days.
Brandon Blum
Yeah. You also got out there early, which was smart.
Chase Clymer
That's true. Yeah, I did. I think I talked to you right before I was leaving. But we're not here to talk about my travels. We're here to talk about For Others.
So for those that aren't familiar with the products that you guys are offering, what are you guys selling online? What are you guys producing?
Brandon Blum
So we make luxury accessories and apparel. We started the brand as a way to give back during the pandemic. My brother and I started the brand in late 2021. The idea was really, really simple: be part of the solution instead of the problem during the pandemic.
There were a lot of people complaining about the president, about the governor, about their mayor, about their friends. It's just a lot of negative stuff in the news back then and still today.
But I remember being really moved and inspired to just create some sort of positive influence into my community. And the way that we thought we could do that and sort of quickly, relatively speaking, was create some very simple apparel and accessories and sell them online to our friends and family and a portion of every sale would go to a food bank in that community.
And so we basically assumed it would be Philly in New York. I grew up in Philadelphia, born and raised and I have a network here in New York City and that's how it was for a while. And then at the end of the year, 2021, we did a pop-up in New York City in Chelsea Market and sold through like all of our inventory at this pop-up, at this market basically.
And I've kind of been like running with it ever since.
Chase Clymer
Would you say that seeing that velocity of sales at that pop-up, was that like a turning point in your perception of what you guys are doing?
Brandon Blum
1000%. And it's always funny. I joke about that moment being such a crazy moment for me and the brand because I don't think we had–and I still feel this way in a lot of ways–but I feel like we had no idea what we were doing. We didn't have brand labels on the back of the hoodies. We didn't have hang tags.
We were literally pulling up that pop-up with, I think it was three suitcases of tees and hoodies and hats in no particular order and just kind of like threw a bunch of stuff in a suitcase and put it under a table.
And every time someone would be like, “Oh, do you have a large and natural hoodie?” We literally would whip the suitcase out and open it in front of the whole market and try to shuffle through the suitcase to find the large. We had no situation. We just didn't know what to do, really.
And so from that moment on, we started figuring that stuff out. But that was a turning point. It got us really, really excited and felt like... That was the first time we really acquired customers, so to speak.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Let's take that moment and go back a little bit because there's a lot of things that led up to that moment.
The impetus of this is the pandemic and the negativity that you see in the world. How long was this brewing in your head before you decided to take action? How long was it where you were quote, unquote, building the brand? What do those steps look like?
Brandon Blum
Yeah, it took a couple of months. Again, we wanted to create something that didn't take forever to develop. I don't have a background in apparel. My brother doesn't either. I come from a marketing and advertising background, my brother comes from more of a software engineer background, so very far away from the fashion world.
I would say it took a couple months of us going back and forth. I remember vividly a conversation the first time we were like, originally we created the idea as a way to hand off to the companies that we worked for to do this internally. That was the original idea.
And then we sort of… I think what we did was we realized that was going to be hard... There's so much red tape. We both worked at big companies at the time. We were like, “This is never going to make it through. Let's just try and do this on our own.”
But to answer your question, I would say it's a couple months of us sampling products, making a very simple brand kit, I guess you could call it at the time, even though it was really just a logo and some colors and just soft launching it. That's really how we did it. We didn't have a huge marketing budget. Very bootstrapped.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
And was that just like start simple and get it live?
Brandon Blum
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
Was that position from a place of knowledge or a place of ignorance?
Brandon Blum
I would say the latter. Mostly. I also feel like there's a lot of paralysis by analysis, right? And I'm always mindful of that, like, not to get too stuck up, too caught up in overthinking things. We just kind of wanted to get stuff live and we didn't know what was going to be our best sellers.
I talked to a lot of students now and at different schools and I've noticed sometimes in their presentations or whatever the case may be that they're like projecting things about the business.
And I'm like, “Well, you're not honestly going to know those answers. You're not going to know what your best sellers are going to be. You don't know that 20% of your sales are going to come from that product. You really have no idea until you actually launch.”
And I think to our credit, we just kind of launched and figured out what our best sellers were and we're still trying to figure out how to use that data. But the only way to learn and know is to go live and start building the planet as it's in the air.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, it took you a couple months to get things off the ground. Does that mean that you have a physical product in hand and you're like, “We have to sell these things now because we spent money on them?”
Brandon Blum
Yeah, basically. With a very little marketing budget. We just posted on our social media and started posting on Instagram. We were lucky to have some friends and family that were excited and bought stuff early because it's not like we had a huge budget. But yeah, it was like sampling products.
During the pandemic, I think we were both working from home and I think I had a lot more time to work on stuff like this on the side. And yeah, it just took a couple months and we just got alive. I think it was out of ignorance, like you said. We didn't overthink it. Now I would do stuff so much differently, I feel like.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Well, let's talk about... You mentioned that you were doing this on the side.
Was there anything in your previous career that came over and helped you launch For Others and help you maybe find some initial success?
Brandon Blum
Oh, 100%. I was lucky to work at some really great companies in New York City before. I worked in advertising. So I worked in digital media, digital marketing for about 7-8 years. I worked for Atlantic Media, the Atlantic Magazine. I worked for Meredith Corporation. I worked for Axios Media before I left and started working on this.
I wasn't doing anything fashion related, like I said, but I was sort of at the intersection of like the digital marketing world at the time. I was a project manager, account manager for all these companies and so I was able to work with the creatives. I was able to work with the ad team, sorry, the sales team, the ad operations team.
And not that I'm doing that really anymore, to be honest, but I am able, I feel like, to take those skills I learned and just like managing projects, communicating, and just executing even in a space completely different. I do feel like I learn a lot from those experiences for sure.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Having a good project manager on whatever you're working on is a blessing.
Brandon Blum
Totally.
Chase Clymer
Things are always getting moved forward. Nothing's getting lost in the sauce. And expectation setting and making sure everything's in scope. It's so useful to have someone that understands the full... And asks questions that people haven't considered, that's always where things go off the rails.
Brandon Blum
Yeah. Yeah. And it was like a lot of trial learning on the fly in these roles. I looked back and I was like, “I was really doing a lot.” You don't think you are because I feel like they always make you feel like you're not doing enough, or at least where I worked in the media.
Chase Clymer
That's corporate life.
Brandon Blum
Yeah. In the media, I say I was like a train conductor. I was just keeping the trains running on time. It was one brief and then another brief and then another brief and then it just like it would never end. That's part of the reason why I sort of wanted to go out on my own and just kind of get away from that because it was really exhausting and thankless in a lot of ways.
But yeah, I was surprised when I... I was surprised at how much of a skill that is, is project management. It is a skill and you do have to learn by doing it, I think.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
You guys go and you get into this pop-up marketplace. Chelsea market pop-up? Was that a goal or was that just, again, right place, right time, luck?
Brandon Blum
Yeah, that's a good question. I remember at that time, we were looking for ways to get in real life and po, and that was a place that we found. I think I actually walked through it randomly one day in New York and was like, “Oh, we could sell our stuff here. This could be cool.”
It was like a market of a bunch of makers. They were selling clothes and jewelry and there’s a tattoo guy there. It was all kinds of things. But yeah, there wasn't a goal, I would say like a big goal, but when I saw that market existed, I remember being like, “I want to be in here. I want to see if we can sell some products here.”
Chase Clymer
And then so you get in, you do it, you sell a bunch of products.
Brandon Blum
Yeah, exactly. And also, I have to say, it was also like a frothy environment at the time, if you remember. A lot of people had a lot of money, disposable income, stimulus checks. People weren't going out.
And I remember thinking like, and this is kind of an interesting thing to talk about, like, was it fool's gold? Did we have something or were we just at the right place at the right time and had a mission-driven brand and people thought the product was nice and they just wanted to support it?
Because now, in some ways, we've done pop-ups since and we haven't done as well as we did back then when the brand wasn't, I would say, 10% of what it is today, I would say.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
And that's very honest of you. There were a lot of bumps in people's sales during the pandemic because of those factors that you just mentioned. There was a lot of disposable income. People weren't leaving their houses and they just wanted to buy things to make them happy.
And it was a very interesting environment to be in. On my side, I was an agency person. Companies made a lot of money that's like, “How did you do that during those times?”
Brandon Blum
Was it all Ecommerce companies that just sort of popped out of nowhere? Or were these existing brands that just started taking off? Or both?
Chase Clymer
Both. Both. I mean, you can see it through the channel. I mean, I know any listener out there, almost every guest has a pandemic story these days, either good or bad. It's like products got lost in the canal or they sold through everything and couldn't get enough. It was all over the place.
And then I think that just now, retroactively, a lot of brands have finally realized that, “Oh, that wasn't sustainable growth,” and they're back to, I hate the word new normal, but it's like they're back to where they should have been. They are readjusting a lot of projections that they put out there for the business.
I see that all over the place with budgets and they overspent and now they're paying for it in certain areas. It's a very interesting outcome of all that extra basically free money that was floating around in the economy and how that affected small businesses.
Brandon Blum
Yeah, I would definitely agree. I think it was like the pandemic was like the floodgates opening. If you think about Ecommerce as a multi retailer store. The pandemic flung the doors open and all these brands just ran in and started throwing their clothes up on all the racks.
And so now instead of there being like 100 brands in that store, there's like a million. And so now it's even harder to stick out. And my brand, For Others included, it's so hard for us to stick out even with a cool, unique differentiated mission.
Someone goes on social media or they go online, or they see a post from an influencer, there's just so many brands. It's so hard to convince someone to buy something online now, unless you're just hitting them over and over and over again with paid ads. And a lot of brands don't have the money to do that.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Now let's talk about... I want to get to how you guys are attempting to do that. But I do want to take another step back.
So after you guys have the successful pop-up, when do you decide to go all in on the brand when you put your day job, and what was going on within the business to help you make that decision?
Brandon Blum
Yeah, so it was early 2022 and I remember thinking, “I'm gonna work on this brand. I'm also gonna take some freelance projects on the side.”
I had some family and friends that helped me with some projects, and I just kind of really was itching to kind of get out on my own. I don't know if it was corporate fatigue or what, but I wasn't fulfilled. I was very frustrated in my career.
I don't know if it was like business school, if it was just building a brand and getting that as far as I could and that would be my business school, which retroactively looking back, I argue that it is and was.
I figured, “Look, worst case scenario…” This is like right at the beginning of 2022, I was like, “Worst case scenario, this doesn't work out at all. Three or four months later, I could go get a job.” I felt strongly that that was the case.
And I didn't realize how hard it was. The further you swim out from the boat, the harder it is for you to turn around and be like, “I'm going to go back to the boat.” So I didn't know that was coming until I started swimming. Now it's so hard for me to think about going back to get a full-time job.
But that was the thought. It was like, “Let me work on a couple of these projects. See how far I can get them and have that freedom that I was yearning for during my corporate career. And we'll see what happens.”
Chase Clymer
So what happened? Did you see sustainable growth within the business? Did you guys expand your presence in different channels? I hear, just allegorically, when I have previous guests on a lot, oftentimes they say the second they went all in, it was almost night and day.
Brandon Blum
In terms of success, like in terms of progress and pace?
Chase Clymer
Yeah, within their business.
Brandon Blum
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the issue that I've always run into with the brand was that I've never been able to take a salary from it. I've always supplemented on the side with freelance projects. I don't always say that, but I'm just going to say that on the Honest Ecommerce podcast.
I wish I could be all in on For Others, but right now it's not paying me a salary. As much as I love it and believe in it and think we're building the next Bombas meets Kith, it's not paying me a salary. So I have to be realistic about it.
That said, the brand did start growing more and more as I put more and more time into it. So we did more pop-ups. We hired a couple interns, we hired a couple like freelancers and we improved some of the stuff on the website. And I just had more time to work on it. And Johnny, my brother too, we had more time to fix things that were wrong and fix things that we wanted to improve.
And yeah, it does come down to, “How much time are you willing to put into it? How much love do you have for it?” And it doesn't feel, it never has felt like a work for me, not a single day, not a single moment. I've always thought it was like, “Man, if I could do this for the rest of my career, what a blessing.”
I think I've always thought about it in that sense of like, “If I can just hold on to this. What a great career. That's exactly what I want to be doing.”
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I think there's a lot of entrepreneurs out there that their goal is just to build something that can sustain them. I think there's nothing wrong with building a lifestyle business. There's nothing wrong with building something that just makes you happy creating a job for yourself.
If you were talking with some of these young entrepreneurs, are there any mistakes that you made building the business that you want to help them avoid or just any advice that you have flown around to help them get to that next level?
Brandon Blum
I'm a big proponent of just starting and going from there, like we talked about earlier. And I think that that's a good piece of advice. But that said, be realistic. Always check inventory literally and figuratively on the business that you're starting, like, what's working, what's not working, and just keep kind of going.
And the biggest thing that I should have said from the beginning is just grow your network, build your network, and meet people. I can't tell you how important that's been for me and the brand. Everything I've done is just the network.
I know there's this saying that most people probably on the podcast listening have heard, but your net worth is your network, or your network is your net worth. It's true. It really is. Just meet people.
And I know schools are a great way to do that. Grad schools are a great way to do that. Living in a big city is a great way to do that, but I can't stress that enough. Going to events and just meeting people… you never know what those conversations will lead towards.
And it's nonlinear, right? It's like you meet one person and that could be a 20x sort of jump. It's like, you might be waking up every day–and not to bring a football reference into this, but– handing the ball off for a 2-yard gain over and over again. But then you go out to an event and you might be able to throw the ball 20 yards down the field in one play.
And that's what I've thought about when I think about networking. I think that that's something that's really important to understand.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. We were talking about how we met at Shop Talk. Obviously, I'm not saying that I'm going to change your business overnight, but I know that there were a lot of people that met a lot of cool people at Shop Talk.
Brandon Blum
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
I know people got into retail stuff with just being in the right room. I personally... Some cool stuff happened for our agency from just being at the right place at the right time at that event. Yeah.
And it's just one of those things. What's that law? An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion. It’s just getting that forward momentum outside of the physics reality of a ball rolling down the hill.
It's like if you are moving towards a goal, and other people see that, they will try to help you.
Brandon Blum
Totally, and totally.
That's another good piece, just putting your flag down and being like, “This is what I'm doing. I'm Chase. I run this podcast called the Honest Ecommerce Podcast.”
Then people will think of you when the right opportunity presents itself. Whereas if you're not putting your flag in the ground and not saying, “This is what I am, I'm the founder For Others”, or “I'm the founder of this consultancy”, people might not think of you or might not know that to even think of you.
And so that's another piece that's important too. It's like being proud of where you're at and being proud of what you're doing and like letting as many people know that that's what you do. And then opportunities, I think, will come from that.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. It's this concept... I forget who coined this term. I want to say it was Brennan Dunn, the Double Your Freelancing guy. But it's this idea of increasing your surface luck area. It's just like creating content, making noise–good content, preferably–making noise and just being top of mind when people need whatever it is that you are good at is a weird kind of anxiety you have to get over as an entrepreneur.
Because the first time you do it, it's not going to work. The second time you do it, it's not going to work. The 10th time you do it, maybe it will work. But you just got to...
Brandon Blum
Consistency is key.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. You just got to get into that motion of speaking about what you do in an expert capacity. Is that producing amazing mission-driven lifestyle products? Is that building a website? Whatever it is that you do, it's super interesting.
Brandon Blum
Got to get reps. That's the other thing about the podcast that I thought was really… sorry, the pop-up, rather, was really good early on. It was like, people come out to the booth, and I basically had to learn how to get this person to understand what the heck this is in 10 seconds or 6 seconds.
I start to figure out what to say, how to pitch the brand, how to pitch the mission. And that's pitching the brand 100 times a day for months, weeks, years. Invaluable.
Chase Clymer
Oh yeah. You learn what resonates instantly. And then you get that weird feedback. It's the stuff that doesn't scale that you really need to do at the beginning. And that weird feedback, someone's going to be like, “Oh, that shirt’s color looks like this”, and you’ll be like, “I never thought of that, and that's probably going to turn off more people. Maybe we won't make that color anymore.”
That's not something someone's going to leave in a comment box on a website. That stuff just happens organically when you're out there in the real world.
Brandon Blum
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I agree.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. So we've been talking a lot about, obviously, the brand that you built and these awesome products.
If I'm listening and I want to go check it out and support you, what should I do?
Brandon Blum
Head to for-others.com. That's f-o-r dash o-t-h-e-r-s dotcom. Not to be confused with forothers.com. That's a nonprofit that we're not affiliated with. People get us confused sometimes.
You can also go to our Instagram @shopforothers. On TikTok @shopforothers. And you can also shoot me an email, brandon@ 4-others.com.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
Brandon Blum
Love to hear from everybody.
Chase Clymer
Brandon, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing your story.
Brandon Blum
Thanks, Chase. I really appreciate it. It was good to see you again. And hopefully, we'll talk soon.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.
Until next time!