How to Define Your Event Brand ft. Koreatown Run Club and Sad Girls Club (Video Transcript)

Our video interview "Defining Your Brand and Building Your Lane", which is featured on the Eventbrite YouTube channel, is an insightful conversation on brand building and communication. This video stars seasoned event organizers Duy Nguyen of Koreatown Run Club and Elyse Fox of Sad Girls Club, moderated by Eventbrite’s Head of Community, Roseli Ilano. 

The conversation focuses on sharpening and communicating a distinct point of view through creative means, merchandise, media, and collaborations. Duy and Elyse delve into these topics — sharing firsthand experiences in defining their brands, building impactful partnerships, and creating coveted merchandise to expand their businesses and excite their fanbases.

Key insights you’ll learn from the video:

• Elyse Fox: Talks about her journey in founding Sad Girls Club, a non-profit dedicated to supporting the mental wellness of the BIPOC and Black community. She emphasizes the importance of creating a space where people feel safe to be vulnerable and share their experiences.

• Duy Nguyen: Discusses the inception of Koreatown Run Club and its evolution. He focuses on creating an inclusive community in which people feel accomplished and capable after participating in runs.

• Brand Consistency: Both speakers highlight the importance of staying true to their brand's mission and values across different platforms and events.

• Merchandise Strategy: Both share insights on merchandise creation, emphasizing the balance between what the community wants and what aligns with the brand's identity.

Full transcript of the interview with event organizers Duy Nguyen and Elyse Fox

Roseli Ilano: I'm excited to welcome Elyse Fox and Duy Nguyen. I'm a huge admirer of both of your work, and I know our audience is really excited to learn from you. So we're going to discover how both of you communicate your unique brand through creative, merch, media, collaborations, and more. Elyse, you're joining us from New York. First off, tell us a little bit about yourself and the mission of Sad Girls Club. Why is that work so important?

Elyse Fox: Yes, so I’m a New York native, very much a creative. I founded Sad Girls Club, which is a non-profit 501(c)(3) committed to showing up for the BIPOC and Black community and supporting their mental wellness. I started it because I had a really heavy depressive cycle after living in LA for five years and feeling like I was worthless. 

I looked for resources or community online because I couldn't afford therapy at the time. I didn't find any communities that represented what I looked like or who I wanted my friends to be. Instead of complaining about it, I decided to just create one. That's how the story of Sad Girls Club came about.

Roseli Ilano: Duy, you’re tuning in from LA. You're a creative yourself, a filmmaker, a photographer. Tell us about yourself and about Koreatown Run Club.

Duy Nguyen: Yeah, I'm from Virginia, out in LA. Mike and I started Koreatown Run Club (KRC) maybe six years ago now. We weren't runners before. We saw that where we lived in Koreatown, it was very much a neighborhood with late-night activities, bars, karaoke, and Korean barbecue. So we wanted to do something different for the neighborhood and started a run club with zero running experience.

Roseli Ilano: Amazing. Let's get into it. I know our audience is looking for those tangible takeaways they can apply to their businesses today. We're focused on brand, talking about building your brand, defining your lane. Both of you have done such an incredible job with Koreatown Run Club and Sad Girls Club. 

When writing about brand design and innovation, Marty Neumeier says, "Brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization." So, a gut feeling. What is the gut feeling when you think about Koreatown Run Club and Sad Girls Club? What do you want people to walk away with after coming to one of your events?

Elyse Fox: I can start. When someone attends a Sad Girls Club event, we want you to understand and know that it's okay to be vulnerable. If your gut feeling is telling you to talk to someone, to ask someone for help or support, and you're feeling on the fence about it, after coming to one of our events, you will feel like it's okay to talk about these things. I'm not alone. There are people who live in the same area as me or even across the globe who are experiencing the same things as me.

Duy Nguyen: For Koreatown Run Club, especially before showing up, it could be intimidating running with a big group of strangers. After completing a run, I hope people feel like, "Hey, I did it." One mile can lead to three miles, can lead to a half-marathon, a full-marathon. After you've done a marathon, there's not much else out there that's pretty tough. You can do anything you want.

Roseli Ilano: You both are master storytellers. We talked about why you do what you do. Let's talk about all of the creative aspects and those creative touchpoints when you are developing those assets, when you're thinking about how your brand shows up on social media — everything from the look, the feel, your website. 

What advice would you give to folks tuning in today in terms of how you make sure your brand story is consistent through those other creative touchpoints?

Elyse Fox: The main thing is, from the first question you asked, go with your gut. If it feels a little bit off, then question it. If it still feels off, don't move forward with it. You have to really dig into the community, and see what they want, what they're asking for. 

We really tap into our community, and try to identify, "Okay, these are the big conversations that are happening on social media. This is what isn't happening. Maybe we should fall back and talk about something different."

Duy Nguyen: As a designer or any sort of creative, learning and exploring and having fun through creating stuff is super important. You’ve got to be confident, and like Elyse said, confident with your gut feeling. People follow your brand because of you. Just trusting yourself and designing what you want to design.

Roseli Ilano: Let's talk about how that can translate into live experiences. How would you say organizers should approach thinking about those experiences, and how they design those experiences to ensure that the brand is really communicated throughout?

Duy Nguyen: For me, I kind of have to be a different person in these events because I'm very introverted. Just understanding that people interacting on a screen, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever, is different from showing up in person.

Elyse Fox: Know what your capabilities are. Know how much support you have going into it, and use it as your tentpole of building up whatever your event is.

Roseli Ilano: Let's talk about merch. If you were to give organizers one tip that you think they should copy and one mistake that you want them to learn from when it comes to merchandise, what would it be?

Duy Nguyen: Merch is interesting because, as a creative person, you just want to create. But when you're talking about merch, it is a business. You don't want to sit on 100 shirts that don't sell. You really have to think about what people want. Will it sell? Maybe the things you don't want to make will sell. You have to give a little of your creative side and make something that just says Koreatown Run Club on it, or whatever it is.

Elyse Fox: Understand that if you are going to create a T-shirt, you have to have a full-size run, and those are a lot of SKUs to hold on to. We use our merch more so as marketing. It's not so much an income revenue thing for us; it's more like marketing or we'll send out friends and family packages just to get our name out there and to get the brand out there.

Roseli Ilano: Both of you have described this idea of having boxes in your apartments, and there's this side that people don't realize when they purchase something from your websites. There's actually a human that's fulfilling all of that. Tell us a little bit about what that's like and how you approach fulfillment.

Duy Nguyen: For fulfillment, it's really just Mike and I sharing an email and just going in whenever we can to send these orders out. Especially when someone's buying items from you that don't run with you or aren't local or don't know you personally — you know they treat it as a real business, and it is. 

But with that comes customer service. If someone wants to return something or it got stolen, you might have to bite the bullet and refund them and just lose out on that order.

Roseli Ilano: Both of you have done amazing collaborations with big brands. What was a moment that you knew that you had turned a corner with Koreatown Run Club or Sad Girls Club? Not only was it the big brand collaborations, the impact that you're making, people giving you positive feedback. 

What was the moment that each of you found that you had turned a corner, and the brand was resonating with an audience?

Elyse Fox: A big moment for us was that within our first year, Nike reached out to partner with us. We did a run club with Sad Girls Club in the middle of winter, and we ran alongside the West Side Highway in 10-degree weather. People were coming from Queens, Bronx, to come to Manhattan, and that's an hour-and-change-train commute just to run in the dark and freezing cold weather. And I was like, "Oh, people are feeling this. People really are resonating."

Duy Nguyen: I would say just have fun with it. Always have fun. That's where most of my creativity and everything comes out of. And if you don't have fun with it, it's not going to last in the long-term. If you find yourself just having to do things, you'll burn out and you won't put 100% effort into it.

Roseli Ilano: Thank you so much. There are so many tangible takeaways here. We talked about the power of storytelling, the importance of consistency, and how you lean into your mission. We talked about merch, not having too many SKUs, that balance of, “Is this going to sell?” “Is it going to resonate with the community, or is it something that I actually want to do myself?” “Is it something that I would wear?” 

Making sure that at every touchpoint, there's a really compelling throughline to your mission. And that you are really thinking about the gut feeling people are walking away with. And I think for both of your businesses, it’s having a safe space to explore, to have fun, to be creative, to see yourself amongst others, and be encouraged.