FINIEN

Missed the latest Episode of Hitting The Mark? Allison Taylor grew up on her family’s plum farm in Northern California, which has been around since 1916 and is one of the world’s largest producers of dried plums. In 2018, Allison and her sisters launched Le Prunier, a plum-based skincare brand that reunited them with the farm and created a new family business that is rooted in authenticity and sustainability.

The story of the brand is amazing, filled with ups and downs, both of which happened when Chrissy Teigen created a viral moment for Le Prunier at a moment when they were low on stock and in midst of a re-brand. And that, my friends, is entrepreneurship, and this is an episode not to miss!

Listen:

↠ FINIEN — https://loom.ly/uCcK82A
↠ Apple — https://loom.ly/nS_Y7nI
↠ Spotify — https://loom.ly/Xe1c_ZE
↠ Simplecast — https://loom.ly/26ZhVuA

→ This is post 7 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

As an authority (I prefer it to expert, and definitely to guru or ninja - please!) in brand building, I talk a lot about the importance of building community and how it is different from gaining social media followers.

With Toneoptic, I had to find my own path of creating a community for the brand.

In an almost naive way, I did something so simple, so inexpensive, and so not-corporate that it actually worked.
worked.

I am very much my audience: a design and music-obsessed record collector. We like exploring new vinyl stores and finding rare and exciting records.

So I launched Crate Dig, a monthly giveaway of an exciting, usually rare, record. I seek out a new store, ask the owner to pick a record that recently came in and that (s)he is excited about, that costs around $80, and that’s the record I then give away to our tribe.

I get to know store owners, and they learn about Toneoptic. Our community starts looking forward to seeing where I go and which record is up for grabs this month.

I kept it real. No big brand collab. Just an $80 record that shows I am one of them. It’s the stuff we mutually love. And we enjoy supporting local record stores just like they do.

We have done this 31 times now, and the records we gave away ranged from a Keanu Reeves-signed record from a store in Chicago to the original Rolling Stones’ self-titled 1964 Mono LP from a shop in Santa Clarita.

This month, we are giving away Mac Miller's 10th-anniversary box of GO:OD AM, featuring two white LPs, plus a single-sided etched yellow LP with bonus tracks. Check it out and enter here: https://loom.ly/KiHuKmo

Building community this way is an act of shared passion, and that is always a great place to play in as a brand.

⚫ Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com
💫 Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: tinyurl.com/finiennewsletter
🙋 Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.

→ This is part 6 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

I was a guest on a podcast yesterday (more on that when the episode airs), and Edilsa Bueno, the wonderful host, crafted a theme around the idea that my career is not a ladder or a lattice. Not even a ‘Career in Motion.’

We decided, towards the end of our conversation, that it was a thread.

Welcome to the 'Thread Career,' then.

Running FINIEN and being a partner at Chameleon Collective can confuse some clients initially, but it really is just semantics. I am a brand strategist, and FINIEN joined the Collective. One role that looks like two. At the heart? Brand strategy.

Me being an author, an advisor, a podcast host, and a mentor? It’s all about brand strategy.

And then there is Toneoptic, a D2C product innovation brand I happened to start out of a need I saw for myself. This is where one would think I lost my organized career path or my professional identity, of sorts.

But nothing could be further from the truth, as it was the next logical progression of brand building: I helped hundreds of clients shape and reshape their brands; I mentored thousands on the same topic. I wrote four books on the subject.

Wasn’t it about time I myself did what I spent all my career doing as the backseat driver, or in many cases, the co-pilot wishing to get my hands on the steering wheel?

Well, now I have.

I am steering.

And I am building the car while reading the manual while going full speed.

It makes all the sense in the world. In the end, this brand's strategy needs to reign supreme to survive and thrive. This was decades in the making; I just haven’t looked at it quite that way until today.

What is your career thread? I am positive you can uncover one.

( 📸 Me, not in my black dress-shirt uniform, being 'last week years old' learning that you blow into plastic gloves to make them easier to put on. Yes, I learn on the job.)

⚫ Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com
💫 Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: tinyurl.com/finiennewsletter
🙋 Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.

→ This is post 4 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

Advice we all heard at least once in our lives: “The best way to see if an idea for a product will have an audience is to put a sketch, a comp, or a prototype out there and see how people react.”

And so I learned the hard way that this may not be the best advice, or at least it needs to come with a big fat asterisk about production timelines and the *risk* of virality.

Back in 2022, I conducted a photoshoot of an early prototype: a beautiful walnut box containing my (now-patented) rpm mechanism, which allows records to be showcased library-style while being easily flipped through with an elegant motion. I put the product online at a ridiculously high price to see how people reacted to my innovation. I quickly learned that the price was indeed ridiculous, shipping was impossible given the design, but that people loved the mechanism and solution and were hungry for innovation in a stale space.

A year and a half later, this video was picked up out of the blue and went viral across all major social platforms, with one TikTok clip alone garnering 2.2M views. It was the night I was heading to the airport for vacation, and the week I gave the green light for the production of a different flat-pack-shipped design. No more walnut box. Not what was shown in the viral video.

People loved the clip; they loved the design, but here I was already much further along, and I saw very little reward for an ill-timed moment of unplanned virality, besides making some great connections with A-list musicians and growing our social following. But no sales since the product people saw and wanted, they could not get.

We are now months away from bringing back a similar design. At a fraction of that original cost and with no shipping issues.

But the viral moment has faded.

Lesson learned: Don’t publicly test your market with a unique product unless you are ready for a wave of positive responses and a process to make that product a reality very, very quickly. Virality comes and goes within days, or if you are lucky, weeks, but R&D and fabrication take months, or more likely years.

⚫ Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com
💫 Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: tinyurl.com/finiennewsletter
🙋 Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.

→ This is post 2 of my Walking The Talk Summer Thursday series: a transparent look behind the scenes of building my product innovation brand in the music space, Toneoptic – a humbling and rewarding experience of me choosing to walk my brand talk ←

Studying Communication Design and having a career as a Creative Director and Brand Strategist, I frequently exhausted my mind during a typical workday, but never my body.

A goal with Toneoptic has always been to produce products locally, in California, regardless of how difficult everyone made it sound (they were right). With our new product, we made that dream come true: Our factory space that also serves as a warehouse.

Every piece of the product is being touched by my hands. Extrusions are cleaned, aluminum parts drilled, and parts trucked from the powder coater to the anodizer. Trucks I learned how to drive, filled brimful with pallets of things I mastered how to pronounce.

Over the past half year, I learned to cherish the balance between physical and mental stimulation and to embrace the new sensation of working hard with my body (which is very different from working out).

When I was done holding a bag of ice in my right hand after tapping (creating screw threads for) 160 pieces of aluminum extrusions today (which will serve as the handles of our new product), I wondered why this pain makes me feel strangely fulfilled. It comes down to a sense of completion that is lacking on a day filled with virtual meetings and e-mails.

I cherish my work of brand identity and strategy, but after handing off a final logo, for example, you won’t see your work in Times Square at that time, for a long time, or perhaps ever. You know you did great work, it is stimulating, but besides an invoice sent and appreciation received by the client, you basically move on to the next project, until a while later, you might start seeing your work being enjoyed in real life.

That bag of ice on my hand, those 160 extrusions that are now tapped, those 200 50-pound boxes I moved to another area in the space, those 1,200 aluminum plates that have now been quality controlled, one at a time, that is something that is real.

It happened. I can see it.

And more so, I can feel it.

Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: toneoptic.com/pages/about
Get notified via e-mail about next week’s post: tinyurl.com/finiennewsletter

Want to hear me talk about something specific in my startup’s journey? Leave a comment or DM me.