At the start of 2021, Amber Venz Box realized that her startup
had a problem. The high-flying creator-guided commerce company
she had co-founded with her then-boyfriend a decade earlier was
flourishing. Its big-name partners in the fashion industry were
happy, as were the influencers they were helping to enrich
because so many shoppers were using their app.
Yet at the heart of all this success lay confusion. The startup
had launched as rewardStyle, but more people seemed to refer to
the company by the name of its popular app, LIKEtoKNOW.it. Some
used the app’s full name, others shortened it to LTK. “There
just was a constant battle of which brand wins in every
communication,” Venz Box says. But taking the step back required
to overhaul their brand was never a priority at a fast-growing
company focused on building out its platform, developing new
products, and increasing market share.
That’s hardly unusual. The importance of brand can be difficult
to appreciate in a startup’s land grab days, when the typical
founder is most concerned with product and growth. A rebrand can
be tricky; doing it right requires focus and money. And where’s
the ROI in a future that a company will never reach unless it
first hits more measurable metrics? “I didn’t want to do
anything that would be disruptive to the existing business,”
Venz Box, the company’s president, says. Her co-founder and
now-husband, Baxter Box, says he worried a rebrand could be a
massive effort with an uncertain payoff. Yet, after much
internal debate and some resistance, the two decided to embark
on a rebrand they agreed they could no longer afford to delay.
In June of last year, they announced to the world that their
company name was now LTK. The payoff was immediate and surpassed
all their expectations. The name confusion disappeared, but that
was just the beginning. “It was almost like a steroid shot to
the company,” says Box, who is CEO. For employees, it was a
clarifying event, a galvanizing force that provided certainty
about the path forward. Mission and strategy came into sharper
focus, and everyone became better aligned on goals and what they
had to do to achieve them. LTK’s growth accelerated after the
name change, too. “It really was the best decision we’ve made,”
says Venz Box.
An investment many startups overlook
There is little more fundamental to a business than its brand.
It’s who the company is and how it presents itself to the world,
including customers, partners, investors, and employees, says
Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at
the University of Pennsylvania. Yet many startups fail to
appreciate its importance. “There’s a tension that’s uniquely
associated with startups because they’re in a kind of fast-fail,
pivot-quickly world, and they don’t take the time for more
strategic things that more established companies do, such as
brand building,” Reed says. “Many startups drop the ball on
branding because they don’t appreciate what the brand actually
does as an asset.” That was Venz Box and Box. As a
fashion-forward consumer company, they were always brand
conscious. But that didn’t translate to investment at the
corporate level. In the early days, Venz Box herself
hand-painted the rewardStyle name on office walls. Investing in
branding seemed an expense they would take on when they were a
more established company. Only in time did they start to
appreciate that the distraction of multiple names came with its
own costs.
Creating a new retail concept for the influencer era
The couple founded rewardStyle in 2011. They lived in Dallas,
where Venz Box worked as a personal shopper, earning commissions
from boutiques, and had started to make a name for herself as a
blogger. But her blog, while generating clicks and compliments,
didn’t deliver commissions. If they could solve that problem for
Venz Box, other fashion bloggers might benefit from it, too.
They decided to develop a simple platform that would allow
online personalities like Venz Box to make money when a follower
bought an item they were promoting. The original company name
was literal: It would reward style as it was put forward by a
growing world of bloggers, influencers, and social media stars
in the world of fashion, clothes, shoes, and accessories. “It
was a completely new concept and tool,” says Venz Box, who was
23 years old at the time. That required educating those the
company calls “creators,” as in content creators, and also the
brands they needed to convince to pay a transaction fee for the
business they steered their way.
“They are visionaries who saw trends ahead of the industry and
really pushed to define the business of social commerce,” says
Angela Du, a SoftBank Vision Fund partner and LTK board member.
The business took off, and by the start of 2021, rewardStyle was
working with more than 100,000 creators scattered across 147
countries. It had enabled $2.8 billion in purchases in the
previous 12 months and had partnerships with more than 5,000
brands. Originally, rewardStyle, which sometimes insiders
shortened to “RS,” was a behind-the-glass product known only to
participating creators and the retail shops and brand sites that
used it to boost sales. But Instagram took off and in 2014, the
company launched a consumer offering they called LIKEtoKNOW.it.
(If you “liked” an item, the app sent information about it,
along with a link to buy it.) Quickly the LTK app became a core
business driving growth in retail sales for brands while giving
creators a dedicated shop to promote across social platforms.
The growing downside of multiple brands
The name problem began to reveal itself in a myriad of ways as
the couple, who married in 2014, continued to grow the company.
A new crop of influencers sought to affiliate themselves with
the LTK app and yet the onboarding process began with emails
from an entity called rewardStyle. “I’d be talking to a creator
and wondering, which brand do I lead with?” Venz Box says. The
multiple names hurt recruiting when few even knew the
rewardStyle name, and it also watered down their success in the
eyes of the wider world. The company had business relationships
with any number of big brands, from Gucci, Chanel, and Dior to
Walmart, Amazon, and Alibaba, and Venz Box was flattered
whenever she heard an executive at one of these blue-chip
companies call them out during an earnings call. But it was a
crapshoot whether they would be referred to as rewardStyle,
LIKEtoKNOW.it, or LTK. Kit Ulrich, a newly hired general manager
overseeing the company’s consumer operations, was among the
first to start voicing concerns about the confusion. “Kit
introduced the concept and then would bring it up maybe every
two weeks,” Venz Box says.
Another new hire, Nikki Kuritsky, who oversees the company’s
relationship with its creators, brought a sense of urgency to
the problem. “We needed a single brand to market and push before
we started using paid media and other acquisition methods to
bring people in,” Kuritsky says. “It was fundamental that we
make this change.” The conviction from both Ulrich and Kuritsky
was so absolute, Venz Box says, that it got her onboard with the
idea. She still worried that not everyone would appreciate a
change or what it signaled, and she feared alienating the people
who had been with them the longest. There was also the company’s
long to-do list as they mapped out growth. But with the prospect
of an upcoming fundraising round and the thought of wasting time
explaining the multiple names, the scales firmly tipped toward
action.
A strong brand builds a deep connection between a company and
the people who use its products. It also communicates to
employees and external partners what’s most important. So it’s
natural for a rebrand to feel like a big risk and a big deal.
But there are ways to control that risk. Successful rebrands
tend to follow a similar formula, says Gabrielle Muse, a brand
and product strategist who co-founded the San Francisco Bay
Area–based Studio Mococo. That starts with research. “Doing
research is more than saying, ‘I showed it to my wife and she
likes the old version better,’” Muse said. “It’s putting in
place a process that lets you rigorously ask how this rebrand
fits around your strategy, mission, visioning, and positioning
of the company.” Ultimately, the rebrand is a decision made at
the highest level of an organization, but it’s imperative that
it feel inclusive. “Rebrands are highly emotional,” Muse says.
“You need to go into the process knowing that your team is going
to have strong feelings about it, and you need to build a
process that allows people’s voices to be heard.” From the
beginning, the rewardStyle team believed that LTK was the right
name for the company moving forward. But the leadership team
spent much of April testing those instincts during a series of
individual video sessions with seven top creators and seven top
brand partners.
The process, which was led by the company’s internal talent,
rather than outside consultants, was consistent with Venz Box’s
focus on “building community among creators and empowering
everyone around her,” says Du, the LTK board member. The
company’s new creative director, Maggie Collins, would walk
creators and brands through not just a name change but a rebrand
that included a new color scheme and typefaces. By design, the
discussions, which took place over multiple sessions, also
included frank conversations about each person’s feelings toward
the company. That gave the team a roadmap for sharing the news
with the broader community. “It wasn’t just five executives in a
room,” Nikki Kuritsky says. “It was really us gut-checking with
a community of power users who, by the end of the process, were
really excited about moving in that direction.” Among other
lessons: “Constant reinforcement is so important,” she says.
Based on feedback, the company decided to keep what they called
their heart and shutter icon but tie it to the new name, LTK.
They would also change their colors from a pink-dominated
palette to one heavy in black and white. Venz Box and Box
announced their decision at an all-hands meeting in June. “It
was important to let people know why a single name for the
organization would be better for all of us as we hire and as we
fundraise and as we grow,” Venz Box says. To help spread the
word among its partners, they armed the troops with a series of
lighthearted videos to bring along creators and brand executives
who had not been involved in their internal discussions. “It
felt like I was part of the family,” says Kailee Fodge, an
influencer who has been on the platform since 2015 and who
learned of the rebrand through an emailed video featuring Venz
Box and Box. Fodge felt relieved when she learned of their
decision. “I think there was a little bit lost in translation”
with the multiple names, she says.
The unexpected payoff
One of Venz Box’s first acts after the rebrand was to raid the
marketing closet and purge the company of all rewardStyle swag,
donating what she could and tossing the rest. “Overnight, we
stormed the office and our operations team changed all of the
art,” she says. Pink was out, black-and-white was in. Other
small changes, from the making of LTK-branded swag and light-up
signs to backgrounds with the new logo for employee video calls,
were introduced over the next few weeks. To date, employees
still send their emails from the rewardStyle domain. Box says
the step-by-step approach has made sense. “A rebrand does not
have to be some massive exercise…[that] requires 100% attention
of every team member,” he says. “It can be done iteratively, and
it absolutely can have disproportionate value in terms of that
effort.”
That was the big surprise: While it’s still hard to quantify,
the rebrand, both founders stress, has been a driving force in
the company’s accelerated growth. While they embraced the
journey to rid themselves of a gnawing problem, they didn’t
anticipate it would end up reinvigorating the company. As LTK’s
growth picks up even more steam, the company’s story is an
object lesson about the power of brand no matter a company’s
trajectory. “Even as a startup, you need to put some effort into
building a brand,” says Reed, the Wharton professor. Before the
change, some employees had been holding on to strategies that no
longer made sense, Box says. “The rebrand allowed us to more
effectively communicate our strategy as a company and do so with
urgency, with fierce prioritization, and allowing the team to
think much bigger about how we were going to grow the company,”
Box says. “It made clear that our future is not the same as our
past.”
