Whether you’re an influencer building a new business for a dedicated community or a well-known brand with lifelong customer loyalty, the answer is the same: build authentic brand-led products that leverage your existing community.
But how do you protect your existing brand? What does it take to launch and maintain a new business? And how does - or should - brand influence your product decisions?
We spoke to the experts at building brand-led digital products: Ennismore, Camilla Lorentzen, Financial Times, and Skin Rocks.
Andrew Antoniades, VP of Brand Marketing, Ennismore
Andrew Antoniades is Vice President of Brand Marketing for Ennismore, where he oversees their new travel & food membership, Dis-loyalty. He has more than 10 years’ experience building global businesses across luxury lifestyle covering hospitality, art, technology, fashion, retail, and beauty; this includes the likes of LVMH, Mr Porter, Estée Lauder, and De Beers.
Holly Brooke, Commercial Director at Skin Rocks
With over 10 years of experience across strategic partnership-led roles; Holly is now the Commercial Director for award-winning skincare brand Skin Rocks, founded by advanced aesthetician Caroline Hirons.
Having led the development and launch of Skin Rocks’ industry-first skincare app of the same name, which received 30,000+ downloads within the first hour and multiple award wins since, Holly has secured partnerships with numerous, globally recognised brands and continues to drive lucrative opportunities to increase brand awareness.
Debbie McMahon, Product Director at FT.com
Debbie currently works at the Financial Times as the Product Director leading the consumer product teams. This involves iterating on the existing product experience that supports over 1m users and also developing new products and propositions to showcase the world leading FT journalism for individual subscribers.
Previously she worked at the BBC as Head of Product for BBC Account, developing innovative experiences to showcase the value of the BBC and creating seamless experiences to access all BBC services.
Camilla Lorentzen, Founder at Mila
For the past 10 years, Camilla Lorentzen has made it her mission to help people feel like their bodies are good enough. Alongside her wife Julie Lorentzen, they’ve built a community across Instagram, TikTok & YouTube of over 12.3 million followers.
Working with award-winning digital product studio Planes, Camilla launched Mila: a first-of-its-kind fitness app that gives users exercise suggestions based on their mood. On launch, the app received 20,000 downloads in the first 24 hours and hit #1 in the Health & Fitness app chart in over 5 countries.