Jamie Schwartzman - Founder, Flux Branding

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have Jamie Schwartzman with us today. He's a creative visionary and brand strategist, so founder at Flux Branding. It's a proven LA-based agency, uh, in rebranding. We're going to talk about rebranding today. He's also founder of Visity, uh, or Visity.

It's pronounced Visity. And Charles, you have a cold.

Yes, yes, I do have a cold.

So I think before we get into the conversation, we want to make sure that you're feeling okay.

I am feeling okay. Or what's that question? Um, but yeah, Vistity, it's an immersive, uh, travel social platform, right? So yeah, and you're raising capital for that. So let's start with your background, Jamie. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Well, I'm a creative entrepreneur. I always have been. Uh, you know, got my start at UCLA where I was in the art department. And actually came out as an artist, but really went into business. And so where's an art guy going to find a role in business? It's in branding and in creative. So I kind of emerged pretty quickly to be the sort of top pitch guy. You know, I write a good deck, I know how to converse with people, communicate ideas, and that's really been sort of the foundation of being a brand strategist. And I would say in my product development too.

Interesting. So what did they teach you at art school that is still relevant today and that will stay relevant in the age of AI?

Okay, well, interesting you should ask. I'm also writing a book right now, so it'll be out in about 2 months. It's called Brilliant. And one of the things, you know, I studied in school was what makes something valuable. How do people perceive value? How do they, you know, and, and it really came down for me was the precious object How can I— is there a theory, in fact, for creating something that people will hold dear and precious? I think it is the fundamentals of brands, right? We look at brands as things that are important to us and precious. And I do believe that there is a methodology for developing this and creative positioning. And I say that's the basis of it. So really, my work as a graduate student was in the nature of the precious object, and that informs all the work that I do today.

Interesting. Let's start with, uh, yeah, your main company, which I guess is the cash cow, Flugs Branding, right? 26 years doing that. Uh, don't you get tired of being creative?

Well, you know, it's interesting. This is not my first company. I've had several before this. Uh, I started out as a manufacturer, and manufacturing is great, but it is capital intensive. And, um, you know, you spend all— you invest a lot of capital before you can turn $1 and start generating income. Professional services are pretty straightforward. You know, I don't have to keep any inventory, although there's, you know, headcount, right, and some operations. But really, since the pandemic, we have modified our operation dramatically. We used to be a studio-based company in downtown LA. We were in the Arts District. We had the reclaimed wood on the walls, the French Bulldogs, the bar, the coffee, all that kind of stuff. It was awesome while it happened and lasted for a long time. But in the pandemic, we just found another— we were able to pivot, right, and become more of a distributed company. I spend a lot less time on the road commuting now, which is good for my well-being, I would say, in general, and everybody else's. But it required a different style of management. And so I, I don't remember exactly what the question was, but that's what sort of came to mind.

Um, what's rebranding like? Is it when you're in trouble and you need to just adopt a new brand, or is it just because you've held up too long to a brand that's getting old and not generating ROI?

Well, it's interesting because I've done hundreds of brands, and really we specialize in rebranding And what I love about that is I, I think that there's diff— a difference between when you're starting up and you're trying to create something from nothing versus now you're in business, you're operating, and you've recognized that there's some sort of a brand crisis. Typically, I look for 5— 1 of 5 things when I talk to a new, uh, CEO or head of marketing, you know, and they're trying to figure out their brand. There's usually something going on, and this is By the way, it's why the agency is called Flux Branding, because flux is— it's, it's about change, right? It's times of change. And typically these are the things that are going on. We've had a competitive attack, new companies entered the market, and we're losing business, we're losing market share. There's a brand problem there. Okay. Second, there's been a crisis of some sort. Something happened. It could have been a corporate crisis, a product crisis, and we need to distance ourselves from the past. Rebrand. Okay, another time it is, um, I will call it generational change. We're seeing a lot of that now where, uh, you know, the next generation's coming in and they just have a different mindset than the prior ownership, and they need to establish that and make sure it's shared by all. We also see a lot of, we're launching a new product or service, now we need to rebalance the portfolio and make it clean and clear. And I'll say the last one is, I'll call it a spiritual crisis. And I don't mean this in terms of religion, but that there's something wrong with the spirit of the organization. We're not retaining talent. We're not charging. And I do think branding has an internal opportunity to develop spirit. And I mean to capture the hearts and souls of people. Spirited organizations don't only work on a paycheck. They're not just getting people in the, you know, in the seats to be performers because they're paying them well. Although paying is important. I think having a brand that people believe in and have faith and have dedication and it really touches them at a deeper level, that is a big part of what we do.

Nice. And tell me about your collab with Gordon Ramsay.

Oh yeah. Well, you know, I get all kinds of calls. So the story was I was on retreat. I was relaxing in the desert at an amazing place, Two Bunch Palms. If anybody's ever been to Two Bunch Palms, you gotta go there. It's an old, uh, Native American oasis in the desert with palm trees and waters. And I get a call, we're doing a TV show, we need a branding person. I was like, well, I'm your guy, I'm your guy. Another call, another call, another— finally I learned that it's Gordon Ramsay. And he's doing a, um, a television show called Food Stars. It's a competition between 20 food entrepreneurs competing for a $250,000 investment in your company by Gordon Ramsay. But first you have to compete, and you— there's a vote-off, you know, classic one of these competition shows. And so, uh, they needed somebody to come in at the, at the, at the end. I was in the season finale There were 3 finalists, and one of them— each one had a specific expert that was brought on to coach them. I was brought in to coach a really interesting company. They were doing 3D printing of food, right? So they were printing food, essentially. It was pretty cool. And I coached the guy, and we did the session, and we filmed it, and he was the— he was the winner. So he won the $250,000. Investment in his company. Uh, it was a, it was a kick.

Gordon Ramsay's brand, the Screaming Chef, is it a good play, good ROI for him, like being known as that? Like, I think people wanted it, but later on when he pivoted to an allocator, maybe that brand did him a disservice, right?

What's— I don't know, man. I think that, I think that every brand has its authentic sense. To it. That was him, you know. And I think he's a, um, he's a character. And quite frankly, brands are characters. And typically brands are characters that we know and that we understand. We use this, uh, kind of— this is a central part of doing a rebrand, is what we call developing the brand archetype. And archetypes are characters that we know and we understand from stories. So we're doing, we're doing an architecture firm right now, big architecture firm. Their archetype is the Integrator. The Integrator is the knowledgeable one that knows a lot of different things and can bring those together. It's a sub-archetype of the Explorer. But there is a specific study and methodology around archetypes. We don't use this overtly. I would say these are covert tactics to try to communicate in a way that's more natural, more intuitive. We don't have to do as much explaining because if we associate with a character that you know, it's easier to relate to and understand and recognize very quickly. It's all about speed.

Interesting. Yeah. Then people need to know Gordon Ramsay didn't have the easiest of dads. And back then when he started filming Hell's Kitchen, he was in a very precarious financial situation, right? So I think he was like, he was like, just, he didn't have any, uh, patient bandwidth, right? And he was just like, the fuck are you doing in my kitchen, dude? I'm like, I owe like this guy like £500,000 to £1,000,000 or something. Like, I don't have time for that shit, right?

No, he was tough. I will tell you that production, there was easily 300 people on set. They took over a really cool part of downtown LA at, uh, at the The Row, which incidentally, we do a lot of real estate. We worked on that project, did all the murals on it. I think that in our shoot, there were maybe 8 cameras. I had a dressing room. I mean, it was a real proper shoot during COVID also, which was interesting as they were trying to do those shoots. But yeah, no, he, it was, it was quite a production. And then it took a long time. That's the other thing people don't know for these reality shows. Between date of filming and date of air, I think it might have been 14 months.

And that's crazy. Why?

Embargoed. And embargoed. You can't talk about it while you're— while they're, um, you know, where they haven't released it. So I knew the results, but I couldn't say anything, you know, during that time.

But that would get me crazy as an entrepreneur, right? If I invest in all that production, I wanted to be marketed as soon as possible. Why 14 months?

Yeah, well, you know, if you're getting a $250,000 investment in your company, you have to wait. So it's an interesting dynamic, and I think that's— it's something that we don't always think about for these contestants that are parts of these programs.

Oh, okay. Yeah, if that's what you mean. Um, I've been on, uh, Dragon's Den, right? Uh, and I run my own show, it's called Spark Tank. We have a show today, actually, a couple of hours after our call. Um, I'm an investor myself, and I mean The truth is, like, people in these calls, like, as investors, they're not like real investors and VCs, right? Like, they tend to take a bit more time because typical VC, like, high performance— you're talking about A16Z, Sequoia— they're incredibly fast to cut the check, right? Like, it's in their favor, else someone will undercut them, right? This guy that was offered $250K probably didn't have, like, other investors, right? So that, that's the tricky part. And that's the show business part. But they like in reality, as an investor, you need to pull the trigger pretty quick to get your skin in the game.

Well, look, it's different than when we're working with, with our corporate clients. And, you know, the Gordon Ramsay thing, it come— it came and went, it came in like a tornado, it went out like a tornado. And it was a lot of fun. And it's a great calling card for us to be associated with that brand. And I think brand associations are important. It changes the way people think about our studio. But the bulk of what we do is working with large companies. Right now we've got— we hold about 12 different companies as sort of that we're working on at any one time. We do a lot of real estate, which is an interesting game because it takes a long time to build these campuses that we work on. Um, we do a lot— interesting, we've done a lot in transportation. And so we're doing a fair bit right now in automotive, we'll call it mobility. These are, we work with one of the companies that's one of the largest dispatch of roadside assistance and tow trucks in the country. They also provide insurance services. And it's interesting how that whole world is changing now with autonomous vehicles. So I just finished a pitch that was, went out to Waymo onto this and Really, I think we're seeing it's with ultimately it's all coming down to technology, right? And how technology is having an impact on every single bit of business. And I would say AI for us, huge impact, huge impact. I think it's extremely positive the way we're using it. But this is a really— this is like I would call it a really rad tool.

And what's VistaD? Why launch another startup like 30 years in the game?

So, you know, interesting, Vistage, a lot, we also work with a number of, uh, municipalities. We work with cities and you kind of, you think about the way destinations, uh, market themselves. You've got sort of the country, the United States, visit the US. You've got the con— you've got, uh, California, visit California. You've got visit Los Angeles, and then you've got visit downtown LA coming down to the smallest district level. We work at that district level. So I've worked with a number of different, um, downtowns. Downtown LA was one of them. During the pandemic, we had just redesigned their web. We did their talk track because I would say LA is— LA has always been hard to communicate. You know, what is LA? Is it Hollywood? What is LA? Is it Disneyland? Is it the— is it the beach? You know, what is LA? So we have done a lot of work on trying to communicate what LA is all about. And then the pandemic came in, and, and they just— economic development started to run to a halt. Typically, investors will come on up, get on a plane, come to a destination, and look around. And they could see, okay, here's Walt Disney Concert Hall. Oh, I see, you know, there's an— there's a lot catty-corner to it. We could build a hotel there. Or, you know, these are major investment undertakings. And so they had no way to show that. I figured we could just build a website, use Google Street View, use satellite images. The problem was they weren't accurate enough and they weren't controllable enough. So like the day the little Google car drove down Grand Avenue in LA, ambulances and fire trucks parked in front of Walt Disney Concert Hall. You just— when you're look— using an investor who can't get on a plane and that's what you're showing, it puts it at risk. So we started flying drones over aerial, aerial images, high-resolution aerial images over urban areas. And so we did this for downtown LA and we built this thing. And all of a sudden it won an award. It won an award. It won the Award of the Year by the International Downtowns Association. The executive director, um, at Downtown LA says, Jamie, you should probably show this to some other cities. 'cause they probably like it. Next thing you know, we're in Dallas, we're in Memphis, we're in San Francisco, we're in Sacramento. We started like cities after cities after cities. And then I decided this is something that needs to launch on its own. So Vistity was born for that. It's Vistity, like this fusion of visit a city, Vistity. And so we've been doing econ dev for major cities. Now we're pivoting to do tourism.

I'm just not sure I get it though. Like, is it, uh, who's your ICP? Is it cities? Uh, like, who's the end buyer of that and what do you charge them? How do you make money with this?

Yeah, cool. So, so currently Vistity, um, is sold to business improvement districts. The business improvement districts use it to support their economic development efforts. Their targets are investors, developers, major, major projects. We're not talking somebody who's going to build an apartment, you know, building high-rises, taking, you know, 6 big surface lots and turning them into a community campuses, big projects, remodeling the convention center, these level of projects, major infrastructure projects. But what we found is that there's an opportunity to move into tourism. So we're now in a pivot. We're changing our GTM. Away from working with these cities. And cities, they pay us, they pay us, uh, you know, sort of an initial implementation fee, professional service, and a license fee every year. And that's how we've generated our money. But we see a bigger opportunity, and, and the opportunity is kind of how the tourism dollar is, is sort of allocated, I guess. Best way to say it. I mean, I, I, I'll give you a little bit more of our pers— our perspective. So our perspective is that the cities do all the work to try to generate tourism. They market their areas, they generate interest, you can come check them out, and then at the 11th hour, Expedia and Booking.com swoop in and take the transaction. And those booking fees that are charged by Expedia and the big— they're called OTAs, online travel agencies— are massive amounts of dollars. And that money is extracted directly from the community and landed into the pockets of big tech, into the oligarchs. And ultimately, those dollars really make their way into Google for advertising. We've developed a more democratic process. Where those fees are sent back to the location. So as you decide to visit a destination, your booking fees go back to the area to help them grow. So they should own their own area. And we have a whole influencer platform. Essentially, our platform lets you create a playlist like you've created playlists on Spotify that you could share with your friends. Imagine if you could create a playlist, uh, where you know, like, where's the, where's the best place to go and hang, man? Where, what's, what's the bars you like to be at? What's your favorite pizza place? Where do you hang? Where do you go? Am I going to find that on TripAdvisor? Who are these people on TripAdvisor? Like, if you know me and you like who I am and what I'm all about, I got a lot of friends, they're interested in where I go in the world. So Vistage allows people to share that.

But why would I use a— I use like ChatGPT for traveling to be ChatGPT knows me and would send me like some specific stuff. Uh, isn't that like the new way to travel optimally? And I can share my list to friends as well.

We think, we think that, that Vistady will know you better because we will have a profile of what your preferences are, similar to what you have in ChatGPT. Maybe you transfer it across, but certainly our platform has an AI uh, advisory that can help generate, uh, itinerary for you. And also our platform, we have sort of a points system, whereas people book, they're earning rewards and points. And ultimately there's a cause-based piece to us where we're giving back to the destinations and the user experience. And look, I come from an art background You know, the design really matters. Okay, I, I just think about it. I'm, I'm in, I'm in art school in the early '80s. What's happening? The Mac. You know, we were the first gen that was using the Mac to move off of, you know, paste-up and actually do typesetting. So I would say, and I've been a Mac user since probably System 5. Now I would say the way that tech is packaged, the way that it works, the way that operates, it really matters. And we think we can provide an exceptional user experience. Is it going to be for everybody? No, we don't need everybody. The travel market is a $9 trillion industry. It's massive. It's a huge, huge, huge industry. It's consolidated with a few big players, and, uh, I think everybody agrees that it's fragmented. What's it like for you, Charles? Do you go to— you go to TripAdvisor, you go to Airbnb, you go to Expedia, you go to OpenTable, you're going to look at a couple of blogs, you're going to look at, uh, TikTok, you're going to look at Instagram and try to string it all together in your head. We think we can create an integrated platform that brings it all into one place.

Yeah, we didn't go on TikTok, uh, but It's more like ChatGPT knows me and would probably scrape the ratings on Google Maps. Google Maps, still my go-to, ironically, to check the ratings, right? Never trusted TripAdvisor and all these platforms. It's a platform, right? So there's users that give feedback on one end. What's the business development side of things? I haven't understood that part.

Um, give me a little bit more specifically when you say business.

You said you dealt with cities, right? Like, it's— you give them data about like what users want or what? Like, I'm not sure to understand that.

Well, listen, we're, we're currently in market with our platform. Our platform is V4 at Vistity right now. Uh, V4 platform is an economic development platform. It embeds onto, um, the city's website, and it has more high-resolution detailed aerial images than you can get from space. Because when you fly a drone, you can really see places, and you can see them accurately. And when you want to, we can set a drone back up and take a better image. So they're, you know, uh, spherical images, this kind of a 3D sort of thing where you can look around. And then we overlay different content on top of that. So the interface allows for the creation of hotspots where you can bring data onto there. We integrate other sources, market data, economic data. What is the average rental rates of a, of a apartment unit? What are the square footage costs? This all strings together to an immersive experience. And then the cities can use that in their podcast. They use it when they're, um, you know, having important meetings with developers that are considering investing in campus in their city. And that's been the focus of Vistity. It's a good business. You know, it's a small little niche enterprise business, but it's given us the basis for growth in a highly scalable way to move into consumer and tourism.

Interesting. Thanks for being on, Jamie. Where can people find out more about you?

Well, check me out. Uh, you know, my websites are fluxbranding.com. That's my studio in Los Angeles. We've been around a long time. Check us out. We've got a lot of cool work. Go to vistity.com, V-I-S-T-I-T-Y, like visit a city, and you'll see a little bit about us there. You can also hit me up on LinkedIn, Jamie Schwartzman. Thanks for having me, Charles. It's been a kick talking to you today. I hope you feel better.

Yeah, thank you. That was Jamie and