Episode 216: Into the Metaverse with Harper+Scott's Michael Scott Cohen

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Michael Scott Cohen is CEO and co-founder, along with his business partner John Allagem, of the creative agency Harper Scott. Harper Scott is a name that is spoken of almost reverentially within the industry. Their branding, their team, and their mission— it's all been behind a secret veil, the shroud of mystery. And there's a reason for that. They've just been busy cranking out innovation after innovation. Their client list includes some of the most coveted brands today: Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Nike, GM, Netflix, Spotify. I could go on. Michael has spent nearly a decade creating, sourcing, and distributing promotional and private label merchandise, including the incubation of brands with celebrity partners. Prior to starting Harper Scott, Michael spent his entire career in the business development function. Leading companies from the recruiting industry to insurance brokerages, building relationships with chief procurement officers and marketing professionals. He holds a BA from Indiana University Bloomington and is a member of YPO New York Metro chapter. In 2019, Michael and John took an investment that valued Harper Scott in excess of $59 million from power investors including Lou Frankfurt, John Howard, and Bruce Toll, among others. Recently, Harper Scott created an incubated brands division creating and building successful brands across the CPG and food and beverage sectors. And they recently announced the creation of their new division for the metaverse, H&S Meta. Today, Michael and I chat about numerous topics, including reframing our thinking to serve our clients better and think more entrepreneurial.

Like, that's what it comes down to. It's a simple word— is no matter if you're an account manager or if you're a junior designer, you have to think very entrepreneurial to think bigger than just, hey, here's Sony and they need their logo on some items.

What working with the most successful clients in the world looks like.

I would say it's honestly been a blessing and a curse for Almost. To give you a little more insight into the company, obviously you grow a business as fast over 8 years, it's hard to keep process up with people.

You know, we would—

And out of all their projects and collaborations, which one sticks out as among his favorites? If I had to pick one, it would be What we did for Carnival Cruise Lines is one of, one of the things that I'm most happy with at Harper and Scott when I look back on programs.

We also talk about the new Dare to Roam antimicrobial product line launched with multi-platinum R&B pop vocalist and songwriter Ciara.

We launched it in August of 2021 with Ciara, not just the backpack, but there's a few other items. And it was like bonkers.

Like it started selling faster than we thought it would.

And finally, we chat about what led Harper and Scott to the metaverse.

We could take our client's brand from the tangible space and replicate it in the digital world, not just for a new revenue stream for them, but a lot of what we work on are loyalty.

Hi friends, I'm Bobby Lee Hu, Commonsku's Chief Content Officer. Before we get to our chat with Michael, on Wednesday, March 9th, we will be hosting Commonsku University, a conference for Commonsku customers that that focuses on how to use the platform to grow your business and boost your sales and productivity. It's for distributor and supplier customers. We'll share everything from how to simplify your workflow to creating a killer client experience. One reason I love Commskey University is that it's in-depth, in-app insight in an easy 2 hours of concentrated learning. And we all know we underutilize the tools that power our business because in our hurried pace, we often don't set aside the time to learn. So Here's your chance. Go register at commonsku.com/university, and I'll see you there. Today's episode is brought to you by Commonsku, the work-from-anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more or to begin your free trial now, visit commonsku.com. Now here's my chat with Harper Scott's Michael Scott Cohen.

I shared in the intro a glimpse of your journey from staffing and recruiting and then into insurance with a really strong emphasis on business development in each role. In 2010, you ended up in the promo industry for 6 months and you didn't earn a dime. Like, you just— nothing. That 7th month came and you were hooked.

Can you share that story? I was just sharing the story yesterday with a member of our sales team who's in a similar situation, and I had a very good friend of mine who was working for a distributor out in LA. They had a few clients on the East Coast and he was coming back and forth and, you know, really good guy doing a lot of cool things with a lot of great companies and asked if I would come and help him with this New York office. And honestly, the first few answers was no because I didn't understand it. Like t-shirts and water bottles didn't sound very cool to me. But learning a little bit more about like how he can make an impactful change in a brand through tangible products, it had my ear and I was like, all right, whatever. And I was open to taking a base salary cut with a greater commission because I just felt like everybody's buying this. This is gonna be easy. And so for the first 6 months, I did what I did in insurance or in recruiting where I just came up with a list of every single marketing manager, every single procurement manager, and literally just email blasted all day about 200 emails a day. I was, I remember sitting on my couch at night, watching shows, like typing emails. I wanted to make sure each one, even though I sent 200, was still personal. And a lot of them got rejected, probably like I maybe heard from like 5 people a day out of the 200 I sent. And I just kept my organized spreadsheet. And then on the 6th month, there's a big agency called Interbrand that rebrands companies that reach out to me saying like, Hey, I got an email from you a few months back. It sounds like you guys can do anything. Is there any way you could source 15,000 Granny Smith apples for an insurance company? It matches their Pantone color. And I was like, of course we could do that. Like, why not? Turns out, like, my cousin is in produce supply and he put me in touch with somebody who can get me 15,000 Granny Smith apples. And I reached out to a supplier in Minnesota that can make these 4-color imprint stickers. And we had the apples sent to the New York office. And we actually independently put each sticker on all 15,000 apples. The 15,000 apples turned into like a full-scale rebrand for this company with 40,000 employees in Kentucky. And we had to fly out there and manage the whole process. It ended up being, I think, about a little over $2 million project on a very healthy margin in which I got a healthy commission check for. So yeah, it was definitely worth waiting the 6 months for. Once I made that big 6-figure commission check, it was like, It was like no looking back from there. Now I could taste it.

Right.

I just wanted more.

Yeah.

Yeah. Literally. That's great. So speaking of that project, that's a nice little dovetail into something else I was going to ask you. You and your business partner, John Alligem, started Harper and Scott in 2014. By the end of 2015, we're close to $4.2 million, somewhere around there. 3 years later in 2018, around $24 million, and now well over $50 million in revenue. Most people hear that story and they think that there has to be something behind a trajectory that moves that fast. But you started Harper and Scott with virtually no clients.

Is that right? Zero clients. I actually had a non-solicited non-compete with the distributor I left, so I had to start all over.

Wow. Your, your Apple story fits well with the Sephora story, possibly, in that you started with a single order for Sephora of $3,000 in 2017. You turned that into being an exclusive provider for, for their merch as well. Is that part of your business development history, and how much of your backstory in business development feeds into all of these projects?

So yes, I think for us, it's about, we believe in our process. We believe that we're the most innovative company in our space, not just from a creative side, but from a production side of speed, time, transparency. Like, you know, about our B Corp status, we want to be cutting edge. We want to be innovative, hence Harper Scott Meta. But all of those things tie into the confidence that we have that is like, nobody's heard of Harper Scott. There's 20,000 companies that do exactly what we do, from taking a logo and putting it on a piece of apparel or whatever. We need to just get people through our process. How do we get people through our process? Let's just ask for their biggest headache. Is it 15,000 Granny Smith apples that you need solved? Or in the case of Sephora, they had a contract with a company at the time, but for whatever reason, new store openings lived outside of that contract. And it was quick turn, it was pain in the butt, sort of products and things that you had to manage along the way. We ended up doing USBs, which nobody has the USB anymore, but getting them through the process is really important because asking somebody for a favor, like, hey, can you refer me to your procurement department? Most of the time they say, no, my procurement department gets like a million emails a week from different people. Like they're just going to pass you off. But if they feel comfortable that say, hey, I worked with this company, they did a very small project for 60th and Lexington, new store opening. It was very innovative, it was quick, it was easy, it was cheap, whatever that is. Then when they go to refer us to procurement, they're speaking from experience and it's a, it's more of a warm lead versus that cold shoulder type lead that we would get more and more.

It also sounds like you're very open to difficult projects that help also lead to other projects. You have spent a lot of time in the discipline of business development in your previous careers and then of course at Harper Scott. How much of that has really fed into the success?

Because that's a really fast growth rate. I mean, I think that that's where John and I work well together is in business development, you're always taught like you're only as good as your last sale. So keep pushing, getting more sales, getting more sales. It doesn't really work that well in this industry because quality and product matter. And so having a partner like John who doesn't come from business development, comes from technology, which is all about a better user experience, And he actually really cares about slowing down the process to put out beautiful product. It's why we're able to go from, you know, buying from ASI to buying from a ceramic factory in Portland, Oregon to make something for an influencer mailer that, you know, we kind of got into all these different fields, not by accident, but by saying yes. And then kind of figuring it out because we know that we're creative. We know we can do production, but like, oh, you need an influencer mailer where you crack it open and inside is the product. Sure. We could do that. And then afterwards, we'll find a hammer factory that can paint it in Texas and that Portland, Oregon ceramic factory. All of that is credit to John. And now that we have 60+ employees in the US, it kind of is how can we over the years put ourselves in the backseat a little bit and empower our employees to do exactly what we did in 2014, 2015 and think more entrepreneurial. That's what it comes down to. The simple word is No matter if you're an account manager or if you're a junior designer, you have to think very entrepreneurial to think bigger than just, hey, here's Sony and they need their logo on some items. Yeah.

I saw the L'Oréal— I think it was L'Oréal— the clay ball project for influencers. You guys have architected some brilliant campaigns. Speaking of John, how do you and John split your leadership responsibilities and your focus? Are you— you both share sales?

He's over tech, as you mentioned. How do you split those roles? Up until about 2019, it was wherever the business needed us. We were all over the place. And, you know, sometimes you'd see us both in a meeting with a client, and sometimes you'd just see one of us doing something else. We got a lot more institutionalized over the last 2 years, and especially last year coming off of the craziness of the pandemic and making sure that we're set up for success going forward, we hired really strong mid-level and senior-level leadership. And so it allows John and I to do maybe what we're better at, but also what we enjoy. I like to be, you know, with the sales team, take me to a client pitch, take me to something that we did, something successful, and meet clients and be out front-facing. John likes to develop products from the ground up. So maybe he's spending time with the product development team or on the labs division incubating brands from the ground up. So we've kind of figured out where we are better at or where we enjoy and empower those leaders to take on some of those responsibilities to get us to be able to do that.

Yeah, that's cool. One of the things that I loved about you, uh, in an interview, you talked about your company mantra: bring ideas. It's actually very simple and powerful. It reminds me of the New York Times culture editor David Carr's advice to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who said— he said to him, stop coming to my office and telling stories and start coming into my office and bringing stories. I love that because we're in such an idea business, yet there's problems all around us. Do you repeat this internally a lot?

Bring ideas. Is this part of your culture? I've never heard of that mantra. I love it though.

I'm going to start using it.

I ascribed it to you, I guess, man. Yeah, I love it. I think that for me, I don't think of myself as an intelligent person in every area. I think that I know a little about a lot, but I don't know a lot about a little in certain cases. And maybe that's from my business development background. I just wanted to kind of know a little bit about things that I can talk to it, dig in deeper where I, where I thought that it was meaningful, but like For financial accounting and audits, for instance, like my CFO can be the expert of that. I just need to know that what does he mean by GAAP accounting and how do we talk to the board about it? The same thing goes for production or creative. I'm probably the least creative person in my entire company, but we have really strong 3D designers and illustrators. And so how can I come to them with some sort of innovative product or innovative idea if I'm not an expert and they are? So yes, it's always about come to us, and in the beginning it was, you know, sometimes we'd have the youngest people on the team were sometimes in leadership roles just because of that. They would come to us and say, we need to create a whole new department. We need to go from account managers to account managers and production. And I think I'm the person that could lead that production team. And we would empower them to do that. And yeah, I think that that's where it came from. And also same for solutions and problems. Don't come to me with the problem, not because I don't want to hear it. I want to be there for you to talk to me about a problem, but I want to empower you to come to me with solutions. Think through it first, and then let's talk about what that solution could possibly be. Whether it was a supplier delivered something late or improper, there's the problem. Okay, what's the solution? What's the plan B or C? Yeah, everybody should be empowered to do that, and hopefully we can continue to do that as we grow.

I, I guess a part of that has been a forced incubation. When you're growing so fast, that's really what you have to do, is you have to be a constant solver of problems. Let's talk a little bit about creativity, collaboration, and clients. Your client includes like an A-list of some of the most covetable clients. I mean, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Nike, GM, Netflix. We could go on and on. Spotify. I mean, I know this is a really broad question, but how do you end up working with such A-level clients? Is that an aggressive part of proactive sales strategy, part reputation?

How would you split that? I would say it's honestly been a blessing and a curse for Almost. Um, to give you a little more insight into the company, obviously you grow a business as fast over 8 years, it's hard to keep process up with people. You know, we would just hire people just to hire because we need, we need people that to do the functions to keep up with it. And, you know, for, for the client list, what we do really well is we showcase our creative ability more than anything. And so when a client first comes to us, it's usually they heard of us or they seem— for instance, I know you know about the Tim Hortons big project that we recently worked on with them. Yeah. Maybe they saw that and they want to do some special campaign with us. And I would say that the benefit is, of course, we're opening doors with top-tier level brands and brands that we could grow with for the long term. The downside is that we don't do as, as great of a job growing those clients internally, meaning like we can do those hard creative projects and we could do their really inexpensive pens, napkins, t-shirts, tote bags. But we're always leading with the creative hard things and never really explaining to them. So they're always like, oh yeah, we already have a supplier for that. And it's like, what do you mean you already have a supplier for that? You came to us because the supplier couldn't do this other project in a speed, in a creative or whatever the cost. And so don't— doesn't it make sense to consolidate all the spend with us? We had close to, I think like 300 or 400 clients last year alone. And I think you can look at that as saying that's incredible opportunity in front of us. But it's also an incredible distraction if we don't have our processes down right.

So I want to focus on that this year. Yeah. It's also a curse of the most complex and creative types of organizations. So we had a client once that did about $3 million in revenue. We were getting about $1 million in revenue and we were getting all the difficult kitting fulfillment projects. This is pre-pandemic, right? This was before, this was before everybody was doing kitting and fulfillment. Nobody wanted to do it. And we had to figure out a creative way to go in. Why aren't we getting— we're like, we were sweating more. Than our competitors for this client. But yeah, it's an interesting—

it's a good problem to have in that you start with a great position of strength though. We took our leadership away last week for a retreat. We started doing these retreats and rather than spending money on getting a new office or a bigger office, we kept the office that we had pre-pandemic. Everybody kind of works from home still. Sometimes people go into the office, but the money that we saved instead of going to a bigger office, we put it towards enhancing like our employees' experience at Harper and Scott. And a lot of that is taking them away from their, let's call it their habitat and bringing them into certain— so the first one we did was in Nashville in October of past year, we brought our sales team and we brought the account managers, about 22 people over 3 days. We brought in an outside facilitator and we all walked away really feeling impacted by that and excited. And so last week we took away 6 of people from our leadership team, to California, and it was the exact same thing. Meetings from 8 AM till midnight every day, dissecting the business and understanding the data that our CFO brought. But it was eye-opening. But I think all of us came away very excited to then put in place some of what we discussed and maybe have a hard date of the start of Q2 to start putting some of these processes in place.

Yeah, that's awesome. Speaking of Tim Hortons, you know, Harper Scott is like I think of you guys as masters at these big name collaborations from Popeyes and Megan Thee Stallion to Tim Hortons and Justin Bieber, Sally Hansen and Jelly Belly.

Which collaboration was one of the most rewarding for you and your team to work on and why was that? I have these Wednesday randomizer huddles with different people from the company where I split people up and I ask them the same question, what's your most memorable product that you worked on? And the answers that I get typically are the projects where it's a collaborative effort, where there's teams that are coming together to make shit happen, for lack of better words. It starts from like the sales team of actually being consultative sellers and understanding what does the client actually want out of this. And then transitioning to the account manager to get all of the behind the scenes people, like the creative and production team in place. Those projects are a lot of the ones that you mentioned, and they all come together pretty last minute. And a lot of them come because the current supplier that those brands worked with couldn't achieve something like the enhanced date, the pricing, or a lack of innovation or creativity. And so a lot of those are my favorite. Again, it's gonna be hard for me to choose. I honestly would say that if I had to pick one, it would be, uh, what we did for Carnival Cruise Lines was probably one of, one of the things that I'm most happy with at Harper Scott when I look back on, on programs. What was that campaign? Carnival Cruise Lines ran an RFP in, I think, end of 2018 where they're outfitting their 27 ships logo shop. For many years, they've worked with a lot of different suppliers. They weren't finding a level of perceived value on the products for the price that they were getting. And so I got a LinkedIn message from their head of retail who basically was like, hey, I heard of you from Weight Watchers, my friend over at Weight Watchers. And she told me that you guys are super innovative. And we only did like one small project for Weight Watchers at that time. But then we got down to Florida and he's like, so I just wanted to fill you guys in. We've been running this RFP for 3 months. You were the 54th agency we're meeting in the ASI space. We're at the finals. You have 2 weeks to put this together, but we're looking for— take our brand, which they worked on the ideas and show us what you would do. And our team put together an 80-page deck and a lot of samples within a 2-week period, full samples, not just renderings, but full samples of what that looked like. And they ended up onboarding us as one of 2 suppliers to work with their partners outfitting 27 ships. That was my favorite. And it also brought us into private label retail, which then brought us into where we are today incubating our own brands.

So yeah, pretty excited about that one. That's amazing. You've mentioned a few things that are very connected, and that is the complexity around these projects, the incredible pressure, It's like people enjoy, they walk away from these, and that when they're in the middle of them, it's like they're middle of a hurricane. It's very difficult, but they also talk about that being the most rewarding. Dare to roam. Now you did something I think more of us should do with our teams. You set them free to creatively imagine possibilities when it comes to products. So in a story you shared before, you talked about how these incubator pods you created, you basically sent the team away and said, think of ideas. You gave them the freedom to roam. There was an article in Forbes that talked about how neuroscience has discovered what work environments we must have for the best creative solutions. And one of the comments was that in order to get our creative juices flowing, we need to have some unrestrained thinking. And in a sense, what you did was, as I understand it, right, you sent your team away to just think about some creatives. What can we do? We're in the product business. Um, what did you learn about letting your team loose to chase wild ideas?

Because out of this process came Dare to Roam. Is that right? Yeah, so it wasn't intentional by any means. And if it happened today, we're all working so hard, I don't necessarily know that we could carve out time to do this again. It just so happened that we transitioned the company to be a PPE company from like the beginning of COVID early March, till about August of that year. And obviously Carnival wasn't sailing and Sephora was closed and most of our clients weren't ordering anything. A lot of our competitors were laying off, furloughing, or cutting salaries. And that one day, I remember it being like, I think March 13th, John and I looked at each other. We had advice from the board to like, maybe we should think about cutting back some salaries or downsizing. And John and I said, there's no way we're ever going to do that. We're going to figure this out. And so by making that commitment to each other at the beginning of the pandemic, we stuck through that, never laying one person off, furloughing, or cutting a salary. We intended to go into this PPE space to just survive, and we ended up really thriving. We did it the Harper Scott way. We did a really beautiful creative deck. We had a bunch of sources that were giving us different hand sanitizers and masks, and we updated that deck maybe daily, like, oh, there's a new thermometer out there, there's a new 3-ply mask, and updated the pricing daily. And again, it was presented in an easy way for clients to follow, especially that weren't educated on 70% hand sanitizer in March 2020. So anyways, so we're not a PPE company. We never really wanted to intend to get in there. It was just something that we did to survive. Towards the end of that summer, PPE was becoming a commodity. There was a lot of companies selling it and we wanted to go back to our traditional business, but our business was not back. Carnival still wasn't back and Sephora's doors were still closed. We could have laid off probably 90% of our staff and still like had a really banner year that year. But instead we're like, all right, we're going to split up. All of us are going into 8 different teams. And this is where it was unintentional. It's like just something to do to kill time. And so, you know, you're paired with 8 different people in the company and you're paired with 8 different people in the company. And I don't care what you guys do in your time. You should be thinking about what's the new revenue stream? What's a new product? What's something different that we could do at Harper and Scott? And A few people came with some really amazing ideas. One of them being this, like, you know, when you touch an elevator and it fuzzies in your finger, you've seen it now, like the cootie keychain or something we called it. They designed this sort of item that we built a brand around saying like, oh, you're sending your kids back to school at some point. And you're thinking all the time about coronavirus or germs. People are going to be a lot more conscious about germs going forward. Let's design a whole like line for kids. And maybe put our hero item as a backpack, as like kids. And then we decided like, well, I travel all the time to work and I want my backpack to be safe too. So maybe not just for kids, maybe for everybody. And let's find a celebrity to get this off the ground really quick. We have relationships with a lot of agencies. So we decided, all right, we're doing an antimicrobial travel and accessory line where the product material is going to be high quality material. It is going to be a certified B Corporation. We know that it's going to have a give back, social responsibility, and giving back to a charity. And we're going to do an antimicrobial wash. So we might partner with a big antimicrobial company or whatever, but this backpack needs to be safe for when I travel. It needs to be safe for my kids put it on the floor in the classroom. We launched it in August of 2021 with Sierra, not just the backpack, but there's a few other items. And it was like bonkers. Like it started selling faster than we thought it would, knock on wood. And then Oprah picked it up. Oprah got ahold of it and made it one of Oprah's favorite things. And so through that, we're like, okay, um, I guess we're not a direct-to-consumer business right now. We are maybe going into retail. We're actually going to be in one of the largest retailers in the country, rolling out to all their doors in August of this year, and really maybe going the wholesale channel. So took a back seat because of the limited inventory we have with there to roam right now. Repurposing, refocusing the team on what the future of the brand could look like, and hopefully raising for the brand to prepare us to be a successful retail brand going forward. But it's a brand where Harper Scott owns a majority of it, and Sierra, who's a phenomenal partner— Sierra was involved in the whole design aspect of it, the feel and touch, to make sure she believed in the brand. And then obviously with her brand ambassador agreement, not just a couple posts a month or a couple whatever. She really is in it as a true partner and is incredible. So we're going to model that out with a few other brands that we're coming out with over the next 6 to 18 months.

That's amazing. Duplicating your success is obviously a hallmark of something that you have done. In an interview with Glossier Magazine, Ciara said this: I got to connect with the Harper Scott team at the beginning of the pandemic, and we actually have a mutual relationship through my agency and mutual friends. And so I got the pleasure of connecting with the founders, John Algem and Michael Scott. There was this cool opportunity to talk about creating backpacks together. I love vision. I love their approach. I love how they build out businesses. I love how involved they are and how passionate they are. So kudos.

What a—

what an amazing project. Now that you're on the other side of it, like, going into it, what did you think about it would be like? And then on the other side of it now, what have you picked up? I know it's a big question, but what have you learned from that experience?

You're obviously going to duplicate it. So you have to have the right product and the right celebrity paired together, otherwise it won't work. A lot of people are looking at what Ryan Reynolds did with Aviation or what Kim Kardashian's doing with Skims and they're like, "Oh, well, I can do anything and just pair a celebrity with it and I'll be successful." A lot of times celebrities have followings, but they're following them for music or because they're an athlete, not necessarily because they trust them with consumer products. And so having somebody who's as genuine and as talented as Sierra to come in as a partner and we haven't looked at her contract once, honestly, since she signed it because Some months she'll post a lot or she'll be as involved a lot because that's what the business needs at that time. Right. And other months, like, it allows her to go focus on her other brands or her other projects that she's doing. Like, she's back in the studio maybe now doing more music. And I think that allows her to kind of be as involved when we need her and take a step back when she needs to as well. But the right product and the right celebrity are really important. We started working with another celebrity on a different brand. We loved this brand. It was going to be a really great product. The celebrity, just a good person, but wasn't really in it for the business side. Maybe saw it as more like, "Oh, you're using my face and name, so that's all you need." And we ended up killing that brand because we didn't feel like it was going to be successful with having the wrong celebrity at that time.

Yeah. Right product, engaged celebrity. For those listening, that product again is Dare to Roam. My favorite was the Prodigy backpack, by the way. And 3% of profits go to the Why Not You Foundation and not a nonprofit founded by Ciara and Russell Wilson to fight poverty through education. So what an amazing story. Obviously you're going to try and mint that and duplicate that success moving forward. Anything you can give us a preview of?

I'm sure that's a ridiculous question because that's all under wraps, but no. What's interesting is you look at our business and you see cut and sew, but it has nothing to do with cut and sew whatsoever. It's actually in food and beverage. And again, we feel like we can be the experts on innovation and production even though It's not a cut and sew or plastic injection mold. It is a formula of a drink, for instance. It is packaging.

So it's pretty exciting, and there's about 4 or 5 that we're working on. That's cool. Let's talk about B Corp for a second. You earned your B Corp in 2020, and what many people don't know is that you have to renew this every 3 years. It's very difficult to get. It's very difficult to retain. And based on the B Impact Assessment, Harper Scott earned an overall score of 81.7. The median score for ordinary businesses who complete the assessment is currently 50.9.

What did you think that process was like and what's the reality of it and how did it reshape your business? When we looked at attaining a B Corp, even initially, we're like, hey, it's a no-brainer. We need to get a B Corp certification because like, A, our team members care a lot about the environment. They care about social responsibility. They care about sustainability. But going into all these meetings with like Sephora, for instance, or Diageo, they're starting to talk this was in like the early days of like 2016, '20, they're starting to talk about sustainability and social impact plans and all these things. So it was important for us to be the expert and allow them to say they want to achieve this as a KPI, but it's on us to be the expert there. And so we wanted that B Corp status really bad. And before we even applied for it, we made sure that we had a lot of things checked and covered all of our factories being audited. All of our books really in order to make sure that we're not— you can't BS this. This is why there's not that many companies that have B Corp status. They are very, very diligent, which makes me even more proud to have it afterwards because I know how hard our team worked to achieve that status. And I also love the fact that they do re-audit you every 3 years to make sure that like, this is not a forever thing. You didn't just get this and now you can like go back to your old ways. This is like, we're going to assess you and It's not a pass/fail thing. It is improve your score and set goals to help you do that. So we have our own little B Corp team internally and making sure that we, in 3 years' time from 2020, make sure we get that B Corp is really important to us, obviously.

That had to completely change your filter in terms of how you view products, how your whole team views products and production and everything moving forward.

What a huge transition for a company. It's big. I mean, there's still times where we talk to clients where they mention sustainability and they don't necessarily know what it means to They'll talk about, hey, we need to be sustainable, but like, do you have anything organic? And it's like, you know, that's only part of it, but like you're doing an influencer mailer, which we need to make sure that influencer mailer is something that is going to be a leave behind, that that influencer is going to use it, that maybe it has limited waste associated with it. All of those things go into our, just our overall thought process, not necessarily B Corp, but thinking sustainable is definitely something that all of our employees do.

Yeah, it's cool. Let's talk about HNS Meta because this is something that a lot of folks are gonna wanna know about. You recently launched HNS Meta. It's an end-to-end solution for brands looking to make waves in the ever-adapting meta world. Potential virtual products and experiences include 3D animation and assets for NFTs, incentivized gifts with purchase for in-person events and tangible goods, virtual gallery showrooms, meta world community management, and more.

What led to this? Okay, I've been dabbling in the NFT space, the metaverse, for the past year or so on my personal life. And coming into 2022, I talk about building brand equity this year. It's no longer that we can continue doing the same thing. It has been very hard to be a CEO of a company, which I don't think enough CEOs talk about. It is very hard because you have you don't have a lot of people to talk to that are, can kind of talk about some of the things that you go through as a CEO. You have 60+ people that rely on the success of literally what you're building here with them, but like, it's, you're the CEO. So there's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of burnout that people had over the years. There's a lot of looking at how we can improve our process over the years. There's a lot of people that work extremely hard at my company that and no fault to them, feel as though like, hey, I've been here 4 years and change is coming, but like, when is change coming? And, and I want to make sure that people like start seeing things versus hearing things, for lack of better words. And it is, it's still hard. This year has been, I mean, it's only 6 weeks in, but it's been challenging. And I want to make sure that Harper and Scott gets credit. I don't think Harper and Scott gets enough credit out in in the world of business because people don't know about us. And so how can we do things that build that brand equity like we're doing with the Labs division, where it's leveraging our core business to create new opportunities for our team to either be more sticky in companies or to be more innovative? And I think it was a Friday afternoon in early January, and I was like feeling very down on myself as a CEO, just very I don't even want to use the word burned out. I just felt like, I felt like what some of my employees feel like every day where it's like, I work really hard that day and like, what do I have to show for it? Sometimes, you know, you work really hard and a product doesn't go through. We talk about the successes, but there's many failures also that lead to those successes. So I locked myself in this office over the weekend and I just spent all weekend thinking about it. And I was like, what can we do that leverages our core, that can add a lot of brand equity to make us more sticky. We're launching Harper and Scott Meta early next week. And I put together a PowerPoint presentation over the weekend to pitch to my leadership team on Tuesday. And I get too excited about things sometimes. So I immediately called one of our biggest clients on Monday morning at 9:00 AM. And I was like, we're launching Harper and Scott Meta. I can't wait to tell you about it. And it does make complete sense because we make tangible products. We actually don't charge for creative on that side of the business. Because we want to sell the product. And so we have really strong 3D designers. We know we have some people internally that are, I would call them NFT experts, and we could take our client's brand from the tangible space and replicate it in the digital world, not just for a new revenue stream for them, but a lot of what we work on are loyalty programs and to build that community for them or to help grow that community in the digital sphere was really impactful. And so when I spoke to that company on Monday morning at 9:00 AM, They said, "You're the third agency in the last two weeks that pitched us on an NFT project." And they said, "If we do this, we would do it with you guys because it makes sense because you're already doing the t-shirt for us. So having that one-for-one copy in the metasphere," in this case it was Decentraland, "makes complete sense." And then I pitched our executive team on Tuesday and we started building from there. But yeah, it's awesome.

I really do love The meta, what we're building on that meta side. A couple of things I've learned from you, one very valuable lessons. One is that how you look at your team and the assets that you have, because we are attracting top talent and we need to make sure we're maximizing that talent. That's a great, that's a great thing that you did. Something else that you said in a previous interview that I loved, you deflected the word pivot, but you talk about, you know, as a company who's into big name collabs, who got into PPE, who creates brand activations, who created a consumer product line, who now launches an agency in the metaverse, you don't call these pivots. You consider them just an extension of this brand expression or work extension of who you are. I think that's a really important distinction and something we all can learn from.

Has that been a lesson for you too, as you look back and piece that together? Yeah, I think that— I think when I say that, you know, sometimes we don't get enough respect as a company, it goes to a lot of these ideas that we have. People think of us as like, oh, you're just doing something else tomorrow, you're just doing something else tomorrow. And, and it's not, it's not something else. It's the exact same thing, just in a different vertical, but we're leveraging the exact same people. So there's no reason why we can't launch Harper and Scott Meta. We didn't have to hire one new person for this team. It made the people that are joining this team really super excited and reinvigorated back, passionate about bringing these new ideas. It will help us as we talk to all of these clients. We've already had about 8 meetings and a few more next week with different brands. We want to take it a little slow with them, but it's as simple as you're selling t-shirts, backpacks, and hats in your franchise. Let's make those same t-shirts, backpacks, and hats on Decentraland Marketplace, and we'll have a big party. Harper Scott's building this amazing house in the fashion district of the metaverse that we're building internally. We didn't have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to build it. We're building that internally, and we could reskin it, and you could have let's say Justin Bieber perform there and get all your guests there. And we could give those people that attended this proof of attendance protocol, which I love. It's free to give that to them. But every time I open up my NFT wallet, I look at the brands that I have their POAPs of, their proof of attendance protocols. So it ties me back to the brands that I love so much. Yeah. And then there's other things that we're doing, like maybe reskinning the Harper Scott house into one of our clients' to showcase their community what's coming down the pipe for some of these products that we're building. We can have different vending machines that sell jeans, for instance, for a large retailer, or if we're working with a consumer product company to do a full-scale NFT project. And for that, definitely getting outside consultants involved, like the developer, for instance, is not an in-house person, but we would be managing those, that person or that team from our side with our 3D designers that we already have on staff.

It's not as big a stretch as people think. I mean, you look at Fortnite, Balenciaga are doing outfits in the metaverse.

I mean, that's what we do in the physical tangible world, so it's not as big a stretch. My thing is that this is a no-brainer. Most companies will be doing this. Every day you look at another brand that's going in that space. Every day you look at like, "Oh, metaverse real estate's super expensive," or, "It's going up." This is going to happen. My goal was I wanted us to be there first. I wanted to rush that out there over the weekend and get out because everybody's going to be doing this. But if Harper Scott's the first, we become the expert, we become the early adopter. It's a no-brainer for our clients to go to Harper Scott versus going to the 10,000 other companies that want to be doing what we're doing.

So yeah, it was really important to rush that as quickly as possible. That's cool.

Let's learn a little bit about Michael. What do you enjoy doing when you're not running Harper Scott? I have an amazing family. I have 3 kids and a wife and a dog actually. So as much time as I can spend with them when I'm not working is really fun for me. Traveling is fantastic too. And I am a part of some leadership organizations that I get an escape from that. And I talk about how hard it is being a CEO because you don't have other people to commiserate with or talk about successes with and joining some of those is great. I'm actually on a panel today at 5 o'clock. There's about 110 people that are joining and the topic is the metasphere. So I enjoy doing that. I enjoy representing Harper Scott in ways like being on podcasts and talking about all of the amazing talent at Harper Scott because I don't think they get enough credit, not just me or the brand or the company, but the people that work here.

I want them to get the credit that they do. Be set up for success with what they do after Harper and Scott. Last question, speak to that younger Michael Scott Cohen from 2010 who hasn't made a sale in 6 months. And if you were to have coffee with him, what would you say to encourage him?

What would you, would you encourage him to do differently? Take bigger risks sooner, be more cautious? What would you say? I swear I had this conversation with a salesperson yesterday that's been here for 7 months and maybe had one small sale. And it's— you put so much pressure as a salesperson on yourself to make that sale, to hurry up and get that, generate that income. But if you believe in the process and you believe in what you're doing, then the money will follow. And I think that for him in particular, when I was talking to him, it's like, nobody's firing you. Like, stop putting pressure on yourself. I took 6 or 7 months to make my first paycheck and Yeah, not expecting that. Like, look at what the company is doing. We're giving you all the proper resources. If you do make a sale, and you will soon, that client's going to feel like amazing that they work with Harper and Scott, and you're going to get a lot of credit, not just because of the money is coming, but because the person you bring in here is going to say, holy cow, that was amazing. I'm so happy I took that leap and worked with you guys on that project. But I think it's the pressure. I say that, but I don't put it into practice. I've always put pressure on myself and I wanted to get away from that.

And I envy the people that are a lot more chill than me, but, uh, maybe one day I can, I can sit back and enjoy that.

Thanks for your time, man.

I really appreciate it.

And so much respect for you and your brand, and so many folks in the community, uh, look up to you guys. So thank you for leading the way.

I appreciate it.

It was really great chatting with you, and hopefully we can keep in touch. Let's do it. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkewCast.

Be sure to keep up with our latest content content by subscribing to SKUcast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.