Why Huckberry Took "A Big Swing" with an Episodic Travel Show
Chief Brand Officer Ben O’Meara and Senior Manager of Strategic Media Partnerships Jeremy Berres Paul from men’s lifestyle retailer Huckberry discuss the creation and distribution of their episodic travel show “Dirt,” and why they chose to invest in such a high quality format.
TRANSCRIPT
Jeremy Berres Paul: We do want to get the Huckberry name out there more. And we are doing a lot of great storytelling and specific films, one-off projects with brands. But we wanted to build a new channel on YouTube specifically and build a larger ecosystem and a larger funnel for eyeballs. And for us, that was episodic content and high-quality TV-like production. It wasn't just about the legitimacy of the quality of content; but we wanted to take a bigger swing and we can over-strategize and think so much about the potential here or the potential there. The action really comes to fruition when you put something out there, see how that responds, and iterate, iterate, iterate.
Jesse Roesler: Greetings and welcome to ‘Content That Moves,’ the podcast from Credo Nonfiction and BrandStorytelling, that pulls back the curtain to reveal how the very best in brand films and episodic content is being funded, created, distributed and measured.
I'm your host Jesse Roesler, the founder of Credo Nonfiction, where we partner with brands to find and tell stories that reveal brand purpose and deepen brand meaning through short and feature length documentaries or episodic series. Visit CredoNonFiction.com to learn how we can help you create real, moving stories for your brand.
This podcast is co-produced by BrandStorytelling, bringing you the latest news, trends, and insights in branded content with top-of-industry events and in-depth industry coverage online. BrandStorytelling encourages a higher level of collaboration among advertisers, agencies, media partners, and creators in pursuit of a richer media environment. For more of the latest in the world of branded content or to explore event offerings, visit BrandStorytelling.TV today.
Today, a brand I have a whole lot of love for personally with Huckberry, a men’s lifestyle retailer that’s been building quite a media brand with an episodic travel show. Chief Brand Officer Ben O’Meara and Senior Manager of Strategic Media Partnerships, Jeremy Berres Paul discuss their original content strategy, highlighting their episodic travel show, “"Dirt",” that’s been funded in part with some strategic media partnerships.
Jesse Roesler: All right, gentlemen, it's confession time for me. The amount of Huckberry boxes that have arrived on my porch in the last year, year-and-a-half is substantial. It's a habit. But in my defense, I'm a forager, an angler, I hunt, and I host another podcast about the benefit of time spent in nature. So it makes sense I'm a big fan, right? So it's such a treat to have you here on the show. Thanks for joining.
Ben O’Meara: Thanks for having us. Love to hear that. Hopefully, all of the products you have gotten have lived up to the expectations and all of those various adventures. They've been key components to them.
Jesse Roesler: Yep. There's a lot of fun stuff I've been lusting after I’ve got to say.
Ben O’Meara: I love it.
Jesse Roesler: Before we dig into "Dirt" here, a beautiful travel series that was just featured at BrandStorytelling, I'd appreciate it if you could set the stage with a bit about Huckberry as a company for anyone not as familiar. Then, it'd be great to know about your roles in the company, and then we'll get into the content side of things.
Ben O’Meara: So I'm the VP of Marketing here, overseeing broadly our creative content and brand marketing strategy.
Jeremy Berres Paul: Yeah, and I'm the Manager of Partnerships here at Huckberry, working across our content series and third-party brands and adjacent partners to bring stories to life as well as explore new opportunities through our Huckberry Presents medium.
Ben O’Meara: I can start on the Huckberry origins and the important DNA that went in to how "Dirt" came about from that and that connected line. Huckberry was started 13, going on 14, years ago. Andy and Rich, our two co-founders and co-CEOs, started Huckberry in San Francisco. I could go deep on this, but I'll try to keep it relatively high level. The idea behind Huckberry then and still the idea of Huckberry now is we’ve been digital-first from the very beginning. So when Andy and Rich started the company, this was at the rise at the very beginnings of what is now the norm in Shopify and e-commerce and everyone having their own platforms. At the time, it was still a brick-and-mortar-dominated retail landscape, or Amazon. Andy and Rich saw the opportunity in not only the e-commerce space but more specifically the origin of the Huckberry brand and DNA.
They were guys who lived in the city and worked nine-to-five jobs. They both worked in finance in New York and San Francisco, but on the weekends, they were getting out there, just as you described—big skiers, fishermen, traveling all over the world. That's how a lot of guys live. They might be living in a city or an urban environment, but they really appreciate the outdoors and they live for adventure. You have and have had brands on the traditional outdoor adventure side and then on the everyday style side you have that whole ecosystem. They felt a void in the blend of the two worlds. Sometimes the outdoor industry and outdoor brands felt almost too exclusive, and if you weren't climbing Everest, you weren't an outdoorsman. And then on the style side, there was a lot of fast fashion and keeping up with the Joneses. They cared about both, they cared about what they wore to the office and were intentional about the products they bought, but they lived this adventurous lifestyle.
What came then in terms of business strategy, there were a lot of cool, up-and-coming brands, a of of smaller brands that weren't necessarily getting the exposure because we didn’t have e-commerce in what it is right now. They were regional brands, too small for big-box or Amazon, but there wasn't that digital landscape to get their word out and create their communities beyond where they were founded. The combination of lifestyle and then the business opportunity, they went about curating cooler, smaller brands that connected those two worlds. And Huckberry at the very beginning and still to this day was built on storytelling. We're going to work with you and tell your story. You may not be known yet. But guys like us, we appreciate a story, they appreciate discovery, they appreciate the quality with which something is made. Those are all incredible ingredients to a great story. So building this e-commerce platform that was rooted in curating cool brands that stretch outdoor to everyday style. And then using our email newsletter and our journal at the very beginning as a place to go deeper on those stories and better connect them to people that were absolutely the target customer but weren’t’ aware of that brand for whatever reason. They weren’t from that area of the country or that brand had just launched. So Huckberry has always been built on curation and storytelling and we so have been able to articulate that a little bit better as we’ve gotten bigger. And what we’ve landed on, and again, Huckberry was this from the very beginning, was this idea of everyday adventure and our tagline of "Inspire and equip adventures near and far." All of those words are intentional.
Inspire is storytelling. Equipping is the product. And then the “near and far” is very intentional. It isn’t just going somewhere really, really far. Adventure is starting a new hobby. Adventure is exploring your local park. But we still have that thirst and quest to jump on a plane and fly around the world. So how do we combine all of those things in one online ecosystem?
Jesse Roesler: Awesome. I can feel that ethos in all my interactions. Is that where the storytelling started—was of the brands you were curating? Did that reach beyond different types of media as a precursor to "Dirt?”
Ben O’Meara: It was all written at that point. We were not doing any video 13 years ago. The foundation was finding these brands and telling their stories through our newsletter and journal. And at the very beginning, as with many startups, Andy and Rich bootstrapped the business. For 6 or 7 years, we didn't have a marketing budget, so that was also how we created brand awareness. You work with us, give us your products, we're going do an in-depth story on your founder, on the construction of the product that you're making. To those partners, that was a great piece of marketing that they in turn would share. And so that snowball is what was really our early customer acquisition efforts. Now we've got more sophisticated in the types of stories and the different channels that we're playing in. But that was, that was it at the very beginning: what is the brand story? How is that relatable to our future target customer? And then using those stories as ways to build an audience through partners.
Jesse Roesler: And I imagine, with such thoughtful curation of the brands that are part of your offering, you really know your audience, maybe better than a lot of online retail brands.
Ben O’Meara: We like to think that way. We’ve got an incredible data team that goes deep on metrics, purchase history, where people live, demographics, and then the qualitative. We've always been a brand that despite being online, connecting with our customers in real life. So we've got a pretty good grasp on who our core customer is. And that's always at the center point of every decision that we're making, whether it's developing a show like “Dirt” or bringing on a new brand. So,there are certainly more people that we think need to know about us and we want to continue to expand that customer base. But, that core customer, and even more broadly what are our core values? What are those values that we know our core customers gravitate to most? And those being the centering pieces that we are always looking through for any decision that we're making.
Jesse Roesler: How did those values translate into "Dirt?” What was the strategy that said it was time to invest in a video series that feels like a television series? In fact, the way I came across it was on Outside's OTT channel. We had licensed a film to Outside, and one of the reasons I wanted to go with Outside is I saw “Dirt” was on there and I saw what they were doing, and there's a lot of great content. And I thought we'd feel really at home here. So thank you, by the way, for that. But that's how I saw “Dirt,” and it's a beautiful show. Do you want to talk to the origins of that?
Ben O’Meara: I can talk about the origins, and Jeremy can discuss how we now use "Dirt" and look at "Dirt" through the property.
Jeremy Berres Paul: By the time we had launched "Dirt" we had moved aggressively into video, and were starting to understand our video impressions. We had gotten pretty good at storytelling and really understanding key pieces of a story. And then we started to bring on brand partners that would be paying us like an advertising agency to do a branded video about their particular brand or their product. And so from a video standpoint, it became, I wouldn't say like a core competency, but something we got really comfortable with. The more that we built those videos and built that identity, one the one hand, it was something that resonated really well with our partners in the community and obviously our customers.
But the one thing it wasn’t proving in doing those one-off videos was that consistent storytelling like an episodic strategy, where you can really build an audience. The whole strategy behind “Dirt” was to get the Huckberry name out there more, and building a lot of bottom-of-funnel product education and a lot of great storytelling and specific films, one-off projects with brands. But we wanted to build a new channel on YouTube specifically, and build a larger ecosystem and a larger funnel for eyeballs. And for us that was episodic content and high quality, tv-like production. It wasn't about just the legitimacy of the quality of content, but we wanted to take a bigger swing.
We knew all of that, and those were certainly the pieces and helped us make that initial decision. But I'll be very honest: The beauty of Huckberry is we see the opportunity, but we've always been really agile. And Richard, our co-founder has got this saying that is ingrained in all of our heads, “You always throw out your first pancake, right?” We can over-strategize and think so much about the potential here, the potential there. But where the action really should come to fruition obviously, is when you put something out there and see how that responds and iterate, iterate, iterate. So we had all these conversations: We want to expand our storytelling efforts, we want to build a new channel, we want to be more of a media arm because we are good storytellers. Let's do an episodic show. Let's come up with a few ideas. Let's choose the best idea, and then let's greenlight a pilot. And that's how we landed on “Dirt.” We got lucky because it was incredibly thoughtful in the actual creative concept that Kate, who runs Huckberry Presents, and Josh with sort of the co-creators of this. Again, the idea was there, but again, we did not have that ecosystem created yet. So we were lucky in that the the creative was nailed and it took off as soon as we launched it.
Ben O’Meara: Coming back to what our mission is, “adventures near and far,” and why not start with a near adventure with Josh who is local to the Seattle area for the last 15 years. So let's have him explore his backyard and we'll tell that story. And I think that is what made it really humanized and connect Josh to our audience and made the pilot resonate. I think at the time, the first episode went live on our YouTube where we had 10,000 subscribers. We're close to 12, 13x that today, and aspirations to be much, much larger. And that was only a year ago, really a year and a half ago. So let's do the near adventure and see if it works. Let’s not use the huge budget and throw it all out there on the first go. And then that did hit, but let's expand the adventures and then unlock other members of the Huckberry community. I think that's what's really cool about the series is each one, we meet those local chefs and that are like you, Jesse, a fan of Huckberry. Like Mason in New Orleans or Yia in Minnesota. So these are friends of the brand in the community, and that's what makes it so authentic, I believe.
Jesse Roesler: That’s such an important point for brands looking to get into serial storytelling. You can prototype, you can start with a pilot just like is done in most of television. I'm curious, another question for other brand listeners that would like to follow in your footsteps. Was there a moment when you were pitching “Dirt” as a pilot when you were looking to get an investment or funding that tipped the scales? Was there anything that you presented that you found particularly persuasive, or did you have the investment from leadership from the get go?
Ben O’Meara: The first "Dirt" we self-funded. We did not bring in any sponsors. Part of that was we didn't have a Jeremy yet. But part of that was still foundational. We were building “Dirt” for Huckberry and to build the Huckberry brand. And so we wanted complete creative control to make sure that we were really nailing and that it was the right representation of Huckberry. While taking into consideration how we expected and wanted this to open the aperture onto new eyeballs. But the first pilot was completely self-funded and it was something that was a sign-off from leadership, Andy and Rich. Again, because we have that foundation in storytelling, because I think also uniquely we have a really big audience base. We don't just have a customer base because of all the work that we had done to build our journal and content storytelling, the catalog magazines that we put out, we have a million and a half guys signed up for our email subscriber list.
And we know we have the data that if a customer interacts with our content, their lifetime value to Huckberry actually increases exponentially. So from a “covering our bases”, or a confidence that even if this thing doesn't go viral and take off, it is going to provide value to the Huckberry business and the Huckberry brand. That's what gave us the initial confidence to allocate a certain part of our marketing budget into creating this pilot. Then once obviously that pilot took off and we hired Jeremy, it opened up the opportunity to start bringing in the right partners to help finance and build this program.
Jeremy Berres Paul: If you've been a subscriber to the Huckberry newsletter, which I was for a long time before I came in and worked here, is you'll see, there's diversions and content that's mixed into every send. And people love food, people love to travel, and we have the data that was explaining what our customer likes and wants. So let's just bring it together and work our team to really bring it all to life. So it was a little bit of marrying data to get behind throwing it up to leadership, so that definitely helped push things along too.
Jesse Roesler: I think a lot of brands are in the position where they are needing to self-fund, maybe not even the pilot, but more. But what you've done here with the strategic partnerships, obviously I'm familiar with Ireland since we saw that episode, and I know the tourism board was involved. But it seems like there's a lot of potential for brands to partner with other non-competitive brands to both fund and then increase the distribution reach. Can you talk about how you approach those partnerships and how that's been beneficial? I'm sure it's in a myriad of ways.
Jeremy Berres Paul: From the Ireland one specifically, it really all starts with the conversation and having the partner really get to understand the audience from there. And then vice versa, us too, every time we get on with a new partner to explore, even if there's a third party brand partner we've been selling for years, we really want to get to the bottom of who they're trying to reach. What's the story they're trying to tell? And then, you know, make the decision: does this make sense? Are we wanting to continue to go down the path and explore through our many different avenues? What might make the most sense? So for this example, “Dirt” was a home run because the tourism board wanted to tell a story of not just Dublin, they wanted to tell a story about food, they wanted to tell a story about parts of the country that usually don't get shined on. So what better avenue than “Dirt” that can go deeper into specific places.
Then continuing from that through the series of “Dirts,” We've worked with brands like GoreWare and Gore-Tex, as well as UPCO Electric Bikes. We have future episodes coming out with some airline partners. It really all comes down to the ethos of adventure and wanting to continue to tell great stories and meet interesting people. It's all conversation and relationship driven. And we're in a great position to evaluate and really love our partners that entrusted us to tell their stories too.
Ben O’Meara: Tourism Ireland, by the time we had launched that project, we had already put out three or four episodes so strategically it provided a much easier sell. Because look at the success the show has seen from an eyeball perspective, but then also from a creative quality perspective. And to keep coming back to our foundation: we are building this for us and we have a strong point of view that our customers really trust. And luckily every partner that we're working with sees that and they want to amplify what we're doing, not completely change what we are doing.
And we of course want to make sure they're really happy. The KPIs that Jeremy mentioned, they are getting what they need out of it. But every partner that we bring in for “Dirt” it's very clear that there's going to be a natural integration.We're not going to force something in here just because there's a check involved. And there's that mutual respect of, we work with you, we love you as a brand, whether it's a brand that we carry, or they're conversations that Jeremy has sussed out. And that brand alignment, that customer alignment is there. Authenticity can get thrown around quite loosely in our world, but it's a very authentic crossover. Any of the partners that are featured within our “Dirt” series, they're products that we would actually bring, or they're regional to that place. Like when we went and did Minnesota, Red Wing is one of our longtime partners, and Red Wing is still making boots in the same factory. And that would be a story that I would want on “Dirt” regardless. So it was a national integration.
People always ask, what do you love most about Huckberry? And it's our community. The amount of brands that we work with across the world, they represent different interests, activities, regions, it plays itself really well to a travel brand where we want that variation of places and adventure and story. So that natural integration and customer alignment has just been foundational.
Jesse Roesler: I love that you not only travel and see new places, there’s an entertainment value, but I also plan to use it as a travel guide. When I’m in Ireland next, I'm going to pull this up.
Ben O’Meara: We love hearing that on a variety of levels. Our brand and content strategy has always been, we want it to be actionable and accessible. We of course want an element of inspiration, but we love the data that we're seeing behind “Dirt,”but from a qualitative standpoint, the thing that I love, and I know all of us love most in a sense is, is that exact type of comment where: that was an amazing thing to watch, beautifully shot all of those really hard things to do, but in the end, you actually are going out and doing something with it. And that's always been our mentality of storytelling, even when we're talking about product. We're not selling the product, we're selling what you're going to do with that product. So that for us is really important that it can be a travel guide to people. And that discovery element that Jeremy mentioned, Ireland's a perfect example, right? A lot of those places aren't on the top places to go on TripAdvisor but they're sure as hell going be places when all of us go to Ireland that we are making sure that we stop by.
Jeremy Berres Paul: That is the authentic validation too, is from locals. I don't know if you've watched our episode from Up North? Minnesota people say yeah, this hits home. This is what I would recommend my friends to do if they visited me here. So to continually get that feedback every time an episode comes out that locals say we're giving their home a great representation, I think is so important. And that again, going back to like Kate, Josh and how ingrained they get in the community and the pre-production and let the individuals lead our storytelling is what will still continue to be very important to make sure that the show's successful.
Jesse Roesler: I can vouch for that. Very proud of Red Wing Boots. Very proud of Yia Vang and what he's done for our food scenes. So absolutely you're hitting those notes.
I'd love to talk a little bit more about your distribution. Because like you said, you're building your own platform with your YouTube channel. When you're going to partners, you're not only offering content, but audience comes along with that, not only through your newsletter but now through these new video channels both on YouTube. But I imagine a lot of people are seeing it on Outside just like I did. What's the makeup and calculus of your owned platforms and your other platforms where there's probably a symbiotic relationship? You're probably bringing viewers to Outside, and people on Outside are probably becoming Huckberry customers. Like how do you put that all together?
Ben O’Meara: I think for us right now, and that's part of the reason why to shout out BrandStorytelling. We were there to have those conversations. We are still new in this game as it relates to streaming partners and how you scale a media business. Outside TV is the only partner that we have on the streaming side of things. It's a non-exclusive partnership. Again, coming back to those authentic relationships we've been working with Outside. They were the first affiliate that we worked with years ago and getting in their newsletters. They've been a close partner of ours for a long time. And so we obviously know there's a lot of crossover and customer base. And so for us, they were looking to continue to find great storytelling to put on their platform to their audiences. And we obviously wanted to get the “Dirt” name out there. So it was one of those organic relationships. It just made sense. And that's like as far as our distribution strategy is from an external partnership standpoint. Of course, we use all the partners that Jeremy referenced, like Tourism Ireland, Red Wing, they're all getting behind it, sharing it in their ecosystem. But from a pure media partnership streaming strategy, we're still building it for our channels first, and building our YouTube.
As Jeremy mentioned, I'm incredibly proud of the growth that we have had. We have 125,000 YouTube subscribers as of recording today and we had 10,000 last year. Each one of our “Dirt” episodes gets on average over a million views and that's feeding into the broader YouTube ecosystem. We know that YouTube is the number one platform that our customers are spending their time on. As Jeremy mentioned, we know travel and food are streams that we want to be flowing in. And so the YouTube algorithm, whatever they're doing is obviously helping there. So not to oversimplify, but that is our distribution strategy right now. It's the right strategic partners we bring in to be featured in “Dirt” and getting into their ecosystems. It’s Huckberry, Huckberry’s YouTube, and then we are continuing to explore opportunities to get “Dirt” in other places.
Jeremy Berres Paul: And then two, we love to make pull-down assets for the performance team, or for just our organic social. So as marketers, we like going in with the lens on our shoots that let's make sure we're getting great imagery for our PDP pages.We're making that ten-second UGC cut that goes on Instagram and TikTok. So we have double value in our shoots as well that can back into maybe a more of like a ROAS KPI that a certain team needs to hit that can help continue to fund too.
Jesse Roesler: That's super smart. And it seems like the challenge for a lot of brand marketers that are trying to do something similar is having a need for shorter content that we can put on all these other channels. Now can we also be doing the long game with what you're doing? So that seems really smart. On that note, I’m curious if you have any other parting advice for brands that are hoping to create something similar and follow in your footsteps that we haven't already touched on?
Jeremy Berres Paul: I think listen to your audience would be first and foremost. If that's through direct one-on-one conversations, We do things like VIP happy hours where do things like have our customers into the office, to literally talk to them about what they wanna know as well as through data. I think that's first and foremost, listen to what your audience wants. And then come up with something that is for you and them. Because if it's something that you know you wouldn't want to watch, or your customer doesn't want to watch, I think that should be a perfect place to stop and move on to the next concept. Yeah. So I think that that would be my number one advice.
Ben O’Meara: You have to be incredibly dialed and specific on what are your brand values? What do you uniquely own? And that drives your point of view. And that point of view, connected to what your customers want, that needs to be the through line. I don't care how big a potential sponsor could be, how creative the idea is, does the world need another travel or food show? That's a question that, you know, we jokingly have been asked. And the answer is yes, as long as you have a distinct point of view on it. If you're just trying to copy and jump into something that's trending, that's certainly a data point you should be looking at. But you need to then come back what is your unique point of view and your expression of that? And that unique point of view is a really strong brand point of view and a really, really strong understanding of who your core customers are. Because if they love it, there's gonna be a lot of other customers that love it as well. And I think sometimes that can get reversed and you almost start with this to be a really big idea and then you bring it back and it's like, do we have license to play here? Do we actually have something specific and unique that hasn't been said already here? That's something that we are just incredibly maniacal about and is, as Jeremy and I both shouted out, like Kate and Josh and the Work Shirt team, that's how they view every one of these is that point of view and specificity, and making sure that it is unique, even if it does take inspiration. Bourdain has been one of our inspirations. And that's certainly been a muse for this show, but what's our take on that?
I think it's just incredibly important to have those two foundations before you do anything. And then you need a great team to really build that strategy. The content can only be as good as then what is your distribution strategy? Who are the partners that you're bringing in? How do you get more out of them? As Jeremy mentioned, I think that is one of those unlocks for us is “Dirt” isn't just a single episode. “Dirt” powers six other things across the Huckberry ecosystem. It really creates a flywheel and it becomes this like centering piece of content. So looking at it from that lens too, not just shooting a single piece of content, but how do you use that in other places to build your audience, build your revenue, whatever your KPI might be.
Jesse Roesler: That's great. And I think the arc of your content story at Huckberry is a great lesson too. Like you said, you were embedding storytelling from the very beginning. It might have just been written stories, but the fact that it was embedded within everything else you were doing, it seems like a natural evolution. We saw this from other brands at the conference with Wine Enthusiast, they're known for their publications, their magazine, now they're translating into audio with a podcast and looking at other realms they can explore. But it all comes back to knowing their point of view. And they've always been telling stories, just thinking about how else can we do that? And bringing partners, like you're doing. Super smart too.
Well thanks gentlemen. I appreciate you being here and sharing a little bit of the inside of how this all came together. We'll certainly be watching for more episodes and maybe new series? Do you have anything coming up you can say anything about?
Jeremy Berres Paul: A little bit of both. Definitely new series in the works and in development, as well as four more episodes of Dirt in the next year that are already in process. So I think, Atlanta in February. Keep an eye out.
Ben O’Meara: Atlanta. The team just got back from a three-week shoot in Japan. I won't give too much away, butI think that we're going to be expanding “Dirt”and doing some extensions that will come out of the Japan episode. We'll be shooting in our home state of Texas, and then we're finalizing a few more of the rest of the year. So, we'll be a full year of “Dirt” as Jeremy said, we've got a couple lines in the water.
Jesse Roesler: Exciting. Maybe we’ll be talking about the next thing at Brand Storytelling in 2025.
Ben O’Meara: We’d love that.
Jesse Roesler: I hope you've been enjoying the podcast, and I'd love to hear from you. If you have ideas for guests or topics for future episodes, drop me a note at jesse@credononfiction.com.
