Feel Your Impact - From Me to We with Simon Mainwaring
When you start a brand, establishing its purpose is rather easy. However, as that brand or business grows and matures, clarifying it, engraining it, and describing it to a greater audience is much harder. In the second episode of the Feel Your Impact podcast, we talk to top author, Ted Talk speaker, and CEO of We First Marketing, Simon Mainwaring about the importance of finding the purpose of your business or brand and then crafting a message that catalyzing your audience around it.
The story behind “Feel Your Impact”
We met Simon through our connection with SanMar when he spoke at an American Apparels Manufacturing Networks in Honduras. I remember hearing about how is values and belief system aligned with what we were trying to do with Allmade but never really dug into it more than that. As we were looking to relaunch Allmade with a much larger SanMar partnership we started to evaluate firms that could help us with some clarification of our brand message. Simon’s firm “We First” was at the top of the list, and so I dug in.
The first thing about Simon Mainwaring that popped when I was researching was his Ted Talk. At first glance, I was rather thrown back as he starts off with some pretty cocky self-centered remarks that set the hook for a compelling personal story and life shift. If you have seen the talk I would highly recommend it as he then goes to talk about the very issue that Allmade was established for and the purpose of business in the world to help solve that these problems. It was like I was going back in time and watching myself listen to this Ted Talk by Simon and form the ideas around Allmade.
We ended up engaging Simon and his team to run a brand purpose workshop with the SanMar and Allmade teams at SanMar Headquarters in Snoqualmie WA. We were looking for that perfect slogan to say “Allmade”, the “Just Do It” of Allmade if you will. It isn’t an easy task nor made easier with such a big group of people. This was a pretty momentous occasion as the only other time had the entire Allmade group of founders been together which was at the Long Beach impressions Show in 2017, not even the first trip to Haiti as Erin Moore was about ready to give birth to her 3rd baby. Simon did an amazing job asking questions and challenging our assumptions of what is behind Allmade and how to describe that. He brought out some amazing thoughts like this voice-over from Johnny Edelstein I was able to record during the session and we ended up using for our brand re-launch video. The biggest thing that came out of it was the ability for a group of 20+ people to challenge each other, laugh, cry, argue, and not settle. That’s something pretty special about the Allmade movement and group of founders and by the end of the second day, even though we hadn’t come up with the perfect new slogan I felt confident that we were well on the path and had established a much clearer purpose statement and way to describe the vision of Allmade than we ever had before.
Simon has a gift of pulling key words out of conversations and ideas and stitching them together to say exactly what you are thinking. After 2 days of conversation and workshops, the Feel Your Impact tagline was born. When I heard it and read it for the first time immediately, I could hear it in an ad, I could see it on a billboard, Feel Your Impact, it had apparel, feeling, a challenge, and impact wrapped up in three words. Allmade, Feel Your Impact.
Subscribe to the Feel Your Impact podcast and be sure to listen to Episode 2 with Simon Mainwaring and learn about the process of developing your brand's purpose.
If you want to chat to Simon about your brand, email him at: Simon@WeFirstBranding.com or head to his website wefirstbranding.com | Checkout his Podcast: "Learn With Me" wherever you listen to podcasts! You can follow him on Instagram @simonmainwaring or @wefirstbranding.
