Second crabby post in a row: I can get cranky when people confuse our brand with our business
OK, I will get off the crabby kick soon. It’s constitutionally unsustainable, for me. But have to get this thought down today.
This is the Daily Grommet brand:
- Friendly folksy, real, honest, humble. (Are you really humble if you say you are humble? Maybe not.)
This is what the business is going to do:
- Be the first business to figure out how to effectively launch products massively, and powerfully across the internet.
Here is my frustration:
- Sometimes people think the brand’s deliberately personal and intimate approach—expressed via things like having our actual employees curate the Grommets and talk about them on video– means we have intimate (i.e. small) ambitions.
I want to scream, “Are you kidding me? Do you think we would work 24-7 to build a cute little lifestyle business?” We have a HUGE ambition. We want to take unknown and worthy products from new, or small, to GIANT. We want to make markets for their creators! We want to be the first people to crack the Holy Grail of super-charging word of mouth online in a viable economic model. We want to rule the WORLD!
Ooops. I don’t mean that last line.
But we really do see the scope of our opportunity as big enough to merit enormous personal investment and sacrifice. We aren’t kids living in our mom’s basements. We have mortgages, tuitions, day-care costs. We have spouses we have to answer to every night when we come home late, underpaid, and overworked.
That’s why I get a little nuts when people confuse the brand with the business. OK, sometimes just writing about something that bugs me slays it for me. Done. Off to eat toast with sour cherry jam.
Jules Pieri 
3 Responses to “Second crabby post in a row: I can get cranky when people confuse our brand with our business”
I’m glad you made this crystal clear, because I think it’s a very understandable confusion for someone browsing the Grommet site…wonder if there’s some way to make it clearer there…
First of all, I LOVE the picture you chose to go with this post! Classic! Second…from day one, when I first heard about the Daily Gromment, I thought “this is going to be HUGE!” Whenever I tell people about the Daily Grommet, the word “HUGE” is always used when describing what the Daily Grommet will become. So, with that said, I have HUGE expectations for your business!
Courtney, huge is right. A friend of mine — who made his millions nearly a decade ago by selling an e-commerce infrastructure company to one of today’s e-commerce giants — said to me recently, “This Daily Grommet company is going to be huge. They are going to deliver on the promise that the rest of us only talked about back then but failed to deliver on. Grommet has figured out something that no one else has figured out before.” I suggest we’re seeing the early stages on something that will soon be very big.