How Frida baby went from single cult product to 70% share of its category

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TLDR 📓

Frida is a newcomer to the baby category that has quickly positioned themselves as the must-have brand for parents. Frida's balance of short-term response and long term brand building activity are a masterclass in building a valuable brand.

➡️ This will inspire you if you’re a B2C marketer:

• scaling a single-product business

• making a first foray into brand advertising

• who’s a devotee of Binet + Fields or Mark Ritson 

Today

Here's what we’ll learn today:

• How Frida uses brand as filter for business decisions

• Frida’s distribution strategy that passes the 2AM grocery store run test

• Investing in brand building to drive fame

Pineapple on pizza. The oxford comma. Scrunch or fold.

Marketing twitter’s tribal debate that will likely never be settled: brand vs promotional marketing.

The short-term online metrics that DTC brands often worship miss the importance of investing in long-term brand building.

On the other hand, purists who swoon over manifesto-ish brand ads and creative but miss the mark on actually converting sales, also fall short.

Obsession with short term promotions or brand-building alone are both obfuscations of how brands actually grow.

Businesses need to create valuable brands.

Frida does both, pulling off the rare trick of nailing the long term brand-building and short term direct response activity.

This is the story of Frida.

Background 📚

Today Frida is a market leader of a $214B baby market boom. In 2014, Frida was a single-product import business operated out of a garage. CEO and “refounder” Chelsea Hirschorn, purchased the business and scaled it. A former in-house attorney for the New York Mets, Hirschorn runs an effective ship: profitable from day 1, Frida is both a successful business and a successful brand.

Here’s how Frida are riding the baby boom all the way to the bank: 

1️⃣ Using brand as filter for research and development

For Frida, “the fuss stops here” is a filter for research and development.  “That line has anchored us in a really disciplined product development approach,” says Hirschorn. Frida don’t make products that aren’t must-haves.

The result: Products designed to solve a parenting problem, neatly summed up in a 2-3 word, often graphic, humorous descriptor of a product (example: the Windi Gaspasser - a backdoor solution to gassy babies), plus an illustration of how to use the product. The lesson here? Use your positioning internally to build a strong brand externally.

2️⃣ Distribution, distribution, distribution

Distribution doesn’t sound sexy, but it’s imperative for brand growth.

Frida excel at distribution by doing 2 things. First, they’ve built a distribution strategy to catch the desperate parent at 2AM who needs their product right now. Second, they’re brave enough to portray the real side of parenting in an emotive way that sticks with you. You could swap the word distribution for what Byron Sharp, Professor of Marketing Sciences, calls “mental and physical availability.” In short, brands grow by making products easy to recall (mental availability), and easy to buy (physical availability).

Frida nails both:

+ 🏪 Physical availability: From day 1, Hirschorn prioritized getting Frida into retailers. Today the brand is available in 40,000 stores throughout the US. Perfect for when you need a product faster than Amazon prime. 

+ 🧠 Mental availability: See: Frida’s banned 2020 Oscar’s ad is a masterclass in leveraging emotion and building fame for the brand. To radically oversimplify the science behind it, emotions are processed much quicker than rational thought, more likely to capture attention and more likely to be remembered.

3️⃣ Invest in brave brand building activity to build fame amongst moms

Frida is a young brand that understands and pulls the levers of emotive brand building better than almost any other brand I can think of.

Their north star: showing the raw realities of parenting that other brands are afraid to.

1. The brand’s first ad was rejected from the Oscars. Frida added the rejection in the ad’s opening copy and released it on YouTube. On cue: an uptick in views from thousands of moms.

2. In another ad, run during the Golden Globes, Frida ran a montage of women breastfeeding, pumping, trying home remedies for clogged milk ducts with a real-talk internal dialog talk track over the top of it.

3. Recently, on New York marathon day, Frida Mom took out a full page ad in the NYTimes celebrating the unsung endurance athletes - moms, announcing a post-partum kit giveaway & medal for women who gave birth on marathon Sunday.

Bold brand building + short term promotional activity = a winning brand strategy that’s building a valuable business for Frida.

Bottom Line 💰

• Founded: 2014

• Frida holds over a 70% share of its main category

• Available in 50+ countries and over 40,000 stores in the US

• Price: ~$20 / product

• Generating revenue? Yes - the company has never not been profitable

• Funding roundup: 1 private funding round in 2016 by Garnett Station Partners

• Employees: 138

• Publicly traded: No

YOUR TURN

Tactics to love & learn from:

‘Hire’ each touchpoint with a different job to be done to build your brand. Frida make every single touchpoint from product name to reinforce their brand: Build fame = banned TVC. Stand out on shelf & educate on usage = naming & packaging. Drive consideration = ads. Tactic ➡️ Map your audience path to purchase including product naming, packaging, and ads. Align it with your brand.

Get mileage out of existing brand love. Frida recycle brand love by repurposing rave reviews into an ad series called “real reviews.” Tactic ➡️ Find reviews from your happiest customers. Hero them in ads.

Immerse yourself in your audience’s problem. Frida ships highly emotive creative by being intimately acquainted with their audience. Tactic ➡️ Don’t ask your audience why they love your product. Ask them about their experience of being the user with the problem your brand solves. Write a manifesto to them.

P.S. Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you.

1. If you’re looking to grow, launch or scale a brand and you want support building strategies to build a brand that lasts, let’s have a quick 20 min chat here.

2. If you already have a brand strategy but are tired of working with agencies and want help building an internal strategic creative team that can handle your brand marketing while you focus on big picture decisions, book a 20 minute chat here.

3. Follow me on LinkedIn where where I share brand tips, insights and strategies you can use along the way.

👋 Until next week,

Amanda