It’s the influencers who are leading when it comes to the next generation of marketing agencies.
Take Santa Ana’s Common Thread Collective, which bills itself as an “e-commerce growth agency.”
It’s helmed by former New York Yankees minor league player and UCI alum Taylor Holiday, who started the business with quarterback coach and former NFL quarterback Jordan Palmer, the younger brother of standout QB Carson Palmer.
Their athletic backgrounds, in some ways, made them competitive enough to want to compete and win.
“When you’re an athlete, you are an entrepreneur of your own career,” Holiday said. “You’re responsible for your own outcome.”
The company, with annual revenue north of $10 million and a worker roster that should hit 100 by the end of 2020, this year made the decision to go fully remote following the pandemic, positioning its model well as it eyes potential merger or acquisition targets into the year ahead.
Common Thread is specifically focused on helping companies grow their e-commerce business with some buzzy names topping out their list of clients, including ColourPop, Lululemon, APL, Born Primitive and The North Face.
The agency said it has helped more than 60 companies surpass $2 million in annual revenue and 24 pass $10 million in revenue, through a mix of ad creation, Facebook ad buying, running Google campaigns and other digital marketing efforts.
Its achievements aren’t just seen with their clients. Common Thread ranks No. 12 among midsize companies on this week’s Business Journal list of Best Places to Work in OC.
Power Balance, QALO
Holiday, after being released by the Yankees, returned to Irvine to finish school at UCI, in 2009 earning a major in political science and minor in psychology. The thought was he would go to law school. As he was finishing up at UCI, he began hanging out in the office of one of his friends and now Common Thread partner, Joshua Rodarmel, helping fulfill web orders and other tasks for his then upstart company, Power Balance, a maker of hologram silicone wristbands for athletes.
Power Balance reportedly grew to more than $60 million in revenue over a two-year period.
“Somehow that company exploded in growth and that became our business school,” Holiday recalled.
He was later tasked with figuring out all things digital.
“It was literally me Googling ‘How do you set up a Facebook page? How do you use [e-commerce platform] Magento?’ I didn’t want people to think I was there because I was somebody’s friend,” Holiday said.
Baseball’s ‘Moneyball’ theory of data analytics got put to use in a different field. “The premise of marketing for me was always, from the very early days, an analytic pursuit. I became enamored by the idea that I could spend $1 and track how it came back.”
Holiday later went on to the agency side of the business, working at Costa Mesa-based Lucid Fusion, which became VaynerCommerce in April following its acquisition by serial entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerX.
There, Holiday found another playground to learn new skills before being approached by Palmer about a potential project that became the starting point for Common Thread Collective some six-and-a-half years ago.
They started out in a 12-by-12 office above the Blue Frog Bakery in the Orange Circle, sharing the space with Holiday’s brother KC Holiday, who simultaneously was building his own business in QALO (quality, athletics, love, outdoors), a silicon wedding ring maker that hired Common Thread with equity to serve as its marketing department.
“We got to grow these businesses together,” Holiday said. “About eight months into the journey, QALO was growing so fast. At one point, we had 12 people in this tiny room above Blue Frog and we had all this cash. We had no credit history.”
The growth prompted QALO to buy a building just off Glassell Street, which was paid for with cash.
QALO, with revenue reportedly over $150 million, was sold last year to Win Brands Group, a New York e-commerce company, on undisclosed terms.
The Office Question
Luckily, growing out of an office isn’t an issue for Common Thread anymore.
The company made the decision to go fully remote following the shelter-in-place orders, shuttering and selling its Santa Ana office near SOCO and The OC Mix and also buttoning up its New York office, which opened in August 2019.
With no overhead, it made the 25 new hires in the past five months much easier to absorb.
“One of the things we did was we committed early on [to remote work] because otherwise we would have been stuck in such ambiguity,” Holiday said.
The move has opened new doors to explore.
“For us, we have ambitious growth goals and things that we want to do, such as acquisitions of other agencies,” Holiday said. “Because we’re now fully remote, the idea of integrating workforces across the country really opens up possibilities. That’s a big piece of what’s ahead. We want to get in a position to be able to hire globally.”
Holiday said the agency’s in conversations often, although declined to name anyone publicly. He said many are curious about the remote model, which bypasses the challenges that come with a physical merger.
Dream Makers
The question of how to maintain the agency’s corporate culture while working remote has also been addressed. Common Thread Collective has a ‘Tell Me Your Dreams’ program aimed at helping workers reach goals they’ve set for themselves, which could include anything from buying a house to hitting a career target or overcoming an addiction.
One unique offering from the company: All employees meet with a licensed therapist every two weeks for the first six months of their employment.
The company has five therapists on its roster and Holiday pointed out greater awareness around mental health was definitely a by-product of COVID for the industry.
“In the agency world, burnout, mental health, all of those things are such a huge part of the narrative,” he said. “You combine that with a global pandemic, and now you’re starting to bring to the forefront the question of what is a company’s responsibility to provide care for the people it employs?”
“When I started CTC I asked myself: ‘Why would anyone want to work here?’ The answer was that we could care more about our people than everyone else,” Holiday said.
To keep things interesting and also further keep the group tightknit, special boxes are sent out to employees that are sometimes opened during Zoom calls. A recent box example was a call to action to vote, filled with pins and fliers. Temporary tattoos to wear during calls or Father’s Day gifts have also been sent.
Next Steps
For marketing firms of all types, there’s been an acceleration of trends that have impacted the business as a result of the pandemic.
“E-commerce has fast-forwarded five years into the future,” Holiday said.
Even influencer strategies alone, which had already evolved so much from their starting point and was relied on so heavily in Holiday’s earlier endeavors, will continue to morph.
“Individual people are fundamentally media properties,” Holiday said. “Now, there’s no difference between a GQ and a Tim Ferriss. They’re both, in the same way, media properties that control massive audiences.”
It’s an exciting time, some would say, to be in the digital world with the playing field leveled. Common Thread Collective’s role in helping those businesses is what keeps Holiday motivated to stay in the game.
“For us, our lives were transformed by entrepreneurship,” Holiday said.
“For me, personally, that was seeing my brother go from a bartender to a business, which he sold for a good amount of money. E-commerce in particular has democratized entrepreneurship. The barrier has never been lower.”
