Jake Kassan, MVMT: Owning Your Brand – Well Made E63

After two failed business, Jake Kassan started MVMT. MVMT’s minimal, sleek take on watches and accessories in addition to their focused marketing gained them millions of followers. In 2013, Jake bootstrapped MVMT through Indiegogo, and this August, the five-year-old brand was acquired by the Movado Group.

Through those early ventures, Jake learned the importance of brand. For MVMT, brand informs, motivates, and guides every part of their business, especially their influencer marketing.

“I believe all the great brands represent and stand for something more than the physical product they sell.”

On the podcast, we sit down with Jake to talk about the pillars of the MVMT lifestyle (2:15) and creating aspirational content with influencers (3:53). He talks about leveraging Shopify to scale (8:59) and the tools that are important they build in-house (10:15). He shares the most valuable lessons he learned from his failed t-shirt company (31:39) and finding the backbone of a successful business (33:31). Jake talks about not pursuing outside investment (33:55), hacking the crowdfunding system (34:57), and being financially disciplined early on (39:11). Finally, he shares how MVMT will grow their offline footprint with Movado (43:01) and how he’s all in for the foreseeable future (50:08).

Follow Jake Kassan and MVMT on Instagram.

Also mentioned on the show:

You can find this and all future episodes on iTunes, Google Play, and here on the Lumi blog. This episode was edited by Evan Goodchild.