Tag: celebrity

Michelle Pfeiffer on her brand “Henry Rose”

Kim Sheehan on

Day 4 of the Fast Company Festival of Innovation featured actress and entrepreneur Michelle Pfeiffer’s talk on how beauty products can be sustainable. Her line of fragrance is called Henry Rose, and she spent a decade creating a line of luxury fragrances with fully transparent ingredients that are safe, sustainable, non toxic, and humanely sourced. She now has seven fragrances in the line.

She started thinking about the line when her children were born, and she noticed that many products did not contain full ingredient lists. She examined the “Skin Deep” database where she found she could check ingredients of products she was using and look for alternatives. She noted that many fragrances contributed to high toxicity rates, given the total lack of transparency in reporting about fragrance ingredients—a brand can say that one of their ingredients is ‘fragrance’ and no additional information about the make up of the fragrance needs to be provided.

No major beauty company would do a partnership with her. She put the product on hold for several years, and then saw that there was more of an interest in ingredient transparency for fragrances. She met with a company called IFF, which introduced her to a group called Cradle to Cradle, which certifies products based on lifecycle assessment.

Most fragrances have over 3000 ingredients they can choose from. For Pfeiffer’s products, she could only choose from about 250 because she was only sourcing fragrances with transparent ingredient lists.Since the brand has launched, it has won an Allure Best of Beauty award along with multiple other awards.

She prefers the term ‘safe beauty’ to ‘clean beauty’ or ‘natural beauty’ as there is no real standard for ‘clean’ or ‘natural’. Safe, to her, makes a specific promise—the brand is not dangerous. It takes away a worry from people’s lives. People shouldn’t have to choose quality over safety.

She’s the founder of the brand, but she’s not the face of the brand. She wanted the brand to be credible on its own, without a ‘celebrity endorsement.’ She promotes the brand on Instagram. She tries to be authentic true to herself and her values, and realizes that any content that she posts could be construed as political content (e.g. ‘wear a mask’). The posts are really pretty:

Learn more about Henry Rose here!

Chip and Joanna Gaines on authenticity, beauty, and a return to simpler times.

Kim Sheehan on


Day 3 of the Fast Company Festival of Innovation featured Chip and Joanna Gaines–Founders of Magnolia, a home and lifestyle brand and the soon-to-be launched Magnolia Network. They became famous through their show ‘Fixer Upper’ on HGTV.

They are launching the Magnolia Network as a joint channel with the Discovery Network. The Gaineses wanted to start a network because they love challenges, they love storytelling, and they found that their own expertise (contracting and small business/retail) translated well into developing content. The network grew out of the success of the magazine and all the things that the magazine could do. The stories didn’t have to include Chip and Joanna as the ‘centerpieces’ but the curated stories of homes and home improvements would be the center. Home improvement, food, decorating, kids programming—a variety of types of programs will be presented.

Television and magazines are kind of ‘old fashioned’ ways to tell stories—linear and non-digital. They wanted the value of being able to physically touch the magazine—and there’s a limited number of ads so the reader doesn’t have to page through lots of ads to get to the stories. The network will be the same. They want the network shows to be ‘appointment television’ that families can watch together—highly meaningful and highly authentic.

The shows on the Magnolia Network will be ‘season long’ and each program will have multiple episodes. They reached out to people they’ve read about but didn’t know personally and ask them to be on the network—they said about 2/3 of the people they reached out to said no thank you! The people who agreed are ‘dreamers and risk takers’ who can motivate others to go out and take risks as well. The stars of the shows are diverse, and inclusivity is important to them because they believe everyone deserves a seat at the table. Diverse talent brings a diverse group of experiences to the network. It will be a ‘beautiful tapestry…telling beautiful stories.’ Chip said that our country is more divided than ever, and the network can try to bring people together. Different opinions make us all better, our lives more richer, and helps us see lifestyles and viewpoints that many people may not have seen. This is a way we can develop a new reality for the future—the Magnolia Network will bring a variety of perspectives to their audience.

Authentic stories are going to resonate with a variety of audiences—from young adults to their grandparents and great grandparents. Everyone should feel welcome. Every program won’t appeal to everyone—but there will be something for everyone during the programming day.

Basically, they are taking an existing Discover channel (the DIY channel) and changing to the Magnolia Network. They are ‘honoring’ the legacy of the DIY network and our working with existing DIY Channel audiences to make sure that content for them will still be available.

Chip and Joanna’s identity as small business owners has become their platform for growth. Their businesses taught them they are always evolving as a business and that they personally are evolving as people. It also taught them that they have an opportunity to create beauty—not only beautiful buildings, but beautiful moments when people are connecting with one another.

The culture of Magnolia focuses on a belief that dreams can come true—and that as a company, as a tight knit community and family, they can work together to make dreams come true. They want to learn, they want to try new things, they want to take risks, and they want to work hard and do work that really matters.

The secret to their relationship? Chip says that they are kind to one another, first and foremost. That transfers to their company—they lead with kindness. Kindness evolves into mutual respect, which causes teams to rise to new heights. Kindness is a fundamental value that some people are naturally drawn to, and some people may have trouble with this, as they think kindness equates with weakness. Chip and Joanna believe that kindness leads to strength.

Why Waco? They are impressed by the resilience of Waco. Waco had to deal with lots of negative things, both natural and man-made, and they both believe in the promise of Waco and how Waco can be a center for change in the world.

What are they most proud of?
1. The way that they handle adversity—they always put kindness at the center.
2. Innovation for innovation’s sake may not be always the best strategy—values of family, community and kindness are always important and shouldn’t be sacrificed in the name of innovation.
3. Simpler ways of life and innovation can live side by side, but must be complimentary.
4. The way they always look for hope and beauty.
5. Shiplap

Chatting with Tommy Hilfiger about a vision for a better fashion industry

Kim Sheehan on

Day 2 of Fast Company’s Festival of Innovation–Innovation for Good had me (and thousands of my close friends) hearing from Tommy Hilfiger, the fashion designer.

Tommy Hilfiger is on the left, an editor for Fast Company is on the right.

Tommy Hilfiger defines American style. The brand has worked on becoming more sustainable and innovative. The pandemic and BLM led them to think about how they operate, and they realized they needed to change their strategy.

Covid at first made them change to short term thinking, focusing on associate health and well being and cash flow. The brand then changed to midterm recovery: how do they get out of crisis and build back the business? Sustainability became even more important. The brand did not slow down investment in sustainability—now they are launching a new sustainability strategy.

In September, they announced their ‘make it possible’ strategy for the next ten years. Co-creation process with 100 of associates. Circularity and inclusivity: the brand wants to be a brand that wastes nothing and welcomes all. These two pillars will drive everything they do.

• They have many new styles using organic cotton, sustainable cotton, and low impact finishing techniques.
• Tommy For Life—resale market for used Tommy Hilfiger clothes
• Washing denim pollutes ocean and lakes and streams with poison as indigo dye goes into system and hangs around. They figured out a way to wash denim without water. The denim is broken down (softened and colored) with laser treatments!
• Use fewer chemicals, water and energy in manufacturing.
• On-demand manufacturing—the goal is to have no inventory.
• Using all solar power in their plant in the Netherlands.
• 3D digital design—designs are all done on computer, not wasting time, money, logistics, emissions, materials

Tommy believes that if his company takes the lead on this, other companies will follow.

They are also focused on creating an inclusive workspace and looking after workers’ rights. Workers will have stronger voices in the company. They are also reintroducing “People’s Place”, a platform that the brand will use to bring in BIPOC to mentor them and tap into the Hilfiger network and collaborate with them.

My take–this company says the right things. It has a history of being on the cutting edge, particularly in the digital space. They have made some strides to be more sustainable, and if they can keep up the momentum and show a profit they will be a market leader in sustainability. Cotton is always a problematic fabric, so we’ll see how the continued use of that fabric affects their sustainability.

I’m not as familiar with issues of diversity and inclusion in the fashion industry—my take was that this is one of the more diverse industries but I may be wrong. I’ll do a bit more digging on this aspect and watch to see how they build a better company in this area.

Fast Company Festival of Innovation: Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey

Kim Sheehan on

The Fast Company Innovation Festival kicked off Monday morning with an interview with Robert Downey Junior and his wife Susan Downey. Together, they run “Team Downey”, a production company and the “Footprint Coalition” , a non profit designed to help use technology at scale to save our planet. The conversation focused on both what makes a successful story, and what makes a successful company. While they didn’t talk about brands directly, in this post I will interpret some of what they said in the context of brands today.

In terms of storytelling, the questions that the Downeys ask are as relevant to brands as they are to movie blockbusters. First, you must ask -why should the audience care? What in the story is relevant to the audience today? Clearly, many brands talk about social issues because people care about them today, and want brands to care about them too. Of course, you can’t just stop there.

The story needs to be authentic, and the Downeys talked about how audiences want to feel like they are in the place and the time period when the story is told as an example of authenticity. They referred to their HBO series, Perry Mason, as an example of having an authentic time and place. For brands, this suggests that production choices can help contribute to authenticity.

Stories also need to have creative risk taking, and storytellers need to understand how the risk they take can lead to a great story. For brands, I think this means not relying on traditional tricks that advertisers use, and finding interesting new ways to talk about themselves. It means moving beyond what consumers might traditionally expect for a brand message.

Finally, stories need to give audiences heroes and other characters they can empathize with. The Downeys suggested that these people will create long term connection between audiences and stories.

All these points taken together made me think of Nike’s Colin Kaepernick ad. The ad was authentic as it showed us people who we recognized who had overcome obstacles to reach their dreams. It took a risk by using a controversial spokesperson . And it used both of these tactics to show a range of dreamers that could inspire viewers to be the best they could be, echoing back to Nike’s value proposition—that we are all athletes.

In talking about how they built and now run successful companies, a few key points stood out which can apply to all kinds of brands today:

1. Leaders need to be hands on and intimately familiar with how all the processes are working together to achieve the goal..
2. Treat every company like it is a small, family business, as there is a level of investment there that is can lead to success.
3. Encourage each employee to be proactive in the area where they have responsibility to create a sense of commitment and buy-in to the company. Employees should find ways to be invaluable to the company.
4. Every day, practice communication, trust and respect.