An interview with Pattern Brands GM, Katy Marshall

Welcome to the DTC Growth show.

Every episode we talk to founders and leaders at some of the most exciting DTC brands in the world. We discuss their vision, how they launched, and how they are growing their brand.

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In this episode, we talk to Katy Marshall, the General Manager of Pattern Brands. She's on a mission at Pattern to help our generation find more enjoyment in daily life. Before founding Pattern, the company was an award-winning design agency called Gin Lane. They spent over ten years focused on building consumer brands. While helping to launch businesses was incredibly fulfilling, the long-term aspiration was always to have a more direct impact on onsumers' lives.
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During her career, Katy has been able to hold multiple marketing titles and work for large brands like Kraft. She reflects on these experiences to shed light on what makes the Pattern Brand team so successful now. 

She explains that with many DTC brands you can create and launch campaigns quickly, get them out the door, see how they perform, iterate, and improve in real-time. This mentality gives the benefit of moving with the speed of a digital environment.

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From her days working for Kraft—where they had one shot a year to get a campaign right— she learned the importance of brand planning, upfront strategy, brand, and consumer insights, which is where you win. That’s what she loves about the Pattern Brands team, they try to put the best of both worlds (DTC and Big Brands) together.

One of the most exciting parts of this interview was discussing Katy’s approach to learning about her customers. Katy believes that seeing what people do is more powerful than the story they tell you, and it’s more interesting and rewarding to be able to observe as close as possible to real behavior vs running a survey. Before COVID she even visited customers’ homes to interview them.
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“...you can't just ask the customer to tell you what the product benefits are. That's how people are trained to think, right? It's our job as marketers to find other ways to extract that information from them organically so we can get to the strongest insights and conclusions.” - Katy Marshall 

To learn more about Pattern Brands, go to patternbrands.com.

This is the DTC Growth Show by #paid.