Jump-Starting Brands

Lesson 4- Protect your ideas, invest in an expert

The name Oddpodz was developed in our early stages of planning. We thought it was catchy, memorable and leveraged the popularity of the pod generation. But until we really knew what we were doing with it, we only registered it for business usage. After we had a clear map for our business, we hired a lawyer to help us protect our intellectual property. This was our first costly mistake. We hired a general, small potato lawyer. She ended up being a total waste of money. No sense of urgency, lack of expertise in the area, and we ended up switching to a trademark specialist and forfeiting all of our up front payment to the general legal disappointment.

Early in the game, you need a crystal ball. Protecting your brand trademark property means, securing not only URL's, related URL's but, registering many items in projected usage categories, which can get expensive. Basically you have to look in to the future and determine what you will be doing and selling with your brand's likeness in the next 10 years. If you don't apply for protection in several classes, you could have trademark troubles in the near future. We protected our brand names, the visual marks and a character. We selected the priority classes for each item. As we grow we will likely add classes. Short cutting IP protection is not recommended. Thoroughly conducting due diligence is vital if you plan to be in the game for a while.

Back to the plan

Whether you are going to be raising outside funds or not, you need a comprehensive business plan. There are companies that can help with this, but I believe it's an important exercise for the company leadership to produce. In our case we decided that in order for us to build our venture at the speed and size we wanted to, we would need outside funds. This biz planning process actually helped produce many new ideas for the company and it's marketing. Here are some of the by-products of our efforts, a branded T-shirt line, a venting section, a weekly ezine, a blog, and a social network.

After completing our plan we focused all efforts on creating as much tangible value and proof of concept as quickly as we could.

We knew we needed two working sites. One for the community, which is content driven (oddpodz.com) and one a pure ecommerce play for the pure shopper (odditeaz.com), both interlink. Our business plan, and more importantly, our brand essence guide proved invaluable as the litmus test for all major decisions.

The branded product line

The deeper we got into the development of Oddpodz and its future, we soon discovered that T-shirts were a $18 billion industry in the U.S. alone. What a great way to make money and build a brand. To support the odd mantra of our company we needed something different, not just another cute T-shirt. So after much thinking we came up with Odditeaz, T-shirts with Latitude. The cool thing about these shirts is they totally speak to the brand. Off beat, creative and unexpected. To garner publicity and WOM buzz, we created packaging in oversized, earth-friendly tea bags -- the shirts are all printed inside out and sport right-brain taglines and interesting graphic images.

From February 30 - July 5 we built out two working sites, created, manufactured, and packaged a 39-piece collection of very cool shirts, secured relationships with designers, programmers, content writers and providers, assembled a kick-butt advisory team, wrote 250 pages of site content and a 120-page business plan all while doing other jobs.

By July 1, an ad we produced hit 250,000 mailboxes. And we were not ready to flip the switch on. We started getting our first cranky mail, "Shame on you, don't buy an ad in a national publication and not be ready for business," a visitors screamed. They were right if we lived in a perfect world.

Lesson 5- Be ready for the unexpected

We quickly posted a note on the slash site, apologizing profusely. Along with promising a gift once we were live. All was calm for a couple days.

July 5 came, and of course we are nervous -- we not only had our blood, sweat and tears and cash in the deal, but we were about to expose what we think is cool to the world.

We soft opened with the one ad, a press release and some prayers to people who are not in our inner circle. Will they come? Will they buy? What will we do next?

Stay tuned for next month's article. I will talk about product development, open source branding, sticky technology, easy fulfillment, viral marketing and producing a weekly ezine. In the meantime, if you have any questions, shoot me an email.