Handbag Designer 101: The Stories Behind Handbag Designers, Brands, and Industry Icons

Dr. Jessica Quillin & The Power of Cohesive Luxury Brand Storytelling | Emily Blumenthal & Dr. Jessica Quillin

• Emily Blumenthal • Season 1

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What if the real engine of modern luxury isn’t loud marketing—but meaning delivered consistently across every touchpoint? In this episode, Dr. Jessica Quillin, fashion strategist and PhD in 19th-century poetry, breaks down how elevated storytelling creates brands that feel unified on the site, in the feed, and in the store. She shares her journey from studying the philosophy of beauty to advising global fashion houses, revealing how emotions become experiences—and how experiences become communities that buy, return, and advocate.

Jessica takes us through the post-pandemic clutter of beautiful but disjointed brand moments: e-commerce that doesn’t guide, social feeds that don’t match the retail floor, and campaigns disconnected from values. Her antidote is both strategic and doable—codify your identity, then run small, disciplined pilots. Launch a three-post content series, read the data, refine, and repeat. From nostalgia-powered Gen Z engagement to experiential moments that spark belonging, Jessica shows how consistency across platforms is now one of the strongest moats in fashion and accessories.

💡 Key Takeaways:

  1. Meaning Scales Faster Than Noise: Codified identity + emotional storytelling = real brand equity.
  2. Pilot, Don’t Spray: Small experiments on single channels will sharpen your narrative—and your ROI.
  3. Narrative Systems Win: Reusable “story bricks” keep your website, social, and in-store aligned and unmistakably you.

👤 Our Guest:

Dr. Jessica Quillin is a fashion strategist, brand storyteller, and co-founder of Quillin Consulting. With a PhD in 19th-century poetry, she bridges deep cultural insight with modern marketing strategy, helping luxury and fashion brands build cohesive, emotionally resonant identities across every platform.

Host Emily Blumenthal is a handbag industry expert, author of Handbag Designer 101, and founder of The Handbag Awards. Known as the “Handbag Fairy Godmother,” Emily also teaches entrepreneurship at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is dedicated to celebrating creativity, craftsmanship, and the art of building iconic handbag brands.

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SPEAKER_00:

Helping brand teams do more with what they have and maybe relying a little bit less on the marketing agencies and things like that, that they send everything out, but to really own that story more in-house so they can actually help shape how that's heard on the other end and you know create sort of just better, deeper stories that everyone wants to be a part of that are really unique to that brand across platforms. And so yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, and welcome to Handbag Designer 101, the podcast with your host, Emily Blumenthal, Handbag Industry Expert, and the Handbag Perry Godmother. Each week we uncover the stories behind the handbags we love, from the iconic brands and top designers, the creativity, craftsmanship, and culture that define the handbag world. Whether you're a designer, collector, or simply passionate about handbags, this is your front row seat to it all. Welcome, welcome, Dr. Jessica Quillen of It's a Working Title and Fashion Strategy Weekly. Thank you for joining us and welcome to Handbag Designer 101.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much for having me today, Emily. I'm a huge fan and it's a it's a pleasure to chat today.

SPEAKER_01:

I know. Well, you know, like what drew me to you was your PhD, your sexy PhD, that not a lot of people have in this industry. And as I mentioned to you a minute ago, that I truly believe you are a one-of-one. And you are inspiring, I think, and should inspire everybody all over the world to get a PhD, because I think it's just such a good thing to say, if for no other reason, just that we can call you doctor. And you know, that's a flex. Um except that there's an emergency on an airplane, in which case I'm totally useless. Not okay, comma, not that doctor, but the cool doctor. But how is all this? Because you you have a very unique specialty. You did a lot of deep diving on something that made you and kind of took you to where you are. So let's just dive right in. What's your story, Jessica? No pressure.

SPEAKER_00:

So, first of all, I should contextualize that, you know, my PhD is not in fashion, but my PhD is actually what drew me to fashion and luxury in the first place through sort of the unique lens of my research. I have a PhD in 19th century British literature, specifically poetry um and music. My doctoral research, if you want to dive that deep, looked at intersections between poetry and music and the life and thought of the romantic Perseus Shelley. You know, right, but really at the heart of my research is that I spent four, four years, you know, steeped in aesthetics and the kind of history and philosophy of beauty and really kind of what drives people to kind of more elevated experiences, you know, kind of looking at the place where, you know, kind of art becomes emotion and emotion kind of drives experience and all of that, and kind of looking at the intricacies of how language becomes imbued with meaning and how that meaning can sort of become, you know, personalized and something you own and can kind of shape how you think. And there's this whole kind of deep theory for Shelley in terms of how art can make the world a better place and really kind of drive more imaginative type of expression. And really, you know, kind of that research and my book, which is actually available on Amazon for anyone who wants to read a really boring academic work, kind of drove me.

SPEAKER_01:

It's called Shelley and the Musical Poetics of Romanticism. Okay, good. That's it, okay. Now we had to plug that. Back to you.

SPEAKER_00:

So, you know, my research drove me. I didn't sort of my fate was not to teach. Uh my fate was really to kind of, I guess, work in content and in marketing contexts. So, you know, I've been a content strategist for about 20 years in different roles. I started out in the arts. I used to ghost write for Plaza de Domingo, uh running communications and marketing at Washington National Opera. And, you know, that eventually led me to fashion as uh first as a freelancer and then as a fashion editor for Glass uh magazine, which is a cultural quarterly edit of the UK for about 10 years, from about 2012 to 2022. You know, I sort of had a day job on the side as an enterprise content strategist kind of along the way. And, you know, after doing that for a while, I took a little bit of time off from fashion during the pandemic because everything was crazy in the pandemic, and you kind of just get sensorly overloaded with things and you have to kind of focus on what really matters. But I kind of took two years off from the magazine and working in fashion, and then I kind of came back to it with a more refreshed lens and started doing consulting and really started to see kind of just huge gaps in the way that fashion and luxury brands were handling content across platforms. I mean, you know, uh post-pandemic, luxury was still in this big sort of phase of growth with e-commerce, but I look at digital content and content in general kind of a little bit differently from everybody else. For me, content is very much an everywhere thing, not just a digital thing. And for me, brands were really focused on doing e-com and doing social media over here, and it all just feel very disconnected to me. You know, you have brands building e-com experiences, which are very pretty and kind of very design first, but they don't necessarily meet user needs in the way that I want them to. I really want to have this more, everybody talks about Omnichannel in the back end, but they don't talk about it as much on the front end in terms of creating more guided experiences for consumers that really actually match how people search and find content across channels. And so looking at this sort of more cohesive storytelling across the universe of a brand's content touch points, which for me are everywhere from digital content on their econ site and their website all the way through what goes down the runway to in-person experiences in the store. So three years ago, I sat down with my business partner, who is also my husband, and we started, it's a working title, really looking to educate, but also bring the sort of practice of holistic content strategy and content operations to the world of luxury. And we're now writing a book kind of around a lot of the work we do, but really the principles are pretty simple. It's just to really help brands tell better stories that people actually want to hear that match their brand codes and values across platforms with the right infrastructure underneath it from a publishing standpoint to get that content out the door. You know, there are ways that things like AI can streamline how all of that works and things like that, but helping brand teams do more with what they have and maybe relying a little bit less on the marketing agencies and things like that, that they send everything out, but to really own that story more in-house so they can actually help shape how that's heard on the other end and you know, create sort of just better, deeper stories that everyone wants to be a part of that are really unique to that brand across platforms. And so yeah. And we also publish a lot of thought leadership through Fashion Strategy Weekly as well, because yeah, can't turn off that academic in my head.

SPEAKER_01:

So so I mean, this there's oh my god, this is so juicy. And, you know, I think for those of us who get excited about this information and everything you're saying, like there are people like me who hear that and I'm like, tell me more, tell me more, tell me what the pitfalls are, tell me what they're doing wrong. What are the things that you see? Because and I know you you speak a lot about luxury, luxury, but I think there's so many brands that just miss the mark, and there's so many windows of opportunity to be very thoughtful on brand messaging. And can you just talk a little bit about just basic fundamentals where you see brands misstep? Where I mean, look, I teach, I teach entrepreneurship, I teach it to college students. There's a lot of things that are obvious to us that aren't obvious to other people. That so many brands get lost in the sauce, they get excited about the principle of having a brand, the principle of having a product, that they forget, you know, the the ethnography of like understanding their customer where they shop, how like the who and the why and all that, like trying to meet the customer where they are, so they develop a product around the needs of who their customer is. And speaking just because I'm fluent handbag, going so far as to say that if you're a customer that you know is your loyal customer and she is above a certain age, never have a lining that's dark because she has glasses, she'll never find it. And make sure the bags you're selling have some sort of structure. Nobody wants a bag that's an abyss, right? You lose that for whoever you're trying to sell. What are some things that, like, if a brand comes to you, I see you're ready to talk, that you're like, okay, here's some low-hanging fruit. Let's go.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And honestly, that low-hanging fruit is always the best place to start. I mean, I don't know. For me, for a brand of any size, and we we talk a lot about luxury because luxury is kind of unique to any other industry. Luxury does not exist without story, right? Like there's nothing that the, I mean, you can find an equivalent, say, bag, to talk about bags that is crafted with, you know, similar artisanal craftsmanship at much lower price points from smaller vendors than you do from big luxury brands in some cases. But luxury brands have the heritage, they have the story. Even if they don't have the heritage, they have the the vibe in the budget. Is it because they have the budget? Is it because they have the budget? It's partially it's partially the budget, and part of it is just a perception of elevated meaning, right? It's their they're beveling goods, right? The the pricing doesn't necessarily make sense logically from the business standpoint. They're they're priced at a certain point because people believe they they're worth more. They're valued because they're people believe they're they're high-end, right? They believe that they are timeless, one of a kind, you unique, kind of worth the investment kind of thing. So we spend a lot of time with luxury brands and talking about luxury because for them, content needs to be very specific, refined, and elevated, but also still culturally relevant in today's market. And that's a lot harder to do given sort of the state of a lot of content marketing tools available kind of right now. So, I mean, we focus a lot about on that sector, not just because of the money, but because of the sort of unique nature of storytelling for a lot of brands. And I, as you and I were kind of discussing before, coming out of the pandemic, a lot of these brands rushed into e-com kind of unprepared for the type for how content kind of how their their overall brand ethos, this idea of kind of being elusive and kind of higher end, fits within this new ecosystem. If you're saying a smaller brand, a more digitally native brand within this sort of digital ecosystem, there are a lot of things that those types of brands know just because they've, you know, grown up on TikTok or they've grown up on Instagram that a lot of bigger brands that have maybe been around for 150 years don't know. So we're trying to kind of teach a lot of those sort of digital native instincts to bigger brands and help them kind of get content out the door in a way that gets those processes and, you know, kind of meanings in place there. But to your point for your question in terms of what we see in terms of content is especially for brands of any size, is just, I don't want to say it's a fear, but it's this very sort of reactionary mindset that's much more focused on building visibility. I mean, when I uh say we give lectures a lot to say college students and people starting new brands, you know, kind of even people that maybe a couple of years into that brand journey. And, you know, the first question I get asked when I say I'm a content strategist is how do I make my content go viral? And I always pause because I know the question's coming. And, you know, our response to that is always, you know, that's not the right question, right? The the question is not how do you go go viral? It's really why are you producing content in the first place? You know, who are you telling stories to? What stories do you need to be telling? What makes your brand different than other brands? And how do you use content to kind of drive those brand values and codes to build experiences kind of through content for people? And, you know, as I, as we were saying kind of before we came on, for me, I mean, for me, content is an everywhere thing, not just a digital thing, and something that drives experience both, you know, kind of through through language, but also through visual cues, assets, and things like that across channels. And if it does not feel the same everywhere customers meet your brand, whether that's in person at a trunk show or on your social media, if that does not feel like the same website in today's absolutely just saturated landscape, you're not going to stand out and people will forget you. So the whole idea, I think, for smaller brands is to really take a step back, define a lot of those sort of, I know they sound very esoteric brand questions, but they can really help you make better decisions about content. Answer a lot of those, write them down for yourself and sort of some sort of brand matrix and things like that. And then for me, that's where the fun starts with content strategy, because it's really for me much more a practice of putting brand strategy into action, but it's creating a smaller universe to start from. And then you can start saying, okay, what platforms do I have? How can I tell the story in kind of some interesting ways that make sense for what I'm trying to do, what my products are, who my audiences are, but also kind of what resources do I have to kind of drive content that I can maintain. And for me, a lot of the sort of important part about planning ahead for content and not just kind of driving marketing out the door and throwing up content and trying to do things is taking it into smaller chunks, even if you're a smaller brand and you know, picking a smaller campaign and say piloting a series of like three Instagram reels or three TikTok posts that kind of all have that sort of conceptual idea together, like almost like a mini-series kind of thing, and piloting it and seeing kind of how that works, see what you learn about your audiences and how well those particular messages resonate and kind of move from there. So it's really break it down, start small and you know, pick a channel and experiment for a bit and then and then try another experiment. And then after say two or three of these, see what you've learned, and then you start to get information about what content is really like what specific formulation of content and stories and kind of balance of product and whatever you're trying to do with your stories makes sense for your brand, and you start to get unique kind of content from that sort of formulation. So I just think everybody makes it too complicated. So really breaking it down, making it in smaller pieces, and then you can kind of build your content strategy from there based on that sort of fast and learned approach.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm excited to share my new book with you. Welcome to Savvy Susanna's Amazing Adventures in Handbags and the start of Susanna's triumphant journey to become a young handbag designer. Filled with ingenuity, fun, and a hint of steam. Susanna will inspire children and you everywhere to follow their dreams and put in the hard work to get there. Savvy Susanna is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you get your books. Thanks for your support. You know, I couldn't agree with you more, but I have a whole lesson specific to guerrilla marketing, to ambient media, and now I've folded that into experiential and immersive experience. Well, that's redundant. Experience opportunations, if you will. I know I it's funny. I was writing it and I'm like, how do you write experiential experiences? That's not it. It's experien immersive experiential activations. I was going through that to try and figure that out. It's a funny place right now in terms of how and where people will spend their money. And things and services are a lot harder to get people to spend their money on. I feel like the lift or I can't speak too specifically with luxury, you can more than I. But I feel based on what I've seen that experiences people are willing to spend that money because community is king, right? It's a way to get like-minded people to come together. We just spoke about this article, interestingly enough, it was I can't remember which UK paper it was from about adults who are obsessed with jelly cats and spending upwards of 3,000 pounds to collect them. But and my students, we had this whole conversation about how ridiculous they are. And my Gen Z students were I pity them. Maybe they weren't getting hugs as a child and all that stuff. And I said, I agree. Maybe all that could be true. But the reality is there's one thread that you're all missing, and that's what do they all have in common? And then one student said, a community said, Yes, you will find one adult who's obsessed with spending that, you'll find another one, and then they will all come together and want to be together because they have something like-minded. So I feel like now, and maybe you can speak to this that experience is an immersive ways of getting your customer involved in your brand carries a lot more value than something short form, like a pop-up. I don't know. Thoughts.

SPEAKER_00:

No, I totally agree. And you see that working with it's funny. I I just uh saw an interview on LinkedIn. Uh LinkedIn's a bit weird right now, but anyways, with uh Gene Silverstein, the CMO of Coach. I know their head of visual martializing Giovanni Zaccaria, you know, kind of as an acquaintance, and I've talked to it with him about how they sort of build experiences right through this kind of new focused strategy. And really, experience in with them as a perfect example of that is it comes from a number of places, but for me, the true community building happens when you really own your brand codes, you know your brand more than anyone else and kind of how what that speaks to. And they've kind of re-redefined around this sort of very well-focused Gen Z strategy. And you build experience and community through emotion, right? So it's it's how did that brand appeal to the emotions of those consumers? And then how do you build emotions into shared values, right? And when you build emotion into shared values, that's where experience kind of becomes community and where community kind of builds brand loyalty. And it's sort of this, I'm sure somebody could diagram it better than I can in my head, but it's and you see this sort of push towards nostalgia a lot. And I think for me, from my you know, academic analyzing everything to that standpoint, a lot of that I think is post-pandemic drive towards that childhood feeling of the world is kind of messed up right now, okay, very messed up, especially if you're in the the US with things and this sort of sense that like the economy is not going great for some people in some circumstances. And you know, buying cute things gives you that sense of kind of childhood pleasure and nostalgia. I mean, what else can explain laboo boos, which for me, if you grew up in the 80s, man chichis like a man chichi on a chain. Like, okay, oh, I get it from that sort of again, nostalgia standpoint, but again, it's around that that sense of it triggers those really happy emotions of like feeling like you're a kid and this is this fun collectible there. And you know, I think, you know, as any, it doesn't you don't have to be a psychologist to know that people want to belong to something. And I think, you know, a brand at any stage of maturity has the potential with today's tools to to do this type of build this type of of loyalty. And this is why you see so many even big brands leaning into, you know, microcommunities and things like this. And you have people in, you know, small locales who are like obsessed with their local bagel shop or something, right? And that local bagel shop can somehow manage to go viral on TikTok because they have figured out how to create content that conveys the emotion of why everybody loves that bagel shop and that sort of thing. And you know, I think every fashion designer on the planet has the creativity and the skills to do this within today's tool. But it's really from our sense, I mean, we've actually just I was telling you before we came on, you know, I I think I've done something that nobody else has done before, which is both good and bad, because I'm I'm an academic, not a salesperson. But we just kind of launched our first uh one of our core products after about a year of working on this. And it's called FlexNar, it's a narrative design system, but it's basically designed to help brands have a system for telling stories across channels, kind of building from those foundational brand codes and using the if you to go in my content strategy toolkit, the tools of structured content, which are basically just like Legos. We turn basically brand codes into like Lego bricks that once you combine them together in different ways with things like, you know, metadata and just different types of meanings, you can use those small brand codes to combine with other brand codes into, you know, kind of parts of stories, and parts of stories become full stories, and full stories can be combined with other stories on different channels to become sort of a full story ecosystem. And we have a whole kind of framework that that drives this. But the point is with this is that every brand on the planet has the chance to kind of step back and figure out who they are, what makes them different from somebody else, and defining what that set of values is, and then really focusing on understanding their audiences and understand how figure out how those codes can really build emotion and build community within those those channels. And again, I for me that's you know, starting small really helps. But you know, experience comes from building whatever emotional connection you want. I mean, you you saw around Halloween a lot of sort of people leaning into the, you know, the the fright manifestos and this sort of thing. I mean it was in, you know, the Fifth Avenue, my romanticist lines here. The the windows at Tiffany is on Fifth Avenue leaning into the Frankenstein movie that just came out there. Of course, I have lots of opinions on that as a romanticist there, but I'm sure the windows on Fifth Avenue are just like, I mean, walking by the Tiffany shop there with the, they have uh the one of the necklaces in the window there. There are shots of Mia Goth behind it kind of from the movie thought, and at the top you've got all this lightning and stuff like this. And it's the experiential kind of elements, those sort of dynamic, you know, uh visual design things like that cues draw you into the experience. And the window is only a window, right? So it's not like doing anything, but it's evoking emotion. And there are just people stopping and watching and recording it and putting it on uh TikTok, and you build these shareable moments, and you know, in a sense, that's how you get community, and you know, it's it's figuring out what emotions you want to build, or how do you tell your stories that build that create those emotions? And then how do you turn those emotions into experiences that can get a life of their own and build a living ecosystem for your brand? And for me, any brand of any size has the potential to do that, but it does take some work.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think like with a lot of the brands with whom I've worked, and again, uh specific to handbag, so many of them get so obsessed on the principle of saying they're a designer, saying they're a brand, saying they've created product. But again, without creating these kinds of experiences and emotional connections, it's really hard to get that 80-20. You know, 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. It's hard to find that 20 because that 20 is your community. So, what can you do to get those eyeballs locked into this kind of emotional connection? And truly, that has to come down to experience. And I put my students to task, like, okay, come up with something out of the box. And I made it very clear like, you can't have stickers, you can't have a scavenger hunt, you can't have a barter swap, you can't do QR codes on the ground. Like, what can you do that can make a moment? Because even using Blair Witch as the case study of what they did, what that was just flyering the East Coast of saying that people were missing, that the police picked it up, the news picked it up, that predated social media. And then once they got their three-picture deal, no one ever heard from it again. Because sometimes when you're scrappy, you work 10 times harder because you don't have the resources. So sometimes when you get the money, then all of a sudden the creativity's out the wall. And then it's like, okay, we'll do X amount of ads, we'll do X amount, we'll give to these influencers, and then you're just like everybody else. And to your point, I believe everybody has that capacity to stand out, to be something, but you do have to put in that work. Do you put your clients to task and give them homework and saying, okay, you need to fill out a manifesto, if you will, so we've got something to work with. If you ever wanted to start a handbag brand and didn't know where to start, this is for you. If you had dreams of becoming a handbag designer but aren't trained in design, this is for you. If you have a handbag brand and need strategy and direction, this is for you. I'm Emily Blumenthal, handbag designer expert and handbag fairy godmother, and this is the handbag designer 101 masterclass. Over the next 10 classes, I will break down everything you need to know to make, manufacture, and market a handbag brand. Broken down to ensure that you will not only skip steps in the handbag building process, but also to save money to avoid the learning curve of costly mistakes. For the past 20 years, I've been teaching at the top fashion universities in New York City, wrote the handbag designer Bible, founded the handbag awards, and created the only handbag designer podcast. I'm going to show you like I have countless brands to create in this in-depth course, from sketch to sample to sale. Whether you're just starting out and don't even know where to start up again, or if you've had a brand and need some strategic direction, the handbag designer 101 Masterclass is just for you. So let's get started, and you'll be the creator of the next it bag. Join me, Emily Blumenthal, in the Handbag Designer 101 Masterclass. So be sure to sign up at Emily Blumenthal.com slash masterclass and type in the code INCAST to get 10% off your masterclass today.

SPEAKER_00:

So we do a lot of work. So we do the answer is yes, but we try to make it fun through interactive workshops. Um, you know, I think it's a a lot of, especially in sort of the discovery phase with a lot of stuff we do, we have our own sort of content effectiveness platform that kind of analyzes sort of how what what the current state of your content is across platforms for for a lot of this. But you know, at the end of the day, whenever we finish an audit and make recommendations and that whole thing, you know, part of that sort of help us understand who you are and then help us figure out both what your what what your strengths are with content and kind of where there are gaps and places to optimize. It's amazing how many times, even for like some of the largest, most recognizable blend brands on the planet, how much it boils down to that there's not a lot of system structure or strategy in terms of how they do content. Like they do content, like their brand is, you know, kind of expressed in different ways through words and ads and in social media content posts over here and product packaging and all of this. And for most brands, a lot of that decision making is amazingly siloed. And some of this is obvious, like I mean, you were talking about the the sort of pace of today's business landscape. But even for small brands, the urge to kind of do everything at once is there, right? I mean, content is 24-7. Now you feel like you need to be on LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, you know, driving paid, or gonna, I mean, it gets very dizzying for for things like that. And for us, we just tried and I'm all about simplifying, I'm all about streamlining, I'm all about starting small and really even for small brands, making that bucket of things you can do now to make your life easier, but more connected. So, you know, for some brands, it may be a matter of centralizing how you do stuff, like instead of using five tools to do produce content, maybe you know, use Canva more to do things or or things like that, or centralize more of your CRMRM efforts into HubSpot or into Shopify with all of their sort of plugins for everything and creating more integrated approaches to things that are kind of more centralized. And I think for smaller brands, that's a really key thing. For bigger players, that's harder because their ecosystems are much more diverse. They have a lot of teams, a lot of tools and things like that. And we look to build more decentralized kind of approaches to brand and content that create more integrated things between teams so teams can collaborate better. But again, it's still a matter of simplifying, streamlining, figuring out what's most important to do now and not getting overwhelmed by everything you think you have to do, and then phasing out, okay, what can I do next? What can I do next? And then from there, as you start planning things more incrementally, that suddenly becomes a strategy. And you're, you know, that sort of smaller thing always starts out by initially mapping out what do I actually want this to look like at that end state? Like, what is my, as you're saying, talking about experience and community, like what kind of community do I want to have? What kind of brand do I want to be? And you can kind of start to map from those smaller things into the bigger thing. And you, you, it it all should come from that sense of these are my values as a brand, these are my codes, this is what makes me me, as opposed to somebody else. And as you start to kind of do this step by step, as long as you're maintaining that sort of staying system of core values, you start to build community on your own because you're, you know, really owning who who you are and you're talking as yourself, you're picking those influencers who really make sense for your brand universe and you're building a universe that you're, for the most part, controlling. And even if you're letting that evolve on its own through in through influencers and things like that, it still comes from that more kind of centralized base of this is my brand and this is what I want to do on these platforms. And our idea is that this makes just life a lot easier for brands and lets you focus on making your handbags or, you know, making your jewelry or selling cars or whatever it is you want to do.

SPEAKER_01:

What are, just because I don't want to hold you too too long, what are some best practices that you would give to a brand that you would speak with that would say, okay, before you and I even meet, make sure you have your home in order. What does that mean? What does having your home in order mean?

SPEAKER_00:

So we have a sort of, I mean, and brands can do with ChatGBC, we can do almost anything now with these things. But I always like to ask brands to kind of give themselves a, you know, kind of brand health check assessment kind of thing. Like, you know, give yourself a checkup on, you know, kind of how do you, you know, kind of do you have your kind of brand story, you know, documented somewhere, you know, kind of what systems are you? I mean, we deal with content. So what are the systems and tools you're using to do what you do? Like, like, are you are you using Shopify to sell all your products over here? What channels are you on? Document everything you have and make sure you can kind of write down, this is why I'm doing that, these are the resources I have for this, and just kind of ensure do that little homework exercise to kind of document how you're communicating your brand across channels, you know, kind of what does your current marketing strategy look like? And then do a little mini, you know, kind of gap analysis on your own, you know, kind of what am I struggling with? What are those pain points? And then use those to start thinking about, you know, these are my short term goals and these are my long term goals. And You know, I think when brands have spent the time to think about that sort of list of, you know, kind of little checklist health health assessment thing, it allows us to kind of know where to start with things like content strategy in, you know, content marketing and a lot of you know tools like that to drive better content across channels. But we kind of need those ducks in a row first because, you know, there are much bigger brand strategy experts on the planet who will help you figure out, you know, your brand colors and your story and how to kind of a lot of founder led brands, how to separate your story from the, you know, your brand story and kind of how all that sort of storytelling art universe is there. We can actually sit down and help you sh use that story to turn it into a narrative system that drives a content strategy, but you really need to kind of have the rest of it kind of together before you can do, you know, before you're kind of ready for us. And, you know, it's something that any brand at any stage of maturity can can do. But again, you do have to kind of allow yourself the the space for for thinking a little bit to kind of take a step back and really figure out, okay, I know this is not working, you know, say Instagram is not achieving the kind of reach you you want for things, and I want to do things better, you know. Okay, this is what I want to fix here. These are examples of people I think are doing things I like. And then you start to be able to kind of make lists of ways to optimize, and then we can actually help refine those sorts of things.

SPEAKER_01:

No, I think like competitive analysis, right off the bat, I always tell people see what they're doing, mark down what you like, what you don't like, and your personal slash professional opinion. Exactly. What resonates with you, you know, is their flow of posts? Is it product post on a clean white background? Is it lifestyle post of someone using it? Then is it hopes, wishes, and dreams, a mantra, a field, rainbows, fairies, unicorns? What is their pattern? Because nothing is an accident. So unless it's somebody who's just doing it to do it, which I think a lot of people are because they know that box must be checked. Like, okay, I must have a social presence, then what?

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And the other elephant in the room for me is AI. AI is, I mean, it's inevitable at this point. I think it's it has been a part of many tools for a while. And people are now just rebranding everything as AI. But I think as creative people and creators, it is so tempting to just launch into AI and start replacing, you know, people, processes, and tools with AI-driven things. But I always caution people against doing that because again, AI can be a tool, it can be a really great assistant in very specific use cases. But unless you can actually say why you're doing it, kind of what value it's going to add. Like, I mean, I think AI, for instance, for smaller brands to use AI to help you refine product descriptions, even and do things like that, can be great. But in the new world of AI search, even your product descriptions now need it's no longer a matter of SEO. Your product descriptions need to reflect your brand story a lot, like literally down to the metadata that sits behind it and the alt text you use to describe your images. You now need to have more unique brand identifiers on the way you write those languages. So it's something you use AI to rewrite your product descriptions, but in fact, you may be rewriting your product descriptions in a way that makes them unreadable by AI because it makes them generic. So again, things like technology should be used with caution and context, and it can speed up processes, I think, behind. But I think for you know brands at different stages. Again, why do you need to use these? What are you trying to do with them? And even things like AI image creation and things like that, I think for you know a brand at any stage, it needs to be done in a way that feels purposeful, connected to your brand, and always reflective of those brand codes. Otherwise, your consumers will know the difference. I mean, they and they, you know, you've seen brands from Mango to you know HM get under fire for you know using AI AI images without either reporting it or they have flaws. I mean, they'll notice it, you know, like the hairs on your wrist don't look right and your arm is facing the wrong way. I mean, there's all sorts of things. So I got right. You've nine fingers with purpose. Everything with purpose.

SPEAKER_01:

No, I tell my students, like, it is a wonderful thing that AI exists, it's great, but at the end of the day, it's a tool, it's not the answer. So at one point in time, people had a hammer and nail, and then someone invented a drill. You still need the person behind the drill, you still need the person there to direct it. Like, one's not replacing the other, one is trying to make your life easier, but you still need to have the eyeballs behind it to proof, to check, to make sure. Otherwise, you go back to your hammer and nail because your consumer will see and they will sniff out. Hold on a second, because I can see when something's done by AI, I'm fine by it. Use it to help you templatize, but then you need to go in and clean it up. It still needs that extra cleanup. So I think it's great because it cuts our time in half, but without the effort still needs to be there. It's just expediting the dirty work that, you know, like a roomba came out. Guess what? I don't need to do my floor, but I still need to make sure the roomba is going around the corners because it can still be going back to the same spot over and over again, still leave the whole place dirty.

SPEAKER_00:

No, exactly. I mean, AI is still, I mean, even for and look, I'm I I started my career as a writer. I still consider myself a writer and I will to the end of time. I wrote my first story at the age of five. I used to write some halfway decent poetry a long time ago. And you know, AI content creation makes me nervous on the one hand, but I think as a business person, I think it can be a super handy tool. You know, I still get the thrill of AI quoting me back at me. It's hysterical.

unknown:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

In a lot of business contexts. But, you know, in some cases, I think, especially if you're planning like, you know, a marketing-focused piece or you're trying to do, you know, kind of focused collateral for Instagram and and things like that. AI can be great to help, as you say, with ideation. I think from a content creation side, it does greatly speed things up, but you always need to make sure that you refine it there. But you know, the one thing I do like is AI. AI embeds a lot of, and part of the reason I always say it's garbage in, garbage out with is AI. And we spend a lot of times with brands making them basically making their content ecosystem ready for AI because AI loves structure, right? AI loves structure, it loves mean, it loves predictable patterns, it loves, you know, unique patterns of meaning and all of that. And then it's still learning how to do this. But I think for things like low-lying content production for say an Instagram caption or even like, you know, again, structuring your product descriptions to ensure that you have the right parts of information. Like don't forget your fabrics, don't forget the, you know, how to use it, things like that, FAQs, a lot of basic content pieces. It can be great for helping you make sure you have that right hierarchy for all of that. But again, you need to make sure you as have humans behind it to ensure that the output says what you needed to do and that you're always doing that. And, you know, we we we always recommend that brands of every size at this time of year, for instance, do a content audit. Figure out kind of, you know, do you still have stuff on your website from three years ago that you really don't need to be promoting anymore that you can actually clean out and move on there? And AI can actually be pretty cool at doing some of those sort of little mini content audits and things for you. But you know, sometimes bringing in an expert to put to plug myself again for all this that assets your ecosystem as a whole to look on the places that AI is not going to, like, which is how connected are you? How connected is your content digitally to what you're doing in store and things like that can bring in the experts can help. But for smaller brands, that's not always realistic.

SPEAKER_01:

So Oh my goodness. Jessica, Dr. Jessica, this has been a delight. How can we find you, follow you, learn more about you and your colleagueslash husband, and all that good stuff?

SPEAKER_00:

So our company website is it's working title.com, and we also run Fashion Strategy Weekly uh dot com. And I'm always on LinkedIn, usually writing a lot about content and luxury and AI things, all that good stuff.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much for joining us. We'll have to have a uh a State of the Union perhaps and as a follow-up coming in the future, because this is this has been enlightening. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review and follow us on every single platform at handbag designer. Thanks so much. See you next time.

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