Photography: @Maxxkeyys
Before we begin, we want to let you know that everything that you are going to read below has not come from any business plan or derivatives but in a totally natural and spontaneous way, this was nothing more than a hobby, but now it turns out that there is also a name for the way we have of seeing things, although we didn't know it until much later. The term is known as Smallest Valuable Audience and we are going to explain how we got to it. To put you in context, during my first years of university, I was always a bit rebellious, after all, I was in a place where I did not belong or at least that's how I felt during my years studying at the Carlos III University of Madrid. It was during those years when I rediscovered reading, it did nothing but ignite the flame of curiosity. Authors like Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk, Ryan Holiday, Simon Sinek, Robin Sharma, Daniel Kahneman, Dale Carnegie, Marco Aurelio, Christopher Voss, Bobby Kim were in charge of keeping it on, but most importantly, they became great references for me. They have been the ones that have helped us shape the idea of Sprynks and how we were going to do things.
From Simon Sinek we have learned the importance of starting with the why and not with the what, to create something that can last over time you cannot chase money, but rather something that is above yourself, something capable of staying in the game for always, since fashion is not something finite but infinite; From Seth Godin, we have learned to express our idea in terms of marketing, he is perhaps the author with whom we have felt most identified, since his books seemed to be tailor-made for us. He has been the person in charge of ensuring that we never stop believing in what we do, but above all, motivating us to do it our way; From Ryan Holiday to building a brand personality strong enough to try to overcome any obstacle, because in the business world as in life, the obstacle is the road. He introduced us to both stoicism and Marco Aurelio, who have taught us the importance of having an unshakeable foundation and identity in the face of any adversity.
If we have to keep something from all these authors, it is how they have influenced us to see the more human side of business, they have taught us to look beyond numbers because there are things that they will never be able to explain. They were the ones who made us fall in love with the beautiful idea of creating something different, but above all they were the ones who validated our ideas and fantasies that we had in our heads, which might seem crazy ideas in the eyes of many people but are not. for yours.
For a long time, we have tried to explain what Sprynks meant and as expected we found a lot of people who did not agree with what we said, nor did they quite believe in it. Why bother making your life complicated, when there are other brands out there making tons of money and you could too, they used to tell us. If something was clear, it was that this was not the client profile for a community like this, sprynks was not something made to earn a lot of money, but rather to try to create an impact, however small.
In order to create something that can have an impact around you, we believe that it is key to build a community. Despite the fact that we have more means to do it than any other generation in history, it is more difficult every day to create an audience / community due to the great lack of attention that surrounds us. Our generation is capable of spending several minutes a day on countless websites, but instead we are incapable of spending several days reading books by a single author. With such a dearth of attention, the only viable strategy for building an audience would be to focus on mastery, not metrics. In 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote about the idea of 1,000 “True fans,” which says that if you get 1,000 people to support you and buy your products, you can make a living from what you do. content creators) This summer we realized that if we really wanted to get to 1000 “True Fans”, we needed to continue to focus on what we have always focused on, which is our message and meaning, instead of just looking at the metrics .
What is the problem with this? A society in which we crave the search for status which is completely natural, as Dr. Sigmund Freud said, everything we do comes from either the sexual impulse or the desire to be great/important, the problem appears when we begin to measure this status with ¨Likes¨, ¨Followers¨ or the ¨traffic¨ that an account generates.
This summer we carried out an experiment, taking advantage of our dissatisfaction with the brand at that time, we decided to close our main Instagram account, to attract people to our secondary account, in which we barely have 400 followers. It is a private account in which we only allow access to clients, family members, friends. By closing the account, we tried to get the vast majority of artists to follow the secondary account, which allows us to have closer contact with them. In a period of 8 weeks, we have gone from having 87 requests to 734 follow-up requests. What we have managed to create with this is an account, that if you happen to come across it, there is a very high probability that you will follow an artist who is following the account. But what are artists doing following an account with only 400 followers? You can't know. It is curiosity that killed the cat, which raises a certain sense of secrecy around the account.
We believe it is important to emphasize that Sprynks began as a hobby, never with the idea of earning money, which was mainly thanks to reading, we were able to mature and shape an idea, to turn what was previously our hobby into a real business. . One of the authors who has marked us the most has been Seth Godin and with his book ¨This is Marketing¨ it was there where we found the term Smallest Viable Audience, which we wish we had known before. Apparently the term is also used a lot in the world of start-ups to validate projects as quickly as possible, but I think Seth Godin gives it a more creative definition than a technical one, that is, perfect for us.
¨The goal of the Smallest Viable Audience is to find people who understand you and fall in love with where you hope to take them¨ Seth Godin, This is Marketing.
The Smallest Viable Audience forces us to focus on the person who reads everything we write, who buys every collection, and who invests some of their most precious resource—their time and attention—in our work. To Sprynks, this person is worth more than a million people who suddenly show up because something went viral and then you never see them again. The lifetime value and attention of a single person has much more weight than that of a million people paying attention to us for a small fraction of their day. We are lucky to have friends or clients who decide to take some of their free time to promote or try to improve Sprynks, both from within and outside the brand. Members of the Misbehavior Club who have decided to dedicate their time to us for university projects, final degree projects, final master's projects or even Lein students are helping us take the brand a step further, we think it would be an insult not to pamper and take care of each and every one of these people because they have the same or more love for the brand than we do. Ignoring these kinds of things because they are not something that translates into instant monetary benefit would be totally pointless.
For things like this we have never paid for an artist to publish content for us, because this is not about uploading an instastory or tagging us in a photo, but about creating a link that cannot be bought. That's why we don't give clothes to influencers, because to be completely honest there is no influencer that we admire like we admire rappers. Because we are going to spend money on a couple of publications that will be totally ephemeral when we can dedicate it to giving away clothes to our favorite artists. Wouldn't you be more excited to see people you admire in your clothes than a simple influencer? And that is what it is about, to do something that really excites us and fills us with pride. We are not patrons or big investors of artists, instead we support them in the most humble way possible, making available everything we have in our hands to try to contribute a grain of sand in their careers.
The goal is very simple, we want that artist we blindly admire to be able to enjoy our brand as we enjoy their music and that is not done with money, because no one has ever paid us to listen to their music, what's more, we are the ones who are willing to pay for their music. We try to treat all artists as we would like to be treated, without stress, without compromise and in the most natural way possible. In the same way that we share their music because we feel identified, because we like a song, because it makes us happy or for whatever reason, we act from our most sincere emotions without looking for anything in return. But if we like something about music, it is that it can be very personal, something that we enjoy in our most intimate moments, we tend to feel it as our own and this makes it really special because it is directly linked to personality. Well, with clothes, it works the same.
Therefore, giving clothes to artists with the sole purpose of having them upload a story or a photo does not come into our plans in any way. This is about giving without expecting to receive anything in return because that is where the fine line between generosity and interest is. Perhaps you consider a gift something that is linked to ties, small letters and many other clauses, we are clear that it is not, what's more, we think that it would go from being a gift to almost a nuisance full of responsibilities. Having this approach when it comes to contacting artists has led us not only to create an incredible network of contacts for the brand, but more importantly, it has given us incredible friendships. People we admired from childhood we can now consider our friends. The cause of this comes from refusing to send garments by mail to any artist, the only requirement we had was that the delivery be by hand, because true relationships are created face to face and not through a screen. Since we started selling on Instagram there has been one thing we have really enjoyed and that has been getting to talk to most of the customers who have bought something. This has led us to hate web sales, it eliminates almost any type of contact between the brand and the customer, a hello and goodbye with a high probability that you will only hear from them again if something goes wrong. During the last four years almost all the garments we have sold have been to clients with whom we have first had to talk on Instagram and then face to face, this has allowed us to meet almost all of our clients, build good relationships with most of them. We are not going to talk about whether this model is scalable, because the reality is that it is not. Giving between 1,500 and 2,000 pieces of clothing in hand over 4 years is not staggering, but it has worked for us, and it is true that we have never been in a hurry to build the brand, since it is more of a learning process, because this was a hobby of that we have ended up learning more about the real world and about business than at the university itself.
To conclude, we believe that we can say that without the influence of reading we would not have been able to get here. If we had to choose one word to explain our journey it would be: spontaneity, and if we had to choose one to define Sprynks it would be: process. Now that all this has been said, thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing us to do what we love the most and supporting us unconditionally. Especially to you, who have bothered to get here, to dedicate 5 or 10 minutes of your most precious resource, your time, we would be nothing without you and we would like to make it clear that this is not the typical verbiage but the pure reality .
SPRYNKS