Scaling a niche brand: advice from WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey

Executive overview

Three founders call in with growth challenges: a premium pants brand, a grief-care gifting company, and a history merchandise store. Each faces the same core tension — a strong product with limited reach and unclear next channel.

The recurring answer: tell the story behind the product relentlessly, meet customers where they search (including AI), and lean into the specific moment of need rather than broad awareness.

The brand story you omit is the sale you lose.

Copa Threads — premium pants with a hidden story

• Founder Jane Barthel: neonatologist turned clothing maker, pants priced at $295, made in a Minneapolis women-owned factory.
• $15,000 in sales since launch (mid-2025), mostly friends, family, and one local boutique.
• Goal: sustainable side hustle, eventually a full business post-medicine career.
• Problem: the website shows beautiful pants but none of the origin story — local factory, US-sourced fabric, handmade craft.
• The why matters: customers paying a premium need to understand what they're buying.
• McKelvey's parallel: American Giant succeeds by making the manufacturing story the front page, not a footnote.
• Tactics recommended:
  • Tell the factory story, the fabric sourcing story, and the personal origin story on Instagram — repeatedly, not once.
  • Pursue user-generated content; photos of customers wearing the pants in real settings are high-converting.
  • Seed the pants with local restaurant servers or coffee shop staff — visible, public, conversation-starting.
  • Resist pressure to make black pants; the colorful "wearable art" positioning is the differentiator.

Good Grief — care packages for life's hard moments

• Founder Melissa Jensky: co-founded with her sister in April 2021 after personal experiences with illness, infertility, miscarriage, and family loss.
• Revenue: ~$200,000/year for three years, down 7% in the most recent year.
• Previous growth engine: Google Shopping ads — collapsed in summer 2024 for unclear reasons.
• Challenge: diversifying channels with limited time and budget; purchase intent is situational, not constant.
• Repeat customer rate: 20%; many discovered the brand by being gifted a package first.
• B2B employee gifting exists (Nike, Microsoft, Gates Foundation orders seen) but hard to scale without a direct corporate contact.

Content and SEO strategy

• McKelvey's key insight: build a webpage for every search query someone might make in a grief moment — "what to do when a friend has a miscarriage," etc.
• Optimise those pages for AI crawlers, not just Google; people now ask AI assistants what to do in emotional situations.
• Produce TikTok and YouTube videos answering the same questions — be the resource, not just the store.
• The brand's job is to solve "I don't know what to say or do" — make that the explicit marketing message.

Channel diversification

• B2B gifting (HR teams, employee bereavement support) is high-potential; start locally rather than cold-emailing Fortune 500s.
• Direct mail: a physical card kept in a drawer creates recall at the exact moment of need — hard to replicate digitally.
• Email is already bimonthly; consider AI-assisted automation to test frequency and increase brand presence without adding workload.
• Grief in the workplace costs US employers $75B+ annually — a concrete B2B pitch anchor.

The History List — history merchandise and content

• Founder Lee Wright: started as a content site in 2016, now ~hundreds of SKUs (t-shirts, hats, pins, antiques, rare finds).
• Revenue: $750,000 last year, ~50% gross margin, ~$20 blended CAC, $80 average order value.
• Distribution: mostly direct website; some sales at historic sites and reenactment events.
• Social: 60,000 Facebook followers, 14,000 Instagram followers; newsletter with 50% open rate, sent twice weekly.
• Timing: 2026 is the US 250th anniversary — a rare moment of heightened public interest in history.

Growth tactics

• McKelvey: the unit economics already look strong — $20 CAC on $80 AOV at 50% margin; scaling spend is the obvious move.
• TikTok: the platform rewards narrative storytelling by real people; history content performs well there even with an older-skewing audience (platform demographics are aging up).
• Podcast advertising: target smaller niche history podcasts (10,000-listener shows) rather than large network shows with high minimums.
• Consider co-branded merchandise with smaller history podcasts that lack their own merch.
• Continue the "surprising and accessible" social content strategy already in place via History Dame.
• Own a podcast: a weekly episode highlighting one historical item and its story doubles as content marketing and brand-building.

Closing advice from McKelvey

• Look hard at the things you're bad at or avoid — those are the gaps most likely to cause problems.
• Delegating away your weak areas entirely (e.g., delegating finance so you never think about money) creates blind spots.
• Founders must stay responsible for everything, even areas they dislike, especially early on.