In the world of apparel and accessories, Sequential Brands is one of the largest scale licensing companies with an extensive portfolio of famous brands across multiple industries. And today’s guest, Lauryn McLaughlin, seems to manage it all.
On today’s episode, your host Sherri Langburt goes on a deep dive going back to how Lauryn started as a digital assistant and what her journey was like in landing this role as the Senior Director of Marketing for Sequential Brands. Sherri also discusses her passion working for a brand and her time at Weight Watchers.
Juggling a portfolio of brands like Lauryn does on a daily basis is no easy task. Sherri asks “How do you make sure you give every brand the love and attention they want? Or is it just defined by how big that brand is?”
There are also the challenges of working with influencers in the beauty and fashion industries. From creating authenticity, clothes that fit and letting influencers choose their own clothes, things could get out of control!
Lauryn McLaughlin, Senior Director of Marketing at Sequential Brands | Full Transcript
Sherri Langburt: It appears you have worked your way up through the ranks as digital assistant and now you’re a Senior Director of Marketing at Sequential Brands.
What was the journey like? How did you get to this role? Because I know that could not have come easy for you.
Lauryn McLaughlin: Yes, as you mentioned, I started at Martha Stewart Living, back then it was Martha Stewart Living on the media when I was 22 right out of college. It was my dream job. I joked that I would’ve worked there for free, but luckily I didn’t have to.
I had such an incredible boss there that was really just the definition of a mentor and helped guide me into new roles and helped me rise up throughout the company and we always tell our interns is that,
“Starting as an assistant is a great thing, not something that you should balk at because the gives you such access to leaders within the company that you can really interact and learn with.”
Lauryn McLaughlin: And my most exciting and kind of pivotal role that happened at Martha that helped me rise up was about five to six years ago before influencer marketing had really caught on. And my boss at the time called me into her office and told me about this influencer program that Fortune was doing and thought it would be such an incredible concept for marthastewart.com.
We were thinking of it as a way for us to really create high quality content at scale and give our readers fresh content while also helping us improve our SEO ranking.
So she ended the conversation by asking me if I wanted to start that program for Martha Stewart and Martha Stewart Weddings and I remember leaving her office and feeling like I was going to pass out. I was so terrified. So we called it the Contributor Network at Martha. We kicked it off that year and ended up growing it to 75 plus contributors within the year for both Martha Stewart and Martha Stewart Weddings.
Lauryn McLaughlin: That really helped me with my growth and helped me get more recognition within the organization. And that was about five years ago. So a year later, Sequential purchased Martha Stewart and I was offered a role in brand management and marketing for a few of our fashion brands and I stayed with the company for another year and had an opportunity come up to leave about three years ago.
I went to the media side of things at UrbanDaddy, if you’re familiar. It was a fun organization to work for a very startup vibe even though they’ve been around for 11 years at the time and very boys club. And it was interesting because I was able to be on the media side of things selling as opposed to purchasing. So it gave me a good insight into that side of the business.
I left Sequential on great terms and I always said if a role opened up at a more director level, I would love to come back, and seven months later I was back. So I worked as the Director of Marketing for our active brands, which is GAIAM, Avia and AND1, for about a year. And then just about two years ago, I was given the role of Senior Director of Marketing for our fashion division. So that is my story.
Sherri Langburt: Congratulations. You bring up so many different things. The Martha Stewart team, there’s several that I kind of have known forever, like Alison Hoffman and Vanessa Drassman.
Lauryn McLaughlin: Oh, I love them.
Sherri Langburt: They both are. And Alison, I have been friends for many years, so when you say that, but also when you talk about working somewhere and saying it’s your dream job, my history is that I stopped Weight Watchers when they first launched their online. And like I always, it was my, I just loved working there.
It definitely speaks to rising somewhere and just being passionate about a brand that you work with, so that’s really exciting.
Lauryn McLaughlin: Yeah, it was an awesome place to work.
Sherri Langburt: That’s good to know. So I know that you do a lot and I just… What does a day look like for you?
How many brands are you managing and how do you do it all?
Lauryn McLaughlin: Oh, so there’s a lot of brands in our fashion division. We have Joe’s Jeans, William Rast, which is a men’s and women’s sports wear denim brand, Ellen Tracy, women’s sportswear brand, Heely’s, kids wheeled footwear and actually adults wheeled footwear too, Caribbean Joe, which is a women’s/men’s/kid’s lifestyle vacation brand, DVS, which is a footwear like skateboard culture brand, Franklin Mint, which is a coin collecting brand. And then some things we recently have in our division and I think I have not explained yet, so maybe it would be helpful.
Sequential is a brand licensing company, so it means that we purchased the intellectual property of a brand and act as the brand owners. And then we license out all of the categories within the brand to our licensed partners so we can grow the business, distribution, and getting consumers.
I think I’ve mentioned to you and Craig in conversations before that the most simple terms of explaining it is that …
we buy really high quality, well-known lemons, and then we try to squeeze as much lemonade out of each one of them as possible.
For example, we purchased Joe’s Jeans five years ago, it was just women’s and men’s sportswear and now we have kids’ clothes, we have women’s shoes, small leather goods, like wallets and belts, fragrances, we’ve expanded to international distribution. So I explain that because it’s the licensing model is a lean model as far as staffing goes. So for all the brands that I just talked about, we have about it six to seven… Oh and Jessica Simpson’s also in our division. But I don’t work on that brand.
We have about six or seven people that do everything from brand management, keeping our licensees happy and making sure that they’re staying true to our brand, marketing and also expanding business into new categories with business development. So because of all of that, everyday looks very, very different.
There could be one day where I’m in back to back meetings with our partners, our licensees, to discuss new products that are coming to market, new retail stores we’re launching with and what our strategies are for the upcoming season. And another day I could be up to my ears in an Excel document, updating the marketing spend for four hours and then jumping into agency partner meetings with our PR partners, our media social partners. So every day is different. And I think that’s one of the best things about the job because you’re never ever bored.
Sherri Langburt: Yeah. It sounds a little bit like my world at Weight Watchers where it’s a lot like dealing with franchises, like you’re balancing multiple stakeholders.
How do you make sure you give every brand the love and attention they want? Or is it just defined by how big that brand is?
Lauryn McLaughlin: It’s different based on each brand and their seasonality. So you know, for example, Caribbean Joe’s summer and resort is big, big time frame for them. But then our denim brands like Joe’s Jeans and William Rast have a little bit of downtime in the summer months, so we’re able to balance it out by that. And we focus all of our energy with our partners, we try to give everyone some kind of attention and love, but we prioritize our partners by the kind of revenue and volume they bring in. So Ellen Tracy, the top six to seven partners that make up 80% of the business are where we focus our efforts, even though there’s 22 partners for Ellen Tracy. So it’s a juggling, balancing act and I think we’ve gotten into a good rhythm knowing who needs priority when and when things are very urgent and when things can wait two days, feel it out that way.
Sherri Langburt: Yeah, I guess that must be really challenging.
How do they all approach influencer marketing? Are some brands more like, “Yes, we want to do it.”
And then it’s not just the brand, but it’s also like the manufacturer or the person, the company who’s providing that product. So if it’s fragrance, they might be all in, but then if it’s shoes that they might not be.
Lauryn McLaughlin: We haven’t found any of our partners that are not supportive of our influencer marketing initiatives. I think across the board they agree with our approach that it is a great way to get the product into hands of people using it in a really authentic way and creating content about it. Certain partners are more adamant about doing it and others think it’s a great added value.
With our outerwear, we actually did that with you guys, this fall our outerwear partner was launching at Nordstrom, and Nordstrom has made a big push for their influencer partnerships. And so that was a definite that we were going to make sure that influencer marketing was incorporated into our support of that outerwear business. But I really haven’t had any licensees or brands come and say that they were against it because there’s really no negative if it’s done well and in a brand authentic way.
Sherri Langburt: And how do you go about it? I think industries are very different, I know that with fashion, particularly in beauty, there’s much more stringent regulations or criteria in terms of selecting influencers.
What kind of criteria do you look for when selecting influencers? Are you looking for macros, micros, engagement? Where do you fit within that whole selection process?
Lauryn McLaughlin: As I mentioned the list of all of our brands in the portfolio, a lot of them are really different from each other, whether it’s in product, and target audience, and sales volume, and where they’re distributed. We really like to approach each brand uniquely as far as who we’re working with so that they’re all truly authentic to that brand.
The things that we try to keep in mind when we’re selecting them is, first and foremost as I mentioned, that they really represent the brand in the base DNA of the brand. So, for example, if in Ellen Tracy that we’ve worked with with you guys, we want to make sure that we’re working with women that are relatable to our woman. A woman that dresses sophisticated but she’s approachable, she’s going from one activity to the next and wants to be comfortable but also fashion forward, that she’s aspirational but conscious of spending.
With a brand like Ellen Tracy, we have a huge audience in Belk and Dillard’s. So we would try to make sure that we work with more Southern women that are living the day to day life that our woman is and that can really show them how their styling their clothes, how they could use a piece of the Ellen Tracy sportswear for the spring season, but then transition it well into summer. So that’s definitely important as far as the “who” we work with.
As far as the size, I think that’s always dependent on budget.
I think that there’s a benefit to both small and large influencers.
I think we’d always wish to work with big names where we can, because it helps us with getting in front of more people.
If it’s just a purely content play in helping us create content to fill out our site and our social, then it’s more about the who than the how big.
Different brands have different budgets and also have different budgets on different seasons, our denim, we would definitely spend more in the fall than we would in the spring. So that’s we kind of prioritize what we have going for the year on seasonality and product launches and figure out cool we’re going to work with from that lens.
Sherri Langburt: That makes sense. One of the things that struck me in two comments that you made. You brought up Belk, which I just actually met with their agency when I was in Charlotte and Nordstrom’s. And we’re seeing a lot of companies asking us,
“Can you help us get that message out because our product is going to be in a retailer.”
What are some of the things, whether it’s rating and reviews or anything that you’ve done to kind of… or it could be geo-targeting influencers, like …
What are some of the things that you’ve done to move the needle and get that awareness in the specific store location or locations?
Lauryn McLaughlin: Yeah, as you mentioned, retailers, it’s always an important thing for us to support, but also difficult as far as how we’re measuring the success of that campaign because the majority of our brands do not have direct to consumer, they have largely a retail business. So all of the influencers that were driving there with traffic and click through, we really have no insight into what the sales actually amount to.
We measure success more on a click through basis. I should also note that we actually don’t work directly with the retailers, our licensees are the ones that designed, develop, distribute all of the product. We’re really relying on our licensees to be communicating regularly with the retailers and then translating that priority to us. Whether it’s a certain new line that’s coming out and they want to showcase the versatility of it or business, they really think that business is going to grow in X, Y and Z area of the country, we should do a more geo-focused campaign.
When we rely directly through them on it, there are instances though when we do get involved with the retailer and that’s mostly for new product launches or if a brand is coming to a retailer for the first time. Our Ellen Tracy bedding for example is launching at Bed, Bath and Beyond in February, which we’re very excited about. And so that is an instance where the licensee really wants to put priority behind it and that we’ll both be contributing to a spend to support that business. And so we would communicate directly with the retailer in that instance.
Sherri Langburt: That makes sense and congratulations on that launch.
Lauryn McLaughlin: Thank you. It’s great product, you’ve got to check it out.
Sherri Langburt: Yeah, I want to see it. Bedding is one thing, but apparel with influencers is extremely picky, like hard because they’re very picky. Oftentimes they want to pre-approve the merchandise that you send them and there’s all kinds of sizing involved.
What are some of the best practices that you use in predetermining the merchandise? Do you allow the influencers to select?
How do you deal with all the sizing and, “Oh, I got this, but now it doesn’t fit or I don’t like the color.” Just any best practices when it comes to apparel?
Lauryn McLaughlin: Yes. I think that somebody is going to invent a way to deal with this in an automated way. And I wish I was going to be that person because I think whoever does it is going to be the next Zuckerberg.
Ideally we’d like influencers to be able to select the products themselves so that they’re true to their style and what they feel great in because it really shows if they feel comfortable in something and consumers are smart enough to know when something is not really truthful.
That being said, there are definitely instances when we have something that’s a priority focus that we want to make sure is represented in our campaign. So we usually give a number of selection priorities and then we let them select.
We have meticulous note keeping here of every sizing and things like that. We’re in the midst of a Caribbean Joe campaign actually right now, and the sizing has been off because people thought they were different sizes than they were. You’ve got to be focused on the details with that and making sure they get the right product because, again, the content won’t look like they are happy if they don’t fit well in the sizing.
The other element to our process is it’s not just us that is weighing in on it, it’s also our licensees. So they have to say, “Our biggest buy with X, Y and Z retailer was this category or this print,” and things like that, so that they really know where the volume is going to be.
It’s a partnership between the influencer agencies we work with that are the experts in that with us that are the experts on the brand and with our licensees that are the experts on the product and the health of the business at retail to come to a decision that hopefully makes everybody as happy as possible.
Sherri Langburt: It sounds like a lot of people to manage.
Lauryn McLaughlin: It is, but I think that we’ve been lucky to work with influencers over the past year, two years, that really are easy to work with and excited about it and have no diva-esque qualities to them. We’re always accommodating and pleasant when there are things go wrong, which things always go wrong at some point, that you just work together to fix it the best you can, as quickly as you can.
Sherri Langburt: I think that’s definitely a call out because you hear the horror stories about influencers, but in our experience, they don’t typically write something bad or get all nasty, they try to work in any way they can to help support and accommodate if something doesn’t fit them or it’s not the right cut or anything like that.
In terms of campaigns that you’ve run or a collaboration that just jumps out at you, or even an influencer event, is there anything that you want to highlight that was an incredible collaboration?
Lauryn McLaughlin: I have two in particular. We worked with Danielle Bernstein of We Wore What for Capsule Collection for those chains this spring of 2019 and fall of 2019 and I really love what brands are doing with influencer collaborations from a capsule product collection because …
it’s such a great opportunity for the influencer to be involved in the design process and really put their own touch to the brand’s products.
It’s also a great way for a brand to create a sense of urgency, through limited availability and new product drops, think of what Something Navy did with Nordstrom.
Danielle was with us for 2019 and her denim capsule of high waisted jeans were just so gorgeous and they were really unique from other products that we had online and very authentically her. And, of course, her audience responded so well to that because it was clear she put her hand in the design process and she was super vocal about celebrating it. That was one great partnership for our brand last year.
One of my favorite things that we did is a throwback, GAIAM, which is a yoga brand in our active division, I was working on it about two years ago and it’s a brand that really has, a “cult like following” in the yoga world just because it’s really truly incredible product and it’s at such an approachable price point.
We had a group of 25 women that we regularly worked with in the fitness world. They were similar to the Martha Stewart contributor network I mentioned, they were regular content creators and product ambassadors. They were anything from yoga instructors to bar, pilates, and strength training and they brought the product to life.
We did a weekly Facebook live with them, which was amazing and they could teach our audience how to put the GAIMA product to use in their everyday fitness practice, which was of course so authentic because it was what they do for a living and it was just such great added value to the customer because they’re getting these mini workout tips for all the products that they’re buying, so that was another one that we were really proud of.
Sherri Langburt: That sounds incredible. GAIAM, actually, was probably, when I launched my agency, one of my first clients. Yes, I’m not going to go into the details, but definitely one of my first five clients.
How do you measure success of a campaign? Very different, as you said, you’re not looking at the sale. What is your ROI?
Lauryn McLaughlin: Well, again, it definitely depends on the brand and campaign, but I think that, generally speaking, it’s sales are the goal and maybe it’s not the actual dollar amount, but if it’s a campaign where we’re driving to a third party retail, we would attribute success to the volume of traffic we drove.
For the brands we do have direct to consumer, so that’s Heely’s, Joe’s Jeans, DVS. For Heely’s, we have a campus ambassador program with super active college kids on, I think, it’s up to 40 campuses across the country and they’re out there with their friends posting, constantly doing tricks on the Heely’s and creating content for us. And they also are, it’s almost like an affiliate program, they have the incentive to sell shoes and get a a portion of that. I don’t really know how the particulars of the affiliate part work, but we work with our licensee BBC to select and create guidelines for these ambassadors and that’s definitely something where the success and the deciding factor for new ambassadors is chosen based on sales.
Social growth is definitely a secondary performance metric for us, especially for a brand like Caribbean Joe.
That was a brand we didn’t even have any presence on social for until this past summer because it had historically been targeted at a little bit of an older consumer and now we’re more in a lot of categories and kids and younger women clothing. So we’ve done a number of campaigns from an influencer perspective to grow that, not only audience following, but engagement with this existing audience we have on social. So sales and then social are our growth and engagement are really how we measure the success.
Sherri Langburt: Cool. I mean it’s funny that you say that about affiliate for and I know that with college influencers, definitely different model or how the mechanics work is slightly different. But for years we were very about pay for play, we need to only work with influencers that we want to pay because we know that they deserve to be paid.
We’ve had a lot of people raising their hand saying, “Can you launch an influencer affiliate platform?” So we did do that and it’s amazing, like there’s a lot of influencers out there that are interested in affiliate, are interested in just driving that sale, whether they’re smaller and they’re just starting out or they’re bigger influencers who just have an affinity for the brand. So that’s very interesting. Thank you.
Lauryn McLaughlin: I actually have a four o’clock meeting with a potential partner for affiliate, but I think it’s a great way to get the brand and the influencers to have a skin in the game and know that the better they do with supporting the product on a continual basis, the more value they’re going to get from it.
We have an affiliate program for Avia, which is our running brand over on the active side that I worked on a couple of years ago and we got a lot of influencers interested in a non-paid content partnership that was made profitable through the affiliate program. So I definitely think there’s a lot of interests out there from people.
Sherri Langburt: Yeah. And then how do you do it? Because traditionally those affiliates didn’t get product, so what are they sharing? Or are you sending them product?
Lauryn McLaughlin: What are they sharing?
Sherri Langburt: Like on their social are you send-
Lauryn McLaughlin: Well, I actually don’t work on the Avia.
Sherri Langburt: Oh okay.
Lauryn McLaughlin: Brand anymore. Stay tuned for future conversations with the potential partner I have at four o’clock. We trying to figure out a great something to do with for Ellen Tracy with it.
Sherri Langburt: Okay, perfect. I can fill you in on what we’re doing too. I guess in all this we just talked about affiliate.
In your experience with Ellen Tracy, has influencer marketing replaced any other marketing efforts that you’re doing?
Lauryn McLaughlin: I’m not sure if “replaced” would be the right word or gotten a more significant level of priority.
I think it’s really important to integrate as many verticals of marketing as the budget allows into your brand strategy.
That being said, we’ve definitely shifted a couple of our brands in the last year to two from having a larger spokesperson spend where they’re part of the campaign shoot. They have a couple of requirements as far as social posts and appearances to being more in a model of regular influencer content creation and communication because with the spokespeople spend, some of them are perfect for the brand and they’re the right move.
For other brands, it’s hard to stretch your dollars as far once you’ve committed such a significant spend to something like a huge deal celebrity. And, specifically, with Ellen Tracy, we feel that our consumer has responded really well to the relatable women that we’ve been working with in the influencer campaigns. It’s just more her than the high end fashion models that are gracing the covers of Vogue and Vanity Fair that serve a wonderful purpose for certain brands, but for a more mid tier retail distribution.
I think that having the relatability factor really has been something that has shifted in priorities for us over the last few years.
Sherri Langburt: Yeah, and I guess that is the whole thing about influencer marketing is the relateability. So I know you have a meeting soon and I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but my last question, which I always ask, is
Name an influencer that you love to follow, but hate to admit that you do? I’m going to think it’s someone within the wine industry, but I’m guessing.
Lauryn McLaughlin: Oh, I love this question and I’m surprised that it’s not necessarily in line, but I would say that there’s nobody that I wouldn’t want to admit to falling because I think that everybody I follow, I either A) like them, love them or B) have to follow them for work.
I’m going to say I love them. But I have two favorites, one is Serena Wolf, she has a blog called Domesticate Me and she has… I love to coo, pretty healthy and she has like healthy, fun recipes, but she’s always drinking wine while she’s doing it. So you were right about the wine.
Sherri Langburt: Okay.
Lauryn McLaughlin: And she’s funny and she has like great skincare recommendations and has like amazing style. And the second is Melissa Wood Health and she was actually an influencer that I onboarded to the GAIAM program years ago and now I even subscribe and pay for her like at home pilates fusion workouts. They’re only $9 a month, everybody should check them out. And she has such good fashion and like her apartment’s amazing and her workouts are just the perfect for on the go fitness. So those are my two favorites.
Sherri Langburt: Well thank you. I’m definitely going to check them out. I’m not sure if I do so much pilates, but the cooking, for sure, I will. But thank you Lauryn McLaughlin.
Lauryn McLaughlin: Yeah, Serena Wolf.
Sherri Langburt: A pleasure, pleasure to chat with you and wishing you all the best and hope to see you soon.
Lauryn McLaughlin: Thanks so much, Sherri. It was great being on. I’ll talk to you soon.
Sherri Langburt: Thank you. Bye.