Sana Jardin: Growth through Micro-Communities

[Music] Brom consumer insights across the world to the latest tactics and trends. You're listening to leap into luxury, the go-to marketing podcast for luxury brands. I'm MJ and today we're talking to Dan Chalice, head of brand at Sanajarden. Starting his career at Jack Will's, Dan gained a deep understanding of content and branding, which he then developed at Turnbull and Assa, and Lucky Saint before making the leap to the world of fragrance at Sanajarden. Today Dan joins us to share his insights on the power of microcommunities, a resource that brand taps into keenly to connect with their consumer base and drive long-term loyalty. Welcome Dan, thanks for joining us. Gosh, that was wordy. Sorry. Thanks for having me. Take that wordy every week, ain't it? Yeah, yeah. Stop being so successful that is too much to talk about. Okay, microcommunities. I'm going to be the first to admit here that I don't know enough about this, so I'm going to be picking your brain to like a crow today. What a visual. So how do you define a microcommunity in the context of luxury branding? A microcommunity is about kind of creating that highly engaged niche of people who love the brand, follow what you're doing, following your conversation, like on Tenta Hooks waiting for the next product, these kind of things. Try and think of it like a stan loving like a pop star. You know, they've got their like communities, they ride or die. The Swifties, you know, who are the San Jose dance Swifties? So yeah, that kind of, you know, the depth of emotional collection runs deeper than just like a kind of casual fewer. They'll always pop in, pop on their, you know, if they're in town and Liberty, they'll always pop in C San Jose dance spritz, that kind of thing. Giving that kind of shared sense of identity and really just sort of sharing the core values of the business with them as well. Amazing. And what would you say are the unique advantages around building a brand, especially a luxury brand around a micro community versus a mass market approach? Because I think, especially on this podcast, we've explored mass market approach is so much to be really interested to understand what it is that that micro community brings. You can't have many micro communities as well. You know, good brands have various people that they can tap into at different times. That classic 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. So it's like those sort of really highly engaged people, other ones that you want to work with. Creating micro communities in a luxury context about delivering sort of connections and experiences that customers can't get elsewhere. So what is really unique to your brand that no one else can deliver? For example, at my time at Terminata, you know, the bond community, they make shirts for James Bond. They're always, you know, the ones in the DMs, the ones in the comments, really like loving what the brand were doing and always asking more when we launched a specific collection with them servicing those guys, which is really great. So I managed to down values of like wellness, empowerment, run deep, building that kind of like truthful word of mouth and advocacy is kind of key. So yeah, kind of Amy founded the brand on this. Should I explain the brand a bit? Yeah, great. So yeah, Amy founded it in 2017 and it's kind of a business of two halves. So you've got the luxury fragrance business and then we've got the cooperative in Morocco. So it's kind of a community of women who harvest the flowers for fragrance businesses that we then also buy. So Amy sort of visited the area before launching the brand and marrying her kind of background in nonprofit with a business was sort of her way of, I'm sure I use businesses as a way of social change. So communities and kind of in that sense micro communities has always been at the core of the brand. And yes, they're kind of like expanding that out. It's not only the wearer that benefits from the properties of these fragrances. It's also the supply chain. And so we're trying to apply that to kind of all communities. So whether you're like store staff in space and K or aware or influencer, whoever you might be like just a brand fan, like basically trying to empower people through all these experiences that they come to us for. Amazing. And just a minute for the idea of just being in Morocco picking flowers. Oh, I have three minutes. Just with a bunch of your best mates just picking flowers in Morocco. How nice. It's very hot. So how do you identify and nurture those core values and interests that define your micro communities? Yeah, there's kind of a few ways you can do that. We obviously listen to our audience quite a lot. I say it always goes down in the DMs. Always look for the comments section of anything to like understand and figure out what it is across those things. It's about understanding the kind of customer sentiment and like what kind of makes them tick and kind of how you can respond to that. It's like going back to what we're saying about tailoring it to like the specific brand. So always bringing it back to like empowerment or wellness for us is really key. We do like Friday breakfasts like alchemy clubs that are quite good for everyone to get together. It's just what we've called our like kind of like founder breakfasts. Oh, yeah. We found like a little spot in West London that's very nice invite everyone down. We've done that with like kind of brand friends, press, you know, people basically trying to spread the word in kind of a lovely way over a cross on. I think so. I think that's about the wine nights moving forward. Alchemy Club. Yeah. It's a nice spin on it. Alchemy Club comes from we did a rebrand in July and kind of the Alchemy of Energy became our kind of like mantra I guess. So, you know, this idea that the life from petals can be transmitted onto the skin of the wearer and also like effect change. So like energy and this kind of idea of alchemyzing, I guess kind of way of giving more meaning to the product in a way that the app builds love. So kind of like bringing that energy through. So that's where the Alchemy comes from. Oh, it's a very nice nail. I remember that. I'll keep you on the lookout for that. Okay. So how would you say that the power of these micro communities translates into tangible business outcomes, especially for a luxury brand? Ultimately, especially kind of scale up luxury brand. It's all about the commercials. Obviously sales is number one. If you have high engagement rates on social, that's great driving that through. Also kind of LTV and obviously like advocacy going forward. So it's like terminal NASA, for example. They have a bespoke shop next to their kind of ready to wear shop and sort of LTV. It was actually generational for them. So you'd have like grandfathers taking their sons, taking their sons to get their bespoke shirts made. I think that's yeah, a really lovely way of thinking about when you're building a brand, kind of like how you take that through and what it might be for Sandra Jan is sort of like, you know, mother daughter or friends or however that might be, whatever your community is, like kind of bringing that through. Yeah. Yeah, trying to apply that, especially in kind of, you know, sometimes a lot of my work is DTC based. So like how you can bring that online, I think is interesting sort of build that forward. But yeah, essentially it's like commitment to your mission, organic brand growth. We've seen sort of, you know, 30% increase of following on social sense, the rebrand. And the rebrand remind us when that happened. That was July last year. So it's aggressive. Yeah. Really aggressive. Yeah. Like we've seen like 129% increase in UGC, like 300% reach increase. So like really sort of is all, especially when you're small, it's kind of all about visibility. Yeah. Yeah, very, very those stats in mind. I mean, you know, we had a chat offline when we were discussing what this topic would be today. You're essentially, you're managing a lot of this yourself. I have like an, we have like an amazing team, like, yeah, you know, shout out to everyone. It takes a village with everything. It does. We are a very, we are a small team. Yeah. But yeah, not a lot of you managing a lot of this. I mean, and then, and then to be focusing so much on these micro communities as well, which I imagine needs so much attention in themselves because different messages, different things you're having to do for each of them. I mean, what are the biggest challenges and opportunities in building and maintaining a thriving micro community for a luxury brand and especially for yourselves in the current digital landscape? So, so is time one of those factors? Time is definitely a challenge. And also the channels that are hungry, so volume of content, all of those kinds of things are obviously a massive challenge when there's only exactly, you know, there's myself and Beth on the team. We're like doing all of that. Obviously like bringing in, when you've got a small brand, it's like fractional. So, got an amazing like PR, Lauren in the UK and Shreya and Roman in the US. So those are kind of like, and I'm going to shout everyone, but like everyone is doing their bit to kind of manage each bit, like identifying which ones are most valuable to you. You know, obviously number one are your current customers and your brand friends, they're the ones that you want to look after the most. And then sort of identifying sort of like out if it's like a rings of a tree, like, you know, everyone else coming in and you basically want to get everyone to the core. So niche fragrance lovers is another one that we sort of identified as, you know, people who already switched in, you don't have to do too much education piece, they're already sort of brought into the idea that fragrance can be this amazing mood-driven life-enhancing thing in the same way that like fashion, you know, can change different moods, different fragrances, like one of our fragrances. We call the red lipstick of fragrance because, um, tag by our side, this is name and you can basically, you know, it's the sort of shroud of confidence that you can perv yourself, um, be it for a date or a meeting, whatever it might be. Um, and each one of our fragrances has that, so we can kind of tap into that within that community as well. I feel like I'm one of those niche fragrance lovers, but I didn't know that I was until we started having this conversation. I'm the sort of person who will stop random people in the street and be like, what are you wearing? She's not joking. Yeah, I'm wearing. And you should, I think, like, it's a terribly awkward conversation to have with just random men though. Like, you smell great, sir. What are you wearing? I'm currently actually wearing, uh, one of your fragrances, sandalwood, temple movements. I'm flicking it towards you now. So I'm just filming this. And I found it just because I was, I was looking for something different a couple years ago, walking through Liberty and then I fell in love with it. So it's nice. I do think I like an e-shirt. I like smell a bit different to everyone else. Yeah. And I think you can, it's especially with things like discovery sets and, you know, you don't have to invest. I love a discovery. You don't have to go like the whole hog and get 100 ml, 150 ml. about you know you can be playful with it, I think it's good. And obviously layering is great and trying not to do that. - Wait, layering. - I don't think I'm clever enough to do the layering. - There's no layer. - I know, there. - The newest thing is marinating, so like putting all of your clothes in a plastic bag, spraying your perfume and leaving overnight. That's like, new one, one fragrance of toxins. - Oh god, I've got serious to learn. It makes it go further, surely as well, right? - Yeah. - Okay, I like this. - But I'm with oil based ones, sorry, we can take this off like that. - Yeah, I'm excited. No, no, the people need to know. Right, so moving on from marinating, which I will be going into a TikTok hole for later. Tell us a bit about your experience at Turnbull and Assa. How did you balance craft with the images of James Bond and how did that inform your understanding of how to build a luxury brand around a specific community? Because that is very niche. - They have the kind of bespoke house where they've made clothes for Winston Churchill, Presidents of the US, Prime Ministers, etc. And that is the craft of making a share, especially within the UK. That's obviously a huge part of their draw. When I work there is actually COVID, so it's kind of like quite a tricky time. But ultimately it kind of all centered around the store and kind of how you bring those values and those people and those stories on German streets amazing going check out. But the bringing those to the people at large as it were, that heritage but also how you story tell in a dynamic and new way. We kind of went into archives. They have just incredible centuries, almost, it's like 150 years old. So there's old sports books, old letters, obviously everyone used to communicate in letters. Just like everything is incredible, old adverts that were in newspapers. And all of those things translate essentially into fantastic content. So it was about getting that balance of bringing in the new, obviously the businesses to evolve as well as sort of like, I guess, honouring or like paying tribute to what has got the brand to that point. - Yeah. - Love an archive as well. I went to the Gucci exhibition and I could have stayed in the archive room for about three hours. - That was one of the best things I've been to. - And stuff. - And you know what? I personally wasn't a Gucci, you know, I'd die hard Gucci fan until I went there and was like, oh my gosh, I love it. - Yeah, that's got this good A exhibit written all over it. - Yeah. - Stuff like this. - Yeah, exactly. So it's that kind of balance of craftsmanship and storytelling. - Yeah. So for, yeah, some of the dynamics kind of, you know, with the rebrand, so the social impact mission has always been central to the brand, but it sort of became, and we'll always talk about that and that will always be central. But I think to broaden horizon and get more people in, you really need to talk about kind of the effects of the product, like how amazing it is, the craftsmanship that goes into that. We work with Carlos Benem, who's like an incredibly like made flower bomb and Polo and like launched for these people. So we're the smallest niche brand that he works for because he's like French Moroccan, lives in New York, works on IFF. So like incredible, Amy took him the concept of helping women in Morocco through what we do and he was like, great signed up. And we still work with him. So we've just launched a new fragrance, Arab Aquarius, and he worked on that with us as well. So how do you talk about that in a way that is accessible whilst also nodding to social impact is kind of that fluctuation? I guess each community has its own, you know, you wouldn't necessarily be talking about like the science of fragrance to everyone, you know, you can kind of tailor those messaging. Exactly. So I mean, I'm asking this because I'm super curious about this, but can you share specific examples of how you're leveraging these microcommunities? Obviously you're having to speak with them differently, or using kind of unique values for the brand differently with each of them. How are you leveraging that digitally and in real life, I suppose? Specifically examples that we do at San Ajadhan. Obviously you can reach most people online. So ways that we've trying to bring in people in is through kind of a Zoom Alchemy Club. Sending people, you know, if they sign up, we send them a discovery set, and then, you know, Amy comes up with a call. We have her flower healer who's been working with like 17 years that sort of inspired this journey to begin with, and we sort of go through the collection, talk about from a perfume point of view, like all of the kind of notes and what have you, also from a flower healing point of view, which is kind of this kind of aromatherapy tick properties of flowers. She's actually a quantum healer, so it's like, it's like really, really, really niche. What a mix in title. It's amazing. So yeah, kind of sharing that and kind of gives you a really safe and, you know, people logged on during their lunchtime, sat there with their discovery sets, and we're just able to kind of enjoy and be with the brand. Another one is obviously creators and kind of micro influencers, I guess. So we actually leverage Shopify co-labs, so out of the box, services Shopify offers, but you can basically use that to connect with anyone who's interested. So anyone can go to our website, sign up if they want to be a creator, and then we basically kick back if they drive sales. So it's sort of going back to that initial thing that Amy had, which is like empowering micro communities, like if you're a founder brand and you help us with getting the word out and supporting these women, we'll also sort of give you a share of that as well. Yeah, kind of like I haven't had a club before. I love that. We've got about 500 people around the world. Really good in the US as well. I think the, you create like that kind of peer-to-peer seems to be working better over their bills, maybe it's just a bigger market. And then in person, as I say, this alchemy breakfast series that we've been running, thankfully Amy is just a wonderful person, so it's just a joy to be around. And like that is just reflected in every piece of feedback that we get. But then also when you're a small brand, you are across so many things. Another example of this is like going in and doing install training in person, especially you know, we launched in SpaceNK in September, which was amazing, first national doors. Big move, for sure. Really exciting. You know, we're up against like, some tomfooled by Raido, huge, huge brands, but like we can hop on the tube, go to Canary Wharf and actually spend like half a day with all of the team sort of instilling the values, having a chat, hearing from them what they love about the brand, and also they've got tons of insights about other brands of what they're doing. So that kind of like personal touch is all really about something it's a lot, but if you can put invest the time, I think that's especially where you are a small niche luxury brand. If the time is like the most valuable thing that I think you kind of lose the kind of as you scale, that's quite hard to hold onto. But yeah. That's so true. But that passions spreads as well. You spread your passion onto those people you're training and they share it with the customers and it kind of, and again, even that builds that brand kind of loyalty and long-term sentiment that's invaluable at this stage and where you're at. Totally. You've spoken a bit there about kind of the brand storytelling, it seems to really inform the strategy around the micro communities that you're doing, in fact everything that you're doing. And there's certainly a lot of authenticity at play. It's coming across, you know, it's at the very heart of your brand as this wellness and the story about giving back to the community. What role does that play in how you move forward as fostering a strong micro community around the brand? Yeah, as we say, content is king, storytelling is everything, especially in fragrance, especially if you're trying to sell things that smell online. You can't see. You can't even see what it smells like. I do a lot of fragrance. So, you know, how can you try and like come up with new ways of talking about it? Like Red Lipscafray gets being one of them just trying to describe the alchemy of energy, like whatever that might be. Storytelling is everything, especially for a founder, a business, the founder and their truth is often so like intrinsic to the brand. Obviously, as the brand grows up, that can change and morph, but sort of knowing how much to use the founder as it were. So, you know, Amy is fantastic. Exactly, as I've been saying, sort of in like breakfast small environments. Like she's not great on content. Like she doesn't want to be in front of the camera. She doesn't want to be doing those things. I think it'll be good for a lot. Yeah, that's not good. That happens a lot. It's quite important business-wise as well to separate at some point the founder from the brand and the product offering. It's something that Herb Isam Agnai are exploring at the moment. Isam Agnai, he's in the title, you know, and a lot of up and coming brands or disruptive brands are being founded off of the back of people who are famous in their field already. So, you've got the likes of Enneer Bing, for example. They're trying to separate. They have their own brand and separating from the business is necessary at some point but quite a tricky thing. So, so respect, Amy. It's not easy. Especially when social media managers are like, please. I'm like, please just do another video. Like, please just play my love this again. Yeah, I imagine you've done, you've done this for, you know, over five years, whatever. You've done it a lot. With the rebrand, it was really about reestablishing that kind of messaging hierarchy. So, for us, it's obviously putting the product at the forefront while keeping the social impact mission at our core. How we tell that story, you know, changes in all the contexts. So, you're investing a lot of your internal resource, I suppose, into nurturing these microcommunities, both digitally and in real life. I imagine you have things like segmented email marketing campaigns and I don't know if you've got broadcast channels already, but like, I'm, that's a lot. So, how do you measure the success of this versus the level of resource you're putting into it? Do you have specific KPIs that you work to? Again, we're always looking at sales. And, you know, where we can drive, where we can kind of measure that is really key. So, things like the Shopify Colabs platform, you can obviously see which creators work best with their, which resonates best with their audiences. And so, then we take that, for example, and if we love the content, if they're, and we kind of see that good combination working of like great content that also performs, we like trying to move them up into the next tier. We've got lots of things with tears. So the next area is working with them on a specific partnership, asking them to reiterate, can we repost this? Can we use this as an ad, that kind of stuff? So that kind of helps us, again, like Roas is, like we live or die by Roas. So-- - MJ has kept me-- - Is it? Oh my god, we can do a whole lot of that. - That's about like your-- - Bram Billy, I speak about it in every single episode that we do. - I'm even bashing my hands against the table. - I mean, I love it too, but yeah, my MD always says, there's no long term if there's no short term. - No, no, no. - It's a-- - You know what, MD's a bad day, and I'm just gonna cow a quiet. - I'm gonna cow a quiet. - Love to have an age. No, yeah, I mean, 100% is all about the long term brand build, but I guess you can only-- Yeah, you got, sir. - You need the other-- - I get it. - You need to feed the other, exactly. Some of the Mavarti metrics, but like, if something is, those of you, those of comments, those of saves, like something's resonating, and like listen to Jacques Moub podcast recently where he was talking about, like, not being able to, like, not having the luxury of being a snob, and like, just actually needing to drive visibility for his brand, and I think-- - It's been very well. - Which is obviously done incredibly well. Shout out to Chris D. Tellington, one of our customers as well. She walked for him like yesterday. - Oh wow! - So that kind of, it's sort of that visibility piece as well, is what we have to measure it by too. Like, more people talking about you, share a voice, there's kind of things where you can. - Do you track that? Do you have a brand track or anything? - We don't. - No, it's absolutely-- - It's not as much as it is actually as well. - Yeah. - 'Cause I'm really fascinated by that side of things, that it can be like, really helpful. They're built in a way where they then tell you, like, what you need to do this year to achieve it. So I do, I find it quite fascinating, as well that you can harness the power of small, sort of focus groups through these things. - I find them quite fascinating. - But it is a luxury and unfortunately, it's not a luxury, everyone can have it. - We did do, someone did reach out with like, they're interested in working with us. We've done some digging and your share of voices increased by, I can't remember the stat, but from like, 2022 to 2023, which is, I've joined the brand in 2023. So, you know, you can see, we can see that more articles are being written, more people are mentioning us on socials. You can see that through, sort of UDC that's being posted. So, I guess you can't necessarily, we don't have like a fancy tool, but-- - I mean, I'm so excited. - You can sort of get a sense. - Yeah, you're quite, it's not easy. - Even like, you know, old colleagues being like, "Oh, I see it everywhere now." You know, that kind of thing. - How nice. - I'm like, do you like a file? - I've just put you in the algorithm, like, because I want you to see it. - From 2023, everything's gone very well. - No, everything is gone well. And like, yeah, you've got to be able to like, test and learn and failure is, you know, part and part of it. So, you'll do things be so sure that you've got a hilarious TikTok idea and-- - The flops. - And, you know, you're doing all good brands have their flop errors. - We did, that's fine. - We dust ourselves off and move on. - Okay, so what advice would you give to other aspiring luxury brands who are looking to tap into the power of microcommunities? You've obviously done it quite a lot in your career. So-- - Yeah, I think-- - Yeah, bring it back to the values. So, you know, it's kind of the same with content or anything really like what, like how can you make what you're standing for standout? So-- - So, do you think the values come before the communities or do you think your community almost drives though what it is that's speaking to them so much about you? - Like, to bring it back to the Swifties, it's like kind of like, power social in relationships of some extent. Ultimately, you're gonna have your values and, you know, you go through rebrands and you redefine them and, you know, I've been in businesses before where, like, the values were defined by the employees first. So, it's like your first microcommunity, that kind of thing. But I think one feeds the other, like, the social impact and using businesses is a vehicle for social change will never change at Sanajjan, that's always what we've got. So, like, how you can then go from that into, like, further empowerment or healing or, you know, all of these different kind of roots. - Sorry, I totally interrupted you as well. You were telling us advice and I stopped you. - I'm so sorry, please, you're always dumb. - A good thing is, like, focus on engagement too, because I think, if you're, like, I think that's like, like, 80/20 rule. It's like, if those 20% are, like, hyper-engaged and part of your part of their life, like, long term, that's great. You've got, like, you know, and obviously you want to put more people into that part as the business grows. So, like, engagement rates have gone up since rebrand as well, which is really good to see. So, how you split your content strategy. So, you've got the algorithm for reach, you've got the reach and your engagement pieces and kind of how you can play into that engagement, rather than scale. I also think, like, you can sometimes get carried away with being so overwhelmed by how much you have to do. So, really-- - I don't know what you're talking about. (laughing) - Like, like you say, like, one of the key things is do one thing well. So, what I think is, like, quite a classic thing, but, you know, like, try and bring it back to, like, what, you know, you can do well, doing that, explaining that to everyone. Essentially, you just gotta kind of build those, like, truthful, like, lasting connections, essentially. Another one would be, like, kind of, going back to what we're saying about being symbiotic. It's kind of, like, letting the community shape the narrative as well. So, with the new fragrance, for example, it's called air of Aquarius, launched for Aquarius season, letting your community shape the narrative also great, kind of what we're talking about, the kind of symbiotic relationship, like, we saw that astrology was kind of another key interest for most of our followers. You know, we've got one of the fragrance and the collection is sort of Venus of Venus. You know, there's that sort of a part of the thread of the business. So, for the new fragrance, we came up with this concept of, so Pluto is moving into Aquarius, which kind of gives us this, like, rebellion, creative, innovative space that we're kind of moving into. The last one was the '60s, like, the age of Aquarius. Seeing that interest within the community sort of informed, or thinking in, like, how we would approach this new fragrance. So, that's then we reach for lemon, which is the kind of key ingredient in it, but then Carlos obviously was able to kind of use that as kind of a starting point for building out the fragrance and the back and forth that comes from it. But, yeah, I suppose, you know, you, and kind of, with any MPD, like, that, you'd like, if you're answering someone's, if someone's asking you a question, answer it first before trying to talk about something else, I guess. Yeah, yeah, really listening to the customer. Exactly. Learning them drive things, not entirely drive things, but, you know, listening to them, acknowledging them, learning from them. Exactly. Amazing. Thank you so much. I genuinely feel like I've learned a lot about my communities for I like MJ. It's not something I've ever really known that much about. So, thank you for sharing the wisdom. Thank you for having me. I'm off to go, um, and bathe my clothes and, it's a fragrance that, what does it really mean? Marry me. Marry me. Yeah, I'm getting a sandalwood in the bag. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, Dan. It's been, it's been a pleasure. It's been a short wait to be. Thanks for listening to "Leap into Luxury." Don't forget to subscribe for more insights into the world of luxury. Or for more information about leap looks and the work we do, head over to leap.lux or find us on Instagram at leap into luxury podcast.