#125 Brandon Higginbotham from Vintage Gentleman: How To Use Social Media To Launch Your Brand

It’s no secret that social media applications have taken over the world we live in. Every business owner is now a creator too. In fact, we’ve spoken about how important story-telling and social media can be in creating a strong brand identity in today’s world in several of our previous episodes of The Ecom Show.

But we’ve turned the tables around for this episode. Join Brandon, the founder of Vintage Gentleman, to learn more about how a social media creator/influencer can use their platform to bootstrap a brand from scratch.

Before we begin, here's a small recap of what this show is all about for all the new listeners. The Ecom Show is a weekly podcast hosted by Daniel Budai, the founder and CEO of Budai Media. Daniel invites e-commerce business owners from different industries to share their experiences, learnings, and expert tips to highlight the latest trends, hacks, and best practices for all e-commerce stores out there. This show is sponsored by Budai Media, a retention marketing agency that’s helped over 130 businesses scale their e-commerce stores with personalized email and SMS marketing.

Now that you’re all caught up, let’s continue with the show!

Tune in to learn more about:

✅ How Brandon Started the Vintage Gentlemen

✅ 3 Things That Have Helped Brandon Build a Successful Business

✅ Brandon’s Advice to Creators Looking To Start Their Own Brand

How Brandon Started the Vintage Gentlemen

Brandon has benefited from having an early adopter advantage. He began using Instagram in 2015 when he started noticing how the application helped create trends. He noticed an opportunity to build an audience and created the Vintage Gentlemen, which back then was just a simple lifestyle account that offered suggestions for men’s lifestyle products.

Since men’s lifestyle was a new niche he quickly gained traction and built an engaging community of about 20-30,000 followers. He started getting offers for brand endorsements and became a popular influencer. Brandon knew that there was scope to build something bigger using the community he had created, this is what led to him launching his own e-commerce store.

Brandon began by dropshipping products from the artisanal brands he had previously done endorsements with. After seeing how well that worked he slowly expanded to creating his own range of products. Currently, about 70-80% of Vintage Gentlemen’s range of products are manufactured in-house.

3 Things That Have Helped Brandon Build a Successful Business

With a following of over 240,000 followers on Instagram, Vintage Gentlemen has grown immensely since it began. What was once an influencer account is now a fully functional e-commerce store that manufactures most of its in-house products. Here are three key factors that have helped Brandon fuel Vintage Gentlemen’s growth:

Reinvesting money back into the business: Despite the success of Vintage Gentlemen, Brandon has still retained his job in the insurance industry. His job allows him to fund his own lifestyle without needing any money from Vintage Gentlemen enabling him to reinvest all the profits into growing the business.

Leveraging organic social media platforms to build a community: Vintage Gentlemen might have gone from being a lifestyle social media account to a full-fledged brand but they haven’t forgotten their roots. In fact, Vintage Gentlemen has expanded its social media reach by focusing on TikTok as well. Their strong social media presence and use of other social media creators to aid their growth has helped them build a community.

Finding a balance between paid and organic content marketing:Since Vintage Gentlemen already had an existing community of followers that supported the brand from its inception, Brandon spent the first few years focusing on fine-tuning the e-commerce operations. He set up other paid marketing channels like Google Ads to drive more leads, and email marketing to convert/retain these leads. His end goal is to create a brand that has both strong paid marketing as well as an enriched library of content that's engaging enough to build a community in the men’s lifestyle space.

Brandon’s Advice to Creators Looking To Start Their Own Brand

We asked Brandon what his main advice would be to content creators looking to start their own brand with very little capital. Here’s what they had to say:

• Have a strategic approach to starting your business.
• Consider drop shipping to save initial start-up costs, invest in a basic Shopify plan, and look at low-risk methods of bootstrapping your business.
• Your initial focus needs to be on grabbing user attention and creating a community around your brand.
• The key is to find creative ways to build your business.

Catch Brandon and Daniel’s entire conversation by listening to this episode.

To know more about Vintage Gentlemen check out their website:

https://www.thevintagegentlemen.com/

Follow Brandon on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-higginbotham-031118197/

Follow Daniel Budai

Daniel’s LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/budaidaney/

Daniel’s YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKtHC2ojO_7mhMHXQ-qZcHQ

Daniel’s Newsletter

https://www.thebudaimedia.com/weekly-newsletter-signup

The Ecom Show

https://www.thebudaimedia.com/podcast

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