Flamingo Estate is a modern luxury brand that’s been built swiftly but intentionally through collabs, pop-ups and an photogenic L.A. estate that exudes big main character energy in a pleasure-centric brand universe

Who will love this

• Luxury brand stans

• Angelenos

• Heirloom tomato afficionados

• American Riveria Orchard and / or Meghan Markle haters (IYKYK)

• People with money burning a hole in their wallet

Today

Good morning 🫡

In 2020 while the basic among us (hi, it’s me) were baking sourdough, doomscrolling and figuring out how to work from our kitchen tables, Aussie born L.A. transplant Richard Christiansen was watching his creative agency business dry up. The king of the pivot, he transformed his 60 person agency and Highland Park, LA home into a produce box shipping hub. Someone eventually called the health department (lame) but Christiansen pivoted again and turned the whole thing into a (seriously big) wellness business.

My entry point into Flamingo Estate, came in 2022 when I bought a Roma tomato candle for $58 (I know, ridiculous). But

Flamingo Estate (named for Christiansen’s property) has:

• 📈 Racheted up dizzying sales of 2,500 heirloom candles per hour after Oprah listed the Flamingo Estate product on her 2023 favorite things

• ⭐️ Counted a roster of celebrities among its collaborators, including Chrissy Teigen, Will Ferrell, Kelly Wearstler, Lebron James,Julianne Moore, Ai Weiwei and SNL’s Tiffany Haddish

• 🛍️ Held pop ups in the Hamptons alongside Porsche, Dries Van Noten, Missoni, and others

• 💸 Doubled sales year on year, brought in $10M / year in revenue in 2023 

Not bad!

We’re going to talk about the brand’s heavily organic but highly strategic growth. 

Let’s get into it. 🦩

Amanda 

How Flamingo Estate use Collabs, Pop Ups and Creative Direction to Earn Outsized Reach and Establish Luxury Positioning

Flamingo Estate is a really stunning example of brand-led growth. What I like about this brand is that it’s a strong counter to the VC/Meta DTC playbook we’ve seen over the last 10 years (which is blowing up in spectacular fashion today). Of course, the usual caveats apply here: Flamingo Estate has taken investment, and I’m not looking at their commercials, but from the outside looking in, business looks good.

BACKSTORY

• Flamingo Estate is a luxury lifestyle brand based out of the 1940’s Highland Park, L.A. home of ad exec (and truly talented creative) Richard Christiansen. The home is actually Christiansen’s home, but also serves as the beating creative heart of the brand, holding Salvador Dali-inspired dinner parties Didn’t get the invite? You can listen to the playlist on the brand’s Spotify.

BUSINESS STRATEGY

• Online and retail sales. Flamingo Estate sells direct to consumer as well as in Mecca (Australia’s Sephora) and Bergdorf Goodman. 

• Membership. $95 / a year for free shipping plus a quarterly gift.

BRAND STRATEGY

Flamingo Estate are really clear about their positioning: radical pleasure. I really like this line on their website, and seems to sum up their brand strategy.

“Mother Nature is the last great luxury house.” - Richard Christiansen

• Positioning: Radical pleasure. Flamingo Estate’s positioning is a nice, fresh take on wellness - think farmer’s market meets high street. I think we’d be remiss not to mention the tailwinds Flamingo Estate had from Covid. When Covid hit, the most privileged folks in society were housebound, cashed up, and and ripe for the picking (I’m sorry, I can’t stop myself).

• Collabs A.K.A. making jam with the stars. How do you sell $60 heirloom tomato candles, $75 bags of compost, and $83 jars of Manuka honey? Partner with your favorite local celeb, craft on heckuva photo shoot, and donate the proceeds to charity. Brand collaborations so often miss the mark: a good collaboration is mutually beneficial: I think Flamingo Estate nails it by facilitating a feel good side project for the celeb, and a killer boost for the brand. 

• Luxury pop ups. When you have limited equity as a young brand, borrowing equity through partnerships is smart. Flamingo Estate partnered with Mytheresa, an online luxury retailer, to hold their first pop up last year in the Hamptons. By sitting alongside Mytheresa’s curation of brands like Toteme, Valentino, Dries Van Norten and Missoni - Flamingo Estate earn eyeballs and establish themselves as a luxury brand.

• Creative direction. The difference between someone with a dusty tomato patch in Santa Rosa and Flamingo Estate is creative direction (and cash, let’s be honest). Christiansen’s background in editorial really shows here. Every product is beautifully photographed, the graphics are flawless, and there’s so much substance to the brand that you can spend hours digging into it and find no shortage of rabbit holes to go down.

Here’s the thing. Brands are not static. Brands are story systems, and the best stories travel for free. Flamingo Estate tell a story about pleasure and produce that’s highly shareable, has a brand world that offers a payoff for it’s most devoted customers, and provides LOTS of reasons to discover and connect to the brand (category entry points, in marketing-speak): through celebrity, an extraordinary ingredients, the luxury brand world or epic creative direction and world-building. 

Brand marketing moves 💃

Here’s some of the things Flamingo Estate have done that I’ve loved.

• 🐝 Beekeeping with the stars. Jane Goodall’s 90th birthday honey. Will Ferrell. Kelly Wearstler. Lebron James. Julianne Moore. Ai Weiwei. SNL’s Tiffany Haddish. Flamingo Estate places bees in celebrities’ gardens, comes back and harvests it and sells the jars for $250 a jar, with proceeds going to charity. Tax write off and buzzy brand campaign? Yes please.

• 💩 Viral products. Flamingo Estate literally sold sacks of manure for $75, which nabbed them headlines in WSJ, Goop’s Gift Guide, and Vice. Genius marketing or the Goop-ification of wellness products? Either way, the earned media from a product like this acts as both a PR play and a brand building move. Who cares if you don’t sell anything? (but let’s be honest, knowing LA you KNOW people did buy that stuff). Most brands would struggle to get any publication to write about them. 

• The inconvenience store. Flamingo Estate is running their second pop up in the Hamptons this summer in the form of an Inconvenience Store stocked with pantry and apothecary products and “plenty of surprises” according to Christiansen. Last year they poured a lifesized heirloom tomato motorcycle candle. What I love about how they did it was their point of view on inconvenience.

@flamingo_estate

Our life-sized motorcycle tomato candle at our Summer Pop-Pop in the Hamptons #flamingoestate #fyp #candle #candles

Bottom line 💸

• Business is growing like a high-end weed. Flamingo Estate is just 4 years old, and Christiansen told the NYT that they had doubled sales each year, brought in $10M in annual revenue in 2022 and were on track to be profitable in Q2 of 2023. I love to see a strong brand led by a creative also find commercial success - it feels like these things often fall apart when you open a P&L statement, so cheers to them.

What can we learn from Flamingo Estate?

• ⭐️ Make friends with celebrities. Kidding. But really, if brand strategy is about using your resources, think about what you have at your disposal. Hiut denim has it’s own factory, they make it center of their story. Flamingo Estate (and Christiansen) make celebrity proximity a superpower.  

• 👩‍🎨 Do things that don’t scale. Does pouring a life sized heirloom tomato motorcycle candle sound like something a CFO would sign off on? Probably not. But when you think about brand building as an investment, I’d rather invest in 5 motorcycle heirloom candles over 150 pieces of mid social content. Make great experiences, content, whatever, and then re-use, recycle, ride that into the sunset.

• 📚 Sweat the story. Listening to interviews with Christiansen, it’s clear that this story is authentic. He’s the son of farmers, they kept bees, he started Flamingo Estate when he was recovering from burnout and lapping up the L.A. lifestyle. The easier it is to tell your story the more easily you’ll be able to generate ideas for spreading the story.

👀 Brand scoops catching my eye this week

• Rachel Bilson reprises ‘The O.C.’ role for 21Seeds, a cocktail brand which I’ve never heard of, but I’m a basic Millennial woman so the hook worked on me. Cheesy? Clever? Discuss.

• Bandit’s Unsponsored Project athlete Trevor Bassitt makes the Olympic team with a 3rd place finish in the 400m hurdles from Bandit. I wrote about this last week but this video they released 4 days ago is pitch perfect. Food for thought: you KNOW Bandit knew one of their athletes was going to make the team - which means this video was probably queued up facilitate a drag & drop job to insert the best athlete story & release it in a timely manner. Worth the ~10min watch.

OK. That’s it for today. 🍅

- Amanda 

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