James Green's Approach to Crafting Memorable Products and Moments

Hi, James Green. I’m the owner of a brand called buildahead.com. Underneath buildahead, we own a bunch of other sub brands, but ultimately the business is about helping people make something memorable, taking moments of life and helping to kind of accelerate those. My background is in marketing, direct to consumer marketing.

I spent about a decade where I was the general manager for an online dating business. The brand that I manage that most people are familiar with is Christian Mingle. So I ran that for about a decade, took that from pretty much nobody having heard of it to around 90 % consumer brand awareness in the online dating space, which was really fun. It’s fun to run a business where you’ve got Jay Leno talking about you on the Tonight Show and you’re in Cloud 9 Superstore, guess it was Superstore was the show, like just lots of pop culture references or kind of in the broader conversation in media, it was a lot of fun to run that. I was chief marketing officer at a pet consumer brand where we helped connect individuals looking to get a puppy with breeders.

So did that for a couple of years and then kind of started my entrepreneurial journey. Had tried my hand at starting a real estate technology company from the ground up. Learned a ton, but ultimately we ran out of funding and weren’t able to make that a success. And decided rather than starting something from scratch that I would go acquire a business. And so I went out and acquired buildahead.com. And I’ve been super excited about it. Love what we’re doing at Build a Head and I’ve enjoyed being an entrepreneur.

Yeah, so Build a Head has been around for about a decade. Most people Build a Head is synonymous with fatheads. People call them fatheads because there’s a business called fathead that puts stickers on walls a lot of times of people’s heads. It’s similar to that, but it’s big head cutouts, life size standups, we do cupcake toppers.

We try to create any product or do something that helps you celebrate life’s big moment. So you can see us pretty often at graduations. You can see us at bachelorette parties, birthday parties, lots of youth sporting events. We’re very event -driven. A lot of moms buying us to celebrate their kids’ big moments. Just a super fun brand. We focus a lot on making sure that we have the highest quality of products. we do think, so that starts with customer sends us an image. We’ll do things to improve their image so that people oftentimes don’t understand when you have a really small image on your phone, it looks fantastic. But then to go print that at a large scale, oftentimes you’re losing some of those unique details. So we spend the time to actually go in, improve the photos so that when you’re scaling them, they look much better.

So it starts there. We print on some of the best printing machines that you can. We print on all the best printing machines. So we print on really high quality printing presses for our big heads, latex printers for our stand -ups where we’re printing to a vinyl that we then mount to a really sturdy substrate called foam core, which is much denser than, say, cardboard.

And looks much, much nicer. And so everything we do when we’re buying a product, when we’re marketing our business, we focus quite a bit on the quality so that the thing that you really care about, which is the emotions that you get when you’re using our product. So that we really amplify those for you. So you’ve got a big head. If it looks like garbage and you’re at the graduation ceremony, you’re not feeling like you’re there supporting your loved one.

You feel like you’ve let down your loved one on their big day. And so that’s really important to us to make sure that we get quality. Along those same lines, we also, we have faster turnaround times than anybody else in our space. So if you get us an image today, we will print and ship it next business day at whatever shipping speed you buy in the purchase process. But in theory, if you bought today, you could have a big head in your hand on Friday.

And so if you’re all man, what do we do? Graduation’s this Saturday. We got to do something big. It’s feasible from our business to get that in your hands because again, you don’t want to miss that big moment. You want to do something big. You want to do something special. And we work really hard to facilitate that. And so it’s really interesting running a business where you do a lot of these tactical things that seem like, yeah, of course you want high quality.

Of course you want to turn things around as quickly as you can, but for us, we try to be very purpose driven of like, we are going to make or break somebody’s special day. And we don’t want to be the reason that these once in a lifetime moments don’t feel awesome. We want to help make them feel bigger and more special than they would have otherwise, which for the most part, we do a great job of doing.

And it’s so rewarding and so much fun to run a business like that. And that’s part of what drew us, what drew me to this business when I was looking at acquiring a business is just the idea that you can, you can help touch people’s lives in significant and meaningful ways. as part of what’s driven me pre being an entrepreneur, it’s part of what drove me when I was at an online dating business. It’s what I do matters.

If I can help two people meet and fall in love, like I’ve changed their life forever. Same sort of thing at Puppy Spot where we were helping connect breeders and people bringing a puppy in their family. Like that’s a big moment for people and we want to make sure that that happened the best that we could. Same sort of thing here. Slightly less impactful from a life standpoint. Like it’s not your significant other that you’re marrying. It’s not a pet.

But it’s taking those moments, could be graduation. A really interesting kind of use case that we saw pick up quite a bit during COVID was our life-size stand-ups being used at end-of-life ceremonies. Like people having gatherings where maybe it’s the one-year anniversary of somebody having passed that was close to them, and they’re buying life -size stand-ups from us to have there so that they feel like that person is right there with them.

And Matt, like, again, a lot of weight and a lot of pressure to make sure we can do the best we can. Because like how awful would that be if you just get that and it just looks terrible? And so it’s great to be running a business that matters in people’s lives and helps make things more fun, a lot of cool things you can do with it, obviously, big heads or they can be silly, it doesn’t have to be this weighty moment. They can be silly, you can do them for parties, can do them for teachers, you can do them for whatever, but just a cool brand to be able to have stewardship over and help people.

Yeah, so our products are pretty simple. So we’ve got the big heads that come on a card stock. Then we’ve got some more durable big heads that go from two to six feet. And then we’ve got life -size standups that you can get in a six inch stand up all the way up to six foot stand up. I mean, our big heads are 12 by 18 inch big heads are definitely our best seller. One, they’re the most affordable so that it’s roughly $15 to buy a big head.

As you buy more, there’s some discounts if you’re looking to buy 10 or 15. You can get even more affordable. Because it’s both the most affordable, it’s easy to get to you, it’s easy to turn around, it’s easy to make sure that the quality is top notch because as you scale, you have to have a better image. That’s definitely our best product for sure.

Yeah, so one thing that we’ve focused on since acquiring Build a Head is also growing other brands that fit a similar need. So I think we’ll continue to grow Build a Head and we’ll launch products like we’re working on some face confetti, just really, really small faces. So instead of big heads, small heads that you can put it, you can throw it at a party or celebration, you can put them on a decorative table, little products like that, I think will continue to add and grow. But throughout having owned the brand, we’ve actually acquired a couple other brands and launched a couple other brands. So we launched PawPrints HQ, which is a pet focused version of Build a Head. We acquired the domain cardboardcutouts.com and launched that where it also has the personalised cutouts, but also offers licensed standups.

So Harry Potter standups, WWE standups, and a whole variety of others like Disney related and movie related and some like there’s Marilyn Monroe, there’s John Wayne, there’s a whole variety, over a thousand different licensed cutouts that we offer on that site. And then about three years ago, we acquired a brand called Gift Wrap My Face.

So personalised wrapping paper where we create these really fun designs and we put your face or your loved one’s face into the designs. So one of our best sellers on that, is the Elfie Selfie design, which is there’s a cute little elf and we put your head or whoever’s head you’re buying it for on the wrapping paper design. And then when you’re wrapping the present, they’ve got their face on it in a really, really fun way. As part of that, we have

We actually have some augmented reality designs as well where you can actually scan a QR code and then put it up to the wrapping paper and you’ll see the elf do a little dance. There’s one where you’ll see the person do a snow angel. So we’ve done that historically and we’re going to look to do that as well. There’s a sticker face business that we’re looking to launch in the next six months. And so we’re looking to go wide as well as deep. And in doing that, we hope to kind of stay true to the, everything doesn’t have to necessarily be face focused, although that’s a fun way to go about doing things, putting people’s faces on it. But we want to stay very personal and customised. And on top of that, we try to look for, I know if you’ve ever read the book, Red Ocean, Blue Ocean, I think that’s what it’s called, it’s something along those lines, but talks about the idea of when you’re building a business or growing your business, Red Oceans are where all the sharks are, they’re eating. You want to go find the Blue Oceans where nobody else is, but they need to be big enough oceans that they matter. so we’re always looking for, stickers is not a new business, but the personalised face stickers and kind of some of the unique designs that will

add to the mix that play off of our Gift Wrap My Face brand and some of our other brands, help take something that is a crowded space and help us find a niche within that.

Thank you. Thank you.

So like so many other people, COVID hurt us really, bad. So you can imagine as I talk about this business, we’re a very events driven business, people in person, graduations, like graduation season is in May, COVID hit big in March, and we were like, let’s just cancel all the graduations. And so,

There were some really hard days for our business. Certainly not life threatening. So like other people had much bigger problems than what we were dealing with. But some scary moments as a business of like, what do we do? And ultimately what we decided to do was to make that a time of investment in the business and making sure that as we came out of COVID, we were better prepared to meet the needs of our customers. So we did a lot of brand survey, survey work to better understand what our customers’ needs were, who they were, what they were looking for, what are the new products they might be looking for. We refresh the brand, new logo, new website, kind of looked at what we had been doing and said, what works, what doesn’t work? Let’s amplify what works, let’s get rid of what doesn’t.

And kind of rebuilt the business from the ground up. We moved our warehouse closer to where our operations team was, where our marketing and operations are. And at the time, it was like, are we just going through emotions because we’re not as busy as we are, or are we really setting ourselves up for success? What we saw as we came out of COVID is, almost all of those decisions have led to us continually growing and continuing to win customers’ appreciation and showing them that we’ve got a fantastic product that they can make part of their big events.

So a couple of things I would say, one, figure out how you can build something that is unique and differentiated. Two, just do it. Like, I think there’s a lot of, if you watch shark tank occasionally, Mark, Mark Cuban talks about entrepreneurs, people who want to talk about being entrepreneurs and want to, they’re the people who research and research and research because they want to feel confident and comfortable. But being an entrepreneur is not about being confident or comfortable. You just got to go do and you got to learn when you make mistakes and just keep pushing through. I guess the third thing I would say is find a support network. Find a friend that you can talk to about things that are tough. Find a business partner.

Find somebody potentially other than your spouse who you can go to and complain about your problems who will help you solve them and help kind of keep you focused. Being a solopreneur is tough if you don’t have some sort of outlet or mentor or somebody who you can go to for advice because the process of making every decision all the time is taxing and wears on you. It’s helpful to have sounding boards and people who can kind of, when you’re having a down day, can pick you up and tell you just keep going, like you got this.

So for us, the focus on quality and making sure that things get there on time are the biggest drivers of our success from a marketing standpoint. So it seems somewhat counterintuitive. However, when our customers have these amazing experiences, when you’re at a soccer game and you’re holding up this huge head and we got it there on time and the quality is better than you imagined, you tell everybody around you where you got that

And so we drive a lot of word of mouth when we do a good job. When we screw up, we do the opposite. We hurt our brand because people, our graduation, we had this big plan to get this six foot big head that we were going to take to the graduation. It got there late or it was damaged in shipping or the image looked like garbage. And that person’s going to tell everybody that we disappointed them and we let them down. And so there’s a reason that we start with quality and start with trying to make sure that we’re delivering on time and the highest quality is because that drives our marketing.

No, just, appreciate, I appreciate you having me on. I think being an entrepreneur is fantastic. It’s not, it’s not for everybody but if it’s something you’re thinking of, just go do it. Like don’t, don’t spend too much time talking about it. Don’t try to out plan yourself. Just take one step, like just take one simple step. See if you can find something that will be successful and don’t look back.

Awesome, thank you so much.