Welcome to DAMN GOOD BRANDS. Today, we're diving into the world of real estate with Julie Newdow and Mark Landisman. With over 30 years of experience in the industry, Julie and Mark are ranked in the top 1% of America's real estate broker teams by the Wall Street Journal.

In this episode, Julie and Mark share their insights on professional growth in the real estate industry and the impact of the recession on the market. They also discuss how trust is the key to maintaining client retention and share details about their success mindsets, emphasizing the importance of working hard to make the lives of others better. Their inspiring conversation left me feeling fired up and motivated.

So, if you're in the tri-state area and looking for your dream home, we encourage you to contact the Newdow-Landisman team. With their vast experience and commitment to excellence, you'll be in good hands. Check out their website at www.compass.com/agents/newdow-landisman or simply Google "Newdow Landisman."

Thanks for listening.

-----

Produced by Simpler Media

Michelle Park is the Chief Marketing Officer for Territory Foods, a female-led fresh food platform that offers a new take on the food preparation and distribution industry with chef-prepared fresh food delivered locally.

Territory offers personalized menus with a chef's touch and can cater to paleo, vegan, pescetarian, any diet you name, they can do it and do it deliciously. As a customer of Territory I can attest to the fact that their food is fantastic - I kinda enjoy cooking but can never get around to doing it, so Territory is a real game changer because it gives you chef-caliber delicious meals that follow your diet and are delivered right to your door.

Michelle has a varied and fascinating job history that includes major positions across major CPG companies like Procter and Gamble, as well as leadership positions at multiple startups and venture capital firms. This was a great conversation about career trajectory as Michelle's did not follow a typical path by any means, but her experience across startups and major companies shaped her professional development to be extremely well-rounded and suited for leadership.

Really enjoyed this conversation and hope you do too. Without further ado, here is Territory Foods CMO, Michelle Park.

-----

Produced by Simpler Media

Jeremy Reid is the founder and CEO of PINCHme.com - the leading digital hub for CPG manufacturers to acquire new customers and increase sales through targeted and data-driven sampling. Since launching in 2012, PINCHme’s community has grown to over 8 million members with $35 billion in collective spending power on consumer products and has powered sampling campaigns for multiple Fortune 400 CPG companies, including Kraft, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Kellog's, Reckitt Benckiser and Nestle to name a few.

The origin of PinchMe started with the observation that CPG sampling programs were inefficient and ineffective, a problem that Jeremy sought to fix by building an entire business around an innovative and data-centric sampling platform. In this interview, Jeremy gets into his overall entrepreneurial origin story and how he overcame multiple obstacles in launching his company only to turn it into a major success story on today's episode of Damn Good Brands.

-----

Produced by Simpler Media

Joshua Ostrovsky is an entrepreneur, social media influencer, author, and plus-size model.

Having started his career as an Instagram humor influencer under the name The Fat Jewish, Josh went on to be a co-founder of Swish Beverages, which launched White Girl Rosé in 2015 followed by the Babe family of sparkling canned wines. In 2019, Anheuser-Busch acquired Swish Beverages, marking the brewer's largest wine investment to date.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Josh and I talked about his humble origins, entrepreneurship, the founding of Babe beverages, and his super exciting new venture. Guys, this episode is a treat, Josh is not only incredibly hilarious but surprisingly inspiring.

That being said, I will issue a disclaimer that this is definitely more of an R-Rated - episode so if bad language or crude jokes offend you even a little bit, you might want to stop listening now because there's QUITE A BIT OF IT. You've been warned.

Now without further ado, here is The Fat Jewish himself, Mr. Josh Ostrovsky.

We recently split up the prior episodes of Damn Good Brands into two different podcasts. If you may have noticed some of the previous episodes of the podcast are missing; but they're not. They've been transferred over to a brand new podcast called Frictionless Marketing.

Frictionless Marketing will feature a series of corporate and creative conversations with CCOs, CMOs, and other executive marketing leaders to discuss today's best in class marketing campaigns and frictionless frameworks to help build your brand in an era where advertising is no longer the answer. Frictionless Marketing we'll feature behind the scenes stories and expert insights to help marketing decision-makers prepare for a future where the consumer rules.

Damn Good Brands—this podcast—willl focus more on entrepreneurs, founders, upstarts, and edgier, more controversial brands and brand leaders.

We hope you subscribe to both, but check out Frictionless Marketing for Fortune 500 brand leaders like CCOs, CMOs, and other comms and marketing leaders, while Damn Good Brands will be the place for edgier deep-dives into new companies and new brands.

Mike Cessario is the CEO and Founder of Liquid Death, an outrageous new canned water brand with quality mountain water engineered to murder your thirst! Liquid Death has made a name for itself as an extremely disruptive force of marketing, and the brand's outlandish marketing stunts are as refreshing as the water itself.

To date, the brand has convinced 180,000 people to sell them their souls, has cursed its water with a real witch and performed a reverse exorcism with an accredited warlock that allegedly put demons into the water. Customers who purchased during this time period were entitled to a coupon for $1 off any exorcism (yes, this is all for real). Recently, to further raise awareness of plastic pollution in the oceans, Liquid Death released a series of plush marine animal stuffed toys called Cutie Polluties that were bloodied and choked with plastic garbage. Additionally, as you can imagine, this is a brand whose unholy approach to marketing inspires a lot of controversy and hate, which is why Liquid Death took their favorite angry online comments and turned them into lyrics for their own death metal album.

Liquid Death also has a very compelling mission, which is to eradicate the over-use of plastic bottles. According to their website, the average aluminum can contains over 70% recycled material, whereby the average plastic bottle contains only 3%. Additionally, aluminum cans are infinitely recyclable, and of all the aluminum produced since 1888, over 75% of it is still in current use. Plastic, on the other hand, technically isn't even recyclable in the first place because it costs so much money to melt it down, sending most of it into landfills and into the ocean. The planet has been overrun by plastic pollution, and Liquid Death is here to do something about it, which is why 10% of profits from every can sold help kill plastic pollution.

Prior to founding Liquid Death, Mike worked in marketing with companies like Vayner Media and worked on multiple viral promotions for Netflix on series like "House of Cards," "Stranger Things," and "Narcos." The entrepreneurial origin story behind Liquid Death is extremely inspirational and a real testament to how putting passion, fun, and personality into a brand can make it into a formidable gamechanger. We get into all of this on this very special episode of Damn Good Brands Origin Stories.

Here are some key takeaways from this conversation with Mike Cessario.

• Throw the rules away. The world of branding is silently governed by a list of archaic rules that dictate what you can and can't do - if you want a groundbreaking brand, it's time to stop playing by these rules. During his advertising years, Mike asked himself why products, specifically in CPG, had to play by these bland and boring 1950's rules, which entertainment brands were never at the mercy of. As a result, Liquid Death's marketing is brash, violent, occasionally foul-mouthed, and extremely controversial, but as a result, it has a rabid fan base because it's so fun and different. So whether you're starting a new brand or want to do something different with an existing one, consider throwing out the puritanical rule book that's been governing the world of CPG for decades and do something new.

• Ideas don't sell. Proof sells. After coming up with the idea of Liquid Death, instead of running straight towards investors, Mike decided to prove the product's viability in a low-risk manner by producing a commercial for the product before it even existed. The commercial was completely insane, became instantly viral, and Mike set up a Facebook page to gauge interest and found that there was a serious amount of demand for his product. He was even pitched by stores like 7-11. Mike then took this data, made a pitch deck, and was off to the races with investors. Had Mike walked into a boardroom with the idea for a mountain water with...

Jeremy Parker is the Co-founder and CEO of Swag.com, the eCommerce platform for purchasing promotional materials that people actually want to keep. When you think of the promotional products industry, you might think of cheaply made items you pickup conferences only to eventually throw away. Or, god forbid you've ever had to order promotional products yourself and are aware of the nightmare of dealing with shipping inquiries, quality issues, and all manner of inconvenience synonymous with that industry. Swag.com's mission is to take the pain out of ordering customized promotional material with a focus on high quality, frictionless ordering, and seamless distribution. Swag.com launched in 2016 and has since become the fastest-growing company in the promotional product space. Inc. magazine recently included the company on its list of fastest-growing companies in the country. Swag.com’s thousands of customers include corporate giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and TikTok. In this conversation, Jeremy discusses the founding of Swag.com, what he learned from pivotal mentors, and how he was able to observe and utilize Uber's inventory-free model to great success.

Observe the Uber model of curation organization and obliterating friction.

The foundation of SWAG.com was born out of the constant frustration most people have when ordering branded items for their companies or clients. Something as simple as branded t-shirts or water bottles can be a nightmarish process consisting of hours of research, waiting around for samples to arrive, comparing price quotes, etc. And even then, quality is never guaranteed. Instead of starting their own custom branding company from scratch, Swag.com yielded the Uber model of brokering, whereby they found and vetted a series of high-quality and trusted custom merchandise providers and created a network of them that they would dispatch orders to through their e-commerce platform. This allowed them to move fast and operate on a large scale, all with a very lean company structure.

Pound the pavement. When he was just starting out with Swag.com, Jeremy landed an enormous client right out of the gate, Facebook. How did he get Facebook? It wasn't from months of cold calling and emailing and asking for a meeting; no, he showed up at their office. By inserting his own foot in the door, decision-makers met with him and ultimately signed on to be his client. This caused a social proof domino effect because once he announced that he had a titan like Facebook as a client, WeWork and Netflix jumped on board next and the snowball for Swag.com was very much set in motion. Clearly, showing up at someone's office without an appointment doesn't always work, and you're likely to be turned away but, if you do it enough times, who knows, you may be surprised at who will take an impromptu meeting with you and what it can lead to.

Surround yourself with greatness. In his earlier years, Jeremy worked very closely with Jessie Itzler, serial entrepreneur, social media personality,self-development guru, and husband to Spanx founder Sara Blakely. Jeremy's time with Jessie was incredibly formidable for his work ethic, entrepreneurial sensibility, intelligence, and overall hustle. If that wasn't enough, Jeremy got to spend a great deal of time with David Goggins; ex-Navy SEAL, motivational speaker, and downright badass in every sense of the word. The combination of these two mentors imbued Jeremy with innate entrepreneurial intelligence and a...

For today’s episode, I sat down for the second time with Greg Galant, co-founder, and CEO of Muck Rack. A lot has changed in the year since we last spoke. Muck Rack was already important to PR specialists and journalists, but with the onset of the pandemic, they’ve seen their use by journalists explode, with their online portfolio tool now being used over a million times per month. Journalists are also benefiting from the release of Muck Rack Trends, which allows users to track how stories are being reported in the media in real-time.

Greg is also the founder of the Shorty Awards for social media and the Shorty Social Good Awards, which has developed into a master class on cause campaigns. Today, having a social purpose is the cost of admission for brands, and it goes way beyond the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of years past. Greg believes that “Social good is the only marketing that matters now.” The companies that thrive over the long run now will be those that successfully pivot to having a mission.

Greg and I caught up on new and exciting trends in social media, how he and his companies have weathered and thrived during the storm of COVID19 and what to expect from this year’s Shorty Social Good Awards. I always enjoy speaking to Greg; he is deeply steeped in the worlds of social media and communications and is overall a dynamic and fascinating entrepreneur who never seems to stop hustling. To my delight, Greg also recently re-launched his podcast Venture Voice and kicked it off with an interview with none other than Mark Cuban. So definitely be sure to check out Greg’s podcast Venture Voice and please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Greg Galant.

-----

Produced by Simpler Media