It's not uncommon for our brand to be regarded as "authentic". We’d like to think that’s because, like any person who takes risks right out in the open, we’ve candidly shared how the Little Saints brand has evolved since its inception just a little over three years ago.
Our experience starting and running Little Saints in an age of rapid technology change has left us navigating the expansion of defining what a brand is. Because when content demands are high and beautiful content is a dime a dozen, we’re left trying to define what the new brand currency is.
Having recently launched a major upgrade to our website and photography, we decided it was time to put words to our unconventional method of brand building.
Katie: Brands of the future are multi-dimensional
I spent a decent part of my career believing there was a blueprint to brand building. It took me walking starkly outside the prescribed blueprint of life to realize the scam I’d been sold: that the success of a proper noun could be templated and repeated with the same success of another. That brand building was merely identity curation vs a living, breathing ecosystem inhabiting something akin to a soul, not just a curated persona or singular archetype.
For decades, we were told the most effective brands were consistent, tightly defined, and one-dimensional.
This worked in the era of billboards and 30-second commercials. It also held strong in the Instagram age, where curation, polish, and aesthetic homogeneity were signs of legitimacy.
But that world is gone.
I see the timing of the pandemic and the boom in TikTok’s popularity as ironic, because they united as a collective force shedding untrue polish. Working from home meant bringing the reality of our personal lives into the work place – crying kids, dogs, messy backgrounds and all. At once, the jig was up. The curtain rose and the masquerade was over.
When Tiktok’s started to take off, it became a new, freer space for expression without the pressure of polish. To this day, the platform begs for a sort of realness that can’t be curated or faked. Because even curated authenticity smells off when juxtaposed next to a hot Gen-Zer sharing an unbelievably vulnerable expose on their acne journey.
With Little Saints, there are still values and guidelines, but they can hold more than other brands I’ve worked on in the past. Like a real human, they have range – complete with moments of Prada and moments of over-worn sweats. Sometimes they’re utterly ridiculous and sometimes they’re vulnerable and spit prose. By allowing this sort of dimension in the brand, I felt the birth of a spirit instead of an archetype. And in the age of AI where anyone can make beautiful images and write decent copy, the bar for “professionalism” is no longer the differentiator.
Because here’s the paradox: the more dimensional a brand becomes, the more recognizable it is. Not through sameness, but through energetic coherence. We’re tracking for resonance now, not just repetition – from my perspective, that’s what earns trust in a post-performance world.
Megan: Growing brands fail fast
Anyone who has been following the brand for a while knows that we are not afraid of failure. We’re a brand run by real people - not agencies or AI bots - which means that we go through the same trial and error processes that people go through on a personal level. Just like people make mistakes in their personal lives when they’re trying things out, brands will also make mistakes as they continue to evolve - so long as they are doing it authentically. To put it simply: authentic brands, just like authentic people, are not afraid to make mistakes.
As a 3x startup leader, I have seen firsthand how much fear of failure can stifle creativity. If someone thinks they’re going to get in trouble if they make something the boss doesn’t like, then they’re not going to be able to produce authentically creative content. Creativity thrives in conditions that are open, receptive and fluid. Any environment that demands perfection leads to content that is dull and soulless.
Our team thrives under the “fail fast, fail forward” philosophy. Because we see mistakes as a natural part of the creative process, no one is afraid to admit when they made a mistake or to point out when someone else did. Rather than viewing a mistake as a stain on a person’s character, we view it as a lesson to help us grow and improve. By committing to never making the same mistake twice, the team can take big swings, learn, and evolve faster than they could in an environment demanding perfection.
Here is a short and definitely not comprehensive list of the mistakes that I’ve made in 2025, from which I have learned a lot and of which I will never make again: considering investors even after I had a bad gut feeling about them, posting Bryan Johnson content on my personal feed without reading the news about him treating his employees poorly, saying yes to events that were a time suck on my team and didn’t produce results, not emailing back the organizers of a conference that would have been helpful for me to speak at, and stalling on reviewing resumes for a much-needed new hire.
I give these specific examples to show the types of discussions we have on a daily basis over here at Casa Little Saints. It’s just as important for me to share my mistakes as it is to demonstrate that I won’t make the same mistakes twice. And my hope is that by sticking to this philosophy, Little Saints will evolve authentically, with layers and depth, just like the type of person that you can’t get enough of.
Katie: planning has diminishing returns
It’s not uncommon for brands to spend a considerable amount of time pre launch to future trip and run through every possible scenario as it pertains to product extensions, disruptions and industry transitions.
While I’m not suggesting bypassing that process in its entirety, it’s important to know when research is an armor from the pain of doing and failing. Because we are never going to guess the entirety of the unknown and real learning is done by doing, not planning. And as far as I’m concerned, a brand is malleable in its early stages.
Before we introduced spirits to our product line, we sold RTD “plant magic mocktails”, formulated with CBD and Reishi mushroom. The brand leaned feminine and while we had some imagery positioning it as a nighttime beverage, we weren’t consistent.
When we launched St. Ember – our first spirit –we were conscious of the fact that night time positioning was going to be important for consumers to start associating functional mushrooms with the back bar, but we didn’t consider that the product extension would drastically shift our demo.
To our surprise, spirits now account for over 60% of our revenue and our highest-spending customer group shifted from women ages 45-54 to men ages 35-44. In hindsight, this made sense. Men are bigger consumers of alcoholic spirits than women, so why would this be any different?
While we could have done this research upfront, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome and we would have spent more time and money researching than learning by doing.
Meta ads quickly informed us of the demo change and rather than doing a major brand overhaul, we made small tweaks: overhauled our photography, shifted the content we were creating for organic and paid social channels and tweaked our brand colors. We didn’t make it a “rebrand” and started making these updates in increments.
