It’s our party and we’ll…end it when we want to. That’s right, we’re bringing Season 1 of Brandsplaining® to a close in order to explore other show concepts for the upcoming NEW season. Hear what we’ve got in store and why it’s the most athletic thing we’ve done yet. A very special thanks to all of our incredible guests from this season—we had so much fun ‘splaining branding with you all. Season 2 drops soon, so stay tuned.

There’s not a more appropriate way to end 2020 than with an episode all about staying in. We chatted with Tyler Calder, the Director of Content for Girls’ Night In—a community and weekly newsletter exploring the ways we unwind, take care, and make friends into adulthood. Girls’ Night In also just launched The Lounge: a new membership platform for connecting IRL and online, and Whiled: goods designed for downtime. (And P.S. Whiled’s tagline is so good it makes us howl like wolves: “Press pause and play.) We’ve admired the entire brand suite because of their fun, candid messaging and their use of levity to open dialogue and foster community. We had a riot talking with Tyler (who herself is the queen of cozy) about the Girls’ Night In ethos and brand strategy and got into a lot of fun topics, like:

• Using candor and clarity to draw in the right audience 
• Having a distinct brand personality in order to foster strong partnerships and collabs
• Resisting the urge to put out clickbait or frivolous content even if it feels the most marketable
• Not being afraid of having a counter-cultural message, because it can often help you carve a niche and find your people
• How a thoughtful, integral brand approach will pay off in the long haul in terms of consumer loyalty 

And we ended talking about snack necklaces (on Instagram @wearyoursnacks, by the way). You can check out everything GNI is up to @girlsnightinclub, @whiled.co, or @jointhelounge on Instagram or at www.girlsnightin.co.

Ready for some un*match*ed entrepreneurial insights that will help you light your industry on fire and blow away the competition? Perfect, because this week’s episode is wick-ed good. We spoke with Ida-Sofia Koivuniemi, the founder of Evil Queen—a candle company committed to bringing light and attitude into homes around the world. Basically, they’re making candles fun again. 

Regularly selling out online and featured on Buzzfeed, Cosmo, and PopSugar, you‘re not gonna find ‘fresh linen’ or ‘pumpkin harvest’ in Evil Queen’s collections. Instead? Amazing scents with names like “Champagne Showers,” “Stolen Hoodie,” and “Wash Your Fucking Hands.” These candles are funny, memorable gifts for any occasion or the perfect home good to bring a smile to your face during a shitty week. Trust us, Evil Queen candles are the one candle you’d never regift. 

We talked with Ida-Sofia about a lot of really interesting things about creativity, entrepreneurism, and branding including:

• Using bold branding to create niches in what seem to be saturated marketplaces 
• How to use make the mundane memorable
• How to stay in your lane creatively even if copycat brands start to pop up
• The power of humor to elicit relatability and inclusiveness
• Inviting others to be in on the joke 
• Risk-taking and the benefit of being willing to say things that others won’t
• How surprise and delight lead to memorability and new customer acquisition
• Ways to resist branding mimicking and instead trusting your unique POV
• Burning down industry norms and writing your own rules

It’s a great chat and a great time (and we play a rousing game of Mascot Who? as well). For more from Evil Queen, you can head to shopevilqueen.com or on Instagram @evilqueen.

You’re nuts if you think we’d do an episode about branding nut milk and not make that joke. This week is all about joy and JOI and we had a lovely conversation with Mike O’Hagan, the chief strategy officer of JOI, who also happens to be a buddy of ours after working together to launch their first site in 2019. 

JOI (which stands for just one ingredient) is a concentrate made from whole, natural ingredients that, when blended with water, create nutritious, plant-based milks. It’s the first of its kind, creating an entirely new category in the food industry and absolutely crushing it—flying off the shelves, being carried at Amazon and Thrive Market, and receiving glowing reviews from bigwigs like Bon Appetit and The Food Network.

Mike, a plant-based eater for over 23 years, has over 16 years of marketing and advertising experience and we got to gabbing all about the Brand Personality of JOI (that Obedient created), the consumer response to the playful and envelope-pushing tone, how humor kicks shame out of the health food conversation, strategies for flexing in varying brand voices depending on platform, and how helpful a fun approach is in helping a new brand get attention. 

Bonus: we haze him into rehashing a line of copy we wrote for them that ended up on the cutting room floor and we still maintain its brilliance.

Your brain glass will be more than half full after listening and we know that only barely makes sense. Just trust us. If you want more JOI in your life, you can check them out at addjoi.com, and @addjoi across social media.

Do You Hear What I Hear? Some Jingle Bell-y laughs and minds being (snow)blown. That’s right, It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Great Branding and in this episode Allie and Lyndsay brandsplain all of the strategies and tactics that make the holiday branding so compelling...and how you can incorporate them into your business year-round. Gather round the fire as they break down the two pillars of holiday branding—spectacle and story—and share magical background stories to classic campaigns (did you know Rudolph was created by a department store?!), insights into how this season taps into consumer emotion in order to convert, and personal anecdotes from their upbringing that prove that fun is an unmatched tool for creativity and differentiation. Like taking a bite out of a Christmas Tree shaped Reese’s, this episode will leave you happy, hopeful, and ready to take your business from Scrooge to Santa—all year long. 

Bonus topics: Taylor Swift’s new album, Evermore, the 1990 classic animated film, Rover Dangerfield, rebranding Saint Nicholas to Jolly Old Saint Nick, satirical holiday gift guides, Andre 3000’s vacuum, the power of a brand mascot, and of course, the namesake of the episode title: Obedient’s fictional head intern, Gary.

This episode is a panty dropper. Oh man we are already sorry for writing that line BUT we promise it sorta makes sense given that today’s episode is all about underwear. And even wilder: recycled underwear. Keep your pants on while we explain: this week we spoke with Eleanor Turner, the founder and CEO of The Big Favorite, which is a company making super soft and circular understuffs (their brilliantly coined term for undershirts and underwear) for men and women. They are an innovative, thoughtful, and offbeat brand with an incredible mission to put a dent in the 11 million pounds of understuffs that go into landfills and incinerators every day. EVERY DAY, YOU GUYS. To use their great slogan: The Big Favorite goes places, just not in the trash. 

The Big Favorite is new to market but already making a big splash—being worn by the likes of Nicole Richie and featured in Vogue and Marie Claire among others.  Eleanor herself is a heavy hitter in the fashion design world, with iconic American brands including Tommy Hilfiger, Tory Burch, and J.Crew on her resume. She also co-founded the direct-to-consumer company, Argent, where she innovated workwear with four patents pending and dressed trailblazing women like Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Glossier's Emily Weiss, and actress, Awkwafina, among others. 

We got to hear about how The Big Favorite was formerly a cotton workwear brand led by her great grandfather in the 30s and how she revived it using a lot of the original heart and story and adding in quirkiness, fun, humor, and intention.

Beyond the amazing backstory and mission, we gabbed about:

• How undergarments are the one apparel category you can’t donate or resell. And how The Big Favorite is changing that with their zero-waste, plastic-free, circular, understuffs.
• The genius process of how TBF is recycling their own textiles
• How Eleanor created a Brand Personality and tone of voice for TBF that deviates from the sustainable fashion industry status quo and how that has impacted everyone from the models on her photoshoots to consumers.
• The eventual plan for these products to be carried at corner stores so that good quality can meet convenience.
• The creative strategy for people to experience joy when they interact with the brand. 
• The importance and payoff of taking risks with your branding.
• Not shying away from the funny/weird sides of your business 
• Eleanor’s mission to conquer textile waste, get her hands dirty cleaning up the planet...and have a blast doing it.
• Her time as the Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer at Argent

We also play a rousing game of Mascot Who? and riff on slogans that would convince party-going teens to ‘responsibly rage’ and recycle their beer cans. We know you’ll laugh and learn as much as we did, and for more from The Big Favorite you can check them out at thebigfavorite.com (there is a Thong Song/Sisqo joke waiting for you on the homepage. bless), on Facebook and Instagram @thebigfavorite on Twitter @the_bigfavorite and on Reddit at u/greatgrandaddyturner

This week we’re dropping a new and fun episode series called “Bcc”. And nope, not blind carbon copy, but ‘business casual conversations.’ These episodes take our guests off the thread so founders Allie and Lyndsay can have unfiltered, 1:1 chats to impart branding insights, experiment with new ideas, and pull back the curtain on creative entrepreneurism. 

As you’ll notice, we did not have a finalized name for this series when we recorded this episode, so you get to bear witness to an informal brainstorm as we toss around potential ideas for these founder-on-founder episodes. Today’s topic is about the deeply accessible, seemingly-simple medium that is sweeping the nation: podcasting. 

We take you through the strategic podcast assessment that we developed years ago using Obedient formulas and data from running our popular podcast, Fangasm. This framework is what we used to develop Brandsplaining into the bright and shining show it is today, and we go over helpful ways to evaluate if your podcast concept has legs and longevity. From content aggregation to niche to format to expertise to audience, we’ll go through the 8 harsh questions you should ask yourself in order to get ahead of critical aspects of creating and running a show that way too many people overlook.

And, of course, this episode has games—Improvised Podcast Sponsor and Mom Jokes—plus an opening ‘true branding mystery’ we attempt to solve. 

So whether you are in pre-production on a podcast, or you have one up and running, we highly suggest taking your show through this evaluation and see if you can’t add in more delight and differentiation so that all of your hard work results in something valuable for your listeners, and enjoyable for you. 

All aboard the ‘splain train!

Link to Medium article ‘Is Your Podcast Idea Any Good? 8 Harsh Questions To Ask Yourself’: https://bit.ly/335XUG8

We hope you’re hungry, ‘splainiacs (okay, wait, this one is actually really good) because today’s episode is full of beans—emotionally and topically. Did you know that expression means ‘lively; in high spirits’? Which works out great because our guest today is the founder and CEO of A Dozen Cousins, Ibraheem Basir, and his joyful energy and branding insights will put you in high spirits indeed. 

A Dozen Cousins is a natural (and delightful) food brand making convenient products inspired by traditional Creole, Caribbean and Latin American dishes and their first product is a line of authentic, regional beans that are cooked in nutrient-dense avocado oil. Are you getting our ‘full of beans’ reference now? Great. The brand is inspired by his childhood growing up in the culinary melting pot of Brooklyn and is named after his daughter and her 11 cousins. (We, naturally, spend several minutes discussing how fun the name is to say and how much memorability and charisma it exudes.) Prior to launching A Dozen Cousins, Ibraheem obtained his MBA from the Wharton School of Business and served as a Marketing Manager on a number of natural food brands including Larabar and Annie's Organic. 

We chatted with Ibraheem about his ethos of celebrating food as a source of joy and a means of forging connection, and he walked us through how he developed the A Dozen Cousins brand personality from a visual and verbal storytelling perspective. 

Other food for thought and belly laughs included:

• His desire to bring laughter and joy back to the dinner table, and his upbringing with 9 siblings
• Harnessing that ‘inside joke’ playfulness into A Dozen Cousin’s branding
• How when it comes to the natural food space, health and culture and convenience do not have to be at odds 
• The story behind the brand name and logo and why word of mouth is so impacted by the name you choose
• Branding lessons he learned during his time working in marketing for Larabar and Annie’s Organic
• The social impact component central to his company’s mission
• The important role that authenticity plays in using humor in your branding
• His beef with banana pudding 

You can check A Dozen Cousins out at Instagram: @adozencousins or https://adozencousins.com/ 

Minute markers for your skimming pleasure (how dare you):
6:58 Spiller Qs
10:03 Branding Qs