In this episode of the Authors Unite Show, host Tyler Wagner interviews Dr. James Richardson, a cultural anthropologist turned business strategist and author of Ramping Your Brand. Richardson recounts his career shift from academia to market research, where he studied emerging health‑and‑wellness trends for a Seattle firm and worked with early‑stage consumer brands such as KIND Bar, Skinny Pop, and Vida Coco. He explains how he identified a niche of “weird within the weird” brands that achieved rapid, exponential growth through unconventional product design and low‑cost field marketing. The conversation dives deep into the KIND Bar case study, covering the brand’s simple, one‑syllable name, its trail‑mix‑based product formulation, a factory R&D breakthrough that enabled a rectangular bar, and a sampling‑to‑purchase conversion rate of 98 %. Richardson highlights the early use of yoga‑teacher brand ambassadors, the shift from field‑marketing events to Instagram influencers, and why disciplined, patient growth beats short‑term hype. He also shares practical branding advice—favoring short, generic‑positive names without heavy connotations—and signals of mainstream adoption, such as placement in vending machines and gas‑station outlets. The interview concludes with details on where to buy his book (Amazon, $9.99 paperback, $4.99 Kindle) and how to engage his consultancy, Premium Growth Solutions (premiumgrowthsolutions.com).
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All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Authors Unite show. Today we have Dr. James Richardson with us. So welcome to the show, man.
Hey, thanks for having me, Tyler Wagner.
Of course, grateful to have you here. So if you can start us off, just tell us a little bit more about you and what you do.
Yeah, so I'm a cultural anthropologist turned business strategist. I work with fast-growing early-stage consumer brands now, and I try to help them tap into the most powerful human behavior possible so they can accelerate their growth.
Okay, how did you— I'm curious, how did you like realize that genius, or like, what, what got you started in doing that?
Uh, in working with founders, you mean?
Yeah, or I guess basically what you said. I haven't heard it like worded that way before, so I guess what did you do prior to helping? Like, I'm assuming this is something I guess you did for your own company and then you started to help others with it.
So I My journey is a little weird because I was on the academic track until about 2003, and then I jumped off the train.
I dropped out of college, so I like it.
I did get my degree. I closed on the degree, but I didn't want to stay in academia, so I went into market research, and I happened to join a company in Seattle that was a specialist in emerging health and wellness trends. Which a lot of them are mainstream now, but back then in 2003, they're pretty weird. And, uh, my, like, my first client was Whole Foods when it was a third the size it is now. So, uh, you know, I'm a, you know, cultural anthropologists are, uh, we are actually notorious, I think, in academia for studying weird stuff.
Um, I like that though.
So And that started with tribal studies, right, in the early 20th century with Margaret Mead and all these folks who are— some of whom are actually famous. But so— and I sort of come from that cloth, I guess. So I studied my own version of a marginalized community in southern India for my graduate work. But anyway, so when I came— when I left academia, I wanted to do something that would use my brain. And I was attracted to this company because they were studying weird, you know, our version of weird at the time, which was natural organic foods, which I didn't even eat. Yeah, I really didn't. You know, to me, Whole Foods was a place you got pretty flowers when you were going, you know, for a date or something.
Yeah, back then.
I had no interest in the food there.
Yeah.
So I, what happened is that over about 15 years at that company, I developed some specialization in early stage brands and how they were in a particularly elite group of them that I wrote my book about. And some of them are now famous, like Kind Bar and Skinny Pop and—
Oh yeah, yeah, Kind Bar for sure. Yeah, I eat that.
The leading coconut water brand, Vida Coco.
Yeah.
And there's many, many others. There's about 100 of them, uh, in this little group. So follow the train of thought here. So, you know, the guy who studies weird, you know, joins a market research firm to study weird behavior that's growing, and then we have to explain it to our big clients. And then what happened is on the way I developed, through some studies we did for big companies, an expertise in a subset of weird, so the weird within the weird, and that's the exponentially growing brands like Kindbar that came out of nowhere, surprised everybody, uh, and they did it through non-traditional marketing techniques and non-traditional product design in the industry as well. That was a big part of it. So that case study set ended up inspiring me to quit I had other reasons to quit, but that really was— it gave me the confidence to leave my executive position at this firm and go out and help founders directly. And so I spent a few years screwing around with that to learn more about where in the early-stage universe I could be of use. When I figured that out, I wrote the book.
Got it.
And here I am. So the book is about— Ramping Your Brand is about the best practices that I learned mathematically isolating brands like KindBar that went from $0 to $100 million in 7 to 10 years or less. And that, that's actually really slow from the standard of Wall Street, but it's actually insanely fast by the standards of the average early-stage company which doesn't have money. And doesn't have an ability to raise it either, or they just don't have very ambitious founders. So it's like the top 10% of the early-stage brands you see at a place like Whole Foods when you walk around their aisles. In those aisles, 10% of those brands are growing exponentially. They're doubling or more every year. And those are going to be the next KIND Bar. 90% of what you're seeing there is just— it'll either be gone, out of business, or just replaced. Within a couple of years.
Where's Kindbar at now? Because I would imagine it's way over $100 million now, isn't it?
Yeah, it's a billion-dollar business now.
Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, because they're like— I eat them occasionally, but they're pretty much in every grocery store, at least where I live. They're everywhere. So I was like, I think just in Miami alone, they're at least doing $10 million. I don't know.
They're in a healthy chunk of vending machines. Yeah, that's the final— I mean, if you want to understand whether a trend, whether something is true, totally mainstream, I always point to gas stations. But much better metric is vending machines.
Like, yeah, they're in gas. Yeah, you're right. If they make it to the vending machine, that's even like—
because Frito-Lay controls like half the vending machine snack sales in the US.
So interesting.
There's a lot of— there's not a lot of room left. So you have to be quite You have to make a big case to that cranky vending guy that you should get a slot.
Let's use KIND as the example. Like, can you walk us through— I know you touch on this in your book, but can you walk us through like the marketing techniques they use? Like, do you— and I'm just curious from a branding standpoint, like the, the name KIND, I, I'm assuming obviously the name I think was part of the strategy. So Can you walk us through how they did that?
Yeah, I mean, I think that Dan, I know, has talked publicly, and I have not worked with him, just to be clear. But off the public record, it was very clear that he had an ulterior motive building the business because he has a philanthropy he wants to fund. And that was part of his inspiration. I wouldn't say Dan, he's not a, He's not, he's not like Clif Bar's founder, Gary Erickson, who like was literally an amateur athlete. And so he developed the product for his mountain bike rides. End of story. Um, Dan is not, he didn't develop this because he had a particular passion in the category, um, that I'm aware of. He did a much more analytical approach to building this thing. And I think it actually kind of helped him. Because he didn't over-design it. Yeah, he didn't. It's— I call— I, I called it, you know, for years I called it, you know, trail mix as a rectangle, right? It's like trail mix, but you don't have to get your hands dirty and you have to dig your hand into a bag because that's all it is. I mean, there's really nothing in it, in any of their bars, that wasn't already in a trail mix bag somewhere. So the whole— the proposition's super easy, uh, very few— there's no reason not to try KIND Bar once you know about it. And that was their big advantage. Was that they had like a 98% conversion rate when they sampled it at events out of the store. 98% of those people would go out and buy one when they measured it, at least once.
Yeah.
And a substantial percentage become heavy repeat buyers. So he had a very simple design. It was in, in a world at that time when nutrition bars were really like these processed slabs. Yeah, like Clif Bar, and they call them slap bars, and they're just endless list of ingredients. Now, Cliff's ingredient list was quote unquote, "All natural." But I mean, it was full of weirdness, fractionated soy particles and all sorts of bizarres. Whereas, you know, KIND was almost like 20 years ahead of its time. It was just trail mix. It was like real food, right? What he figured out was clever. He figured out an R&D process that no one had figured out. So that actually was the secret, was actually literally the factory R&D to produce these things, 'cause it's not easy at all. To take trail mix and glue it into a rectangle. It sounds really easy.
Yeah, right?
But it— no. And I have a feeling it had been shot down already in the big food industry for production-level reasons. Like, look, we'd have to retool our whole factory. We're not doing that. Next concept. But the brand name is— I mean, people look back on the brand name as really powerful. I think what's powerful about it is it's just simple. It was one syllable, everyone knows the word. When you take common words like that, that are sort of generic but positive, they end up becoming what I call like these empty vessels of meaning. So even though kind has very strong denotations and even connotations of philanthropy in American society, if you put it on a package, it's going to start— it's it's almost gonna be like a blank slate of sort of generic positivity. And that was really smart because he can then fill it with these other meanings of the user experience. And that's what I tell people to do. If you're gonna overthink your trademark, just make it simple, make it not have too much powerful meaning and certainly no loaded meaning. And I think it's kind of hard, even though kind, you could argue is moralistic, it really isn't. I mean, who the hell's gonna oppose it? No, I don't want kindness. So I mean, even the most irascible Grinch is going to say yes to kind, at least when asked, right, in public. So they may actually be a jerk, but they'll still vote for kind. So it was kind of a no-brainer. Easy to share the name. That helps people when they're building a business that doesn't have even— has what we call spotty distribution, like it's at It's at one grocery chain, not the other in town, you know? And this is how all these businesses start. So you need a name brand, need a trademark name that's going to be easy for people to repeat. So if you go to like Expo West when it starts up again, you'll see all these brands, and some of them literally have names that are like phrases. And those are, I swear, Tyler, those are the ones that are the most moralistic and annoying, you know? The Better Choice, and things like that. Yeah, it's just like in your face. Um, they're not— they're complicated, they're not easy to remember, they're generic. Um, whereas I think he had a combination of a pack design and a product that was sort of, wow, someone should have done this before, right? Um, but to your earlier question, what he did, what was genius, he and his team— and I— it wasn't even— these were not ideas that he came up with, and that's I mean, you know, he's very much an open-minded leader. He will follow what's working. He doesn't— he's not dogmatic. Yeah, that's really important when you're starting off doing something innovative because you don't really know. You don't really know till you get it out there and start selling it what the market's going to teach you that you need to incorporate back into your operations. And that's what I work with clients on. That's what I wrote the book on, was, you know, get out there and iterate, learn in the first couple of years. Don't just hit the gas. Figure out your playbook that's going to get you a whole bunch of rabid fans that are buying cases and cases of your product. So what did KIND do? Well, they found out early on that yoga teachers in the big cities had discovered KIND at Whole Foods. And they were already advocating for it to their membership. And at that time, it was middle-aged baby boomer females.
Mm-hmm.
They were signing up for yoga in droves. They were really into weight management at a critical point in their lives. So here was this low-calorie snack full of protein, and it didn't have a lot of sugar, like 5 grams of sugar in it. But the weird thing is, tastes like a candy bar. Like, it's got just enough chocolate on the bottom. It doesn't bring a lot of sugar, but it brings a lot of sweetness. And so you got this candy bar snack thing that's like a distraction, and it allows you to like coast towards a meal and avoid other snacks. So it was perfectly timed in American history with this group of women who was big, big group of women, um, were educated, they were going to yoga, uh, and so what happened was that they caught on that these were some early unpaid advocates. And you know what they did? They hired them. So they started going all over the country. They hired yoga teachers to be part-time paid ambassadors. So who was staffing their event, their event tables at marathons and all these other places where kinds slowly started to show up? It was a bunch of yoga teachers. Not exclusively, but heavily. So they— and because this was the first— this was a workforce back in the mid-2000s. The mid-aughts, that it's one of the first workforces of baby boomer women who like quit corporate America and like, screw this, my husband makes enough money, screw this, I'm not doing this anymore, um, I love yoga, I'm gonna teach yoga and then I'll find other sources of income, right? So they were already ready, they're like gig workers at the time, before Uber, before any of this. So they're like super, and they're super well-educated, well-spoken gig workers. So, you know, they're actually pretty good at verbal persuasion, right? So they would hawk it to their studios to their students, and then they would get paid to run the KIND booth. And the beauty was that they had come to KIND before and they already loved it, so you were just paying them to channel the passion, not fake it.
Yes, yeah.
They're not actors, they're just fans who didn't want their time to be undervalued. So it's really brilliant strategy, and it still works today. But the challenge is you've got to— you have to have systems in place to meet your fans and give a crap. If you don't, you go down this weird— well, the problem is social media. So what happened was Instagram took over about 6 to 8 years ago. It took over the brand ambassador role from this field marketing, out-of-store event, and a lot of companies in the early stage They just feel like it's easier to go, go to an influencer agency and get a whole bunch of models on Instagram to talk up their brand, except that there's no evidence it works systematically. But there's systematic evidence that if you show up at a table at an event which is relevant to, like, Kind Bar, your brand, and then you hand free samples, X percentage will convert in retail and buy your product within days.
Yeah, interesting.
So that's a proven model, but then everyone got distracted by Instagram influencing. Why? Because with a credit card, I can start that today. It's this impatience, Tyler, whereas Dan wasn't building a business for the long term to fund a philanthropic foundation. And I've talked about it in the press before, it's sort of like the patient guys who are disciplined always win this game. And they win, they win huge.
Yeah, I think in every game almost.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's true with Apple Computer. I mean, Apple Computer was a joke for most of the '90s. I remember throwing my Apple laptop in the trash in 1993 because it was a piece of crap.
I was 2 years old.
I was so disgusted with the brand, I was like, I'm done.
They've come a long way. Now, are you using Apple product right now? Yeah, I'm using it. Yeah, yeah, I'm Um, well, let's do this. Um, tell us where the people can get the book and, and your website and everything so people know. Um, and then in the future, uh, maybe what we can do is, uh, is schedule a longer time to really dive in. But I think this was a good kind of introduction. Um, and we did— we covered KIND, and then obviously your book is going to cover way more in detail of how to do this. So I'll let you—
yeah. Well, I would encourage people to go to amazon.com, type Ramping Your Brand right in there, and it's very well indexed. So, uh, go there if you want to buy a copy right now. Um, the day this airs, it'll be on sale, uh, on my discount, $9.99 paperback and $4.99 Kindle. Um, and if you're interested in what I do, go to, uh, premiumgrowthsolutions.com, and you can learn about my, uh, my client base and all the crazy things I do.
