When investigating what makes a brand irresistible—and take off as if by magic—few are better equipped to offer insight on the topic than Chelsea MacDonald.
With a career history that spans working within entertainment partnerships at Instagram to Head of Entertainment at Clubhouse, Chelsea has been at the forefront of shaping some of the buzziest community platforms of the last decade. Just a few years ago, when she conceived Sylvie—a destination marketplace for secondhand home items leveraging the rising popularity of antiques and the shortage of affordable, quality supply—she drew on her years of experience in community-centric business strategy to craft a unique vision for building a modern brand.
Fast forward a year later from Sylvie’s pre-seed funding with Baukunst, and the results of her novel approach speak for themselves. The company has already amassed 53,000 followers on Instagram and counting, and the team is actively cultivating a wildly loyal community of fans and buyers.
“Last drop, we sold 80% [of inventory] in one minute.”
— Chelsea MacDonald, founder of Sylvie
[The Sylvie story illustrates] why brand is so important,” MacDonald shares. Sylvie’s selling model works in a fashion similar to the sneaker drop—the site counts down the days until a curated collection will be available. “We have curated inventory. We tell the story, we tell everything about this piece that we have sourced personally, and we really source pieces that resonate with our community,” she says of the overall process. “We build the demand we see with influencers— I have my own platform— we really hype it up, and then drop days, it's crazy to watch.” Thanks to their unique storytelling strategy, traffic spikes around five minutes before a collection opens and sells out within the first 10 minutes of opening. We have a spike five minutes before we open, and then usually within the first 10 minutes. “Last drop, we sold 80% in one minute,” she shares.
According to MacDonald, much of this success is thanks to her initial company investment in Sylvie’s identity. One of her first hires was Nate Brown, owner of design firm HANDSTAND and a social-media savvy creative who built a TikTok presence around the art of brand building. MacDonald recalls discovering his work via TikTok and immediately getting the sense that “this guy just gets it”. Brown is responsible for the creation of the Sylvie visual system, something he worked closely with MacDonald to shape in line with her initial creative vision.
Together, MacDonald and Brown have created a vision that pushes beyond the typical embodiment of brand. She likens the final product not to a visual system, but instead a rich story. To get there, she asked herself from the beginning of the journey, “How do you form an emotional attachment to something that you can't physically touch and see, but it's all online, but you still want to be a part of this world?”
For MacDonald, the art of building a brand built for tomorrow doesn’t just concern optimization of fonts, logos and eye-catching merch: it’s about recognizing the power of social platforms and the evolving media landscape. Her vision for Sylvie, from the start, baked social media’s video-first future directly into the brand’s DNA. She saw a ripe opportunity to connect social-media-savvy shoppers to products normally buried within quiet antique shops. This future-forward perspective is what distinguishes Sylvie as a leader in a new set of principles for brand building in the modern era.
So what are the new rules to building brand magic? Sylvie’s success story offers a case study in how branding is evolving to fit the times, and how you create content with charisma in an information-heavy world.
Invest in exploring what’s most compelling about the story you have to tell.
For a company today to truly break through in this market, those who build it must make it an earnest mission to understand what’s most authentic about what they have to offer. How did they do this? Through introspection and diligent research. For Sylvie, these insights uncovered a few truths around what lies at the heart of antiques and Sylvie’s tone of voice.
One, that Sylvie should embody the thrill of the hunt. “We realized that our team finding the actual pieces was sort of a form of entertainment,” Nate shares. “It created a narrative arc that a user could tell a story off of, could build content around, [and that idea]became very exciting. They tasted this hunch through social posts, and found great reception from their audiences.
Secondly, in a world where we’re all trying to create distinct forms of identity, vintage is a unique outlet. “This ‘niche-ification of culture’ was a very important insight that we were building a lot from. One of the cool things we encountered was that we don't have to change [people’s] purchasing behavior…People want things that they find, they want things that have a story attached to them, that they can bring into their space and give it their sort of own identity,” says Nate.
These are just two examples of statements of many that helped the Sylvie team build not just a brand that is beautiful, but one that deeply resonates with the consumers they are targeting.
Bring strategy into early discussions to fortify and stress test your vision.
For Brown, creating a lasting brand that accurately reflects its user means getting in people’s heads. For Sylvie, that meant building a specific narrative, down to the minute details. “I had Chelsea write a story around the Sylvie individual and what the day in their life looks like,” Brown recalls. “I think great brands are used at very specific times in people's days, even ones that you're kind of on all the time. For you as an individual, you use Instagram at a certain point in the day, you use Netflix at a certain point of the day. So we wanted to get a very clear idea of what this individual's day looked like to try to figure out where we can slot in, and that helps define when you schedule various pieces of content, when you think about drops.”
A brand of the future goes beyond visuals and content, digging deeply into both conscious and unconscious behaviors to ensure their presence feels natural and intuitive in customer’s lives. When you design your brand with these behaviors in mind, you don’t just create a product; you craft an identity that people resonate with, and seamlessly integrate into their lives.
Understand the landscape you’re building within.
As a former insider at Instagram, MacDonald knew that a future-proof brand digs deep to understand the media in which it will live and swim. “[I knew] the brand world I wanted to build had to be video-centric. It had to have storytelling throughout, and that so many details of this brand needed to translate to video and for quick consumption on these platforms.” Understanding the main media you’ll utilize—i.e. Instagram—allows you to focus on brand pillars that repeatedly serve you and your audience’s needs.
Sylvie crafted a brand world rich with stories, focusing on “little details that were easily consumable,” as MacDonald described. Their Instagram posts offer aesthetic glimpses into the treasure hunt for new pieces, tease upcoming collections, and share the fascinating histories behind the objects they discover. Their video strategy is seamlessly aligned with the brand strategy, creating an intimate feel that mimics the experience of rummaging a flea in search of finding a unique piece for your home. This is the type of thinking that creates sentimental connections between brand and audience.
Connect your visuals to your storyline and lore.
MacDonald knew that the “sneaker drop” sale format was the key to getting the business model right—but she didn’t see the specific language around it as a fit for Sylvie: “I really didn’t want to fatigue people with drop culture and instead camouflage it as something else.”
A real-life side quest of MacDonald’s finding an interesting antique key on a sourcing trip led to an idea from Brown: creating a sort of lore about “the Sylvie estate,” a fantasy-scape where the treasures unlocked within a collection drop hides behind lock and key. “This was a huge moment for our brand and our storytelling,” MacDonald shares. Rather than a collection being dropped, the “door” was metaphorically unlocked for eager buyers to explore. This visualization felt much more on-brand. Brown developed a lock and key iconography they use to communicate whether drops are open or closed, and fit within other pieces of the story.
“A brand, really, is just the layer, or rather, container for which a story is told and permeates through”
—Nate Brown
Perhaps uniquely, iconography within Sylvie’s visual ecosystem like the lock and key has intrinsic ties to their marketing strategy, as he believes is ultimately “just a container for which a story is told and permeates through.” But this visual system is also a vehicle for future communications. “One thing that was abundantly clear and very important to MacDonald in the beginning of this process was, how is this world going to expand beyond just what its current representation is? Early on, we wanted to gain conviction that the system that we were creating would, in fact, lend itself to future product extensions [and] inspire the future of the business,” Brown shares.
From the get go, remember community is everything.
Committing from the beginning on a content strategy that brings your community along for the ride of your journey is an extremely special way to earn trust. One way Sylvie achieves this is a content-driven drop strategy that lets people in on the stories of the objects they can buy.
“We reply to every single comment, every DM. We go above and beyond for them right now, because we know how important it is, and we've seen the word of mouth skyrocket”
—Chelsea MacDonald
MacDonald shares that when they source furniture, they work hard to get the full story: “we want to know where it comes from; we document everything…We tell stories about individual items, like if you look at our Instagram, our last post, we have something from 1530, which is the oldest piece we've ever found, and we tell the story of it. And those are those moments that our community feels very attached to, because that thing now is in their home, and then when they're from, friends come over, like, "This was from 1530!" It’s those moments we're building for the community we're very, very, very precious about.”
Next, open communication with your customers and fans is the cherry on top when it comes to earning trust. “We reply to every single comment, every DM. We go above and beyond for them right now, because we know how important it is, and we've seen the word of mouth skyrocket,” MacDonald divulges. “I've just personally seen from launching other people's brands that depth [early on] is way more important than width, because the width will come with that depth.”
. . .
Sylvie is still on its journey of refining and evolving its brand, but the success so far speaks volumes about the power of listening deeply to the fans you hope to reach. “The demand is really there, it's really exciting, and truly, I attribute a lot of it to this beautiful brand we're building,” MacDonald shares. Recognizing a lack of branding in the antique market, Sylvie identified a key opportunity: to help younger generations with digital fluency to rediscover the timeless art of thrifting. With 35% of spending in this market coming from Millennials and Gen Z, Sylvie has created a distinctive platform that not only offers covetable vintage finds but also delivers a brand experience that aligns with the values and tastes of their audience. By pairing strategic vision with a deep understanding of their audience, Sylvie is poised to serve as an example of how a thoughtful brand ecosystem may be the new key to lasting success.