Relationships Over Ads

Matt closes the week with two companies that quietly prove his thesis. First, a feel-good one from the Wall Street Journal: The Gund Company, a 75-year-old family-owned specialty manufacturer in St. Louis, has never conducted a single layoff, while averaging 18% annual growth for a decade, with about 1,300 employees and sales nearing $400 million. Its third-generation CEO credits a philosophy that puts employee well-being over short-term results, backed by a fast feedback loop and constant improvement. The website looks a little dated, Matt notes, but the homepage video of actual workers feels fresh and authentic, proof that behavior leads, not polish. It reminds him of the long-history Japanese companies he knew: culture reinforced through storytelling, updated by a real feedback loop. He wants to go find and tell more untold stories like this, and hints that’s where the next chapter of The Bigger Stage podcast is headed.

The main event is Lush, the cosmetics brand. The headline says they quit social media, but Matt is careful: they quit social media ads, not social media. Back in 2021, over concerns about privacy, algorithms, and platform harm, Lush stopped posting and advertising on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Snapchat (and later X), and five years on still hasn’t gone back to paid. Instead they poured into creator partnerships, brand collaborations, in-person experiences, email (6 million+ subscribers), and their own app (2.8 million users), with collabs alone driving roughly £34 million in sales, on nearly 9.4% revenue growth. They still use YouTube, Pinterest, Bluesky, and Substack organically. What Lush figured out, Matt argues, is that if you just place ads you’re paying the platform to push glossy information at people, and that’s not enough to build a loyal customer who re-ups again and again. Relationships are. Partnering through creators and collabs, going direct, inviting people into real-life experiences around shared values, that feels different, relationship-centered rather than information-centered, and it even inoculates you a bit from over-associating your brand with the platform. The lesson for everyone: what you see others doing isn’t necessarily the best way for you. The question underneath all the jargon (influencers, collabs, experiences) is the same one, how do you build real trust with your people, unseparated by fancy graphics? That old glossy-ad way isn’t gone, but it’s not what builds something new today.

The Gund Company (Wall Street Journal)“Bosses Want the Secrets of the Family Firm That Has Never Had a Layoff in 75 Years”https://www.wsj.com/business/management/gund-company-no-layoffs-family-business

Lush (Digiday)“How Lush quit social media ads and still drove growth”https://digiday.com/marketing/how-lush-quit-social-media-ads-and-still-drove-growth/