Brit Morin wants to be the new Queen of Makers.
To stake her claim, she's positioning herself -- and her self-branded startup Brit + Co -- squarely at the intersection of DIY and tech. Brit + Co, which was recently backed by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and New York’s Lerer Ventures, is harnessing technology already present in our everyday lives, in an effort to streamline the creative process. The company has a very different focus than DIY technology outfits like Adafruit Industries, which aim to make computing and coding more accessible to the masses.
Brit + Co is basically a modern, mobile, Silicon Valley-fied version of Real Simple or other DIY publications. It's a lifestyle service that's part blog, part commerce site, and part social club. It promises to bring out your latent creativity by teaching you how to make decorative terrariums, painted sandals, or how to use apps to improve your cooking or gardening chops, all while showing pretty pictures of cool products to lure you to consume.
Plus, she's putting her face front and center to offer consumers -- and the brands she represents -- a more personal, friendly experience. It's all in the name of personality driven, social commerce.
Morin recently stopped by our offices to discuss how her new company fits into the new age of social advertising and why building a community on and offline is crucial for businesses nowadays, and to respond to comments that her company's early success is largely the result of whom she married.
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Wired: __What was your inspiration for Brit + Co?
__Brit Morin: __I left Google after four years of working on Google Maps, search, and Google TV as a product marketing manager. I knew I wanted to do something on my own. I took a few months off and found myself naturally gravitating towards making things. This was a teenage passion of mine. I realized technology is really inspiring people to want to create with their hands again and also to help make [that process] much more efficient. I didn’t see anyone leading that market forward so I figured why not try to build a company around that.
__Wired: __Some have said that you’ve only gotten the support and funding you have because you’re married to Dave Morin of Path. What do you say to that? Do you think people would be asking the same question if you were a man?
__Morin: __I’m a supporter of female entrepreneurs. I don’t feel like a victim, and I try to not think of myself as one. I would say that no VC would invest in a company that doesn’t have successful growth metrics and a solid revenue plan. If the VC did, they would be pretty dumb.
__Wired: __ So why are investors like Marissa Mayer giving you millions of dollars? What’s Brit + Co all about?
__Morin: __Our mission is to inspire and enable people to create. We started with just me and one other person, and we’ve grown to a team of 16. We've started seeing our traffic tripling on mobile, month over month. Mobile is where 60 percent of our traffic is coming from. Users on mobile are coming back once every couple of days, so they’re super engaged there. Everything we’re doing, we’re trying to design with mobile first.
I think of us as a new media company that’s really [about] content, commerce, community. We’ve led with content first because that’s really how we inspire people and what gets shared around the web. This year has really been all about community and thinking about this network of users and creative makers –- those with expertise in the kitchen, craft rooms, behind the computer, in front of a canvas -- who are all these people and how can we help empower them.
We’re continuing to beef up our social platforms and to bring in makers from outside Brit + Co. We’re also going out to meet them on their turf across the country and hosting events. The maker movement is a largely offline activity. It’s important for us to balance the online and offline network when it comes to building that community. We’re not really going to know how our users feel and what challenges they have unless we’re talking to them in person and getting them to talk to each other.
__Wired: __Did that approach play into your decision to make Brit + Co a personality-driven company?
__Morin: __I think it’s really helped us leverage the brand in terms of distribution and authenticity. So much of what we’re doing is about teaching people how to do and make things and a teacher is a person, not a thing.
__Wired: __How do you approach the relationship between retail and publishing? E-commerce sites like Gilt, for example, have also tried their hand at editorial content with less than stellar results.
__Morin: __Some people approach it commerce first and then move to content and then maybe community. We think of it as content first, then community and commerce is the last piece. We believe in spending at least a year focusing on each one of those initiatives because we really want to get it right. We want it to be authentic. We want to make sure the way we’re connecting those three elements is going to feel natural and organic to our users. Gilt started with commerce and was trying to blend content into that. I think it’s a little awkward if you go that direction because users know you really just want to sell them something. Whereas we have approached things content first.
__Wired: __How do you make money on content?
__Morin: __Yeah, the world is constantly moving away from display. Branded content does the best for us, meaning that if Velcro sends us a bunch of Velcro and says figure out what to do with this that’s new and young and fresh, we would be able to do that. They’re getting content they can use within their own ecosystem, plus we’ll use it and distribute it across all of our channels as well. It’s more about packaging advertising than doing a one-off display campaign. That’s where the whole advertising world is shifting anyway. We’re a valuable source of advertising for them.
__Wired: __So it's the new, social age of user-generated product placement.
__Morin: __Absolutely, and of course we disclose it. It’s not hidden in any of our content. Every month we also do something called a ParDIY -- DIY parties, basically. We send out Brit Kits, which are projects that get packaged up into a box of materials so you can recreate them at home. We’ve found ambassadors across the country who want to host these events every month and invite 10 or 20 of their friends to make together.
__Wired: __Is this a subscription-based model?
__Morin: __It’s not. They don’t pay for it at all. We have brands sponsor that. We insert some of their products into the packages. We might create a kit around those products. It gets the brand’s products in the hands of actual users. It’s a sampling program. We’re basically enabling these people across the country to have free parties. We often send them free party decor. We send them tips on how to host their parties. It’s all incorporated into things that are really fun and interesting for them. And they’re asking to be a part of it. We have a waitlist of people wanting to do this. We ask that all the attendees at the party are Tweeting and Instagramming and are spreading all of this stuff socially so it goes viral as well.
__Wired: __So companies are paying you for your distribution channels?
__Morin: __The distribution and to get feedback from people across the country.
__Wired: __What kind of feedback do companies want back?
__Morin: __Most brands want to see their products used in creative ways. So to use the Velcro example again, we have an upcoming kit with them and they want to know how people are using this material that’s so obscure and generic in creative ways. We appeal to millennials and especially to millennial women. That’s a really hard group for advertisers to reach. They want an authentic relationship with that group of people.
__Wired: __What if I want to do some of the projects, but don’t want to host a party or use my social feeds to advertise a company’s products?
__Morin: __If you don’t want to host a party, you can pay twenty bucks a month and get a kit to do on your own. We started the parties because we saw people buying multiple kits of the same thing. They bought them to do with their friends. It’s just a natural extension of what we saw happening in the data. We figured out a way to get it sponsored.
__Wired: __How do you choose your ambassadors to make sure you can deliver the distribution companies are looking for?
__Morin: __When people are applying to be a host or a hostess, we’re asking, ‘Do you have a blog? What’s your twitter feed?’ We’re trying to see what kind of influence they have across the web or locally in their communities. A lot of these people already have ongoing monthly craft nights or maker nights, and so they’re really connected in their local communities. Sometimes that’s more powerful than having a big influence on the web because they’re influencing their towns.
We have a couple of people on the team who are constantly keeping in touch with our community members offline and online. They try to measure their impact. Online is much easier than offline. We’ve only been doing this for two months so it’s really new for us. We’ll continue to learn as it evolves.
Within the engineering team, we also have a couple of folks who just focus on growth. They’re constantly looking at data and metrics and trying to analyze why this post did better than that one. Which got Pinned more? We’re looking at all these different metrics across all of our social feeds, our site, our app -- what are engagement trends like.
__Wired: __What advice would you have for other young entrepreneurs?
__Morin: __Really take the time to focus on finding your voice and making sure that whatever you’re creating is of high quality and is useful for people in their everyday lives. That was one of my biggest lessons [while working] at Apple. The Apple mentality is really about creating focus, quality and a voice that people understand and can relate to.
