This year the stars aligned for Washington DC Start-Up Week and New York Fashion Week to converge on the same stretch of September. While we enthusiastically attended the former and obsessively followed the latter, a sort of love-child insight took form:
What if we started thinking of our lives as start-ups and our style as our personal brand?
One of the most heavily discussed topics at this year’s DC Start-Up Week was branding. According to Ally Fouts , Creative Director at Viget, “Your brand is how you communicate: who you are, what you do and why you do it.” It’s a cohesive collection of elements including logos, taglines, images, symbols, colors and words that serve as a clear calling card to the public. Brands with worldwide recognition are Coke, FedEx, Starbucks, Louis Vuitton. A brand that does particularly well in communicating values we cherish is Patagonia. Excellent branding allows a company to be instantly identifiable, distinctive, aesthetically pleasing and consistent over time. Branding is absolutely crucial to a company’s success.
Now here’s where things get interesting. If you imagine your life as a start-up that would make YOU the face of the brand. No matter what you are trying to do—land a job, secure a promotion, succeed in school, make a speech at your community center, run for office, impress your in laws—how you speak, relate, present, engage and, yes, how you look is how you are branding yourself. Moreover, every single time you step out of your house and interact with people, how you are branding yourself impacts your achievements that day, big and small.
At the conference we asked (on the record!) two esteemed presenters for DC Start-Up week if they each consider personal appearance as representing their personal brands. They both agreed. Panelist Moderator Kim Cayce, CEO of Vitamin E, believes it is important to present with a consistent image and noted that this takes some discipline. She also emphasized that personal image needs to be authentic and should reflect one’s “true self” for it to be successful. Panelist Aurelia Flores, Managing Member of Athena Digital Group, agreed in the value and necessity of “putting thought into creating how you want to be seen.” She noted that no detail is too small to consider, “eyeglasses, jewelry, body language, voice, all of these influence brand.”
There seems to be consensus that how we come across to others impacts how they hear what we have to say. That is why personal branding in the form of appearance is so important to your success. You may be a spectacular human being bursting with potential but if you are not presenting in a way the world wants to engage with, you will not receive the attention you deserve.
Of course, this does not mean there is a cookie cutter approach to personal styling, or that you need to put on a three piece suit when you hop out of bed each morning. Remember creativity and authenticity are vital here. But it is worth thinking through your goals and responsibilities for each day and what look would best support you in accomplishing these.
Really branding yourself, however, involves more than daily consideration of how you are presenting yourself. Branding asks you to develop a master plan or a vision about how you want to be perceived and why. How can you begin to develop said master plan? We learned from DC Start-Up Week presenter Kelly Miller, Director of Banner Public Affairs, that excellent branding is:
1) Specific (not vague, or mixed messaging)
2) Unique (is it differentiated?)
3) Simple (not too much, not overly complex)
4) Data Supported (you’ve tested it out and know it really works)
5) Interesting/Memorable (this is where authenticity and creativity come in to play)
6) Consistent (doesn’t mean you wear the same thing every day, but that there is a recognizable signature to your look across time)
An excellent example is Marla Beck, co-founder and CEO of Bluemercury, who has successfully (and stylishly!) mastered branding. She wears her signature blue at nearly every single pubic appearance she attends, a creative and distinctive way to use her personal styling to feed back into her company’s branding.
So, if you like the idea of your life as a start-up and your style as your brand, begin to think through these six principles. This will lead you to begin developing a brand for yourself and guide you to make personal styling choices that authentically reflect what you want to communicate to the world. Personal branding is a process over time, and it evolves as you grow and change and learn what works (and what doesn’t).
Building upon our Style Knowledge is Power thought, the core idea here is to be smart about it, to be intentional, even visionary in your personal branding, and of course to deeply enjoy the success that comes from it – because make no mistake, it will work for you if you put in the work!