As part of our series about how to create a trusted, believable, and beloved brand, I had the pleasure to interview Landon Eckles, founder and chief executive officer of Clean Juice.
First, define how your brand is different. Second, be authentic and find a way to communicate that authenticity. Third, stay consistent, because a reputation can be ruined in seconds. Fourth, find effective, efficient ways to blast your message to as many people as possible. Last, make sure you stand for something essential and weave that into all of your messaging.
– Landon Eckles
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
All of that credit goes to my wife, our co-founder. She would make these juices and smoothies at home for me and our kids, and we loved them. She had this vision to open a business that offered people a selection of the cleanest, healthiest, organic juices that could possibly be offered. I had an international business background, and it just made sense for us, so we decided to journey down that path. We sold our home in Pennsylvania, moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, and opened the first Clean Juice store.
Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
The funniest marketing mistake we made when we got started was a 4th of July campaign called, “Free on the 4th.” The idea was to give every guest who came into our store on July 4th a free smoothie. We wanted to create a huge buzz while also gaining a ton of new foot traffic. I still think it was a great marketing idea. Execution was a different story though. All of our smoothies are 100% organic and made fresh, so I’ll bet you can imagine how backed up we were when we had 100 guests asking for smoothies at once. It definitely wasn’t funny at the time, but now I can laugh about it.
To read the rest of the interview, visit this link.
