Latest / The Brand Bitch™ Podcast / EP 01 - Stop Chasing Visibility: How to Build a Brand People Remember
Transcript
- Cat Fisfis: Welcome to the Brand Bitch Podcast. I'm your host, Catherine Visfis, brand strategist, creative director, and founder and creator of the Brand Bitch. After spending the last 15 years scaling businesses, investing over six figures, and starting over more than once, I finally realized something. Businesses don't become unforgettable because of better marketing. They become unforgettable because their founders become recognizable. Every week we'll challenge conventional business advice and explore what it really takes to build a recognizable brand. And a business that is unmistakably yours. So if you're ready to stop chasting visibility and start becoming the obvious choice, you're in exactly the right place, my friend. The world doesn't need another founder trying to fit in. It needs more founders brave enough to become unforgettable. So let's build a brand they'll remember, shall we? Before we dive into everything that this podcast will become, I think it's only fair that I tell you why it exists. You see, I didn't exactly wake up one morning and decide to start a branding podcast. I started it because I wish someone had had these conversations with me 15 years ago. I come from a long line of entrepreneurs on both sides of my family. I even married into one. So you could say that it's in my blood. However, until my mom They were all men. Aside from being a teacher by education, my mom also followed her passion for interior design and real estate while raising three kids and being an incredibly supportive wife to my dad's very demanding career. So watching this and being told by my mother that my sister and I could do anything we wanted in life set a little piece of me on fire. I always knew that I wanted to be more than just a mom. And even now saying just a mom. Sorry, Mama. To me, at that time, I saw her push her passions aside for her family. However, seeing that and having her voice inside me reminding me every day that I could indeed do anything I wanted was everything. So I set out on my own in New York City after college in hopes of making it in the fashion design world. I had my degree, my art background, thanks to my grandmother, and the sheer will and determination of the oldest daughter. If you know, you know. And I did for a while. Make it, I mean. You see, I genuinely believed that if I worked hard enough, success would come. If I was the first one in the design studio in the morning, even after a super late night at a fashion show after party with the team. Or lugging its many rolling racks around with extremely heavy suitcases through Midtown Manhattan at rush hour, or literally being named the Energizer Bunny while sprinting my way through the designer department at Barney's or Saxfield Avenue. And then there was always working through walking pneumonia. Twice. Yeah, not proud of that part. Well, I was wrong about that whole if I worked hard enough, success would come thing. Because while my mentor and several supervisors along the way were incredible, the fashion industry, let's just say it lives up to its name in the Devil Wars Prada. Those details are for another episode. But let's just say that New York was everything I had ever dreamed of as a little girl. And then some. Part of then some being extremely late nights, very little pay, and even less time to see my family. So I went back home, fell in love, and moved to what I like to call the middle of fashion nowhere, Pennsylvania. After having our first baby, I decided that I wasn't yet done with the fashion industry. And because Harrisburg wasn't exactly fashion capital, I needed to create what that looks like for me. While shopping for diaper bags that were available at the time, now granted, this was 2012, I kept thinking to myself, why do all of these have to look so ugly? There was no in-between. There was the Toys R Us or Walmart diaper bags that were hideous. And then there were the several thousands of dollars super designer bags. I wanted something that felt like a handbag first, something that a woman would genuinely carry, that also happened to be functional for motherhood. That was the hard part. You see, becoming a mom shouldn't suddenly erase. The woman who loved fashion and design and beautiful things, or hey, having an identity outside of motherhood, I truly believed that your next season shouldn't require you to abandon who you were before it. And while I wasn't living in New York anymore, or surrounded by the fashion industry at all, and I didn't have the obvious environment or career path at that point laid out in front of me, I essentially said, okay. I can't find what I'm looking for. I'm gonna create my own. You'll see a little through line in here as this story goes on, trust me. So I turned my idea into a product, into an entire line of them, and then into a business. Designing the bags from our home in PA after working a full-time job and picking up our toddler from daycare, sourcing quality leather and materials from sustainable factories overseas, manufacturing in New York City, spending obscene amounts of money on samples, hiring a PR team, cold calling department stores and small boutiques to pitch them on the line to carry them, literally figuring out shit as I went. Yeah. I mean, how else was I supposed to do it? While I know things would have turned out very, very differently if I knew then what I know now about building a brand, I still build something. Something I was proud of. Something that I can say was mine. Something that brought my mom up to New York City on the train with me to spend the day in the city for manufacturing meetings and square seeing meetings. Something that had us spending the nights at my cousin's house, or apartment rather, in New York City, and staying up at all hours. Chatting like girlfriends and having the best cocktails and food Manhattan could get you. Something that had my sister help me pick out color swatches for the lining of the small leather goods in my parents' dining room. Something that allowed my mother-in-law to accompany me to Vegas for a trade show. Our very first trade show. And honestly, that really opened my eyes as to what this business could become. It opened hers too. Looking back, I I don't think I had the language for it then, but I was already obsessed with identity. I wasn't really designing a diver bag. I was designing something for a woman who had become a mother. Still wanted to feel like herself. I think that's probably the first breadcrumb in this entire story. Because nearly every business I've created since, in some way, has been about that exact thing. Helping women become more of themselves, not less, as their lives and their businesses evolve. Eventually that chapter ended, but entrepreneurship? No. I kept getting closer and closer to the part of the business I was actually obsessed with. Identity, brand, community, and helping women build businesses that fit their lives. I still wanted something that allowed me to create and contribute financially while being present for the kids. Yes, kids at this point. We had two. I wasn't interested in choosing between ambition and motherhood. I also wasn't interested in putting an infant back into daycare at six weeks old, like we had for our son. At that point, network marketing presented itself as a business model that seemed to offer exactly what I was looking for. And despite all the baggage MLM gets, there were pieces of it I genuinely loved and am very thankful for. Say what you want about network marketing, you guys. And trust me, I have thoughts. A lot of thoughts, but that's for another episode. There were two things about that world that I absolutely freaking loved: building a brand and building a community. I learned how to communicate online, how to tell stories around a product, how to create connections before asking someone to buy. How a powerful community could be run. How to not run a community. yeah, learn that too. How people wanted to feel like they were a part of something. And how much I loved helping other women figure out their messaging, their presence, their aesthetic. And honestly, I really gravitated towards the brand building side of the business. I didn't quite know it at the time, but I wasn't falling in love with network marketing. I was falling in love with brand building, community building. So after about a decade, I started noticing what exactly people were coming to me for. Kat, can you look at my logo? my god, Kat, help me with my Instagram, please. What do you think about this website? Okay, how exactly would you position this? Because I am not getting any traction the way it is. Can you make my stuff look like yours? Literally, those are the questions I was getting. And eventually I started thinking to myself, can I just do this? Can I do this on my own? I don't want to sell somebody else's product. I don't want to build somebody else's company. I want to build my own. And for the first time in a really long time, I wasn't trying to figure out where I fit inside somebody else's business model. I started asking myself, what could I create from everything I've learned? So the part I couldn't stop thinking about, that's what I wanted to build. So I started working with small businesses. Eventually, I had to admit something to myself. I liked building the brand more than I liked building the network marketing business. Sorry. I loved figuring out how something should look, how it should feel, what we should say, how we can make people care about it. And I started thinking. Could this actually be the business? So I started taking on small business branding projects. This is where baby brand strategist cat first comes to play. I was designing logos, visual identities, brand guides. It was so much fun. I was learning through doing the work for clients, figuring out pricing, offers, and really figuring out what I was good at. Probably saying yes to things I would never say yes to now. Watching firsthand how differently businesses operated when their brand actually felt aligned, when it finally felt like them. I thought I was selling design and eventually realized that I was doing something much deeper. I thought I was helping people make their businesses look better. But for the longer I did it, the more I realized. When they wanted me to create a logo, that wasn't the problem. The real question I should have been asking them was, what do you believe? What do you want to be known for? Who are you really? Why should somebody choose you over the girl next door? Where does your business need to go in order to grow? The high frequency studio was really where all of these pieces started coming together for me. Fashion, design, strategy, identity, business, mindset, personal development, all these things, seemingly random chapters of my career, were suddenly pieces that fit into a puzzle. They weren't random anymore. High frequency studio, a fashion studio for business branding. Genius, right? I thought so. My mentor thought so. And for a while, I thought that that was the culmination of everything I'd been building towards. But eventually, I realized there was still a piece of my entrepreneurial story that I hadn't found my way back to yet. The community. I missed the room. I missed having the space where women could ask the messy questions, where we could talk about branding one minute, business strategy the next, motherhood after that. Where you didn't have to figure everything out before you walked through the door. And looking back now, I realized that I'd been craving that since my network marketing days. Not the business model or the product, the community, the proximity, the feeling of building something alongside other women. And eventually, that became the brand bitch. And the funny thing is, when I look at the brand bitch now, I see all the pieces of every business I've ever had inside of it. Fashion taught me identity. The handbag business taught me how to create something when the opportunity I wanted didn't exist. Network marketing taught me community, personal development, personal brand building. Working around my kids taught me that a successful business means absolutely nothing if I don't have a life outside of it. Client work taught me that the logo is usually never the problem. The high frequency studio taught me how to bring identity, strategy, creative direction together. And the Brand Bitch became a place where all of it finally met. Looking back now, I can tell this story and make it sound like every chapter fit perfectly into the next. Handbags, network marketing, branding, high-frequency studio, the brand bitch. But you know what? It did not feel that way while I was living it. It felt like a shit show. There was a whole lot of trying and failing and pivoting and investing and starting over and wondering what the hell I was doing in between. Over the course of building businesses, I invested over 150K into figuring out how to do this. Between the handbag business, the courses, the coaches, the programs, the masterminds, the products, network marketing, the strategies, the systems, the frameworks. You guys, I followed all the experts, implemented what every successful person told me I should be doing. And for a long time, I kept thinking that. The next thing would finally be the thing that made everything click. Maybe I needed a better strategy. Maybe I needed a different offer. Maybe I needed to post more. but do I need to do a funnel? What's Pinterest all about? Ooh, how about an email marketing program? No, no, just post more. Do I need to niche down? Maybe I need to scale up. Maybe I just haven't found that secret that everybody else seemed to have found. I want to be really clear. I do not regret investing in myself. I do not regret a penny of that 150k. I've learned incredible things from incredible people. Those investments help shape the entrepreneur that I am today, which helped make the woman that I am today, which helped make the mom that I am today, which is now shaping my kids. So no. I would do it all again the exact same way if I had the opportunity. The problem wasn't that I invested in myself. It was that for a long time I assumed somebody else knew my business better than I did. I wasn't buying information. I was outsourcing authority. I kept looking outside of myself for the answer instead of trusting what I already knew about myself, my business, my clients, and the life that I wanted to build. Have you guys ever felt that? Have you ever felt like you were doing everything right, but somehow nothing was clicking? You took the courses, you created the content, you followed the blueprints and the strategies, you posted, you invested, you posted some more, you checked all the boxes on the workbook pages, you posted even more, and then you looked around and said, What the hell does everybody else know that I don't? You guys, I lived there for years. Years Eventually, I stopped asking what's the next strategy? And started asking a completely different question. Who do I need to become? I don't mean becoming someone else. It's actually quite the opposite. I mean becoming more of myself. Not who does Instagram need me to become? Who does this coach think I need to become? Not what version of me will convert better with sales. No. Who am I when I stop looking around the room for permission? That's when so much of what I believe about branding and business started to change. Because strategy matters. Marketing matters. Offers and content, yeah, they matter. But not a single thing can compensate for a founder who is constantly second guessing herself and changing direction based on what everyone else is doing. Started noticing that the founders and the brands I remembered weren't necessarily the ones creating the most content. They definitely were not the loudest, and they weren't everywhere. They were recognizable. I knew exactly what they believed, what they talked about over and over, what their perspective was, what they did differently. I knew what I could come to them for. I mean shit, I could almost finish their sentences. That's when I became far less interested in helping founders become more visible. and completely obsessed with helping them become recognizable. Because visibility gets you seen, but recognition, it gets you remembered. I want to be really clear about what you're going to get from this podcast. This is not another podcast telling you to post more. I am not going to sit here and give you 47 things to add to your to-do list. I'm not going to promise you seven figures in 90 days, or even in a year for that matter. And I'm definitely not interested in handing you another pile of marketing hacks. There are plenty of places you can go for that. What I want to do is help you become the founder your business has been waiting for. We're gonna talk about identity. Who are you becoming as your business grows? And what parts of yourself have you been watering down because someone told you they weren't strategic enough? We're going to talk about recognition. What do you want your name associated with? What do you believe? What do you want people to remember about you when you're not in the room? How do we take everything that's already inside you and turn it into a brand that people can see, feel, understand, and remember? We're going talk about business strategy. How do we create a business that actually supports the life you want? Because I don't believe success should require you to sacrifice the entire reason you wanted a business in the first place. my God. I could do an entire episode on that. Maybe I will. gonna go over some mindset. What it looks like to be a business owner. How do you trust yourself enough to question the rules? Make decisions, change your mind, evolve, pivot, build differently. And before I let you go, I feel like we need to address the elephant in the room. Why the hell did I name this thing the brand bitch? Because when I say brand bitch, I am not talking about the loudest woman in the room. She's not arrogant. She's not trying to piss people off for attention. She is not controversial for sake of being controversial. To me, a brand bitch knows who she is. She trusts her perspective. She questions the rules. She builds differently. And she refuses to create a business that requires her to become someone else in order for it to succeed. But most importantly, she doesn't chase attention. She builds recognition. That, my friends, is a brand bitch. So I don't know where you're listening from today or what chapter of your business you're in. Maybe you're starting, maybe you're scaling, and maybe like me, more than once, you're starting over. Maybe you've invested thousands of dollars trying to figure out the answer. Maybe you've done everything the experts have told you, and you're still sitting there wondering why nothing feels like you. That's where you are. Here's what I want you to take away from this episode today. You are not behind. You do not need another marketing hack. You do not need to become someone else in order to build the business you want. Maybe. Just maybe. It's time to become more of who you've been all along. And that is exactly what we're gonna do here. Welcome to the Brand Bitch Podcast. Thank you so much for hanging out with me today, guys, and letting me be just a small part of your journey. If today's conversation made you think differently, dream a little bigger, or reminded you of who you're becoming, I'd be so grateful if you'd leave a rating, a review, or share this episode with another entrepreneur. Because every time you do, you're helping another woman realize she's already has what it takes to build a business and a life that's her own. You'll find today's resources, links, and everything we talked about in today's episode in the show notes. And until next time, remember, you don't become recognizable by becoming somebody else. you become recognizable by becoming more of who you've been all along. I'll see you in the next episode. And if no one has reminded you lately, you are enough, you are capable, and yeah, you already have what it takes.