Latest / Behind the Founders / How One Founder Built a Business Across Continents
Transcript
- Carmen: Hi everyone, this is Carmen Durva from Behind the Founders and I will be hosting today's episode with Brandon Lebich. Brandon, welcome. Please introduce yourself. Brendan Lebitsch: Thank you so much for having me, Carmen. I'm Brennan Levich, founder of High Life Tech, a merchandise design and manufacturing company that works with brands across all industries to create brand and merch products that are outside the usual playbook, whether that be from apparel to accessories to gifting and PR to anything basically you can imagine. Carmen: Awesome, Brandon. So yeah, I did have the chance to have a look at your LinkedIn profile. it's really interesting because I see that you ⁓ founding two companies. So there's you mentioned High Life Tech and there's another one called Undeveloped. Could you share with the listeners out there a little bit about what both of them do and what got you to start both of these businesses? ⁓ Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, so High Life Tech is my main company. I started when I was 18. I'm now 25. It started out as a phone case company where you could get your face on a phone case and you could drop ship it to your friends, your family, or you could put a design on it. And it was kind of a way to pay for my way through college. and then, you know, as we grew, we started to add products from keychains to pop sockets when they were in style to lanyards. And then from there, we just kept building on that roller deck of products. Carmen: Okay. Brendan Lebitsch: It started out as a phone case company And it was kind of a way to pay for my way through college. and then, you know, as we grew, we started to add products from keychains to pop sockets when they were in style to lanyards. We stopped the drop shipping method and we pivoted into fully bulk ordering. And I was ordering off Alibaba and I was doing all like the sourcing myself. ⁓ and then we kept adding products. And I think our peak moment was during COVID when a lot of people started fashion brand, streetwear brands. We were actually the brand powering a lot of their accessory development and product development, and kind of from there became this full-service merchandise design and development company. So we work with brands like Liquid Death, Dude Wipes. and kind of from there became this full-service merchandise design and development company. across CPG, hospitality, other consumer brands, and we develop these really unique brand and merge products that they'll either do for their public stores, for s for the retail giveaways, or activations. And then my other company, which kind of in a way ties into High Life Tech, is undeveloped. It's an online only apparel denim company. Basically, that's based out of China. We produce a wide variety of silhouettes of denim and tops. And every month, you know, we're kind of releasing new styles, keeping up with the latest trends. That was something I started about two and a half years ago with a friend who's my co-founder. And we've kind of just been building on it from there throughout the side through just our e com channel and expanding into wholesale. Carmen: Okay, nice. And what made you want to decide to start like a second company of undeveloped? Brendan Lebitsch: So with our company, Alive Tech, we have a very established presence in China. We have our own workshop. So unlike a lot of vendors who might be sourcing on Alibaba still, or they have a network of vendors, we actually have our own team on the ground there that handles all our sourcing and product development. So when my co-founder Cole came to me and was like, hey, I want to start this denim company, it kind of made sense because we already had the ties on the ground to find the suppliers in China to have the resources. So we actually have my our high life tech team in parallel with undeveloped that kind of handles all of that. So it's pretty streamlined, kind of an extension of what I was already doing, where it wasn't that big of a, you know, burden or headache. Carmen: Yeah, okay. So you mentioned that, you know, you have kind of like interface with China. tell us a little bit more about that. ⁓ the collaboration with China and what got you decide to basically collaborate with China in terms of all of this ⁓ merchandising design and the mac manufacturing and so on. Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, so probably in twenty nineteen, twenty twenty when I first started, I was ordering a lot of PVC rubber keychains, which everyone at the time was ordering. And the my supplier at the time was a lady named Hannah, and I've been working her for probably two years now. This is like twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two. She had quit the factory and she wasn't working there anymore. And she's like, I can't really help you with keychains. So I'm gonna pass you along the sales rep. Well We had stayed in touch through WeChat and you know, she had experience in the merchandising space. So I kind of started just saying, Hey, can you help me produce this? Can you help us produce that? And kind of from there, our business kept growing. We kept producing things. And she kind of essentially, we were her only client and we were doing she was doing all sourcing for all of us. So then it be kind of came like, look, we're we're getting to that point where we got big enough. Would you want to work for us? ⁓ we got a workshop in China where we do a lot of the production development. And then about in 2023, her we had a lot of production issues because we were growing so fast and we had a lot of different projects. So I actually spent my Thanksgiving in China that year. And then from there we hired her husband. So they lead actually our workshop in China. Carmen: Okay. Brendan Lebitsch: So they handle all the production management. We do a lot of the assembly, the inspection in our workshop. We do the packing and shipping out of there. We store stuff there. So everything's kind of become vertically integrated off of that. the reason I did it was solely for feasibility and just logistics-wise to have 50 vendors to stay up on Alibaba to do all that sourcing. It's very hard. and when you have experience with people who have experience there, it's a lot easier. We can put things on one software, we have our own internal software that they use that they can use with their VPNs, and it's very streamlined process nowadays. Carmen: Course. Mm-hmm. And which part of China did you actually ⁓ visit? Brendan Lebitsch: So our workshops in Dongguan, so I fly into Guangzhou every time I go. I go about once a year. ⁓ I spend two to three weeks there with the team. so that's where we're at. And then we're actually opening a Guangzhou office too, because some stuff's easier to handle from there. So Hannah and her husband are gonna manage from both spots. Carmen: Okay. Yeah, I know. ⁓ wow. Okay. Okay, yeah, so let's talk a little bit about the operational aspect. So you mentioned that you are you guys are planning to take it on a global scale and open another or office in Guangzhou. tell us a little bit about your current team setup, you know, with high life tech and undeveloped, how many of you who is doing what, ⁓ and are you looking to, how are you looking to grow in terms of the team? Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, so for the longest time we were very manufacturing first. So I, through building out the workshop in China, built out that entirely. my belief was that if we have our own team there and we can move with speed, we can do creativity, we wouldn't we would have a an advantage, a creative advantage compared to a lot of other agencies. So that on that side, we have six people in China. ⁓ Hannah and Chen are the production managers, and then we have four people under them that help with assembly, packing, shipping, photography, anything, basically jack of all trades. In the US it was me as the only employee up until this year. And now we just hired another graphic designer full time and a director of branding creative. Carmen: Okay. Yeah, I can definitely see that, you know, from what you have been sharing, there is a lot of manufacturing, logistical processes involved also, you know, collaborating across different cultures, you know, in China and also like different brands that you've mentioned as well, which I also had the chance to see on LinkedIn too. I'd love to learn from your experience because ⁓ know you have been ⁓ this business for a couple of years now. What would you say are some of the behind the scenes challenges that clients purchasing the products that they never see? What would you say are the challenges that you've had to face? Brendan Lebitsch: ⁓ chaos all the time. ⁓ I I could give you I could give you a few examples this year. So we just did all the Cadillac F1 gifting for the F one races. It's Cadillac's first year as a Formula One team. So obviously a a very notable moment. And we had going to Miami for the F one race, which is their home turf. We had boxes that were supposed to be delivered by a certain date that missed the cutoff. So Carmen: Okay. Okay. Brendan Lebitsch: I had to fly down to Miami, reroute those boxes, pick them up, repack all their stuff, and then drive it two hours to that Formula One race, all in a day's work the night before the event. ⁓ some other things that clients never see, you know, logistics, obviously importing is a huge thing right now. Items getting stuck in customs, you really have no control when it gets out. So constant phone calls to the brokerage, to customs, all of that stuff. Carmen: Mm-hmm. Brendan Lebitsch: Those are probably the two biggest things. And then just pure problem solving on the production side when a mold is wrong or like a sizing incorrect, a defect. How do you pivot and navigate those timelines while still making the deadlines you need to set? And if you can't, what are the other things that you can do to kind of make up for it on the back end? Carmen: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I can definitely imagine. I mean, it does sound very I would say there's a lot of uncertainty that comes with it as well, you know, knowing when things are going to be delivered. There's a lot of unpredictability. Would you say that you have used certain tools, perhaps maybe with the help of AI, to help you automate or make your life easier to ensure that everything is met in a timely manner? Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, one thing I've been doing a lot is building out a lot of workflows through ⁓ with Claude. I think some of that have been really beneficial for us is automating shipping sheets. So we've essentially created a bunch of master shipping sheets internally that track all of our inbound shipments. And every day our bot scans those sheets and tells us the status of them and then updates them in real time. So we know exactly. Carmen: Okay. Brendan Lebitsch: When something gets caught up, it's flagged right away. We know when something gets delivered versus having to manage, you know, a ton of tracking numbers. Cause you know, we're getting tracking numbers from our China team, but then we also produce elsewhere. So this kind of joint sheet has really been beneficial for us. other technology that we use for managing, we use something called Lark, which if you're an international company, Lark Suite, I would highly recommend it. It is a project management all-in-one jack of all trade software. They have project management boards like Monday.com. They have messaging channels like Slack. They have wikis, documents, Drive like Google Drive, but it's called Lark Drive. It's actually a very unique platform that not many people know about. ⁓ actually free for up to 20 members. I'm not a salesperson, but we converted over to that from Monday.com because of the all-in-one. And it's very usable in China. You don't need a VPN or any of that, which has been a huge help for us. So definitely some AI on the workflow side. but then also I think LARC has been a huge thing for anyone who has a multi-person team across other countries. Carmen: Mm, of course. Yeah. would you say that so with the help of all of those tools, do you still feel like there's parts ⁓ your business that might feel manual or perhaps a little bit ⁓ inefficient where you kind of have to do double work? Do you feel like there's still some elements where you feel like you still want to address and solve? Brendan Lebitsch: ⁓ I think right now one of our biggest things has become ⁓ a client portal and we're building it out now. Kind of what we've seen is when you work with a lot of clients, emails get super messy. When you're developing a lot of products, you can have an email chain that gets to be a hundred emails long for one chain, especially when you're building 10 products for a season. So we're custom building our own client portal for our bigger clients that they'll be able to be onboarded. All their campaigns and projects will live on this one portal for them. And within each project individually, we'll have messaging, file uploads, you know, costing, shipping logistics. So this way, and then like obviously a dashboard, there's some technology out there that you can use and kind of bootstrap your way through. For us, it became of what's our use case? would this work? Is it easier to build out our own custom from scratch versus pivoting? in two years to having to build it anyway. So I decided to take the call of investing it up front, higher upfront costs versus like some monthly subscription. But once we get that set up for clients who are, you know, for some clients who developing their entire years of accessories and development and that planning has 10 items in a capsule, this will really help us streamline the process. So we're not having one prop one email or 10 emails with five projects. Carmen: Okay. Could you tell the listeners out there, because you're talking about, you know, now you're expanding your client portal. Could you walk us through the process how many products designs you have to come up with? ⁓ at a certain time interval. who does that? Are you in charge of that or is somebody else doing that? where do you get the ideas from just so that we can get a better understanding of how the workflow works? Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, so our work our business model is twofold is come to us if you're a fashion brand, for example. In the UK, we work with Live Fast Die Young. They're a very big fashion brand with multiple stores across Europe, Germany, Belgium. They come to us already with the products that they want developed, and we just handle the development for them. Now, on the other end, for companies like Seven Brew Coffee, the fastest growing QSR in the US. They'll come to us with an idea, but none of the concepts. So we'll develop the concepts. We'll put together a deck with, you know, eight to ten different items with that genre, that theme, and then we present them. So we're constantly developing. We work on over a hundred projects a month that are in production, but then we're constantly putting together these decks with six to eight items to present and like that. So a lot of moving parts that we're we're doing at all times. Carmen: And in terms of all those brands you work with, because you mentioned it seems like you're really going on a very global scale, how do they find you? Do you proactively do outbound leads or is it more inbound that they come to you? Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, a ton of outbound, not necessarily workflow outbound with like we send out a hundred thousand emails every month. We don't do that. How we grew the business was actually Instagram DM, which I think is a very sleeper, underrated form of getting your way in the door, especially for small businesses. A lot of social first brands will check their DMs right now. And you know, people are so used to getting spam emails. So like sending a personal Instagram DM. Carmen: Okay. Okay. Brendan Lebitsch: Sure, it might not always hit and I don't think it's gonna hit for like a Nike. But if you work for like a smaller company or at a smaller company and you're trying to work with local mom and pops or like under a hundred K follower Instagram brands, it you'll get you have a good shot of getting an answer from the Instagram DM. Outside of that, very popular on LinkedIn, very big with LinkedIn and sending, you know, cold outreach through that, connection requests, branding, my building a personal brand. providing knowledge examples of our work and then a lot of other personal emails where it's like based off their need or based off the brand if we're like a huge fan. Like I emailed Celsius last week and I was like, I drink three Celsius every week. How can I essentially work with you guys 'cause I'm such a fan. And that's kind of how they answer. Carmen: ⁓ okay. So you would say that in terms of strategies that work well in getting in terms of getting converting them into leads would be going on Instagram, personali personalizing the messages, especially picking out maybe like a problem that they're trying solve, and then the response ⁓ rates generally be I would say like higher than, you know. when they would consider it to be a spam. Is there any other ⁓ strategies or approach that you would use to be able to get more brands to collaborate with you? Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, so a few other things we do, which are we do a lot of cold pitches. So in a sense, when I say cold pitches, is like we'll take a brand, for example, we did this with Dude Wipes, and we'll put our vision together for what we think a Dude Wipes merch capsule could look like and how we would approach it if we were from Dude Wipes and we were putting out merch. So kind of p presenting ourselves as an extension of a brand where like we came up with these ideas. And then given our manufacturing integration and how streamlined it is, we actually sometimes will make one of those products and we'll send it to the brand or we'll email them a real photo of it because sometimes they don't answer the cold pitch. But like with Dude Wipes, we made a product and we're like, look, we'd love to send you guys this. and kind of like if you don't answer, well, we don't really know what to do with it, type of thing, because we had just made it solely for them. So it's twofold. You got to be creative. Carmen: Okay. Brendan Lebitsch: Everyone's can spam an email and send fifty thousand emails a day with one of the outbounds and burn through emails and get flagged. We've taken more of a different approach of like building a relationship, trying to get in the door with that personal side of it. Carmen: Yeah, definitely it makes all the difference as well. ⁓ this is in a way, a lot of these strategies, it is really similar to what we do also in in terms of recruitment as well. ⁓ I'm actually a recruiter myself from Cherry Assistant, and a lot of the times it is really down to establishing the relationship first, understanding their needs, and really taking the time to tailor make or personalize the message just so that way they know, okay, this is not a spam. They actually are being very intentional, very purposeful as well. Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, totally. I mean, literally I get so many emails a day that are spam. They're so obviously spam. ⁓ they're so obviously written by AI. So it's very interesting, like what's your click, what's your connection to that brand, why do you really want to work for them? What's your are you really that passionate about a brand? So that's really what I think it comes down to a lot of the times now. Carmen: Yeah. It's not. Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. It's always answering the question why and so on. so Brandon, I wanna jump back to the topic about AI. We did talk a little bit about it, but ⁓ ⁓ know, as you know, AI has become very like a hot topic nowadays. I would love to know your thoughts ⁓ AI in general, whether ⁓ especially in the business. Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, I mean I think it's been pretty in our industry it's interesting because you have nowadays and it's very easy for companies and other agencies to put together these proposals, these PowerPoints, these creative things, and like really send out as many outreach as I can of like concepts. But for us, can you actually produce it becomes a big thing? And we see a lot of times that these companies and other companies We do a lot of work with other brand e merch companies for them because a lot of times people will put together these concepts and ideas, like, yeah, sure they could be functional or sure they look good, but can they actually be produced? And a lot of times they don't have the answer for that or they can't. So now it's like, well, we can't go back to the client and be like, we can't produce this, but we need someone to do it. So then we kind of bail them out. So I know if we think that's one side of it. On the other side, like, I use it almost every day. It's become my Google, obviously with Gemini, I use Gemini sometimes, but I think you can build things so easily. You know, we built our UI for our client portal with the AI and kind of understanding what we need, the functionality. And then it's very easy to hand it over to an engineer and be like, hey, this is what we need built. Obviously the integrations get messy, so you can't do that on your own, but like the basic workflow and cutting out processes and timeline to deploy different bots, different apps, all that stuff has been drastically cut down. I mean, we just simply wouldn't be doing it if I didn't have a way to produce it. so and such and such. Carmen: Okay. And when it comes to and so on, do you feel like does enhance ⁓ creativity does it hinder creativity? Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, we use it for in parallel. So we obviously still draw our stuff with Photoshop, Adobe, Canva, Figma, all those likes. It definitely is good for like getting a full picture of a brand very easily and like their aesthetic, their branding, obviously pulling their brand colors if you're not provided a brand book and like the vibe and scan scanning their pages and really getting what their art audience is. ⁓ as for creative stuff too, it's some concept. ideation it can help with. But like I said, some of the ideas don't make sense and some of the ideas maybe are cool, but they don't totally align. So we use it as much as we can, but when we get down to the core, we still are being creative originally and picking ideas ourselves versus like just relying on Carmen: Yeah, absolutely for sure. I definitely feel that when it comes to support of AI, it helps to generate ideas, but the at the end of the day, the element is still fulfilling a very critical part in terms of really being like a bridge to connect to what clients or customers want versus the approach and the design as well. so Brandon, ⁓ I'd love to know. What what's coming next for you? What are you focusing on solving next? Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, so we're actually in this weird point right now. We're rebranding. So our company will be rebranding to off menu, the name off menu in about the end of July. So working through that whole rebrand now. We just finalized the name last week, getting social media handles, website handles, all that stuff logistically figured out, branding finalized. So planning to launch that is more of an agency. When I think of our name, it just doesn't fit what we do anymore. It made sense when we were doing phone cases and tech accessories. It doesn't make sense for being a full service agency. so kind of navigating that and then obviously having new hires. We're looking to expand, partner with brands more as not just doing one-off product development or just product development, but full service from development, from design to development to hosting web stores to fulfillment. as like that full service creative agency. So I'm really excited about that. Should be, you know, our last goal of the year is to get one e com store under our belt. So we're kind of working on that right now. Carmen: That's very exciting as well, especially with the whole rebranding process so that it would align with, you know, your vision, values and goals as well. I'd love to know what is the story behind a new name off menu you mentioned, right? What's the story behind that name? Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, so the story is really that like if you look at the products we create and you look at what traditional branded merchandises look like. It's you know, here's this logo, slap it on a water bottle, slap it on a hat. It's it worked in the what early days, like it wasn't a big thing. It wasn't it's more of a checklist item for brands. Now companies are starting to invest in it as like a form of social brand awareness, PR gifting in a more cultural way and a lot of the products we've always been creating is kind of not from a catalog, not just taking your logo and putting on a product. So that's kind of where off menu ties in. It's kind of like we're curating merch for brands who kind of want something to want to write their own recipe. And it's not something that is just like, hey, give me this. It's transactional. This is more relationship based and it's really curated to what their brand and their aesthetic is. Carmen: Okay, nice. Great. So just a final question. if there is one advice you share to someone thinking of starting a business, what would it be? ⁓ Brendan Lebitsch: I always tie back to this. I think you and I I I have this approach throughout it my entire life is you can't let other people what other people think dictate what you want to do. So when I started High Life Tech, like my friends would laugh at me, like you sell phone cases, you sell all this stuff, you just sell stuff from China. You know, even I at one point my parents were kind of like, Hey, like, why don't you get a real job? Like, you know. You're not gonna stay home and work this company all summer. I think you have to bet on yourself ten out of ten times. when you do and it it works out and it will work out one way or another, those same people will come back and they'll be the ones that try to work for you or the ones that try to pretend like they're there the whole way. So my advice has always been when I tell people is like just do it, especially if you're young. Like we have for me, the financial risk is not as much. Like I'm 25. If it goes to zero, I can get a job. I went to college. Maybe if your time horizon's a little longer later than mine, your age is later than mine, it's a different story. But for me, I'm gonna put all the chips on the table now while I'm young. And if it blows up, you know, at least I tried and I went with my gut versus like I could have stopped my company at the end of college and went to work at a bank with my finance degree. But I think just really betting on yourself every single time and having conviction in what you believe in and whatever everyone else says is really just noise. Carmen: Hm. Yeah, that's for sure. I think that's definitely a very powerful reminder, right? To really like believe in what you do and not let the perception, opinions, or or influence into into for you what you want to build. And I that again is really just like an ⁓ I would a word of encouragement for people out there who are having reservations, having doubts on starting their own business. Brendan Lebitsch: Yeah, totally agree. I mean, there's always going to be doubters. There's always gonna be people are gonna think you're nuts. I enjoy that. I enjoy being told I'm nuts sometimes. And I think that like you should just really go with your gut. Like, there's no reason not to. There's no reason to let other people's opinions dictate your life. Cause if you do, you'll you'll never get anywhere. You'll be constantly trying to please people and you can't please everyone. and that's really it. Carmen: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's for sure. At the end of the day, like no matter what you do, ⁓ there's always going to be one or two people or more that are not going to be happy. And I think it's just about like, you know, staying in your own lane and doing what you believe in. And at the end of the day, that's really what it boils down to as well. Great. Brandon, thank you so much again for coming on. this is Carmen Derwald with Brandon Lebich. Of behind the founders, be sure to stay tuned for the next episode. Brendan Lebitsch: Thank you so much again.