Brij, 60 East 9th Street, New York, NY (2026)

01/25/2024

This was a pinch me moment for Brij.

Brij is on a billboard in Times Square!!!

This is a proud moment for me and Zack Morrison.

And for the entire Brij team.

To think that the fledgling company that we started just 3 years ago is on a billboard in Times Square feels surreal.

Approximately 330K people pass through Times Square daily.

That’s a lot of eyeballs learning about Brij!

For those of us in NYC, we had a little party in Times Square last night with Sush Ravish and Brad Zomick (QR Code Dude!).

Of course, given the global nature of our team, not everyone was able to see it in person - so our team had a watch party to see it virtually.

Larla Halsey, Arely Escandón Salazar, Arqam Saeed, Ali Arshad, Manoj Singh Negi, Qalb Hussain, Zoofishan Khan, Stephanie Peters

The highlight for me, though, was sharing this moment with my biggest fans and supporters: Kevin Stephens and Harper.

Who have been there for the therapy sessions and hugs through the roller coaster of starting a business.

The billboard will be up until midnight on Sunday and runs at 43 minutes after every hour.

Go check it out!

Thank you Brex for this opportunity!

And thank you to our amazing customer, Health-Ade, who has been such an awesome partner of ours and featured their new Pink Lady Apple flavor in the campaign.

Kara Jacobson, Kevin Land, Anna Brook Lowery, Amanda Swisher, Angelica Winns

12/22/2023

Happy Holidays from the entire team at Brij

P.S. Thanks to Zack Morrison and his Midjourney skills, we can finally show off a team photo that shows everyone across 7 countries!

12/18/2023

Modern brands need to think about integrating their digital and physical channels.

ColdSmoke is a certified Shopify Plus partner.

It does custom design and development for ambitious e-commerce brands that typically have $20-100M in sales.

They also handle migrations from legacy e-commerce systems to Shopify and Shopify Plus, custom theme design & development, and headless storefronts.

Coldsmoke founder Mark Shesser tells his customers that they need to meet their customers where they are.

That means thinking beyond email, SMS, and push notifications.

And increasingly, that’s both online AND in-store.

And maybe they are using QR codes to bring something from the physical world to online.

BYLT Basics is one of Cold Smoke’s customers that started DTC and recently is opening its own stores.

Mark hopes that Coldsmoke customers can use Brij to create dynamic and personalized experiences that are not only a great user experience…

But bring back valuable data for the brand, like email addresses and what items customers purchased in retail.

It takes information that would otherwise be lost, allowing brands to build a deeper relationship with the customer.

12/18/2023

It’s pretty hard to be intellectually honest in leadership (or just in life), because we are under pressure to know a lot of information (business, politics, culture), and have an opinion on it.

Not to mention the polarizing environment of the current time period.

It’s harder than ever to be intellectually honest.

Here 5 ways to be intellectually honest:

1️⃣ Learn How to Recognize and Admit When You Don’t Know
2️⃣ Withhold Judgment for a While
3️⃣ Don’t be Afraid to Change Your Mind
4️⃣ Give Credit Where Credit is Due
5️⃣ Stay humble

It’s not always easy, but practicing intellectual honesty, will not only help you grow as an individual, but also help you lead your team, company, or family.

12/16/2023

The secret to failure is failing early, often, fast, and small

When most people fail, they are embarrassed and want to sweep it under the rug.

Consequently, people avoid failure and risk-taking.

As a founder, I’ve realized that embracing failure is mission-critical.

Because it is the only way to learn and grow.

It’s only an actual failure if you don’t learn anything from the experiment or experience.

But the key is to fail in a controlled way.

Fail early, often, and fast.

Declaring and accepting failure is not always easy.

It requires intellectual honesty to spot when things are not working.

Many small experimental failures help you avoid a catastrophic enterprise failure and get incrementally better.

And sometimes, those small failures can lead to big wins.

Below is a picture of Brij's first iteration.

That product was called Found, and it failed.

That failure led to Brij, which is thriving.

What’s your take on failure?

12/14/2023

Retail stores are the new media frontier for brands

There has been a retain media boom in the last few years, with almost all major brands selling digital ads for their online presence.

But now retailers are starting to explore ad space inside their brick-and-mortar locations with digital screens.

According to Andrew Lipsman from Insider Intelligence, in-store audiences are 70% larger than digital audiences.

Walmart’s monthly reach is 213M in-person shoppers vs. 145M online.

For Kroger, in-person reach is 98M in-store shoppers vs. 32.4M online.

The audience potential is staggering for most consumer brands.

Lipsman called stores the “next major media channel.”

Awesome reporting from Erin Cabrey of Morning Brew!

But my big takeaway from reading this article is that there is a huge digital opportunity sitting on the shelf that doesn’t require a brand to spend heavily on trade promotions.

By putting a QR code on product packaging, brands can own digital impressions for way cheaper than buying ad units.

Right now, it’s a huge missed opportunity.

Earlier this year, Brij looked at 3,000 brands in Target and Whole Foods, and only 12.6% were using QR codes to create an owned digital communication channel.

With the addition of a Brij experience, brands can
💪 Share content
💪 Collect data
💪 Stimulate reorder

Retail media is awesome but will price most brands out of participation.

Whereas any brand in retail can afford a Brij experience.

Similar to ads, placement, copy, and offer are important, but they are low-hanging fruit for most brands.

12/12/2023

4 secrets for crushing a Sephora launch

I recently chatted with Colm Mackin, the CEO of Act+Acre.

Act+Acre is a scalp care brand that helps with various ailments of the scalp, i.e., dryness, oiliness, thinning hair, and hair loss.

With a personal care issue that’s taken very seriously, the product really has to work.

So, its success is a testament to the efficacy of the product.

Act+Acre recently launched in Sephora nationwide in 250 stores and is crushing it.

There have been 3 keys to success in their launch.

1️⃣ Hiring new and different talent

Colm hired regional sales and education managers.

And each one of those managers has 10-20 freelance brand ambassadors.

2️⃣ Having a collaborative partnership with Sephora HQ

Sephora brings a great deal of intelligence about the Sephora women.

Which has informed every aspect of the product, marketing, and sales strategy.

They also work on very strict timelines, which adds a new layer of structure and deadlines.

3️⃣ Visiting every store and educating Beauty Associates (BAs)

While Colm invested in the busy press and OOH billboards in NYC AND LA during the initial launch, the real work happens at the store level.

Co-founder and face of the brand, Helen Reavey, Colm, and regional sales managers are trying to visit every store in this first year.

It’s a lot of planes, trains, and automobiles.

And it’s not just a “hi” and “goodbye.”

They spend 4-5 hours in the store.

Talking to 40-50 BAs one by one!

And Helen retells the brand story EVERY time for every BA at every stop.

This way, store employees know when someone has scalp issues, Act+Acre is the #1 choice, and they know what products to recommend for what issues.

4️⃣ Monitor the data closely and optimize accordingly

Every Sunday night, Colm gets a weekly sales report from Sephora HQ,

From that, he can use variance vs. target across all stores.

When a store is underperforming, Act+Acre can invest accordingly.

The two main tools are paid media and deploying brand ambassadors.

—

It’s going so well that Sephora just added Act+Acre to an additional 100 stores.

12/11/2023

The 5 principles of Brij Omnichannel experiences

Most brands are delivering a cookie-cutter experience in physical channels.

Products just sit on the shelf, and shoppers get the same one-size-fits-experience.

What is on the label is what you get.

And if you want more, you need to Google the brand’s website.

Brands can do better, and Brij can help.

Here are 5 principles of Customer Experience that Brij can bring to enhance your brand.

1️⃣ Unified experience

Brij seamlessly helps brands connect their physical presence in stores (or billboards) with their online presence. We even have brands using Brij experiences in social media, email, and SMS.

2️⃣ Informative Experience

Brij helps shoppers learn more about the products they want to buy, and customers learn how to get more value from their products.

3️⃣ Convenience

With a simple scan, customers can get exactly what they need and want in seconds.

4️⃣ Flexibility

Brij offers an app-like experience with the option to explore what else the brand has to offer, i.e., brand story, instructions, recipes, and related products.

5️⃣ Personalization

Brands can create a unique experience for every SKU, so customers don’t have to search Google for help. Customers also get a different experience once they register with Brij.

If you are interested in seeing more of these customer experience principles in action in Brij, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

12/08/2023

8 stats Adobe’s holiday season retail trends dashboard.

I recently learned that Adobe has a holiday dashboard compiling real-time purchase data.

It offers some pretty amazing insights into this year’s consumer spending behaviors and emerging trends.

Here’s what I learned so far, and some charts are included below.

1️⃣ So far, shoppers have spent $109B this holiday season

2️⃣ The peak of spending was Cyber Monday, not Black Friday

3️⃣ We are roughly halfway to the projected sales of $222B (a projected +5% YoY)

4️⃣ BFCM was peak discounting for most types of goods.

7️⃣ Shoppers bought 20% to 40% more items per order on their desktop.

6️⃣ Desktop conversion rates are ~2x mobile conversion rates.

8️⃣ Spending was almost even split by device, with desktop beating mobile by just .14%

There are a bunch of other dashboards with more insights. (link to the dashboard in comments)

Most likely, some of these data points will have changed by the time you check it out.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out at the end of the holiday season.

12/07/2023

Why Jolie partners with Brij, shared by cofounder, Arjan Singh

It’s an old product but with a new spin and category, which requires a lot of education.

To drive this education, Jolie does a lot of street and OOH marketing.

Traditional QR codes just take people to a website or landing page without much opportunity for engagement.

It’s a dense landing page that someone walking with a coffee will not spend time on.

Brij created an opportunity for Jolie to engage with their customers in a mobile-friendly way that is intuitive and on the spot.

Jolie uses their Brij experience to show people who scan their QR code a montage of UGC content.

It shows prospective buyers that everyone is talking about this and that they need to pay attention.

From there, navigating to Jolie’s Instagram, TikTok, email Jolie, or the Jolie website is easy.

It was a quick, out-of-the-box solution that dials in on the experience versus investing time and resources in-house.

Jolie is also in retail, which is notoriously hard to measure and tie back to your digital presence.

Brij provides Jolie with an elegant solution to learn who bought in retail via mobile warranty registration.

There is a subscription component to Jolie - customers need to replace the shower head filter every 90 days.

Jolie also puts a QR code in its instruction manual, which links to an install video, customer support, and subscription options.

12/06/2023

1️⃣ In retail

Many customers put tie Brij experience to in-store displays like shelf talkers to drive rebates and add them to signage while sampling to email collection.

2️⃣ On packaging

To cover the post-purchase customer experience, i.e., customer education, product registration, and merchandising-related products.

3️⃣ Out of Home

Add Brij to billboards and connected TV ads to connect prospective buyers to a shoppable experience or engagement campaign like sweepstakes.

🎁 Bonus uses

In addition to QR code activation, Brij is a short link so you can place it in any digital channel.

Customers also use Brij in these channels
💬 SMS
🗣 Social media
📧 Email
🎯 Paid ads

12/05/2023

New Netflix ad forms include… QR codes

Last year, Netflix introduced its ad-supported tier, which now has 15M subscribers.

And not its looking for more ad revenue from that segment.

To that, it's exploring lower funnel interactive ad formats.

No surprise here, as other streamers are increasingly moving towards shoppable ad formats with QR codes.

We are a fan of this move at Brij, as it strengthens the signal to the market that QR codes are a power play for omnichannel marketing.

Thanks, Kendra Barnett from , for the awesome reporting on this topic!

Brij

01/25/2024

12/22/2023

12/18/2023

12/18/2023

12/16/2023

12/14/2023

12/12/2023

12/11/2023

12/08/2023

12/07/2023

12/06/2023

12/05/2023

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category