As I sit back and begin to reflect on the past year, I can’t help but smile. It’s not because we’ve got a kick-ass group of people making D.M. Burton happen, it’s not our awesome clients; I smile for our past and our future. As a forward thinker, I’ve always had a bold idea for the future of this business, and I am happy to say, our first year was explosive. You may have noticed our slight pivot during our second quarter and our additional focus on branding. This has left a lot of our fans out in the dark and asking the question, what does D.M. Burton actually do?
I’ve sat down about 20 times to write this and quite honestly, it’s kinda hard. I want to spill all the D.M. Burton tea… and honey, there is a lot. However, our advisors have told me that it wouldn’t be the smartest idea. But the other night my best friend said something I couldn’t forget, “Bro, people keep asking me what you do and I have no idea what to tell them.” So here it is: D.M. Burton is a style and branding firm aimed at making the world a more beautiful place by supporting the needs of businesses and entrepreneurs.
Before we go any further, I want to address the elephant in the room; yes, we’ve broadened our focus from personal styling to a wide variety of branding based services. Broadened, not abandoned. In fact, we are going to double down on our commitment to this side of the business; but more on that later. Style In terms of clothing is still our life-blood. However, this is a different type of “style” that we are taking on, and we couldn’t be more excited.
I think the best way to tell about what we’re up to now, is to tell you about what we’ve been up to the past 6 months.
Around the time we signed our first styling client, we took our first pro-bono job working on a campaign for our local city government; the Oak Park Village trusteeship. If you aren’t aware, we ran the social media and brand marketing for the “Christian Harris for Village Trustee” election campaign. While ultimately, the campaign wasn’t successful, we received many kudos on our work, in particular for our branding and design. Looking back on the numbers; even though our campaign did not win, our Vote Acquisition costs were only $2.45. This is compared to the costs for the top three contenders in the race; $3.13, $3.36 and $19.91.Now, I know what you are thinking, you still lost. While that’s true, most elections nowadays are so driven by money that we just didn’t stand a chance.
While the election was wrapping up, we were approached by an Alumni of Augustana College (my undergraduate alma mater) to help with the launch of a new entertainment tourism brand. That’s when I decided to get a little more serious about the branding and marketing side of the business. Our ability to style businesses and organizations had become the main revenue driver, and I decided it was time to double down on these efforts. Over the next few months, we acquired 7 additional accounts. I like to affectionately refer to this part of the business as my accidental marketing agency. But, it really wasn’t an accident. I just couldn’t have dreamed in a million years that we’d have the revenue, skill set, and momentum to become a major player in this industry in our first year. But alas, here we are!
So, what’s the best way to describe what we do at D.M. Burton, well if I had to answer you right now I’d say we are marketing start-up fronting as a personal styling business. Tomorrow we could be a brand-focused business collective. Who can say what the future will hold? What we can say is you might want to hold onto your seats because it’s about to get weird.
I hate to leave you in suspense, but good things take time. Fortunately, for you, in the upcoming weeks we will be publishing a blog explaining all of our services to give a clear insight into work and our goals. Additionally, we will be rolling out quite a few new tools in the near future and we couldn’t be more excited. From software to services, we’ve got some great things in store for the rest of the year. Sign-up for our email list to ride this wild journey with us, we will be sure to keep you in the loop… in fact, we might even let you join our club.
Until then sit back, relax, and enjoy.
