How Online Art Brand ‘Ikonick’ Generated $10M Sales in 18 Months by Leveraging Creator Audiences
Monopoly. Muhammad Ali. Mat Fraser. Footlocker. AND1. NBA Legends.
What do all of these iconic brands & personalities have in common?
Or rather, what do all of these Ikonick names have in common?
Ikonick, founded in 2016, sells high-quality canvas prints online, with free shipping baked into every order. They rely on appealing visuals that speak to an audience that’s hungry for a good message.
Ikonick exists to inspire and motivate through art and visual storytelling; if we’re not doing that, we automatically fail. — Mark Mastrandrea, co-founder
Founded in 2017 by entrepreneurs Jeff Cole & Mark Mastrandrea, Ikonick came into existence when two key factors overlapped:
- Mark had previously been selling art, and 95% of inbound inquiries on open pieces were of interested parties…who couldn’t afford the art.
- Jeff’s curated Instagram following had achieved critical mass — the two business partners wanted to figure out how to monetize it.
Which brings us to the million-dollar question: how did Ikonick land some of the most relevant creators of our age, and set up iconic brand partnerships designed to last a lifetime?
Audience-Message Match
In their early days, Ikonick realized that they needed to target a vocal & active niche, and chose to focus on serving entrepreneurs, hustlers, and ambitious people who were on their way. Relying on messages of focus, grit, and determination, they quickly achieved their first fit of Audience-Message Match.
The first Ikonick avatar was someone who’s already on their way to ‘making it,’ but perhaps hasn’t made it yet. The brand routinely pushes out iPhone-style ads showing their art featured in dream houses, as if to say “this is the house you’ll have if you buy our art.” Because, in their voice, “it’s only a matter of time until you’re here.”
Audience: Aspiring entrepreneurs, business builders, hustlers.
Message: Focus, hard work, determination, hustle.
By emphasizing affordability of art to capture the mass market and establishing a reliable supply chain of direct-to-consumer canvas prints, Ikonick perfectly set up a way to monetize any key idea through effective DTC distribution. Now, where to look to find ideas that have taken root…
The Creator Economy
Every day, millions of creators rely on their next video, post, blog post, or podcast to achieve Audience-Message Match.
In order for Ikonick to continue their progress, they needed to find and create more instances of Audience-Message Match. As they achieved saturation of their first and core market, they needed to look elsewhere to find the right messages to share, paired with the right audiences to share them to.
The term ‘influencer’ has been beaten half to death over the last 10 years, and they come in all shapes and sizes, as a quick glance of any Instagram explore page will quickly show. However, as more and more people have flooded into the space, we’ve seen a new type of player emerge: the creator, who is rewarded less for how they look and more for how they contribute to the world.
Influencer:
A person who has: the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience.
Creator:
A person who produces, invents, is a thought leader, or makes things.
Not all influencers are creators, but the best creators inevitably become ‘influencers,’ especially as their audience continues to scale.
Ikonick’s genius was realizing that we’re living in the heart of the creator economy, where ideas are currency and each social media profile serves as a de-facto platform to spread messages.
To expand the reach of their Audience-Message Match, Ikonick started to focus on partnerships with message-first creators, who have pre-built audiences already consuming specific ideas from the creator.
Just like Nike relies on the achievements of the world’s top athletes to sell more shoes, Ikonick relies on the ideas & audience of their creators to sell more canvas art.
Creator: Tom Bilyeu: Founder of Quest Nutrition & Impact Theory
Audience: Aspiring entrepreneurs, business builders, self-improvement seekers.
Message: Wellness in both body and mind, have an impact, work hard, be relentless, your dreams are achievable.
Creator: Mat Fraser: Cross-Fit Champion
Audience: Bodybuilders, self-improvement seekers, young professionals.
Message: Embrace the pain. Work hard. Work harder. Be like Mat Fraser, and connect with the ideals of your idols.
Incentives for Creators
Ikonick pays a percentage of each sale to the creator to incentivize the push, and gives each creator a unique way to monetize their audience.
This is brilliant for several reasons:
- Ikonick is able to run ads directly through the creator to their social media following, directly accessing the most engaged audience segments of any given creator.
- Ikonick amplifies their campaign with the organic reach of the creator audience, driving marketing costs further down.
- Ikonick is able to create content around the partnership to push out through organic channels, such as email, SMS, and social media.
What about the Ikonick brand throughout all of this? They build brand clout for themselves by maintaining a string of high-profile collaborations that keeps Ikonick in a jet stream of social status.
…Which, of course, helps them to land even bigger partnerships in the future.
The Best Brands Are Creators Too
Audience-Message Match isn’t just limited to creators. A brand is nothing if not a collection of brand values & ideals supported by products that fit their brand message. Take Nike for Athletes (‘Just do it’) or Apple for Technologists (‘Think Different’) for example.
Working with brands vs. creators allows us to go deeper and broader with storytelling by utilizing built-in IP — Jeff Cole, co-founder
The world’s best brands are constantly sharing new ideas & brand messages to their customers. Ikonick, after building a reputation for partnerships with creators, soon realized that they had a massive opportunity ahead of them by plugging into some of the most robust & well-known brands in the world.
To maintain the pursuit of ‘Audience-Message Match,’ Ikonick has expanded their footprint to licensing deals and brand partnerships to further access new audiences, including properties like Monopoly, AND1, and the NBA.
If the Ikonick thesis is built around finding engaged audiences that respond to certain ideas, then their path to providing a platform for other brands to further monetize their existing audiences pours jet fuel on an already roaring fire.
What Happens Once You’re In The System?
You say “OK OK Tom, we get it. Ikonick discovered Audience-Message Match in all these places, now what?”
Well, finding the audience and putting the right message in front of them is only half the battle. The other half lies in the digital storytelling experience Ikonick creates in order to CONVERT someone on that message.
Digital Galleries
The Ikonick homepage is reminiscent of an art gallery; easy on the eyes, easy to browse, and filled with inspiration. Ikonick is well served by creating a comfortable & familiar social scrolling experience, and they rely on this foundation to get potential consumers deeper into the website.
Product Photography:
When you hover over product imagery, two stories are told. The no-hover image shows the studio photography image of a piece of art, to provide a clear closeup and allow the art to stand for itself. When you hover over the image, the preview changes to a photo of the art piece up in a lifestyle setting, ranging from a home office to a living room to even your gym.
Varied Lifestyle Locations
On each product page, Ikonick shows each piece of art in a variety of different locations to maximize the chance that a potential customer sees it in exactly the setting that they are shopping for.
Long-Form Stories:
Ikonick leverages long-form copy on the product page to great effect: while their art is visual, the concepts behind the art are best shared through long-form reading, and serve to anchor the meaning & inspiration behind the piece. They again tap into long-form copy in the construction of their emails, which read like a sequence of inspirational blog posts rather than a canvas art company.
Customized Website Experience
A subtle touch that Ikonick adds to their digital experience are the cues hidden within different website collections — men’s collection, the women’s collection, and kids collection — which each have their own twist on the Ikonick design aesthetic. The kids’ website has bright pastels & little characters adorning parts of the pages, while the women’s site embraces nude-CTA buttons and a lighter color palette.
Invite Your Audience In
Ikonick, through their visual medium and story-based social following, serves as a platform for others to tell their stories too (which sells more art). Ikonick produces a web-series hosted by their two founders where each episode provides either a look into the behind-the-scenes of the company, or a personal interview with a top creator to tell the story of their journey.
Each guest then picks a favorite Ikonick piece to highlight. If they’re actively partnering together, they’ll select the Ikonick piece that the creator had input into. If the creator doesn’t work with Ikonick, they’ll find another piece to highlight, offering yet another touchpoint into a story or message based on the advocate.
Wrapping It All Up
Ikonick makes it easy to browse art, buy into the message, and visualize a piece in your home, no matter what room you’re in.
Their efforts behind digitizing a nuanced art buying process, and their willingness to customize the experience to each customer segment have served as key drivers of their annual growth rate as they seek to maintain their trajectory as the fastest growing eCommerce art brand.
Key Takeaways for DTC Brands
The best way for brands to prepare is to invest time and resources now. Start building systems and rapport to be best positioned as the market catches up. — Mark Mastrandrea, co-founder
- Focus on partnerships with clear ‘Audience-Message Match’ before all else.
- Leverage creators, not influencers to amplify your brand voice.
- Acquire customers by relying on the organic audiences of creators & by running ads directly through creator accounts to their most loyal followers.
- Drive customer repurchase by sharing an infinite wheel of partnerships through SMS, email, and social media.
- Create consistent digital experiences that make it easy for a customer to browse, and even easier to visualize your product in their life.
- Invite your audience into the journey of the company to build the next level of brand-relationships, which also serves as a platform to share with future creators.
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