Naked Brands are a new kind of brand — enabled by social media, powered by personality, and built for the digital age:
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Naked Brands are transparent.
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Naked Brands are founded by social media influencers.
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Naked Brands prize on-going communication with fans and customers.
Since writing the original Naked Brands post, I’ve applied the concept to finance, fashion, music, and basketball. Now, I’m writing a book about Naked Brands.
This book project requires an extensive research process. I plan to conduct many interviews with writers, influencers, and entrepreneurs. The interviews will all be public and will live right here on my website. We’ll go on this journey together — you and me. Together, we’ll cross industries, speak with experts around the world, and explore the past, present, and future of Naked Brands.
If you have ideas or feedback, please send them my way. You can find my contact information here. I look forward to hearing from you.
Note: You can keep up with the series by subscribing to my “Monday Musings” newsletter.
Jaspreet Singh
Jaspreet Singh is an entrepreneur and an investor.
His dream was to be an entrepreneur since he was a kid, but his parents forced him to pursue his education. He wasn’t going to let his dream die so he started multiple businesses while in college.
He even bought his first real estate investment property when he was just 19! He is now the host of the Minority Mindset YouTube Channel, one of the largest channels on entrepreneurship and financial literacy with over 15,800,000 views and 370,000 subscribers.
David: What other YouTube entrepreneurs inspire you?
Jaspreet: Casey Neistat, a YouTuber who has created a whole world of influence around his channel and himself just living his life. It just shows the opportunity now that the internet has brought to people because you can do anything you want and be whatever you want and live your life the way you want. If you’re willing to put in the work. Nothing happens overnight, but anything is possible.
David: One of my favorite ideas that the best creators are short-term, catchy and long-term sticky. You find them and they catch your attention and get you really interested, but then over the long term, education is what gets you to stick around. How do you manage the tradeoff between entertainment and education? How do you get people excited when they first find your content but to also get them to stick around over time?
Jaspreet: It’s a balance, because in the beginning a lot of our videos were just straight education where it was like a lecture, like going to school and I’m a teacher and I’m just talking and I wasn’t being me. Like I was just there. Just giving you a lecture on information, but was getting bored of it. I’m sure the audience was like, okay, this is cool, but you don’t want to just stick to it and watch lectures all day. I’m a sarcastic person and I’m not too funny, but I’ve tried to throw in with jokes here and there. I’m not a very serious person and I’m looking at myself on Youtube, like why am I looking so serious?
This is not me. And so I think it’s partially just being you. Everybody has their own unique style. I know some people throw in a lot more education, heavy content, and some people are more entertainment heavy. It really just depends on what you want to do and there’s an audience for everybody. And eventually if you keep doing it, that audience will gravitate towards you and they’ll want to watch your type of content when it comes.
David: You said that there’s an audience for everybody, but there’s also an element of always improving, right? Trying to get more people trying to increase the relationships that you do have. How do you think about improving on Youtube? Where do you get your inspiration from and what sorts of things have you done to become a better Youtuber?
Jaspreet: The first thing that I did was I took an acting class. I was a part time law student just for fun and then I did night school for acting or like once or twice a week. And that was really interesting because I’d never done anything like that before. So just learning how to express yourself and talk in front of a camera, it just gives you the extra practice. And so for me that was one thing to help me out.
David: As you were going through acting school and think back, if you could go back to one or two things specifically, what were they?
Jaspreet: One thing that was really interesting was the first day I went there, I had no idea what I was doing. So you introduce yourself and then say I’m here for the job attribute. So I had my own ways of doing it. I was just like, oh yeah, I got the job interview or just something kind of plain. But you could see some people that would be really creative and do different things. I never thought of breathing like that. I never thought about screaming or just whatever they did, you’re just kind of see different people’s flavors in different situations of the same thing. So just understanding how to present the same information in different ways. It was really cool and I never thought about it like that until I thought.
David: If you watch movies to act or never really looked at the camera, you’ll get a show like The Office where they break the 4th Wall, and shoot with a shaky camera and the interviews really feel like the white is talking to if you were. But on Youtube, you’re getting these very close relationships with youtubers and it’s sort of crazy, right? Because if we spend all this time with youtube, we all spend more close, really intimate time with these youtubers than we do with our friends, with our family and I’m just wondering how you think about the relationships that you have with your audience and how you think about camera shots like that?
Jaspreet: Youtube and digital video is going to take over TV in because it’s so interactive. When I’m on Youtube I can actually interact with a person who’s watching. You can say, what do you think about this? Let me know your thoughts in the comments and all of a sudden you’re interacting with me as you’re watching, like I might even go and respond to your comment. It creates a whole new dimension that, like you were saying, that kind of the fourth dimension, because we’re breaking that wall between the screen and the viewer. I will try to find ways to interact with you to make you feel like you’re a part of us because that’s what really differentiates the Internet and kind of digital media in the sense of youtube and those type of things as opposed to tv because TV, you feel like you’re so far away from this celebrity that you’ve never heard of.
You might be interacting with them as so many other ways that you won’t with TV personalities.
Jaspreet SIngh with the 100,000 Subscriber YouTube Plaque
David: The relationships that we have with brands have also changed the way that we consume their content on social media. Our expectations of what is the brand are changing just as much as content itself is changing. And from your experience, now that you’ve thought about this from a youtube perspective, how is your interaction with brands changing?
Jaspreet: Brands have to give back in the day if a brand a business or selling a product, their job was just to sell you a product, right? But now I mean there’s so much more to selling a product and just having a product to sell. People want some other value. Why am I going to go to your brand’s page? What am I going to get from you besides just your product? Like for example, I feel like a shopify, they have a very cool tool, but they also have a very popular blog on ecommerce, how to sell products. And so they’re driving traffic in because of people who want to learn how to sell on the Internet at that right there, they have their backend product, which is, well, if you want us to do it, uses our platform.
So they’re giving people more than just a product. They’re giving people a reason to come to them. It opens up possibilities for people who are willing to think different and do things different. I kind of break out of the norms and the traditional way of doing things. It just opens up a whole new world of possibility.
David: Yes! I like to say that people are becoming brands and brands are becoming more like people. The strict bifurcation between people and brands has disappeared. People and brands operate on a spectrum now. And it’s interesting because it’s a byproduct of the way that media is changing, which I think that almost all of this goes back to. What do you see in terms of what is the best Youtubers have in common?
Jaspreet: They’re fun to watch. I mean, it really comes down to that, when you go onto youtube, you don’t want to sit there and be bored. You want to sit there and have fun and relate to the person. Even if I’m learning something, I wanted it to be an enjoyable experience because now I mean it goes back to supply and demand. Anybody can start a youtube channel. And so if somebody else can get the same information in a better, more entertaining, more interactive, more fun way, I’m going to watch them.
David: The internet has destroyed so many barriers and unlocked floodgates of opportunity. What inspired you to get into the YouTube sphere?
Jaspreet: I never planned on going on youtube or making videos or being a so called insolence or, or whatever. I’ll always been an entrepreneur and I was working, I want in my previous business ideas and we, when I was getting ready to launch it, I hired a marketing company to help you with the marketing of it during Gar crowdfunding phase. And it turns out this marketing company was a scam. Before I gave them the money, I was a little skeptical. So I was like, what’s my guarantee? What if I don’t make it work? They were like, oh, don’t worry, we’ll give you a 100 percent money back guarantee. If you have any issues, call us. We’ll get you your money back for the 24 hours.
Don’t get caught in the same scams and traps that I did because growing up I was never taught anything about entrepreneurship, business money, anything like that. My parents always told me that was bad (entrepreneurship and business), that’s evil, stay away from it. Like my family comes from a small state in India called Punjab. So they grew up with very traditional values. They always told me, be a doctor, be good in school, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. And I did school that did all of that and I was always doing my entrepreneurship stuff on stuff on the side because data approve of what I did.
I never really had any guidance. I never had a mentor. I never really had anyone kind of telling me what’s right, what’s wrong or given me some sort of teachings or anything. So after I got scammed I was like, well let me do something about it. So I started putting out content on how to launch a business without getting screwed over. I had no idea what I was doing. And then from there I just started doing it, just started talking and somehow people caught on and they loved it and we grew from there. Now we’re at like 350,000 subscribers, tens of millions of views. It’s like, how did this happen? So it’s been a blessing, with a really unique beginning.
David: You bought your first property during the financial crisis when you were 19 years old, if you could just walk through that story. It’s just unbelievable.
Jaspreet: I never even knew what entrepreneurship was. When I came to college, I wasn’t much of a partier. I don’t drink. So I came to college and everybody was partying and I was like, well I need something to do outside Friday night. I do have some experience in this event planning business. So how about instead of going to the parties, start hosting them.
I started out there and that kind of developed the whole majority mindset versus minority mindset thinking with a majority people like going to parties. So then I started doing something different. The hosting them started doing really well. We’re hosting concerts and shows and we were doing a lot of different things and my parents, they wanted me to be a doctor, so after my second year in college I was studying for the MK, which is the medical college admission test to get you into medical school. And I was going crazy studying for it. I was just the worst. In the library all day. And then during my free time I was reading financial news.
Like finance.yahoo.com. See what’s going on and everything. They were talking about real estate, there was a lot of “rock bottom, get out now”. Real estate is horrible. The economy is crashing. And every business book that I read, they kept talking about how successful people, wealthy people invest in real estate. I had no idea what that meant, but I was like, let me figure it out what this is. So I talked to my dad, I’m thinking about investing in real estate because all these books are talking about it and the new says that real estate is really cheap and my dad’s like, no, you are not going to invest in real estate. That’s just like gambling. So then I was like, well I don’t know if I’m going to listen to my dad here.
So then I called up an agent, started looking at properties kind of long weekends and I found a cheap condo again. I had no idea what I was doing and I ended up putting an offer. We got accepted.
David: Talk more about the philosophy behind the Minority Mindset.
Jaspreet: It has nothing to do with the way you look, your ethnicity, your skin color. It’s a mindset. It’s the mindset of thinking different than the majority of people. If you follow what the majority of people do blindly, you are pretty much guaranteed to fail. The majority of people are broke. The majority of people hate their jobs. The majority people are miserable and the majority of people are physically out of shape. If you keep doing what everybody else does, you’re gonna end up like the majority of people and so it’s the mindset of thinking different and breaking away from this traditional path and doing something and creating something of your own instead of just being a follower and kind of just a victim of the system because right now school and just the traditional system is not working for the majority of people and so it’s a mindset of breaking away and thinking different and kind of creating your own plan.
If you are not growing in a way that you want to grow, whether it’s financially, whether it’s physically, whether it’s mentally, or whether it’s spiritually; get away from it. If people are not pushing you to be better, get away from them. Getting out of your comfort zone to do something that you’ve never done before, that’s the only way you’re gonna be able to grow and get to somewhere where you want to be.
There are so many people doing it. How am I supposed to get seen? Easy. Be Different. How well, that’s what you have to figure out, that’s the tough part. And so, that’s really what it is. If you go in and you start to become an influencer on instagram, we try to build an audience on instagram or youtube or whatever and he just do what everybody else does. You’re going to just blend in with everybody else if you’re going to scroll past you because people have been doing it for a lot longer than you and they’ve already built their niche and their space there. So if you want to get seen and you want to build traffic, you have to be different. Give people a reason to follow you or, or look at your content instead of somebody else’s.
It’s easy to say be different, right? But I think that that sort of begins with our thoughts, our actions, and with the people that we surround ourselves with.
Note: You can keep up with the series by subscribing to my “Monday Musings” newsletter.
