The Launch


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Client : Girl Crush, GEMS, Clutch, MassMarket, Caviar, LALA Arts

A properly concepted and strategized launch is of utmost importance for a burgeoning company or a rebrand, not only to get into the public eye, but to establish a solid, sustainable identity and voice.

We start by identifying your brand’s audience, and developing the press release. But we discuss all the other elements that are integral to the launch process, from events and openings to photographs and bios to digital strategy with social media and content creation.

We approach every kind of launch – a brand new company, or a website rebrand, or a product, or a brick-and-mortar opening – from the same perspective.  We figure out the story.  The strategy of how best to tell the story unfolds from there.

LALA Arts

In April of 2012 we began working with Daniel Lahoda, owner and founder of LALA Arts, to help create the LALA Arts brand and the open of LALA Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. A central figure in the street art scene for the past decade, Daniel has spearheaded the movement of the arts in downtown Los Angeles through the community-endorsed LA Freewalls Project. LA Freewalls brings incredible murals and art to the downtown Los Angeles environ, contributing viscerally to the perception of the community from down-and-out to up-and-coming.  We sat down with Daniel and strategized ways to create a cohesive branding strategy between his already-established brands: LA Freewalls, Jet Set Graffiti, LALA Arts, and the soon-to-be opened LALA Gallery.

Leaping from the traditional passive nature of a gallery as a place to show work, LALA Gallery is also a place for artists to use as a creative laboratory in which to experiment and interact with the community.  The Gallery provides a meeting place to connect with admirers of the street murals, as well as a center for other public art projects to exhibit their studio work.

We helped Daniel consolidate his brand under the LALA Arts umbrella, creating an integrative plan for all of his diverse branches of interest. Next came the launch of LALA Gallery, which encompassed announcements of both the gallery opening as well as the LA Freewalls Inside/Outside art show; the creation of the LALA Arts website from design to content; and the production of the event itself.

We were extremely pleased at the outcome, which brought together over 1200 people from the Los Angeles downtown community, including street artists and fans as well as community leaders and local legislators.

Girl Crush

Girl Crush came to life from the wonderful world of Wendy Withers, art director and full-time blogger. Wendy had the base for an idea; a website that would serve as an archive of interviews and collected photographs from exceptional women. We helped Wendy finesse her concept, building an infrastructure to sustain the consistent production of good content and get it out to an audience with staying power.

Over the course of an initial three month period, we helped Wendy clearly define her goals with the blog. Moving away from the formulaic structure of a typical DIY blog site, Girl Crush began to take form, as we assisted in refining the look of the interview archive and laying the basis for meaningful content.

We launched in June 2011, with two special releases, catered toward targeted audiences: one for the general launch of the site, and the other for the amazing interview of Mary Redding, chef extraordinaire.

After the launch, we presented Wendy with all of the tools she would need to sustain the success of Girl Crush. We established a system and calendar for her stories, showed her how to create her own newsletters and announcements, and made suggestions towards the growth and expansion of her brand. She has since been contacted by bloggers and writers for interviews, and the reach of the blog that was once “Wendy’s Tiny Blog” has increased exponentially – Girl Crush was recently featured in star blogger Joy Cho’s best-selling book Blog Inc.