Having found her own success by building community with her brand Outdoor Voices, Ty Haney is now helping the community of founders with the launch of Try Your Best.
TYB, which launched earlier this month, is a Web 3.0 community platform designed for brands and consumers to build and earn together, offering brands a direct line to engage and reward fans for “meaningful participation.” The company stems from Haney’s ongoing belief that “the future of brand building is community-led, fueled by co-creation and incentivized by reward.”
Put simply, TYB is designed to be a brand’s community-building tool kit with the goal of revolutionizing how brands and consumers interact to create value together. By allowing the consumer to share thoughts and opinions in the strategic forum, brands can get answers to things including preference in color or style to make sure they are creating a better, more desired product.
The design is loosely based on the Outdoor Voices ambassador program, which Haney told WWD was actually the brand’s top growth mechanism. In practice, the ambassador program — which included more than 1,000 members — was managed online and saw members from all over the U.S. hosting events from jogging clubs and exercise events to dress events. The program grew brand awareness but also contributed back to the brand from a product development standpoint, where eventually the brand was taking decisions upstream to these influencers. The result was high conversion rates on collection drops and ultimately a new set of marketing tools.
TYB brands will open themselves up to a new kind of influence — one that comes directly from the consumer where the consumer is a partner. While brands on TYB will gain access to fans to gain meaningful insights, the consumers will participate in exchange for value in the way of collectibles, brand coins and access to exclusive experiences. Haney explained that as part of the community, these consumers, or brand fans, will want to help the brand grow because they see themselves benefiting from the growth of the brand — they feel personally invested.
“With customer acquisition costs skyrocketing, the retail industry requires a new approach to growth,” Haney said. “Brands are quickly realizing that what matters today is loyalty and that keeping their customers for the long run requires a new vision. If you think about it, loyalty today is the same as it was 50 years ago, transactional [and] shallow, and Web3 opens up an entirely new dimension to brand building strategy. Consumers want to influence the products they purchase, they want the brands they love to reflect their personal values and they want something to show for it. Making your community an extension of your team and sharing value with them is a new model we’re calling ‘community-integrated-commerce.'”
Importantly, Haney told WWD TYB is always considering sustainability in all operational practices, from helping brands design and produce items they know are in demand and therefore won’t end up as excess product to using NFT and blockchain technology that produces the least amount of energy possible.
On March 31, Joggy, the plant-based energetics brand, will be the first company to launch on TYB. With the launch, Joggy will offer an NFT that gives royalties in the company. Priced at $250, the first 500 consumers to buy a Joggy Doggy collectible will collectively receive 5 percent of royalties in the company, along with becoming founding community members and unlocking a suite of perks including team pricing (20 percent off all Joggy orders with special access to deals), free product (one free item at Joggy’s launch in April) and insider access (beta test and shape the Joggy community program as one of its founding members).
By launching Joggy on TYB and offering royalties in the company, Haney aims to make good on her promise of creating value for future fans of the brand. Additionally, Haney shared with WWD that as with all of TYB’s projects, the Joggy NFT are minted on the Avalanche Blockchain, which is a net-zero technology that uses 35,000 times less energy than Ethereum and 200,000 times less energy than Bitcoin.
The idea of collectibles like the Joggy Doggy NFT, Haney said, is really to incentivize loyal fans and have them help a brand grow. Joggy Doggy owners will hold the NFT in their TYB digital wallet in the Joggy community channel. Members of the community will see product testing opportunities and prompts to share opinions on upcoming products including color or flavor.
Following the launch of Joggy, TYB has plans to launch with Vada Jewelry, among more to be announced.
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