#242 - Julie Cartwright, P.volve: How To Build a Content First Consumer Brand

On this episode of DTC Pod, Julie joins Blaine to talk about building one of the fastest growing fitness brands. They talk about starting P.volve in the early days, her background in the entertainment industry and how that experience translated to content development for p.volve, why content is the north star of their brand, building a new market around functional fitness, the first product they took to market (the p.ball), launching products that complement their content, how physical studios play into their growth strategy, scaling studios and programming through franchising, building wholistic customer journeys, and much more.<br /> 8:05 - NEVER Get Left In The DustYou have to be able to change with the market. Like, I wasn't gonna be holding onto VHS while the entire industry was moving to DVD and then into digital and talk about a learning curve. But you have to just like stay ahead of all of that<br />8:30 - Content is KING. It Always Has Been.The bigger lesson that I've learned, and it's really helped me here at Pvolve too, is that content is king, period. Like everyone tried to start a streaming service. Everyone, all the major studios, which we're trying to get into it, and at the heart of it, what always wins is content. It's gotta be really great compelling content.<br />28:48 - Marketer? Get Really Good At ThisIt's not easy just to get somebody that's hearing one little snippet about who we are through paid channels, to come in and convert and to understand. I mean, we're really building a brand new modality and so like, we're so proud of it, we're doing it all the right ways. But like, it takes a combination of storytelling and a really, really multi-channel approach.<br />36:00 - Franchising - The Ultimate Hack For ScaleYou have to start sort of slow in franchising because once you're able to make those first seven to 10 locations successful, they become, sort of, this credibility in order to then scale like these guys got it down. So we took the same approach as it related to our own owned and operated. This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.<br />Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptions<br /> Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?<br />Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?<br />Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod Instagram<br />DTCPod Twitter<br />DTCPod TikTokJulie Cartwright - President of P.volve<br />Ramon Berrios - CEO of Trend.io<br />Blaine Bolus - Co-Founder of