Rethinking your brand strategy in the age of short-form video

A conversation with TikTok creator Oren Schauble about being a personality-based brands, the rise of niche products, and how to create velocity on social media today.

Jun 09, 2023

“I found it on TikTok”

If you haven’t seen Oren Schauble’s face grace your newsfeed in the last 90 days, then you’re not on your phone enough—which may be a good thing.

But Oren is everywhere. His swift rise to internet fandom is defined by an intense passion for physical products and building consumer brands, and where those two intersect.

The man is a Swiss army knife.

His content—a blend of education and entertainment—skews towards people who are interested in brand-building. His work documents the process of bringing a product to life and how anyone can start a brand.

From sourcing and sampling to packaging and selling, Oren covers the spread.

And he’s got a loyal following to show for it, with 106K on TikTok and 105K on Instagram already, all of which have flooded in the last six months of consistently making short-form video content daily.

I think Oren’s content resonates with so many people because he’s on a mission to democratize and demystify the notion that anyone, anywhere, can sell anything.

So, we hope you enjoy this sit-down we had with Oren. But be careful; he might persuade you to start your own brand by the end of this.

Here we go!

Well, well. If it isn’t the King of Content himself.

Ha! Thanks for having me.

Look, we’re gonna dive right in. So much of the brand-building playbook feels obsolete these days. How'd we get here?

Yeah, so, as consumers, we buy with our emotions. We used to buy more out of necessity, but now that product creation has been democratized, it’s easier than ever to create a connection between a customer and a product. The playing field is level.

Add on to that how easy it’s become to find factories online or learn how to set up your own Shopify store... it's a unique moment in time for building something commercial.

Building a "brand" now is more like creating a web of personalities and ideas that find their place online and in real life.

It’s less about what we've been told to build and more about leaning into the chaos of personality-based content. It's not intuitive for many marketers or brand builders from previous generations.

The only way to learn it is to participate in it.

Interesting. Can larger brands apply things from this model?

Larger brands need to completely rethink how they're approaching social media. If you're using a large agency for it, you're losing. If you're using a team that isn’t fluent in social media themselves and are participating in this new social economy, and they're not driving results, it might be time to move on.

Brands should retire all of their old strategies and do it quickly.

In my conversations with larger brands, I encourage many of them to continue playing into their existing strengths, focusing on marketing and brand building.

If you have a retail footprint or big distribution, hold on to that for dear life and make sure you’re executing at the top of your game, or the newer brands will start chipping away at your place until your business is a shell. With that as the focus for your existing team, you then go build the portion of your business focused on this new online experience.

A few ways I encourage brands to think differently about content

Relentless repetition. Release short-form videos daily. Build brand affinity for existing followers on your IG stories daily.
Dig into your archives. Reuse old content you have at the same velocity as making new content. Consumers have seen so little of what brands have created, and these are tools for storytelling.
Build fresh personalities. Having a recognizable persona will be more enticing for consumers to connect with and buy from. This can be anyone, perhaps a combination of employees/founders with social presences, social team members who are showing their faces online, or influencers/creators tied to the brand.
Moments multiply. Product launches, viral activations, campaigns... The cadence of showing and repeating ideas needs to be relentless. The better one does, the better the next one goes, but the release speed needs to be faster than your brand has ever done.
Think at scale. I see many brands doing the right things… engaging 10 creators to create brand perspectives; building limited edition products with high-profile designers; activating a popup in a key city. These are great touchpoints to create as a brand, but if you’re a larger brand, you’ll need to replicate these ideas and 10x them.

You haven’t taken a day off from making content in six months. What's it taught you about what brands should think about when leveraging social?

I won’t lie; it’s a grind.

But I just don't see brands making enough content. I make one video a day on multiple platforms, occasionally two. I post 5-8 IG Stories a day. I really try not to spend more than 30-60 minutes daily making content.

Brands with full teams and agencies can't keep up with that velocity I'm doing in an hour!

They either establish too many barriers to getting things done or not making the right content. If you’re a brand that’s making content people like right now, the algorithms and consumers both feel that momentum.

But the momentum never arrives if the content is slow, sporadic, or unexciting.

I always meet creators who are taking the plunge into products, and their brands are doing great... selling out of drops, and building momentum. As long as the product is somewhat unique and right for the audience, the opportunities there are almost staggering.

What you can do with an audience of even 25k followers is hard to comprehend at first, but know that the sky is the limit.

Once you understand the basics of this matrix of content and virality, you begin to feel you could see or build anything.

You talk a lot about the rise of micro brands (single SKU, one category products). How does this manifest in the current luxury fashion/consumer world?

There are more luxury consumers than ever. The rise of "everyday luxury" and general awareness of interesting, quality goods has increased the size of the luxury market.

Consumers are choosing more and more to pick just one luxury thing on their shopping list versus entire generations never doing that in previous decades.

The idea of what’s “luxury” is changing. Artisan is luxury; there is the ability to buy so much more of a short-run thing made by someone who loves their craft, whether it’s a home good, an item of clothing, or a consumable.

People will buy that single item as they see and build affinity with artisan creators.

A brand like Flamingo Estate is a great example of a fast-moving new luxury brand that started in a regional category with vegetable delivery, then moved into adjacent categories intelligently by offering an everyday luxury to consumers that want to feel something special that's of high quality, that is also an interesting, local story to them.

Where are the opportunities within the apparel industry for mid-to-luxury market brands?

Kidswear is a big one.

Understand that it can't be too expensive since kids will grow out, but that story, sustainability, and looks matter in their own way to parents, especially by visual niche.

Niche sports is another great opportunity.

Brands have already gone in en-masse to pickleball, tennis, golf, running, and so on, but there's so much mid-market room for specialized sports product lines. Lacrosse, cricket, jai alai, women's soccer, and even basketball. There is room to take from the giant general brands in the same way we've seen smaller brands like District Vision or Satisfy rise in the running niche.

Big and tall for men is interesting.

We've seen many brands cater to a more diverse set of women's bodies, but many menswear styles right now could benefit from dedicated Big & Tall support.

Consultative sales.

It seems with the reliance on DTC, true service has gone by the wayside. I think almost any apparel category could see brands offering in-person or online by-appointment styling advice etc, that would absolutely do excellent

Bringing creators into brands at an equity level.

I think savvy brands need to give creators ownership to encourage them to hop on to something existing versus building their own. Finding creators to represent a brand almost at a founder or CD level and live and breathe it is a big opportunity to bridge the internet culture gap.